[_ Old Earth _] Fossils They Tried To Hide

[Asyncritus]

Disclaimer:

The following amazing and alarming material is taken from Harun Yahya's Atlas of Creation.http://www.living-fossils.com/5_1.php

I don't know how authoritative it is, but what is certain is that if it is correct, then Darwinism is dead and buried along with the fossils its advocates tried to hide.

Read and be dismayed, O ye evolutionary proponents! Hear and fear!

The material up to post #4 is an entire citation.
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From time to time, newspapers and magazines report that a 200-million-year-old mosquito fossil has been found, or a 30-million-year-old lizard fossil discovered. Reading reports of that kind, one may well imagine that there is something special or unique about these fossils and that their like is seldom encountered.

Yet that assumption is not correct.

The Earth is filled with millions-of-years-old fossils of present-day living things. A very large part of these have been unearthed, and everywhere that paleontologists excavate and study, still they find fossil specimens of modern living things with all their flawless attributes.

Kept in countries' museums are millions-of-years-old spiders, ants, flies, spiders, scorpions, crabs, frogs and many other creatures, extinct and otherwise.

Even specimens perfectly preserved in amber in all their detail are to be found in museums in their thousands, or even hundreds of thousands. Yet their numbers are seldom mentioned in books and newspapers, and scientific journals, forums and discussions do not address them.

Why is this?

The reason is that every "living" fossil discovered is another proof that demolishes evolution. Every single example of such a living species is enough to destroy the theory to which Darwinists dedicate their professional lives. For that reason, evolutionists attempt to keep large numbers of these fossils hidden.

The Cambrian life forms hidden in the famous Smithsonian Institution for 70 years—in other words, fossils of the oldest complex life forms in the history of the planet—are a significant instance of this.

Charles Doolittle Walcott, a paleontologist and Secretary (1907-1927) of the Smithsonian, began research in the fossil-bearing Burgess Shale region in the Rocky Mountains, Canada. On 31 August, 1909, Walcott unearthed one of the greatest finds in the history of paleontology: the first fossils of creatures 530 million years old—which lived more than half a billion years ago.

Walcott collected these fossils, and when looked at the phyla to which they belonged, he was amazed, because the fossil stratum he had found was so very ancient.

No significant life forms had been encountered in any older strata. But this one contained fossils of almost all of the known phyla, as well as fossils belonging to unknown phyla, showing that all the bodily structures in the animal kingdom had emerged all together, in the same geological period.

This represented a lethal blow to Darwin's theory, because Darwin had suggested that living things developed like the branches of a slowly spreading tree.

According to the evolutionary tree that Darwin dreamed up, a single phylum should appear first, then different species, and then, different phyla over a very long period of time. Yet Walcott was looking at clear evidence that all of the phyla existing in the present day, and even more, had emerged suddenly and at the same time, around 530 million years ago.

This discovery completely did away with the imaginary "evolutionary tree" that presumed that phyla began with one species that branched off over long periods of time.

Right at the beginning of the history of life, complex features were displayed with ever-more complex fossil specimens representing a total of 50 distinct phyla, and numerous species.

 

[Asyncritus]

These approximately 530-million-year-old fossils entirely eliminated the false reasoning of gradual evolution. Yet they were brought out from where they had been stored and presented to the world only after 70 years had gone by.

Walcott had decided to conceal the fossils he had obtained rather than making them available up to his fellow scientists.

As the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Walcott was a dyed-in-the-wool Darwinist. According to the theory of evolution, fossils with relatively simple structures were to be expected in rocks of such great age.

Yet in terms of complexity, the fossils he discovered were no different from our present-day creatures, such as crabs, starfish and worms. [My emphasis]

For Darwinists, the alarming aspect of this was that no fossil specimen that might be proposed as the ancestor of these creatures was to be found, either in Burgess Shale or in older rocks.

Faced with these dilemmas, Walcott was all too aware that the fossils he had obtained would constitute a major stumbling block for the theory of evolution.

Instead of announcing them, he sent them to the Smithsonian, together with a few photographs he had taken and a set of notes.

There the fossils were locked away in drawers and forgotten for 70 years. The Burgess Shale fossils were brought to light only in 1985, when the museum archives were re-examined.

The Israeli scientist Gerald Schroeder comments:

Had Walcott wanted, he could have hired a phalanx of graduate students to work on the fossils. But he chose not to rock the boat of evolution.

Today fossil representatives of the Cambrian era have been found in China, Africa, the British Isles, Sweden, Greenland. The [Cambrian] explosion was worldwide. But before it became proper to discuss the extraordinary nature of the explosion, the data were simply not reported.

40. Gerald Schroeder, "Evolution: Rationality vs. Randomness", http://www.geraldschroeder.com/evolution.html

 

[Asyncritus]

These fossils represent one of the greatest difficulties for the evolutionists, making it a certainty that their theory is invalid.

They are proofs of creation that evolutionists are completely unable to explain.

Historically, the proponents of evolution have committed countless examples of fraud, in which an ape jaw was added to a human cranium, reconstructions were produced from a single fossil pig's tooth showing the imaginary social lives of ape-men, or feathers were added to dinosaur fossils. (For detailed information, see Harun Yahya's Darwinism Refuted, Goodword Books, 2003 and The Evolution Deceit, Ta-Ha Publishers, 1999).

The adherents of this theory seek to keep it alive not with scientific evidence but ideologically.

They didn't hesitate to produce fake "intermediate" fossils to support their claims, but have felt compelled to conceal fossils hundreds of millions of years old that would consign their theory to the dustbin.

Their illogicality gradually began to be realized, and since the Earth's strata were full of such fossil specimens, some of them were slowly, reluctantly displayed.

Yet this deception still persists today, and some fossil specimens are still kept quietly concealed in museums.

If all these specimens kept out of public view were made available, the obvious facts would be realized. Most scientists, however, lack the courage to make such a move that would completely do away with the theory of evolution.

This book [The Atlas of Creation] presents a small selection of living fossils and their counterparts millions of years old. Our aim in doing so is to show that no evolutionary process ever took place on Earth, to prove that millions of years ago, living organisms were equipped with the same immaculate features they possess now, and to reveal that evolution is a false theory that has sought to keep itself alive by concealing the truth and misleading people.

Any theory that hides the scientific evidence, that seeks to assume an authoritative guise through fraud and deception, has openly disproved itself. [My emphasis]

 

[Asyncritus]

Evolutionists are well aware that all the scientific evidence shows that their "process" is nothing but a myth.

Living fossils are the work of God, the Creator and Lord of all things, Who first created them millions of years ago and has maintained them in all their perfect forms right down to the present day.

Ever since Darwin's time, his followers have been terrified of this evident fact being revealed for all to see.

At last, however, this manifest and indisputable truth is out in the open, and all their efforts to conceal it have been in vain.

Superstition has vanished in the face of the facts; and God, Lord of the worlds, has once again revealed His greatness and might in the most ideal form.

 

[Asyncritus]

I went and had a look at Schroder's article quoted above, and found a few more interesting things that he had to say:

Nature, molecular biology and the Cambrian explosion of animal life have given us the opportunity to study rigorously the potential for randomness as a source of development in evolution.

If the fossil record is an accurate description of the flow of life, then the 34 basic body plans that burst into being at the Cambrian, 530 million years ago, comprise all of animal life till today.

The tree of life which envisioned a gradual progression of phyla from simple forms such as sponges, on to more complex life such as worms and then on to shelled creatures such as mollusks has been replaced by the bush of life in which sponges and worms and mollusks and all the other of the 34 phyla appeared simultaneously.

Each of these bush lines then developed (evolved) a myriad of variations, but the variations always remained within the basic body plan.

Among the structures that appeared in the Cambrian were limbs, claws, eyes with optically perfect lenses, intestines.

These exploded into being with no underlying hint in the fossil record that they were coming.

Below them in the rock strata (i.e., older than them) are fossils of one-celled bacteria, algae, protozoans, and clumps known as the essentially structureless Ediacaran fossils of uncertain identity. How such complexities could form suddenly by random processes is an unanswered question.

It is no wonder that Darwin himself, at seven locations in The Origin of Species, urged the reader to ignore the fossil record if he or she wanted to believe his theory.

Abrupt morphological changes are contrary to Darwin's oft repeated statement that nature does not make jumps. Darwin based his theory on animal husbandry rather than fossils.

If in a few generations of selective breeding a farmer could produce a robust sheep from a skinny one, then, Darwin reasoned, in a few million or billion generations a sponge might evolve into an ape.

The fossil record did not then nor does it now support this theory. That life developed from the simple to the complex is, in my opinion true.

What drove that development is the debate: random mutations or teleology?

The abrupt appearance in the fossil record of new species is so common that the journal Science, the bastion of pure scientific thinking, featured the title, "Did Darwin get it all right?" And answered the question: no.

The appearance of wings is a classic example. There is no hint in the fossil record that wings are about to come into existence.

And they do, fully formed. We may have to change our concept of evolution to accommodate a reality that the development of life has within it something exotic at work, some process totally unexpected that produces these sudden developments.

The change in paradigm would be similar to the era in physics when classical logical Newtonian physics was modified by the totally illogical (illogical by human standards of logic) phenomena observed in quantum physics, including the quantized, stepwise changes in the emission of radiation by a body even as the temperature of the body increases smoothly.

With the advent of molecular biology's ability to discern the structure of proteins and genes, statistical comparison of the similarity of these structures among animals has become possible.

The gene that controls the development of the eye is the same in all mammals. That is not surprising. The fossil record implies a common branch for all mammals. But what is surprising, even astounding, is the similarity of the mammal gene the gene that controls the development of eyes in mollusks and in insects.


The same can be said for the gene that controls the expression of limbs in insects and in humans. In fact so similar is this gene, that pieces of the mammalian gene, when spliced into a fruit fly cell, will cause a fruit fly eye to appear at the site of the 'splice' . This would make sense if life's development were described as a tree. But the bush of life means that just above the level of one-celled life, insects and mammals and worms and mollusks separated.

 

[Asyncritus]

The eye gene has 130 sites. That means there are 20 to the power of 130 possible combinations of amino acids along those 130 sites.

Somehow nature has selected the same combination of amino acids for all visual systems in all animals. That fidelity could not have happened by chance.

It must have been pre-programmed in lower forms of life. But those lower forms of life, one-celled, did not have eyes.

These data have confounded the classic theory of random, independent evolution producing these convergent structures. So totally unsuspected by classical theories of evolution is this similarity that the most prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal in the United States, Science, reported:

"The hypothesis that the eye of the cephalopod [mollusk] has evolved by convergence with vertebrate [human] eye is challenged by our recent findings of the Pax-6 [gene] ... The concept that the eyes of invertebrates have evolved completely independently from the vertebrate eye has to be reexamined."

The significance of this statement must not be lost. We are being asked to reexamine the idea that evolution is a free agent. The convergence, the similarity of these genes, is so great that it could not, it did not, happen by chance random reactions.

The British Natural History Museum in London had an entire wing devoted to the evolution of species. And what evolution do they demonstrate? Pink daisies evolving into blue daisies; small dogs evolving into big dogs; a few species of cichlid fish evolving in a mere few thousand years into a dozen species of cichlid fish. Very impressive.

Until you realize that the daisies remained daisies, the dogs remained dogs and the cichlid fish remained cichlid. It is called micro-evolution.

This magnificent museum, with all its resources, could not produce a single example of one phylum evolving into another.

It is the mechanisms of macro-evolution, the change of one phylum or class of animal into another that has been called into question by these data.

Endquote

 

[Asyncritus]

Christian de Duve had this to say about the impossibility of the chance production of the first bacterial cell:

In
his book A Guided Tour of the LivingCell, Nobel laureate and organic chemistChristian de Duve summarizes this
incomprehensibly complex and unlikely flow of non-living matter into life. If you equate the probability of the
birth of a bacteria cell to chance assembly of its atoms, eternity will not suffice to produce one.… Faced with the enormous sum of lucky draws behind the success of the evolutionary game, one may legitimately wonder to what extent this success is actually written into the fabric of the universe.

“Written into the fabric of the universe,” by what mechanism?

Something or some Power directed the selection processes.

The US Declaration of Independence refers to such a power as “Nature’s God … the Supreme Judge of the world.”

Morris, in his book Life's Solutions (Cambridge University Press, 2003), writes:


"Life is simply too complex to be assembled on any believable time scale... evolution's uncanny ability to find the short cuts across the multidimensional hyperspace of biological reality. It is my suspicion that research might reveal a deeper fabric to biology..." Elsewhere Morris identifies this "deeper fabric" as having "metaphysical implications."

[I may say that Morris, like Collins, is a great disappointment to me. He worked on the Burgess Shale and knew perfectly well the material Yahya refers to above - and yet retains the word 'evolution' in the above quote. He is a classic example of someone kow-towing to popular scientific opinion].


This impossibility of randomness producing order is not different from the attempt to produce Shakespeare or any meaningful string of letters more than a few words in length by a random letter generator. Gibberish is always the result. This is simply because the number of meaningless letter combinations vastly exceeds the number of meaningful combinations.

 

[lordkalvan]

And more misrepresentation, misunderstanding and personal incredulity masquerading as an argument against evolutionary theory. Can you present any f these fossils that are millions of years old and identical to their contemporary counterparts? And relying on outdated and inaccurate information about life firms before those found in the Burgess Shale doesn't really do your case many favours either. I think this has been pointed out to you before.

 

[Asyncritus]

As usual, your answer has no scientific substance, but is full of the insulting remarks which do not count, and add nothing to the credibility of evolutionary theory.

Refute any of the claims made, and let's see. Here's one for you to be going on with, from SCIENCE NEWS:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/10/061025185208.htm

Scientists Find Lamprey A 'Living Fossil': 360 Million-Year-Old Fish Hasn't Evolved Much :toofunny

Oct. 26, 2006 — Scientists from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the University of Chicago have uncovered a remarkably well-preserved fossil lamprey from the Devonian period that reveals today's lampreys as "living fossils" since they have remained largely unaltered for 360 million years.

​

"This fossil changes how we look at lampreys today," said Coates, associate professor of organismal biology and anatomy. "They're very ancient, very primitive animals, yet with highly specialized feeding habits.

[If they have highly specialised feeding habits, then doesn't that make you wonder just what 'primitive' means. Not much, obviously!]
​

[...]

Because lampreys do not have bone or any substantial cartilage, they are extremely rare as fossils. This fossil not only reveals a nearly complete soft tissue impression, but it also pushes back their fossil record another 35 million years.

[So when did they actually originate? Answer: they dunno, and have no hope of knowing either. I of course, could tell them].

Note the highly convoluted life history:

When adult lampreys return to fresh water, they stop feeding during winter and spawn the following spring. Eggs hatch after approximately three weeks and become blind larvae, called ammocoetes. After four to seven years, the ammocoetes metamorphose into juvenile lampreys called macropthalmia, which migrate out to the ocean and become parasitic adult lampreys, living just a year or two and growing up to 2 feet long.

Evolution? Pah!

Just by the way: more idiotic statements:

'Air breathing evolved in fish and allowed the movement of vertebrates to land and the evolution of reptiles, birds and mammals.'

Don' t these guys ever ask the question 'How'?




...

 

[lordkalvan]

Can you explain what 'hasn't evolved much' sits precisely with your previous statement to the effect that 'fossil specimens of modern living things with all their flawless attributes'? On what scale do you measure 'much' such that it allows you to determine whether the 'fossil specimen' is do a 'modern living thing' with all its 'flawless attributes'? Can you explain why fossil sharks are found together in the same strata with fossil dolphins, and in the same strata with fossil Ichthyosaurs, but that fossil dolphins and fossil Ichthyosaurs are never found together in the same strata? Can you show us how fossil sharks are the same as modern sharks in all their details? Can you explain why fossil remains of extinct animals exist at all, for that matter?

 

[Barbarian]

Walcott collected these fossils, and when looked at the phyla to which they belonged, he was amazed, because the fossil stratum he had found was so very ancient.

No significant life forms had been encountered in any older strata.

But now, we know that a large body of Precambrian life forms preceded the Cambrian. So it's not surprising that the evolution of hard exoskeletons led to a great increase in the number of ways of life. As you should know, the "Cambrian Explosion" happened to coincide with the evolution of completely scleritized body coverings. And yes, transitional forms with partially-scleritized exoskeletons appeared earlier.

But this one contained fossils of almost all of the known phyla, as well as fossils belonging to unknown phyla, showing that all the bodily structures in the animal kingdom had emerged all together, in the same geological period.

Turns out that was wrong. In the Ediacaran fauna, long before the Cambrian, we find many of the body plans that were originally thought to have appeared in the Cambrian.
http://www.peripatus.gen.nz/paleontology/ediacara.html

This represented a lethal blow to Darwin's theory, because Darwin had suggested that living things developed like the branches of a slowly spreading tree.

Surprise.

According to the evolutionary tree that Darwin dreamed up, a single phylum should appear first, then different species, and then, different phyla over a very long period of time.

So far, that's what the evidence shows. The first phyla known are prokaryotes. There was a diversification in very ancient times before the Cambrian. Would you like to learn about it?

Yet Walcott was looking at clear evidence that all of the phyla existing in the present day, and even more, had emerged suddenly and at the same time, around 530 million years ago.

And now you know better.

Right at the beginning of the history of life, complex features were displayed with ever-more complex fossil specimens representing a total of 50 distinct phyla, and numerous species.

Wrong. For nearly a billion years, life was small and mostly unicellular. You've been blindsided again.

Stromatolites are layered accretionary structures formed in shallow water by the trapping, binding and cementation of sedimentary grains by biofilms of microorganisms, especially cyanobacteria (commonly known as blue-green algae).[19] Stromatolites provide some of the most ancient fossil records of life on Earth, dating back more than 3.5 billion years ago.[20]

Stromatolites were much more abundant in Precambrian times. While older, Archean fossil remains are presumed to be colonies of cyanobacteria, younger (that is, Proterozoic) fossils may be primordial forms of the eukaryote chlorophytes (that is, green algae). One genus of stromatolite very common in the geologic record is Collenia. The earliest stromatolite of confirmed microbial origin dates to 2.724 billion years ago.[21]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil

And (of course) no one tried to hide Walcott's discovery. He wrote about it in many papers, and the material was well-known and studied by many. The site of the discovery was also visited by many paleontologists who collected extensively. You were lied to about that, as well.