Another evolutionary icon bites the dust

[Stu]

No surprises here.

Another evolutionary icon bites the dust

Museums and textbooks claim that whale fossils provide the clearest proof of evolution today (they have mostly gone cold on horse evolution because that story no longer withstands scrutiny). Three key fossils are Pakicetus, Amubulocetus and Rodhocetus, which are claimed to link a land animal with the whales known as Basilosaurids. Without these three the story collapses.

Dr Carl Werner, author of Evolution: the Grand Experiment, has checked out the claims made about these fossils, interviewing the researchers who published on them, and has discovered that none of these fossils holds up as transitional to whales. To be blunt, Dr Werner has discovered a pattern of fraud, or at the very least extremely wishful thinking and imaginative story telling that is not supported by the fossil evidence.

We have already pointed out the extreme story telling that occurred with Pakicetus, involving Dr Philip Gingerich. An incomplete skull fossil was imagined to be that of a whale-like creature, displayed as an artist’s impression on the cover of the prestigious journal, Science, in 1983. Some years later the rest of Pakicetus was found, published in 2001, and it proved to be nothing like a whale. Contrary to what Dr Gingerich had imagined, there was no blowhole, there were no flippers (only hooves), and there was no whale neck (just a neck typical for land mammals). Even so, Dr Werner reveals that the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Natural History Museum in London have not stopped using the falsely-reconstructed skull that shows a blowhole.

Dr Werner reveals that in a National Geographic documentary in 2009 Dr Gingerich still claimed that Pakicetus should be classed with whales, based on its ear-bone. However, the ear-bone is not like a whale, which has a finger-like projection (sigmoid process), but is plate-like, like the fossils of land animals known as artiodactyls.

Ambulocetus is portrayed as an intermediate between Pakicetus and Rodhocetus. Dr Hans Thewissen, former student of Gingerich, said that there were eight characteristics that showed the Ambulocetus was a whale ancestor. We have also reported on Ambulocetus, but Dr Werner recorded on video Dr Thewissen admitting that a key ‘evidence’ of whale ancestry, the sigmoid process of the ear-bone apparatus, (again) was actually nothing like a whale ear bone. Also, the cheek bone, which Thewissen claimed is thin like a whale cheek bone, is actually not thin at all; a horse, for example, has a much thinner cheekbone than Ambulocetus (see illustration). Furthermore, Dr Thewissen’s lab has supplied models of Ambulocetus to various museums that show a blowhole in the snout of the skull, but there is no fossil evidence of a blowhole. Dr Werner says, “All eight characters he reported as whale features are disturbingly non-whale features.”

Rodhocetus is claimed to be an aquatic animal that is developing front flippers and a tail with a whale-like tail and fluke (horizontal fins)—i.e. supposedly well on the way to becoming a whale. However, when Dr Werner pointed out to the paleontologist who discovered Rodhocetus, Dr Gingerich, that there was no fossil skeletal evidence for a tail or flippers, Dr Gingerich admitted that this was so. He also admitted that he now thought that the creature had neither of these critical whale features. We provided some of this information in our Creation magazine article in 2012. However, the tail and flippers are still displayed in many articles, and I expect that, like Haeckel’s embryos, will be for many years to come.

Dr Werner provides more evidence in his press release,1 and many more details in a major new appendix in the third edition of his informative and beautifully-illustrated book Evolution: the Grand Experiment.

In addition, you can witness many of these explosive admissions by the paleontologists themselves, as they are recorded in the documentary DVD, Evolution: the Grand Experiment (see products, top right).

Another evolutionary icon bites the dust!

Source

[Seraph]

A theorized section of the evolutionary tree found to be inaccurate? That's 1 down, 50,000 to go! Theres also that pesky matter of evidence from DNA that needs to be dealt with.

There's no source that I would expect to have more objective non-biased info on the matter than a source called "Creation Ministries".

[Stu]

A theorized section of the evolutionary tree found to be inaccurate? That's 1 down, 50,000 to go! Theres also that pesky matter of evidence from DNA that needs to be dealt with.

There's no source that I would expect to have more objective non-biased info on the matter than a source called "Creation Ministries".

The so-called proofs have been falling one at a time quite consistently now for some time.

What evidence from DNA? And I really hope you aren't going to use "Junk" DNA or fused chromsomes as examples.

[PeteSinCA]

There's no source that I would expect to have more objective non-biased info on the matter than a source called "Creation Ministries".

Shooting the messenger doesn't make the message less true, Seraph. These Piltdownian proto-cetaceans were no more whales than I am.

Were they found in Nebraska?

[bippy123]

Or the lack of being able to invoke any evolutionary mechanisms to explain the specific complex arrangements of the nucleotide bases within DNA itself

http://youtu.be/yLeWh8Df3k8

Focus on minutes 3 through 8 here

[PeteSinCA]

Or the lack of being able to invoke any evolutionary mechanisms to explain the specific complex arrangements of the nucleotide bases within DNA itself

Having worked in engineering for much of my career, there is a problem intrinsic to trying to invoke similarities - whether at the gross anatomical level, or at the genetic function level. A Creator is a designer, and designers often reuse elements in the various things the design. For example, that power supply inside your PC or Mac, that power adapter for your laptop, and that wall-wart powering your printer or router uses technologies developed over the past 5 decades or so. The basic technology, switchmode operation, was developed in the 1960s (that I know of) for NASA and the military to improve efficiency and reduce weight in space craft and aircraft electronics. The two most commonly used switchmode controller IC families were introduced in the mid 1970s and early 1980s, and those ICs "merely" integrated into a single package the discrete building blocks that had been developed in and used since the 1960s. Can you guess in what part of the electronics industry I've worked since 1980? Those nice, modern, 10-100 Gigahertz microwave communications and radar electronics flying around in fighters, bombers and UAVs, onboard ships, driving around in vehicles and in ground installations? They use devices whose designs are the current developments of products created 80 years ago (guess how old my current employer is and what they make!).

Obviously, there are analogies to this in many industries.

IOW, designers do not reinvent the wheel for every product. Similarly, there is no reason for Creator-Designer must use unique gross anatomies or proteins (and protein construction mechanism) for each living creature created. So similarities, at all levels, can be invoked as "evidence" for evolutionary descent or of design; just as all those generations of electronic devices were created by reusing and extending existing technologies, I think it much more reasonable to understand the vast array of living creatures with similar structures and molecular biology to be the work of a Designer.

[Morny]

No surprises here.

Stu,

In one of his lectures, (medical) Dr. Werner, who seems to be a YEC, claimed that geologists say that some polystrate trees stand vertically within rock layers that span millions of years.

In my conversation with him afterward, I asked which geologist(s) made such an extraordinary claim. After repeatedly avoiding an answer, he finally admitted that no geologist had made such a claim. Who was the source for Dr. Werner's claim? A park employee.

You can find a better authority for someone intending to topple evolution.

[Morny]

...

PeteSinCA,

Organizing organisms by a panoply of traits forms only one reasonable nested hierarchy. The leaves (organisms) on the tree (of life), grouped by branch and stem, form the nested hierarchy. Evolution, using only the assumptions of a common ancestor, variation, and bifurcating descent, explains the one nested hierarchy.

By contrast, the evolution of human designs can form multiple reasonable nested hierarchies, because humans freely mix-and-match subunits. Why did The Designer stick to the one reasonable nested hierarchy?