APPENDIX FIFTEEN

 

 

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The Evolution Hoax

 

…Fifteen to twenty years ago, paleontologists were fairly certain that Homo erectus - the supposedly immediate human predecessor of Homo sapiens - first appeared in Africa around 1.5 million years ago. So it was said, Europe itself remained unoccupied until about 500,000 years ago, while Homo sapiens sapiens was deemed to have first appeared there only about 35,000 years ago. A mere fifteen years later, the thinking is almost unrecognizably different, for Homo sapiens sapiens is now believed to have appeared at least 120,000 years ago, while southern England and Spain are known to have been occupied by human beings 1.5 to 1.8 million years ago…In addition to this, it is now admitted that the human brain has remained roughly the same size for at least 1.7 million years - John Gordon (Egypt: Child of Atlantis)

The Case for Evolution Summarized

Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species—perhaps a self-replicating molecule—that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection - J. A. Coyne (Why Evolution is True)

Nebraska Man
How many skeletons do you think were found of Nebraska Man? 100? 50? 25? 10? How about one complete skeleton? How about half a skeleton? Maybe 1/10 of a skeleton? Hold on, Nebraska man was reconstructed from a single tooth! What is even more amazing--the tooth turned out to be a pig's tooth! How could anyone be so gullible as to believe a man could be reconstructed from a tooth? Yet many people placed their faith in Nebraska man until the hoax was exposed.
 

Java Man
How many skeletons do you think were found of Java Man? 100? 50? 25? 10? How about one complete skeleton? How about half a skeleton? Java Man was reconstructed from a skullcap, thighbone, and 2 molar teeth. Dr. Eugene DuBois found the thighbone 50 feet away from the skullcap, but assumed it was the same individual. After discovering human skulls at the same level near his Java Man discovery, he hid the skulls under the floorboards of his bedroom for 26 years. Before his death DuBois confessed that he had not found the missing link and admitted that Java Man was probably a giant gibbon.

Piltdown Man
In 1912 Charles Dawson reconstructed Piltdown Man out of a jaw, 2 molar teeth, and a piece of skull. In 1953 the hoax was exposed. The jawbone turned out to be that of a modern orangutan, the teeth had been filed down and the bones artificially colored to deceive the public. For over 40 years evolutionists promoted his findings as fact. The British Museum has documented other discoveries by Dawson as being fakes. Imagine if you lived during that time, placing your faith in evolution based upon Dawson's findings. Wouldn't you be a little upset when you discovered the truth?

Orce Man
Found in the southern Spanish town of Orce in 1982, and hailed as the oldest fossilized human remains ever found in Europe. One year later officials admitted the skull fragment was not human, but probably came from a 4-month old donkey. Scientists had said the skull belonged to a 17 year old man who lived 900,000 to 1.6 million years ago, and even had very detail drawings done to represent what he would have looked like. ("Skull fragment may not be human", Knoxville News-Sentinel, 1983)

Boule's Neanderthal Man
Reconstructed in 1915. Marcellin Boule wrongly arranged the foot bones so that the big toe diverged from the other toes to look like an opposing thumb. The knee joint was misplaced to give a bent-knee look. The spine was misshapen so it couldn't stand upright and the head was placed in an unbalanced position too far forward. Boule's model of Neanderthal man was placed on display in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago for 44 years before the mistakes were discovered! After the mistakes were disclosed, they kept it on display for another 20 years until they created a new Neanderthal model. What did they do with the old inaccurate model? Instead of throwing it in the garbage can where it belonged, they moved it to the second floor of the museum and displayed a new sign, "An Alternate View of Neanderthal." But it wasn't an alternate view. It was a wrong view.


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Another "Story" of Man's Origins Goes Down the Toilet Bowl

Two hominid fossils discovered in Kenya are challenging a long-held view of human evolution.

The broken upper jaw-bone and intact skull from humanlike creatures, or hominids, are described in Nature. Previously, the hominid Homo habilis was thought to have evolved into the more advanced Homo erectus , which evolved into us. Now, habilis and erectus are thought to be sister species that overlapped in time.

The new fossil evidence reveals an overlap of about 500,000 years during which Homo habilis and Homo erectus must have co-existed in the Turkana basin area, the region of East Africa where the fossils were unearthed.

"Their co-existence makes it unlikely that Homo erectus evolved from Homo habilis"

said co-author Professor Meave Leakey, palaeontologist and co-director of the Koobi Fora Research Project. The jaw bone was attributed to Homo habilis because of its distinctive primitive dental characteristics, and was dated to around 1.44 million years ago. It is the youngest specimen of this species ever found. The skull was assigned to the species Homo erectus despite being a similar size to that of a habilis skull. Most other erectus skulls found have been considerably larger. But it displayed typical features of erectus such as a gentle ridge called a "keel" running over the top of the jaw joint. Analysis showed the skull to be about 1.55 million years old. The new dates indicate that the two species must have lived side by side.

Sister species
If Homo erectus had evolved from habilis and stayed within the same location then both must have been in direct competition for the same resources. Eventually, one would have out-competed the other.

"The fact that they stayed separate as individual species for a long time suggests that they had their own distinct ecological niches, thus avoiding direct competition,"

Professor Leakey explained. Professor Chris Stringer, head of human origins at London's Natural History Museum, said:

"Both were apparently stone tool-makers, but one possibility is that the larger and perhaps more mobile erectus species was an active hunter, while habilis scavenged or caught small prey."

It is most likely that both species evolved from a common ancestor.

Other possibilities
But the linear, ancestor-descendent relationship between the two species cannot be ruled out altogether. Fred Spoor, professor of developmental biology at University College London, and co-author of the paper, told the BBC News website:

"It's always possible that Homo habilis lived, let's say, 2.5 million years ago and then in another part of Africa, away from the Turkana basin, an isolated population evolved into Homo erectus ."

After a sufficient amount of time to allow both species to develop different adaptations and lifestyles, Homo erectus could have then found its way to the Turkana basin. With separate "ecological niches", both species could co-exist without direct competition for resources. "But that is a much more complex proposition," Professor Spoor explained,

"the easiest way to interpret these fossils is that there was an ancestral species that gave rise to both of them somewhere between two and three million years ago."

Not so similar
The fossil record indicates that modern humans ( Homo sapiens ) evolved from Homo erectus . However, to some researchers, the small size of the erectus skull suggests that species may not have been as similar to us as we once thought. On average, modern humans display a low level of "sexual dimorphism", meaning that males and females do not differ physically as much as they do in other animals. The scientists compared the small skull to a much larger erectus cranium found previously in Tanzania. If the size difference between the two is indicative of the larger one being from a male and the smaller being from a female, it suggests that erectus displayed a high level of sexual dimorphism - similar to that of modern gorillas. Sexual dimorphism can relate to reproductive strategies and sexual selection. If erectus was very sexually dimorphic it may have had multiple mates at a time. This differs from the more monogamous nature of modern humans, indicating that Homo erectus was not as human-like as once thought. The researchers dismiss the idea that the small size of the skull could be a result of it belonging to a youngster. "By studying how the skull bones are fused together we discovered it belonged to a fully grown young adult rather than a developing juvenile erectus," said Professor Spoor.

 

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Darwinists Squirm Under Spotlight
(An Interview with Phillip E. Johnson)

 

This article is reprinted from an interview
with Citizen Magazine, January 1992.

 

Phillip Johnson has been a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley for more than 20 years. As an academic lawyer, one of Johnson's specialties is "analyzing the logic of arguments and identifying the assumptions that lie behind those arguments." A few years ago he began to suspect that Darwinism, far from being an objective fact, was little more than a philosophical position dressed up as science--and poor science at that. Wanting to see whether his initial impression was correct, Johnson decided to take a closer look at the arguments, evidence and assumptions underlying contemporary Darwinism. The result of his investigation is Darwin on Trial, a controversial new book that challenges not only Darwinism but the philosophical mindset that sustains it.

 

When did you first become aware that Darwinism was in trouble as a scientific theory?

I had been vaguely aware that there were problems, but I'd never had any intention of taking up the subject seriously or in detail until the 1987-88 academic year, when I was a visiting professor in London. Every day on the way to my office I happened to go by a large bookstore devoted to science. I picked up one book after another and became increasingly fascinated with the obvious difficulties in the Darwinist case--difficulties that were being evaded by tricky rhetoric and emphatic repetition. I then began delving into the professional literature, especially in scientific journals such as Nature and Science. At every step, what I found was a failure of the evidence to be in accord with the theory.

What was it that initially made you suspect that Darwinism was more philosophy than hard science?

It was the way my scientific colleagues responded when I asked the hard questions. Instead of taking the intellectual questions seriously and responding to them, they would answer with all sorts of evasions and vague language, making it impossible to discuss the real objections to Darwinism. This is the way people talk when they're trying very hard not to understand something.

 

Another tip-off was the sharp contrast I noticed between the extremely dogmatic tone that Darwinists use when addressing the general public and the occasional frank acknowledgments, in scientific circles, of serious problems with the theory. For example, I would read Stephen Jay Gould telling the scientific world that Darwinism was effectively dead as a theory. And then in the popular literature, I would read Gould and other scientific writers saying that Darwinism was fundamentally healthy, and that scientists had the remaining problems well under control. There was a contradiction here, and it looked as though there was an effort to keep the outside world from becoming aware of the serious intellectual difficulties.

What are some of the intellectual difficulties? Can you give an example?

 

The most important is the fossil problem, because this is a direct record of the history of life on earth. If Darwinism were true, you would expect the fossil evidence to contain many examples of Darwinian evolution. You would expect to see fossils that really couldn't be understood except as transitions between one kind of organism and another. You would also expect to see some of the common ancestors that gave birth to different groups like fish and reptiles. You wouldn't expect to find them in every case, of course. It's perfectly reasonable to say that a great deal of the fossil evidence has been lost. But you would continually be finding examples of things that fit well with the theory.

 

In reality, the fossil record is something that Darwinists have had to explain away, because what it shows is the sudden appearance of organisms that exhibit no trace of step-by-step development from earlier forms. And it shows that once these organisms exist, they remain fundamentally unchanged, despite the passage of millions of years-and despite climatic and environmental changes that should have produced enormous Darwinian evolution if the theory were true. In short, if evolution is the gradual, step-by-step transformation of one kind of thing into another, the outstanding feature of the fossil record is the absence of evidence for evolution.

But isn't it possible, as many Darwinists say, that the fossil evidence is just too scanty to show evidence of Darwinian evolution?

The question is whether or not Darwinism is a scientific theory that can be tested with scientific evidence. If you assume that the theory is true, you can deal with conflicting evidence by saying that the evidence has disappeared. But then the question arises, how do you know it's true if it isn't recorded in the fossils? Where is the proof? It's not in genetics. And it's not in the molecular evidence, which shows similarities between organisms but doesn't tell you how those similarities came about. So the proof isn't anywhere, and it's illegitimate to approach the fossil record with the conclusive assumption that the theory is true so that you can read into the fossil record whatever you need to support the theory.

If Darwinism has been so thoroughly disconfirmed, why do so many scientists say it's a fact?

There are several factors that explain this. One is that Darwinism is fundamentally a religious position, not a scientific position. The project of Darwinism is to explain the world and all its life forms in a way that excludes any role for a creator. And that project is sacred to the scientific naturalist-to the person who denies that God can in any way influence natural events.

 

It's also an unfortunate fact in the history of science that scientists will stick to a theory which is untrue until they get an acceptable alternative theory-which to a Darwinist means a strictly naturalistic theory. So for them, the question is not whether Darwinism is true. The question is whether there is a better theory that's philosophically acceptable. Any suggestion that Darwinism is false, and that we should admit our ignorance about the origin of complex life-forms, is simply unacceptable. In their eyes, Darwinism is the best naturalistic theory, and therefore effectively true. The argument that it's false can't even be heard.

Surely there are some skeptics in the scientific world. What of them?

Well, there are several, and we can see what happened to them. You have paleontologist Colin Patterson, who's quoted in my first chapter. He made a very bold statement, received a lot of vicious criticism, and then pulled back. This is a typical pattern. Another pattern is that of Stephen Jay Gould, who said that Darwinism is effectively dead as a general theory-and then realized that he had given a powerful weapon to the creationists, whose existence cannot be tolerated. So now Gould says that he's really a good Darwinist, and that all he really meant was that Darwinism could be improved by developing a larger theory that included Darwinism. What we have here is politics, not science. Darwinism is politically correct for the scientific community, because it enables them to fight off any rivals for cultural authority.

Darwinists often accuse creationists of intolerance. But you're suggesting that the Darwinists are intolerant?

If you want to know what Darwinist science is really like, read what the Darwinists say about the creationists, because those things-regardless of whether they're true about the creationists-are true about the Darwinists. I've found that people often say things about their enemies that are true of themselves. And I think Darwinist science has many of the defects that the Darwinists are so indignant about when they describe the creationists.

Across the country, there has been a growing trend toward teaching evolution as a fact-especially in California, your own state. What does this say about science education in America?

This is an attempt to establish a religious position as orthodox throughout the educational establishment, and thus throughout the society. It's gone very far. The position is what I call "scientific naturalism." The scientific organizations, for example, tell us that if we wish to maintain our country's economic status and cope with environmental problems, we must give everyone a scientific outlook. But the "scientific outlook" they have in mind is one which, by definition, excludes God from any role in the world, from the Big Bang to the present. So this is fundamentally a religious position-a fundamentalist position, if you like--and it's being taught in the schools as a fact when it isn't even a good theory.

Why should Christians be concerned about a scientific theory? Why does it matter?

Well, not only Christians should care about it. Everyone should. It is religion in the name of science, and that means that it is misleading people about both religion and science.

 

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Relevant References

New Tests Question Human Origins

Shattering the Myths of Darwinism Overview

Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (Book)

Alternative Science: Challenging the Myths of the Scientific Establishment

Richard Milton on Wikipedia

Darwinism: The Forbidden Subject

Darwinism: Time to Reconsider

What Darwin Did Not Know (Book)

What Darwin Did Not Know (YouTube)

Pro-Evolution References

Richard Dawkins on Darwin

Why Evolution Is True (by Jerry Coyne)

Why Evolution is True (PDF download)

Jerry Coyne on Youtube

Jerry Coyne Website