Sleight-of-Hand with the fossil record

this is fascinating.....


By Fred Williams.

One of the most effective pitches evolutionists use to sell their theory is their claim that the fossil record supports evolution. This could not be farther from the truth; in fact the fossil record provides powerful and overwhelming evidence that evolution did not occur on earth. So how is the evolutionist able to effectively sell to their audience the precise opposite of what the data shows? They achieve this by employing a clever sleight-of-hand with the fossil data that can easily be missed by any reasonable person. The purpose of this article is to expose this sleight-of-hand, which will then dissolve the false illusion it creates. Once the curtain is pulled and the illusion exposed, the truth can clearly be seen – the fossil record is an overwhelming and devastating contradiction to evolution.

The Sleight-of-Hand
Here’s the catch, the magic behind the illusion. Whenever an evolutionist presents his line of evidence for evolution in the fossil record, he will without fail, virtually every time, present a vertebrate transitional fossil. Why is this important? The evolutionist is failing to mention to his audience that vertebrates constitute less than .01% of the entire fossil record, and of these fossils, most species are represented by a bone or less!1 What about the other 99.99% of the fossil record? That’s the other key piece of information the evolutionist is withholding from you. Complex invertebrates make up the vast majority of this portion of the record, roughly 95%. We have cataloged literally millions of different species of these very complex creatures, and we have entire fossils, not just pieces here and there. In this rich and virtually complete portion of the fossil record, there is not a single sign of evolution, whatsoever!!!2

If evolution were true, the fossil record should be littered with countless examples showing many different transitions leading up to the millions of species of these complex creatures. YET WE DO NOT HAVE A SINGLE EXAMPLE! NOT EVEN ONE! The remarkable completeness of this vast portion of the fossil record thwarts evolutionists from cooking up "transitionals" because speculation is not so easy when you have entire specimens. There is not the wild guesswork inherent when dealing with willy-nilly fragments of a tooth here, a leg bone there.

The distribution of fossils is illustrated in the pie chart in Figure 1. As can be seen, complex invertebrates constitute 95% of the fossil record. The remaining 5% consists mostly of plants & algae, where again we find no fossil evidence of evolution, whatsoever.3 In the small portion that includes insects, again we find no fossil evidence of evolution, whatsoever.4.


The problems only get worse for the evolutionist. Not only is there no sign of evolution leading up to the complex invertebrates, but also missing in action are the enormous number of transitionals that must have existed to bridge the gap between invertebrates and vertebrates. The transformation from invertebrate to vertebrate would have been a major event in the earth’s evolutionary history. Yet the fossil record does not leave a single shred of evidence for this enormous transformation!5. This problem has been exacerbated by recent finds in China of highly advanced and extremely well preserved vertebrate life forms in the lower Cambrian strata. These fossils have collapsed the available time for the invertebrate to vertebrate transformation by at least 50 million years, to between 2 to 3 million years!6. This is a blink of the eye in geological time (a period called the Cambrian Explosion), prompting the two primary Chinese scientists involved to bluntly admit that these fossils roundly contradict the theory of evolution.7

The nightmare gets worse for the evolutionist when we consider that the wide diversity of body plans that suddenly appear in this brief 2 to 3 million year window are markedly distinct morphologically from each other. This disparity of body plans is followed by stasis, where there are no incremental alterations to the body plans through the entire history of the fossil record up to the present!8 This is precisely what one would expect if special creation were true, and a stark contradiction to evolution.

So all that is left is a sliver of a corner of the fossil record, the vertebrates. This is the rabbit in the hat for the evolutionist. The bulk of this sliver is made up of fish, where we again find no sign of evolution whatsoever.5 A small remainder of this miniscule sliver is left for the land-dwelling vertebrates. Of the land-dwelling vertebrate species unearthed, 95% are represented by a bone or less1. Yet this is where the evolutionist concentrates all his efforts to "show" to his audience that "the fossil record supports evolution"! Their audience is completely unaware that all of the examples they are being shown come from an incredibly puny section marred with incomplete data. They are conveniently left in the dark regarding the other 99.99% of the data, from a portion of the fossil record that is far more complete, that shows NO HINT OF EVOLUTION WHATSOEVER! This is their sleight-of-hand. This is a sham. This is brainwashing. There is no other way to put it.

The Sliver Considered
What about this miniscule and fragmentary portion of the fossil record where evolutionists have been forced to spend so much of their time & energy? We would expect that due to the subjective nature of such fossils, many examples put forth from this group by evolutionists would be either 1) disputed by other experts in the field, or 2) later disproved by new, more complete data. Indeed we have an abundance of examples of both of these expected outcomes.

Take Archaeopteryx, for example. Many evolutionists hail this fossil bird as an intermediate between dinosaur & bird. Yet a decent number of leading bird experts, who are themselves evolutionists, roundly dispute this claim.9 The alleged ape-man ‘Lucy’ is another example championed by many evolutionists, but disputed by other qualified evolutionist scientists. Renowned anatomist Lord Solly Zuckerman once scornfully denounced the australopithecines as nothing more than “bloody apes”!10 He became so frustrated with the claims of his fellow evolutionists that he declared there was “no Science to be found in this field at all”.11

What about dinosaur fossils? Take a look at Figure 2, taken out of the most recent copy of the Britannica Encyclopedia. All of the light red lines and the dashed lines refer to fossils that have NEVER BEEN FOUND! These lines represent "inferred" fossils! In other words, evolutionists cannot offer a single example of an ancestor of the dinosaurs.

Finally, even when we do find well preserved, intact fossils, a great deal of speculation is still required to determine its place in an evolutionary tree, especially when we do not have any of the soft anatomy available to analyze. In his book “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis”, Dr Michael Denton wrote: “Because the soft biology of extinct groups can never be known with any certainty then obviously the status of even the most convincing intermediates is bound to be insecure.”15 He gave as an example the Coelacanth, a fish once believed to have gone extinct over 100 million years ago. For nearly a century the Coelacanth had been considered an ideal intermediate between fish and terrestrial vertebrates based on its well-preserved skeletal fossil remains. But after one was discovered alive and well in 1938, analysis of the soft anatomy quickly revealed that it had all the characteristics of a fish, not the characteristics of an intermediate the evolutionists had hoped for.



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