In part 1 of my comprehensive book review of preeminent paleoanthropologist, Ian Tattersall’s book, Masters of the Planet – The Search For Our Human Origins, we discussed many of the blind assumptions and uncertainty that attempted to fill the gaps in his lack of evidence for human evolution. As we pick up in Chapter 6, we’ll see much of the same speculation and story-telling
Chapter 6 – Life on the Savanna
He continues in his evaluation of Homo Ergaster
And in the absence of substantial evidence of technological change, we have to fall back on physical and other indirect indicators…these indicators are highly suggestive even though we are hard put to draw specific conclusions
The uncertainty and speculation persists. He’s staying true to the evolutionary story even with the absence of substantial evidence
There is no shortage of ideas; and although there is little evidence to substantiate any of them, a circumstantial case can be built
So much religion. Not so much evidence
Perhaps
may have been more important than the material evidence indicates
suggested
may have been
so it seems likely
Whatever their origin
would have
would not have been
would also have necessitated
possible
It is impossible to know for sure
is thought to have been
seems to be
the assumption
estimate
begs a number of important questions
as to leave lots of room for doubt
in which case there should be more and better evidence of it
almost entirely circumstantial
could have
may have
may have been
and if you are prepared to pile on a few more assumptions
probably
may
we are unable to say much more than this with any confidence
probably
probably
purely hypothetical
has to remain a guess
perhaps
we can’t be entirely sure
fairly sure
only indirectly reflected in the material record
must have
probably
Uncertainty. Assumptions. Speculation
Backing up a little to pages 110 and 111 we see
And we can’t take absence of evidence as evidence of absence. Beyond this, it is fair to point out that there is nothing we know or can reasonably infer about Homo ergaster cognition that would rule out the possibility that these creatures used simple containers
The absence of evidence for evolution is the norm. Evolutionists are excellent story-tellers, and they fill the gaps of this missing evidence with wonderful stories. I’m just not persuaded by their stories
Chapter 7 – Out of Africa and Back
Many people may not know that the “Out of Africa” theory was concocted in an effort to hide the inherent historical racism of Darwin’s theory of evolution. When Darwin fabricated his theory he lived in a time when it was perfectly acceptable to be openly racist. He had nothing to hide by presenting his new theory as praising the white race for being more evolved and pointing out that he thought the darker-skinned people were less evolved. From his work Descent of Man:
Sadly this kind of thinking had real and dire consequences built into the foundation of the theory of evolution. People have chosen to be racist for millennia, but with the advent of the new evolutionary paradigm that was deemed scientifically advanced, people felt they had a scientific justification for mistreating people of different ethnicities. The scientific racism went so far as to actually display an African in a zoo as if he were an animal
As the 20th century progressed, racism (thankfully) fell out of favor among the scientific elite, but because evolution had vise-like grip on academia, a new story was needed to hide the racism. Enter the “Out of Africa” model. The idea is that since humans were now said to have evolved in Africa first, Africans now had the GREATER claim to being the MOST human of all. Dr. Marvin Lubenow exposes the fabrication in his book, Bones of Contention
Now, what does Tattersall have to say about “Out of Africa”?
The human family was born in Africa, and many millions of years passed before we have any evidence that hominids had managed to escape the continents confines. For a long time it was believed…now though, things are looking a lot more murky; for the initial dispersal out of Africa appears to have occurred as early as 1.8 million years ago, or possibly more
Claims and murkiness. No science there. He follows with “suddenly” “it was felt” and “suggested” before throwing out this beauty:
Shortly before the early age of the Dmanisi was verified in 2000 and 2002, dates had been published from Java that hinted at the very early (1.8-to1.6 million-year) presence of Homo erectus in eastern Asia; together, these dates placed beyond dispute that the hominid exodus from Africa had begun almost immediately following the appearance there of the new hominid body form-vastly earlier than anyone had previously suspected.
“Beyond dispute“…please! Dates from evolutionists are presented as SET IN STONE when they speak to detractors, but as time goes by, the dates are as pliable as jello on a trampoline. New evidence requires evolutionists to constantly revise dates to keep the story from falsification as evidenced by the last line: “vastly earlier than anyone had previously suspected.” Because prior to that point, the evolutionists would have expelled anyone for suggesting the the dates that Tattersall says are “beyond dispute”. This book was published in 2012. As of the time of this blog post, the proposed (Darwinian) dates for the Dmanisi fossils have changed 3 times since 2012. There’s nothing to prevent future discoveries from forcing evolutionists to change these “beyond dispute” dates yet again to keep the theory from extinction
On page 127 he continues
Limited as our speculations have to be, however, the conclusion is inescapable that the invention of the handaxe must be represented-or at least have reflected-a cognitive leap of some kind
Unfortunately for Tattersall, the argument from his entire book hinges on this phrase, which we will see again: “a cognitive leap of some kind”. No evidence of natural selection acting on random mutations to produce cognition…just an interpretation of bones and stones to fabricate a story. This story includes (not science) but ever-increasing speculation:
Must have been
if for no better reason than there was nowhere else for them to iccur
must have been
remains a bit hazy
we have no idea
especially since there is no evidence that more than 1 hominid grade was involved
strongly suggests
suggestion
quite controversial
remains pure speculation
but it is possible
it is quite possible
we have so little supporting evidence
how we interpret it
suggestive
is at least highly suggestive
regrettably unknown to us
just as likely
a scenario
suggests
maybe about a quarter million years ago
perhaps most bizarrely of all
enormous controversy
Chapter 8 The First Cosmopolitan Hominid
Scattered throughout this chapter, we see the continued howls from Tattersall that the fossil record of human evolution is deficient
The systematic picture among fossil hominids of the period around a million years ago remains rather unclear, because relevant fossils in the African center of innovation are few and far between and widely scattered“
On its own the Mauer jaw was a bit puzzling
Dating is rather poor for most of these fossils
we can’t say much about the body structure of Homo heidelbergensis, since bones of the body skeleton are few and far between.
Some 380 thousand years ago the terrace on which Terra Amata lies was an ancient beach, to which a small group of hunters repeatedly returned (alas, without leaving any evidence of themselves)
Notice the speculation, uncertainty, arguing, and wagering of guesses on which paleoanthropology is built. Yet, when anyone questions the evolutionary narrative, the rebuttal is inevitably “you’re a science-denier!!!!” In their books and papers, to their evolutionary audiences, they drop their filter and expose the tentative nature of their view. Evolution isn’t built upon mountains of evidence; it’s built upon the predetermined ideology that natural selection acting on random mutations can produce all biological traits.
Chapter 9 Ice Ages and Early Europeans
In chapter 9 Tattersall tells the terrifying tale of intrepid travelers traversing frosty terrain as they transformed from Tanzanian apes into tempered Turks. It’s a great fable, with lots of conjecture.
There is thus no way in which we can realistically think of hominid evolution during the Pleistocene as a matter of steady adaptation. Instead, the story is a much more dramatic one
Ice Age conditions were often tough for the hominid individuals concerned; but never had circumstances been more propitious for meaningful evolutionary change than among our highly mobile, adaptable, and resourceful Pleistocene ancestors. Taken together, this combination of internal and external factors may well account for the amazing rapidity with which hominids evolved during the Pleistocene…rapid evolution…rapidly…quite unexpected…may have been
Propitious?!? You mean lucky? What exactly he means by evolutionary change, he never really says, but the implication is that “change happened, therefore evolution did it! Praise evolution almighty!” Again we see that Tattersall is proposing this strange and unnatural view of ‘rapid evolution’. We’ll see in chapter 14 why he’s pushing so hard for this idea that is so far outside the orthodox teachings of evolution: slow & gradual accumulation of mutations filtered over millions of years by natural selection
And very recent findings have also pointed to something quite unexpected: the possibility that, under fluctuating Pleistocene conditions, new genes may have been introduced into hominid populations by occasional intermixing between closely related and poorly differentiated hominid species
He’s saying that beastiality built humanity. Yuck! Too bad we didn’t end up with the monkey’s prehensile tail or the Orangutang’s strength.
But the problem was that each glacial advance scoured away much of the evidence left behind by its predecessors, and the resulting observations were a nightmare to interpret
No kidding. Your modified theory of evolution has staved off extinction despite the scouring away of much of the evidence. How convenient that the evidence is missing.
chronology is based on modern geochronological and geochemical analyses of long cores drilled through sea-floor sediments, or through the Greenland or Antarctic ice caps.
It is not easy to date a pile of bones at the bottom of a pit
Chapter 9 ends with lots of open questions and plenty of room for open skepticism about the story that we are forced to swallow despite the lack of evidence.
Chapter 10 Who Were the Neanderthals
Maybe we’ll get more answers in chapter 10
we know so little about it due to the effects of repeated glaciation and deglaciation in the region
Again, evolutionists know so little because the evidence is missing…supposedly and conveniently by glaciers. Funny how today, the progressive left (which would undoubtedly include evolutionists) pray to, fight for, and weep for glaciers.
As far as we can tell from a less-than-perfect postcranial fossil record
More lamentations at the dearth of evidence
evolutionary time
What is evolutionary time? How is it different from regular time? The pervasive use of ‘evolutionary’ as an adjective shows how religious is their devotion to the theory. They use evolution as a noun, a verb, an adjective, and adverb…it’s just evolutionary evolution of evolution-like evolvement. And if you’re skeptical of the evolutionary evolutionism by evolutionists, you’re deemed to be a “science-denier”.
Perhaps…appeared to have been…suggested…might have been…might have been…probably too early to know what to make of observations…it is not out of the question…may have had
All of these words of ambiguity appear in the same paragraph
Chapter 11 Archaic and Modern
In this chapter Tattersall talks about evidence of artwork and tools. He tries to build a distinction between what he considers to be archaic fossils and modern fossils. Not much to critique in this chapter
Chapter 12 Enigmatic Arrival
In ch 12, Tattersall intends to build the case that Homo Neanderthalensis is distinct from modern humans – not in phenotype, but only in cognition. He admits several times that the fossils are virtually indistinguishable, but because of the different layers in which the fossils are found, he calls 1 fossil Neanderthal, and the other human. Let’s review
Homo sapiens was emerging
This again is the common lingo among evolutionists. They don’t want to say that it was magic, but their justification for these emergent changes sounds very much like an appeal to magic
Still, this is not the whole story, for as far as Homo sapiens is concerned it appears that the body for was one thing, while the symbolic cognitive system that distinguishes us to greatly from all other creatures was entirely another. The two were not acquired at the same time, and the earliest anatomical Homo sapiens appear right now to have been cognitively indistinguishable from the Neanderthals and other contemporaries
Recognizing species from their bones is often a tough proposition among close relatives: in some cases, much physical diversity may accumulate within a population without speciation occurring, while in others, the bones of members of two species descended from the same ancestor may be virtually indistinguishable. In the absence of a good morphological yardstick we thus can’t be absolutely sure that Aterians or the Jebel Irhoud people would not have been able to exchange genes with anatomically mainstream Homo sapiens.
If nothing else from this book, we see that “recognizing species from their bones is often a tough proposition”, and then when evolutionists cancel/expel/dismiss anyone, who is skeptical of evolution, we see that they are simply protecting their religion. Those presuppositionalists, who read my blog, will recognize the Tattersall’s lament of not having a standard when he says “in the absence of a good morphological yardstick”. By What Standard indeed? Evolutionists can NEVER have absolute surety because some new discovery can (and almost always does) change their whole paradigm.
Chapter 12 finishes out with an overabundance of “maybe”
These tools were more or less identical
probably
spectacularly obscure
One possibility
there is no independent reason to believe that they were around at exactly the same time
other possibilities
Notice from the screenshot of pg 192 how many underlined words leave the reader with the idea that there’s no reason to hold tightly to the evolutionary beliefs. The following page includes these gems
in light of the frustratingly little we know, it seems reasonable to see the initial excursion of anatomical Homo sapiens out of Africa and into the neighboring Levant as the fortuitous product of circumstance, facilitated or even spurred by a benevolent change in climate…quite likely…But whatever the ultimate identity…tantalizing hints…we have no evidence
Speculation based on fortuitous circumstance (luck). And “benevolent change”?!!? Are you kidding me? There’s no reason to take this paragraph seriously when he proposes that the climate was “benevolent” to the proto-humans. Let’s move on to chapter 13
Chapter 13 The Origin of Symbolic Behavior
In 2013 Living Waters ministries released a documentary titled ‘Evolution vs. God’, and at about the 33 minute mark UCLA professor, Dr. Gail Kennedy remarked “You know the problem with those who are unable to see evolution, I think, is they don’t have imaginations.” Indeed. To believe in evolution, you must have a vivid imagination. Tattersall agrees:
Our ancestors made an almost unimaginable transition from a non-symbolic, nonlinguistic way of processing and communicating…it is a qualitative leap in cognitive state unparalleled in history. Indeed, as I’ve said, the only reason we have for believing that such a leap could ever have been made, is that it was made.
He states that the ONLY reason to believe that humans evolved from their indistinguishable contemporaries is that humans are here. No evidence of this event. No prediction by evolutionists that it could have happened. No other reason whatsoever other than: humans are here. That’s nearly exact wording for an example of the Post Hoc Fallacy.
Some scholars have suggested that the dazzling Cro-Magnon art represented such a break with the past that a recent genetic modification must have been acquired in the Cro-Magnons’ lineage to make all this creativity possible: a modification whose effects were confined to their neural information processing, and were not reflected in the fossil bones which are all the physical evidence we have of them.
Suggestions…must have been. These evolutionary beliefs are thrown into the conclusions without demonstrative evidence. And regarding the evidence, notice from the last highlighted sentence that the EVIDENCE IS MISSING!
Chapter 14 In the Beginning Was the Word
The reason I bought and reviewed this book was the quote just below. When I heard Dr. Christopher Rupe (who himself is a paleoanthropologist) read this quote during his presentation, I had to see it for myself. You can see the whole video from Dr. Rupe here. He reads the quote at about 58 minutes in. I found it on page 207 in Tattersall’s book:
Evolutionists teach that numerous successive slight modifications over millions of years allow creatures to gain new traits to outcompete their unfit counterparts in the struggle for survival. Slow and steady accumulations. But Tattersall is admitting that this kind of evolutions is not supported in the fossil record. He has to invent NEW evolution, and while he doesn’t use the word, notice how easily you could plug in the word miracle as a synonym for each green word below
As I have already observed, this suggests that the physical origin of our species lay in a short-term event of major developmental organization, even if that event was likely driven by a rather minor structural innovation at the DNA level. Such an occurrence is made more plausible by the fact that genetic innovations of the kind that probably produced us are most likely to become “fixed” (i.e., the norm) in small and genetically isolated populations…In other words, conditions in the late Pleistocene would have been as propitious as you could imagine for the kind of event that would necessarily have had to underwrite the appearance of a creature as unusual as ourselves.
Evolutionists say they don’t believe in miracles. They only believe in science…
But notice how they just avoid the word “miracle” with synonyms…and it continues
But the results of this acquisition were revolutionary: in today’s jargon, they were “emergent,” whereby an adventitiouschange or addition to a pre-existing structure led to a whole new level of complexity and function. Exactly when our amazing capability was initially acquired is something we cannot read directly from the fossil record: the paleoneurologists, those specialists who specialize in the form of fossil brains as determined from the impressions they leave inside the cranial vault, cannot even agree in principle if there us any functional significance to the minor external shape differences
Emergent = miracle
adventitious = miracle
Tattersall admits that the fossil evidence is missing…and his field of expertise is looking at fossils. He assumes that SOMEONE SOMEWHERE MUST have the evidence for evolution, it’s just not in his field
some believe
speculation
sometimes it seems like a miracle
The specifics still evade us, and we as yet have no idea what the genetic rearrangement was that gave rise to the unique anatomy of Homo sapiens. All we know for sure is that this event did indeed occur. But it seems overwhelmingly likely that….our new cognitive ability was acquired as a byproduct of the hugely ramifying genetic accident…Happily for us
The speculation and miracles continue. I don’t see any reason to accept the idea that humans evolved by means of natural selection acting on random mutations…the theory of evolution, which is what this book was an attempt to explain
The story-telling continues
I’ve already briefly mentioned the classic example of feathers, which were possessed by the ancestors of birds many millions of years before these modified dermal follicles were ever recruited as essential components of the flight mechanism. Similarly, the ancestors of terrestrial vertebrates had already acquired the rudiments of legs while they were still fully aquatic, and a terrestrial existence was still far in the future. You simply wouldn’t have predicted their future function when they first appeared. What is more, evolutionary novelties often persist if they don’t actively get in the way; and in the case of Homo sapiens the potential symbolic thought evidently just lurked there, undetected, until it was “released” by a stimulus that must necessarily have been a cultural one-the biology, after all, was already in place.
If you read that paragraph and know anything about evolution, you will declare: “That’s not how evolution works!” Evolution is said to work by reproductive fitness. Essentially, this means that whatever new traits that random mutations can provide, natural selection can judge whether or not to preserve that trait by how well it improves the ability to produce more offspring. Partially formed feathers can’t be preserved because there’s no evidence that they provide any increased fitness. It’s not just that these proto-feathers had to improve fitness in a single individual. These non-flight (what evolutionists think were broken dermal follicles) proto-feathers had to get fixed in an entire population of non-flying reptiles (as the story goes) and after millions of years get converted to the supremely well-designed flight feathers that we see today. Remember, there is no evidence that feather-like broken dermal follicles ever existed. But even if we grant that they did, they could not be preserved by natural selection if they didn’t provide a reproductive advantage for an entire population of reptiles! Same with rudimentary legs (stumps). Their wild assertions of stumps and follicles surviving millions of years of natural selection ruthlessly streamlining the phenotypes is absurd and definitely NOT evolution. They are appending a NEW story onto evolution in an attempt to explain the inexplicable. Now Tattersall invents the idea that “symbolic thought” just emerged miraculously even though the components were supposedly there all along too. In their attempt to prove evolution, they have to redefine evolution to include non-evolutionary (or in this case anti-evolutionary) mechanisms
believe
sparking speculation
has done nothing to quell the argument
suggestion
We can expect debate
notion
It’s anybody’s guess
Maybe
maybe
will require a lot more information than we have at present
suggests
almost unimaginable
remains a subject of pure speculation
If you asked an assortment of scientists interested in this question what that stimulus might have been, two clear frontrunners would probably emerge
we can guess
Some scientists believe
This is an attractive idea momentous event
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe
But this has proved a tricky endeavor, for individual words change quite rapidly over time: so rapidly that beyond a time depth of about five thousand years, or ten at the very most, it turns out to be fairly hopeless to look for substantial traces of relationship
5000-10000 years ago? Sounds very much like a biblical timeframe. At least I agree with Tattersall above
In figuring out just what it is that makes our brains special, we always have to keep in mind that our controlling organ is a rather untidy structure that, from very simple beginnings, has accreted rather opportunistically over an enormous period of time. So perhaps we shouldn’t be looking for one single major “keystone” acquisition. Instead, the extraordinary properties of the human brain are likely emergent, resulting from a relatively tiny-and altogether accidental-addition or modification to a complex structure that was already , and exaptively, almost prepared for symbolic thought.
As Darwin admitted in his autobiography: “Can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animals, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?”, Tattersall too is left admitting his belief that the human brain accreted accidentally. Why should an accidental accretion of neurons be trusted to provide reasonable conclusions? Would you trust the results of a calculator that was accidentally thrown together? I wouldn’t, and neither should you.
To sum up, Tattersall is a talented writer, and he is an excellent apologist for evolution. I’m sure he does a great job digging up bones. But I find that his attempt to convince critical thinkers that humans evolved (natural selection acting on random mutations) from lower animals is based – not on evidence – but on a religious commitment to naturalism. Evolution fails to explain the origin of humans.
For other areas where evolution has failed to explain the origin of:
In these series of posts: “Can Evolution Explain…” we have seen that the LOUD and TRIVIAL mantra: “there are mountains of evidence for evolution” rings hollow. What the internet evolutionists believe as gospel because it has passed through the peer-review process, is really just an accumulation of assumptions and artwork. The links to all of my review articles in this series are at the end of this post
Who would know the story of human evolution best? Dr. Ian Tattersall is regarded as one of the top 5 paleoanthropologists of the last 100 years and has served as the Curator Emeritus in the Division of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History. Surely, if the evidence strongly supports the belief that humans are the result of natural selection acting on random mutations from creatures that were not human, we should be able to learn this information from his book, Masters of the Planet – The Search For Our Human Origins. So I bought the book and read it.
Writing a book is a monumental task, and Tattersall is an excellent writer. He has done a great job in his research, and I was never bored reading through his book. Tattersall attempts to make the case that the emergence of language is the defining trait that led to humanity.
As you will see, my contention is with his assumptions, his supposed evidence, and his conclusions. As with the other reviews, Tattersall’s comments will appear in red with my comments in the default black. Any bold or italics in his quotes are added by me to highlight many of his problems. Let’s get to it
perceived in the apes a bestial savagery that served as an unwelcome reminder of humanity’s feared and (usually) repressed dark side
This is the 2nd sentence of the prologue. Right from the beginning, we see the assumption of common ancestry tied to chimpanzees. It is his right to make and state his assumptions, but as we will see, there’s no reason to be persuaded by his assumptions
Most importantly we have learned a great deal about the diversity and behaviors of our precursors on this Earth: certainly enough to allow us to begin speculating with some confidence about how, when, and in what context humankinds acquired its extraordinary habits of mind and communication
This is a common theme. There is speculation based on Tattersall’s basic assumption throughout the book.
Again from the Prologue, Tattersall proposes the idea that instead of natural selection (evolution) designing an “optimal” and predictable brain:
the long and untidy process that gave rise to the human brain…it is the very messiness and adventitiousness of our brains that makes them-and us-the intellectually fertile, creative, emotional, and interesting entities that they and we are
This perspective conflicts with the view of evolution that most of us were taught in school-where. if it was mentioned at all, this most fundamental of biological processes was usually presented as a matter of slow, inexorable refinement, constantly tending toward achieving the perfect.
Tattersall takes the view that instead of the typical evolutionary story of natural selection bending the human brain to be more rational and more optimized, the untidy and random nature of evolution that produced human thought. It’s similar to what Charles Darwin himself said in his autobiography as to why human reasoning (if the result of evolution) ultimately has no logical reason to produce trustworthy thought:
Incredibly, Tattersall inadvertently recognizes the case that Dr. John Sanford made in his magnificent book, Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome, that natural selection CANNOT preserve or remove traits at the genetic level. Natural selection can theoretically only act against the phenotype, which is why degratory mutations accumulate in the slippery slope towards extinction. Devolution is the norm.
In the end, natural selection can only vote up or down on the entire individual, which is a real mash-up of genes and of the characteristics they promote. It cannot single out specific features to favor or disfavor
Evolution is a myth
And there are yet other reasons for not expecting that evolution should produce tidy perfection. As I’ve already suggested, change can only build on what is there already, because there is no way that evolution can conjure up de novo solutions to whatever environmental or social problems may present themselves
If you didn’t know better, you’d have thought a creationist wrote that paragraph. This is true! Evolution CANNOT conjure up novel traits by means of natural selection acting on random mutations. It was very fulfilling to read this admission from a staunch evolutionist. They DO rely on the idea of miracles to produce new traits and human reasoning, but they have to imagine that nature can benevolently give them these miracles. He gives voice to this in this next section
Of course, it’s also true that not all mutations are equal. Some will have little or no effect on the adult organisms; but a few may have a radical influence on the developmental processes…for all of these reasons we should not expect significant evolutionary change in physical form to happen always, or even usually, in tiny and incremental steps. As we will see, sometimes a very small change in the genome itself can have extensive and ramifying developmental results, producing an anatomical or behavioral gap between highly distinct alternative adult states.
He can’t call them miracles, and he can’t point to any evidence, but he imagines a mutation to have been the magical step from brutish to cognitive ape. There’s no evidence for this, but for his worldview to be true, he has to imagine it. Notice too how to dismisses the standard evolutionary story of “tiny and incremental steps”, which undergirds to the whole theory of evolution in order to make his case for a fantastical unscientific leap in human development. It’s not evolution or science…it’s pure imagination
chapter 1 Ancient Origins
There is much speculation in this chapter, and I’ll list some of the many examples
luckily
as fate would have it
most remarkable
probably
may actually have
Given this reality, it is hardly realistic to expect that we’ll ever find an anatomical “silver bullet” that will by itself tell us infallibly if an ancient fossil is a hominid or not
there’s always an element of human judgment involved
the materials attributed to Orrorin are fragmentary, consisting of some bits of jaw and teeth and several limb bones believed (but not demonstrated) to have belonged to members of the same species
might be
Ar. kadabba is represented only by miscellaneous materials from sites scattered in time and space, and their association in the same species is even less secure than in the case of Orrorin
a lot of subjective judgment
Ardi is a mysterious beast
are not hugely obvious
These elements all add up to a great story, and they may well have been important individually
Presumably
must have
But exactly how and in what precise context the in-line terrestrial foot was acquired remains tantalizingly obscure
This deficit in our knowledge is hugely unfortunate because, given that everything that happened later was dependent on the fateful transition from the trees to the forest floor, it presents us with one of the most fundamental mysteries on all of paleoanthropology
host of questions
Most of the known fossils of this species are teeth and bits of jaws
acquired
acquired
plausible
potential
would have
probable
point to
After the 24 pages of chapter 1, Tattersall has build only a foundation of speculation and story-telling to fill in the canyon-sized gaps. He uses the verb “acquired” several times without any explanation. Just acquired as if the protohuman creatures got a Prime delivery from Amazon. As I have contended from the beginning, chapter 1 was simply a collection of assumptions; no evidence for evolution
Chapter 2 The Rise of the Bipedal Apes
There’s no improvement for the case for evolution in the second stanza
It’s interesting to speculate how differently we might interpret hominid evolutionary history today had the older fossils been discovered first…the order of discovery of our fossil relatives has deeply influenced their interpretations
So often in discussions about evolution, advocates claim that “evolution is science”, but Tattersall – in preaching to the choir – drops the facade to reveal that what is commonly claimed to be evidence is really speculation based on interpretations
But it should never be forgotten that everything we believe today is conditioned in some important way by what we thought yesterday; and some current controversies are caused, or at least stoked, by a reluctance to abandon received ideas that may well have outlived their usefulness
If for 150 years, academia has solely and tyrannically taught evolution as true, it’s no wonder that the last 4 generations of professors believe evolution to be true…and since any evolution dissenters are vehemently removed from academia, there’s no reason to believe that evolutionism will be challenged in the next few generations. Only the most steel-spined critical thinkers do not cave to the pressure from the evolutionists
So, a tolerably complete skeleton from this incredibly remote period in time was an almost unimaginable piece of luck
Given the evolutionary view – millions of years of slow and gradual natural processes – there should be practically no fossils at all. Dead creatures would be exposed to scavenging and decay as they wait for slow accumulation of sediments to protect them such that no creatures should be expected to be preserved as fossils. In any case, the key fossils that should have been available to show the smooth transition of 1 kind of creature to another (the mountains of evidence for evolution) are certainly “missing”. Conversely, since the Bible is true, and there was a global flood about 4500 years ago, we would expect to find billions of dead creatures, buried in water-sorted rock layers all over the Earth. The evidence strongly affirms the Bible, while the evolutionists call the finding of fossils to be “an almost unimaginable piece of luck”
Regarding the Laetoli footprints found in layers which evolutionists believe to be 3.8 million years old (about 3 million years too early to be human footprints)
seems to reflect the way we walk…The feet that made the prints were structured essentially like ours…strikingly modern…remarkably humanlike bipedality
Because of evolutionary assumptions, the Laetoli footprints, although exactly like humans, were dismissed as human ancestors because of the layers in which they were found. Evolutionists did NOT follow the evidence where it leads but have let their preconceived biases color their conclusions. Regarding the A. afarensis fossils from Hadar, Tattersall had this to say:
Frustratingly, it has no foot bones, leaving lots of room for speculation
Speculation indeed
But you need to know that all interpretation of the Middle Awash materials by their discoverers has been conditioned by the underlying belief that the story of human evolution has essentially been a linear one. The idea is that a central lineage gradually transformed under natural selection from one species into the next, until the primitive Ardipithecus had been transmuted into the finely burnished Homo Sapiens
Whether the underlying belief in evolution of some group of evolutionists or the “new” underlying belief in evolution from Tattersall, the underlying belief is clearly just a story. A story that dismisses the revelation of God in the Bible in favor of a naturalistic novel.
Our (human) hands, with their broad palms, long thumbs, and the ability to oppose the thumb to the tips of all the other fingers, are ideally structured to manipulate objects
“Ideally structured”?!!? You mean designed perfectly for their intended purpose by the Creator of the universe.
Chapter 3 Early Hominid Lifestyles and the Interior World
Going through this chapter, I’m again going to point out the ubiquitousness of uncertainty
would have been
would not have been
possibility
unlikely
must have
must have been
possibility
no good evidence
some authorities think
have been made possible
must have been
might well have
while this story…
possibilities
may well have been
may have
may have
possibility
would have been
possibility
suggests
might have been
not at all a sure bet
might have become
if they did
would be
would have
might have
of some kind
Sadly, at present there is much less to say about these ancient precursors than we’d like, although it’s a good bet
Perhaps
probably
would have been
hazy and incomplete
is not something we can hazard with any confidence at this point
seem to
There is no way to answer this question
approximate
presumably
The temptation is to assume…Yet the truth is that we simply cannot know
seemed to indicate
as far as one can tell
plausible
suggest
You can see from this chapter that there is little science going on, but lots of assumption and story-telling. And EVERY chapter is filled with these speculations and story-telling. Where’s the evidence?
Chapter 4 Australopith Variety
In this chapter, Tattersall builds that case in which he believes there is a great deal of variety among creatures that he thinks are not human ancestors. Just a few lines from this chapter that solidify the guessing game that goes into the story of human evolution based on rare and fragmentary fossils
nobody knew…Neither did anybody know exactly how old these early hominids were, although from the accompanying faunas is was guessed…the ankle joint looked fresh…perhaps…This fits nicely with the interpretation…Despite their strikingly different histories of interpretation…early biped species were actively experimenting with ways to exploit their hominid heritage…The unfortunate truth, however, is that this specimen also is so poorly preserved that it is difficult to know what to do with it…The hominid stage was packed with actors, all pushing and shoving for the limelight
Interpreting fossils is just that. Interpretation. To get an evolutionary interpretation of the fossils, one must first believe in evolution and that evolution by means of natural selection acting on random mutations can produce functional cohesive interrelated interdependent systems first. Anyone, who recognizes the truth that evolution cannot do produce systems is not persuaded by the interpretations of the “experts”. Regarding the last sentence of the above quote, these paleoanthropologists don’t actually produce anything that generates income. They rely on the donations of others in the forms of academic grants or benevolence to dig up fossil bones. What better way to generate interest in your work than to claim that you have discovered a human ancestor fossil? Whether the claim turns out self-aggrandizing or ultimately rejected doesn’t matter as long as there is enough interest to fund the next digging season.
Chapter 5 Striding Out
In this chapter, Tattersall tries to build the case that non-human human ancestors are related because of skull shape and bipedality. He focuses mainly on some fossils that have been named Homo Erectus and Homo Ergaster.
People have referred themselves to human since long before anyone had the faintest idea that our species is connected to the rest of the natural world by an extended series of long-vanished intermediate forms
“long-vanished” indeed. And the fossils are STILL missing. It’s why this we all use the term ‘Missing Link’. And notice how evolution by means of common ancestry is ALREADY assumed to be true. He’s made no case for the idea that humans are related to minerals, plants, and fish…just assumed it.
there is not one fossil among all those known in the period before about two million years ago that presents itself as a compelling candidate for the position of direct progenitor of the new hominids to come…This uncertainty is partly due to the fragmentary nature of the evidence…it is difficult to make sense of the abundant but frustratingly incomplete evidence that we have at our disposal
Not one. So, it’s not just a single link that is missing…but hundreds. Thousands. Millions of missing links. It takes critical thinkers (like Christians) to hold the overwhelming proselytizing of the evolutionists at bay long enough to dig deep into their literature like this to uncover their uncertainty and admissions of wild speculation
under the guiding hand of natural selection
I know that Tattersall does not believe in a literal hand of natural selection, but this is the ultimate conclusion of evolutionists. They believe that evolution was unguided. They see the necessity of guidance in forming functional cohesive interrelated interdependent systems, so they reify natural selection as if it is a prescriptive “divine” force rather than just the description of creatures without certain traits being culled. Evolution is inherently religious even though evolutionists despise being reminded of their religious-in-nature claims
Some of you might not believe that evolutionists would be so frank with their admissions with the problems of evolution, but Tattersall clearly thinks he’s ‘preaching to the choir’, and he willingly lets down the facade.
p94 Masters of the Planet
…whether or not “Nature makes jumps.” Darwin focused on slow, incremental change, while Huxley was worried by the many discontinuities he saw in the fossil record-and in nature in general-that were inconsistent with this pattern…as well as in a host of other apparent discontinuities.
Evolutionists teach their theory as if it is the slow and incremental change over time. Single, successive, slight modifications, but Tattersall recognizes the problem with the theory because the fossils don’t show this. The fossils instead show abrupt appearance and then stasis. The Theory of Evolution MUST be slow and gradual, but the evidence is inconsistent with this pattern because of a HOST of discontinuities. So much for the “mountains of evidence for evolution”.
Tattersall released this book in 2012 when almost every evolutionist believed in Junk DNA. He spends a few pages talking about how Junk DNA is what evolutionists would expect if evolution were true. Unfortunately for him (and all evolutionists), the ENCODE project was released between 2013-2015, and completely buried this argument for them.
Strange though: why would a paleoanthropologist spend any time on genetics if his expertise is in fossils? I’ve found this is often the case amongst evolutionists. They believe that since the theory of evolution has staved off extinction this long then SOMEBODY must have the evidence since there’s none in their own field.
On pg 97 he does reveal some evidence, but it’s not for evolution; it’s for devolution
subtle genetic modifications might produce large phenotypic differences…As a result the bottom-livers have lost the spines…The modification is not trivial, involving as it does the elimination of an important part of a complex structure…a small stretch of regulatory DNA has been deleted. This left the basic gene intact to do its essential task, but it has eradicated the development of spines by reducing its activity in a specific area of the body…Most changes on this scale will actually be disadvantageous
You can’t get from bacteria to Bach with this kind of deleterious evolution. He does return to fossils shortly thereafter…sorta
Perhaps the Turkana Boy’s radically new bodily conformation can be attributed to a genetic event of a similar kind…So maybe…Perhaps there simply weren’t any such intermediates-or at least none that we could reasonably expect to find on the coarse time scale that the fossil record represents. Something routine and unremarkable on the genomic level had occurred…it just happened to change the course of hominid history
No fossils. No evidence to record this monumental event that they need to make their case. It’s a grand story filled with ‘maybes’ and ‘perhaps’, but what’s missing is the actual mountains of evidence for evolution
This post has gotten pretty long. Check back next week for Part 2 of the book review
I’ve been told that natural selection acting on random mutations has enough power to produce every biological trait…including sex. I’ve put these claims to the test several times before each time with the same result…no evidence…just assumptions:
God-deniers believe that numerous successive slight modifications (random mutations)
when culled by the forces of natural selection can explain all biological traits. They do not like to be cross-examined as to how natural selection can preserve non-functioning irreducibly complex systems like biological sex, but they cope with fantastical stories of the mystical powers of evolution. Recently, a God-denier posted a link which he thought provided airtight evidence that evolution is responsible for producing sexual reproduction. Let’s put that article under some scrutiny. If it’s evidence, we should expect to see explicit demonstrations of natural selection acting on random mutations to produce information for sex. If it’s not evidence for evolution, we will see words of assumption like perhaps, possibly, may have, likely & suggest intermixed with some clever story-telling. The God-Denier in question, Finn, has before made grand claims about the power of evolution, but when his claims have been scrutinized by simply reading the peer-reviewed articles, it’s clear that what he believes to be evidence is actually a collection of assumptions wrapped in the façade of scientific language. The origin is sex is a well-known problem for evolutionists, so let’s see how these authors handle the problem. Do they deal with the problem using evidence or assumptions?
Here’s how this works: The quotes from the article are in red italics and then just below/after the quote, I’ll post my analysis in the default black font. I have added bold and underline to key words from the authors throughout, so this is just a note to say that neither the bold nor underline appear in the original article.
I’ll begin with the word count of caveat words. Goodenough and Heitman couch much of their story-telling with words that will give them a certain amount of ambiguity for escape:
“possible and possibly” – 6
“could” – 7
“might” – 16
“perhaps” – 2
“may” – 32
“likely” – 10
“hypothesis and hypothetical” – 5
“suggest, suggests and suggesting” – 16
“evolve” – 14
“evolution” – 82
This should tell you right away that we’re not dealing with any kind of evidentially-founded science here. This is a grand story wrapped in scientific jargon and ambiguous assumptions
“During the course of this evolutionary trajectory, the LECA became sexual“
It just “became sexual”. This is a post hoc fallacy: “sexual reproduction is observed, so evolution must have done it”. It’s absurd
“We propose that the transition to a sexual LECA entailed four innovations: (1) alternation of ploidy via cell–cell fusion and meiosis; (2) mating-type regulation of cell–cell fusion via differentiation of complementary haploid gametes (isogametic and then anisogametic), a prelude to species-isolation mechanisms; (3) mating-type-regulated coupling of the diploid/meiotic state to the formation of adaptive diploid resting spores; and (4) mating-type-regulated transmission of organelle genomes. Our working assumption is that the protoeukaryote → LECA era featured numerous sexual experiments, most of which failed but some of which were incorporated, integrated, and modified. Therefore, this list is not intended to suggest a sequence of events; rather, the four innovations most likely coevolvedin a parallel and disjointed fashion“
This is a long section that shows their proposal, their assumption and ultimately, not just the need for a single marvel of evolution, but multiple (coevolution) simultaneous marvels occurring in geographic proximity. Sometimes, a research (or science fiction writer) can get away with introducing a single unexpected/preposterous idea into a story. But the proposal becomes absurd when the reader is expected to believe numerous preposterous ideas (parallel coevolution of compatible corresponding functional interdependent sexual organs, systems, desires, abilities, and cascading offspring developmental solutions ALL at the same time and in the same place) in a “disjointed fashion”. It doesn’t just stretch incredulity, it mocks the readers as rubes.
“Once these core sexual-cycle themes were in place“
As if these themes could just be assumed to jump into place. It’s not persuasive at all
“That said, the ability to toggle from haploid to diploid and back again is dependent on a mechanism for ploidy reduction, which, in modern eukaryotes, entails meiotic or parasexual processes“
They have identified a NEED for sexual reproduction, but that’s a far cry from showing that numerous successive slight modifications over time can meet that need. Let’s see of either of their proposed processes parasexual or meiotic processes can do the job
“we use as examples modern organisms whose mating-type-based sexual differentiation is already established. In subsequent sections we will consider how sexual differentiation itself might have originated and evolved“
Already established?!?!?? That’s like taking an existing nut & bolt and explaining how an ratcheting wrench evolved by random mutations. If it’s already established, how are you demonstrating how it came about my an accumulation of random mutations?
“One interpretation is that the functions of Spo11 have been reconfigured to play a mitotic, parasexual role. Alternatively, the parasexual cycle of C. albicans could involve some aspects of meiosis (such as Spo11-dependent chiasmata), but given the high rate of aneuploidy (e.g., 2N + 1, 2N + 2) that is generated, it does not produce accurate outcomes, and might be considered something akin to a “parameiosis”“
One interpretation indeed. In a peer-reviewed paper, we’re looking for actual evidence rather than “could have”. Parasexual processes didn’t result in the solid ground they were looking for. What about Meiosis?
“An alternative view is that meiosis arose early, without prior parasexual experimentation, as a means to generate haploid progeny from a diploid progenitor. Early meiosis was likely messy and inaccurate—perhaps only somewhat better than parasexual changes in ploidy—with more accurate mechanisms evolving subsequently“
These are clearly guesses, not evidence. Remember in the definition of natural selection, we noted that only those traits deemed most fit would be preserved. How can natural selection preserve messy and inaccurate processes as more fit than something (asexual reproduction) that works very well? Broken unformed traits cannot be preserved if they do not increase fitness according to the teachings of natural selection
“In either view, the enzymes and machinery for meiosis presumably evolved from a core set of DNA-manipulating enzymes brought in and modified as needed from prokaryotic forebears“
We were looking for evidence in this paper, but we’ve been given “presumably”. But the real focus should be on their claim that evolution can “modify as needed”. This is a wild claim, which it completely opposed to the theory of evolution. Evolution is supposed to be completely unguided with no purpose and no foresight. But they’ve tried to smuggle in the idea that evolution can solve problems with foresight by converting hammers into wrenches. It’s not science. It’s hope in the mystical forces of nature
“Recognition of self is not, of course, a eukaryotic novelty. The widespread occurrence of biofilm formation and quorum sensing in modern bacteria (Vlamakis et al. 2013) and archaea (Koerdt et al. 2010; Frols 2013) suggests that the forebears of protoeukaryotes likely engaged in such self-recognition behaviors as well. Modern prokaryotic systems feature the secretion of lineage-specific extracellular matrix materials and small molecules; their receptor-mediated perception then triggers signal-transduction cascades that modulate growth and metabolism. Hence self-recognition modules presumably existed in the protoeukaryotic gene pool that, with evolutionary tinkering, allowed like-like haploid cell adherence to trigger intracellular signals that elicited the conditions for cell–cell fusion“
Notice all of the assumptions of matter and events from a supposed billion years ago! My favorite line from that paragraph is the reification fallacy -> “with evolutionary tinkering”, as if there’s a little cobbler called Mr. Utionary..Evol Utionary. This ingenious engineer tinkers with mutations and existing proteins to construct cohesive interdependent interrelated complimentary systems of male sexuality and female sexuality from spare parts and a pinch of imagination (evolutionary tinkering). Evolution is supposed to be a “force” without foresight or goals, and yet, when described in these peer-reviewed papers, the evolutionists can’t help themselves but give evolution human-like powers
It’s wildly overstating their case to say that it’s like someone trying to construct an engine for a 2025 BMW M5 with parts available only from 100 AD…without an engineer overseeing the parts manufacturing, the assembly, the planning, or the testing
“Exciting recent studies report adaptive changes that occur in the genomes of such cross-species hybrid yeasts isolated and passaged under laboratory conditions; genome rearrangements arise repeatedly and independently“
Notice their euphoric claims that sex simply arose by chance because they observed the injection of code for an existing trait in one yeast not killing a different yeast. That’s their explanation for the origin of cohesive interdependent interrelated complimentary systems of male sexuality and female sexuality. It’s absurdly optimistic and completely unobserved
“The original self-recognition molecules in protoeukaryotic gametes might have engaged in homotypic interactions, like present-day cadherins that adhere to one another“
Might have?!!?? That’s not very scientific
Their “just-so” stories about how a DNA repair system could simply be repurposed as sexual organs is not science…it’s fiction. Their story lacked any reason to believe the nonsense, but since it is wrapped in a thin veneer of peer-review, it will be swallowed as evidence. Those reading past the headline should be able to clearly see the emptiness of the contents in the article as I’ve shown
Objections
After posting these “Can Evolution Explain…articles, I inevitably hear evolutionists respond with some form of: “get your paper peer-reviewed and only then can you get your Nobel Prize for disproving evolution. Until then STFU!”
To be clear, these “Can Evolution Explain…” articles are NOT intended to disprove evolution. They are simply meant to analyze the assertions of evolutionists to see whether the subject matter is actually evidence for evolution by their own standards or not. It’s an internal critique. What I find in all of these articles is that what’s been proclaimed as “mOuntAinS oF eVidenCe” for evolution is really just story-telling and assumptions. We’ve seen that this article is more of the same bluster devoid of actual evidence.
There will be no shortage of “papers” that the devout evolutionists will propose that I must analyze. I don’t have the time or the desire to expose EVERY single article, but I do analyze the top authors and the articles that evolutionists THINK are actually evidence as shown above. Hopefully, given the example of my analysis, other Christians will be motivated to expose how the “mOuntAinS oF eVidenCe” for evolution are really massive canyons. These articles are not intended to prove creationism or anything else. They are simply meant to push back against the dominant paradigm rather than just blindly accepting what is being taught. If these works of evolution can survive scrutiny, then so be it, but so far, I’m finding that their claims are impotent.
Is there a link between youth-earth creationists and evolutionists? Are they “sister” views because they abide on opposite ends of radical extremes…like yin/yang? One might get that impression from the opening of Chapter 11
Countless people have been influenced by the beliefs of youth-earth creationists and their evolutionist opponents, persuaded to accept a long creation timescale is tantamount to accepting that amoebas turned into monkeys that turned into humans…The topic of evolution rouses unmitigated, unrelenting animosity between naturalists and supernaturalists. Unfortunately, both sides have assumed that the origin- and history-of-life timescale constitutes the crucial divide. As astronomical advances proved the universe to be some 10 to 15 billion years old, a majority if both scientists and Christians mistakenly assumed that billions of years allowed ample time for a naturalistic account of life.
From the title of the chapter and the opening paragraph, it sounds like Dr. Ross is equating young-earth creationists and Darwinists as being wrong because they are on opposite ends of the origins spectrum. Before we see if this false equivocation continues throughout the chapter, I do want to take issue with his claim that astronomy proved the universe to be 10,000,000,000 to 15,000,000,000 years old. I’ve already addressed the terrible problems with the Big Bang, but it’s worth bringing up again. He makes this claim as if it’s true rather than in dispute. If it’s not in dispute why has he written a whole book about how a day can be either 12 hours or 10,000,000,000 years?
Young-earth creationist leaders’ views on the fall (Adam and Eve’s original sin) and on the Genesis flood drive them-knowingly or not-into the surprising corner of belief in ultra efficient biological evolution. The first chapter of Genesis (supported by other Bible passages) says God ceased to introduce new life-forms after the sixth creation day. Thus, young-earth creationists need an explanation for the huge number of new species of animals (namely, carnivores) they say appeared suddenly, after the fall, and proliferated again in the short span since the flood of Noah’s day. How did these creatures get here, since God didn’t create them?
Ross does not explain why he thinks God did not create the animals that today engage in carnivory behavior, but it’s clear that he does not understand what biblical creationists teach.
The modern academic paradigm teaches that genetic code has accumulated and through natural selection acting on random mutations “created” new and distinct species. Nature started with nothing and built up the genetic code we see today. It is essentially a bottom-up view. That view is contrary to the Bible and the evidence. What is actually seen is that mutations destroy the existing code as time progresses. God built all the variety that each kind could possibly exhibit into the original created pairs. Over time, through geographic isolation, mutation, and natural selection the kinds have split into distinct species. But the change is definitely “down hill”…not uphill as evolutionists would suggest. The differences described above can be seen as graphics below. The evolutionists suggest a single common ancestor built the “tree of life” in the bottom up view.
Biblical creationists suggest the “creation orchard” as described in Genesis and shown below.
But Dr. Ross suggests that biblical creationists teach Darwinism, and he is gravely mistaken.
His mistakes continue to pile up with almost every word he writes:
The young-earth creationists’ interpretation of the Genesis flood exacerbates the apparent speciation problem. According to their interpretation, a globally extensive deluge wiped out all land-dwelling, air-breathing life on Earth, except those pairs of animals on board Noah’s ark, and virtually all Earth’s fossils and geological features resulted from this relatively recent cataclysmic event.
This is what the Bible teaches, so yes, biblical creationists believe what the Bible teaches. I’ve addressed Hugh Ross’s false teaching about a local flood several times in previous posts, and you can see why his local flood theory wrong both from scripture and the links below:
You can see from the above picture of page 117 that Dr. Ross presents several logical fallacies in place of arguments against biblical creation
Bait and switch fallacy- Genesis says that 2 of every kind boarded the ark, but Dr. Ross talks of 100,000,000 species. Species ≠ kind. The originally created kinds (that contained all of the original variability of traits in their DNA) no longer exist, but the biblical kind would best be equivalent to the modern classification of Family. Species however is a slippery term with no clear definition. Many disparate species can interbreed, which would indicate that they are of the same kind even though modern classification has them as distinct species.
Strawman fallacy – Thinking he is attacking the biblical creation model, Ross says “The problem grows even worse”, when actually he’s attacking a strawman of his own making. He has erected a strawman of biblical creation, and then he has viciously attacked that caricature rather than what the Bible and biblical creationists actually teach.
Equivocation fallacy – As I mentioned before, evolution teaches a “bottom-up” construction of DNA from a single common ancestor to the animals today. But Dr. Ross says that biblical creationists are teaching evolution when he says “Ironically, creation scientists propose an efficiency of natural biological evolution far greater than even the most optimistic Darwinist would dare suggest.” But this is NOT what creation scientists are teaching. At best, one could say that creation scientists are teaching DEVOLUTION as genetic code continues to fall apart.
It doesn’t get any better on p118
Animals, especially those as large and as advanced as horses, zebras, and cats, simply do not and cannot evolve or diversify under natural conditions at such extremely rapid rates (see box, “Size Matters,” page 119). If naturalistic evolutionary processes actually did proceed at such rapid rates, they would, of course, be observable in real time, in our time. Long-term evolution experiments refute the possibility of such rapid and dramatic changes
In this paragraph, Ross reveals his ignorance of what biblical creationists actually teach. In any long-term evolution experiments, the scientists will be concerned with how rapidly new information can emerge from natural selection acting on random mutations. But biblical creationists understand from scripture that because God created organisms to reproduce according to their kinds, that ALL variety that has been expressed in all the different organisms was present in the original created kind that came from the hand of God. A better example that demonstrates this would be the breeding of dogs. In the last 200-300 years dogs have been bred into hundreds of different varieties based on traits from an original robust wolf. This is an actual experiment that confirms biblical creation. Animals can diversify extremely quickly from an original kind, and we can actually see the variety expressed rapidly.
I thought Dr. Ross’s inventory of strawmen had been expended, but he apparently has a warehouse of them because on p120, he erects another caricature of biblical creation and then burns it down with aplomb.
From a young-earth perspective, any concession that Earth or the universe may be more than about 10,000 years old undermines the foundation of their faith-the veracity of a core doctrine and of the Scriptures themselves. No wonder they so strongly oppose anyone, even fellow Christians, who propose an ancient universe and Earth
And all of this because he does not understand the teachings. If he were to spend just a little bit of time reading over the materials of Christian biologists, microbiologists, geneticists and biochemists, his misconceptions could be cured
I’m not a geneticist, but from the reading I’ve done, it appears that Dr. Ross is making a claim on p122 about genetics that is unsupported by the data
Mutations rarely occur. Typically only one individual in a million will experience a mutation
If you’re interested in researching Dr. Ross’s claim on genetics further, here are some pertinent links
When I read through the Bible, it is clear to me that God created the universe in the relatively (relative to modern academic paradigm) recent past and that because of the extreme wickedness of mankind, God judged the planet with a global flood that wiped out all man and animals. This provides a perfect solution for the record of death/disease/suffering in fossils that are trapped in water-sorted layers all over the globe
But when Hugh Ross reads the Bible:
The first time I read through the Bible, however, I observed in the creation accounts an answer to the enigma of the fossil record.
There seems ONLY to be an “enigma of the fossil record” for those who reject the clear reading and exegesis of scripture.
Throughout six creation epochs
Since Dr. Ross believes days and epochs to be the same thing, why does he even insert the non-biblical term epoch into his apologetic materials?
Interpreting the Genesis creation days as tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of years in no way lends support to evolutionism.
Except (Because Dr. Ross believes and teaches evolutionism):
Cosmic evolutionism
Chemical evolutionism
Stellar evolutionism
Galactic evolutionism
Planetary evolutionism
UPDATE: Dr. Ross uses sources that assume human evolution from a common ancestor with chimps to get his old earth dates…so Biological evolutionism
…which the modern academic paradigm and Dr. Ross cannot theorize without. So, the billions of years are necessary for their beliefs to have validity even though their existence is not allowed by the Bible.
As biblical creationists, we can praise God for the consistent nature of his revelation. We do not have to redefine the words in the Bible to accommodate modern academic paradigms or cultural changes in sexuality or political revolutions as we have seen Dr. Ross do. God’s Word is eternal and we can trust God to keep his word regarding the future since we can trust his revelation from the past.
In this chapter, Ross attempts to plant the idea that “young-earth creationism” is a modern day cult. On p30 he writes
By 1980, nearly every American evangelical church and the school had been swayed by young-earth creationist teachings…Societies along the lines of the CRS (Creation Research Society) and ICR formed in more than two dozen nations.
Simply by reading God’s word, one sees the that “young-earth creationism” is the logical conclusion. With deeper and more comprehensive Bible study, a Berian finds that the “simple” reading is confirmed. It’s even a fabulous bonus that organizations committed to the authority of scripture in their scientific research (Answers In Genesis, Creation Ministries International, and the Institute for Creation Research [ICR] ) find that the evidence is in perfect alignment with both the simple reading and the comprehensive study of God’s special revelation.
In an inset on p33, Dr. Ross inadvertently destroys his only basis for knowledge when he ridicules presuppositionalism. He writes:
According to some of its advocates, presuppositionalism says all human reasoning and interpretation of scientific evidence must be subordinate to a “biblical” interpretation of reality.
It might have sounded hyperbolic to say that presuppositionalism is the only basis for knowledge. Much has been written on this topic, and you can see an example of this apologetic method here, but I will provide a short primer below
Since all of humanity suffers from the influence of sin, even our reasoning and senses are subject to the curse of sin. (Genesis 3:17-19, Romans 1:18-23,Romans 8:18-27). So, trying to place one’s epistemological foundation on human reasoning or scientific observations of a corrupted creation is insufficient for true knowledge. By the gift of grace, when a person repents of their rebellion, a person can have an epistemology that is uncorrupted (Pr 1:7, Isa 33:6, Ps 111:10, Col 2:3).
God has revealed Himself in creation, which has since been corrupted by the curse of sin. God has revealed Himself in his special revelation, which is the eternal Word of God. God has revealed Himself in Jesus
God is the foundation of truth, morality, induction, knowledge & logic, which are immutable, abstract, & absolute. All of these things are necessary for empiricism. Empiricism works because these absolutes are unchanging. (Prov 1:7, Isa 33:6, Psalm 111:10, Col 2:2-3)
God is immutable, transcendent and absolute, so He provides a sufficient and necessary justification for truth, morality, induction, knowledge & logic.
Presupposing God is necessary to know anything, and because God has revealed Himself in the uncorrupted person of Jesus and His Word, we can be certain of everything He has revealed in his word. If outside sources (corrupted) have authority over the interpretation of God’s Word (uncorrupted), then the perfect epistemic foundation is no longer the highest authority but subject to those outside sources.
From pages 32-34 the “appearance of age” theory is panned by Dr. Ross. The “appearance of age” theory was a model introduced by a few biblical creationists in the early 1970s. Dr. Ross quotes Dr. Gary North, who pushed the model:
The Bible’s account of the chronology of creation points to an illusion…The seeming age of the stars is an illusion…Either the constancy of the speed of light is an illusion, or the size of the universe is an illusion, or else the physical events that we hypothesize to explain the visible changes in light or radiation are false inferences.
Also in this section, Dr. Ross quotes Dr. Marvin Lubenow who said, “There is no general Bible-science conflict if one recognizes the domain of science to be primarily in the present and involving the investigation of present-day phenomena.”
I agree with Dr. Lubenow on this point. Scientific concepts can assist with finding out about past events, but not at the expense of eye-witness testimony from the Almighty…which Dr. Ross tries to do time and again.
On a side note, I highly recommend Dr. Lubenow’s book, Bones of Contention. It has been one of my favorite books. If you have an interest in fossils and completely refuting the old earther’s story about human evolution, you will appreciate this book too.
On pg35 Ross introduces the idea that young-earth creationism drives people away from God.
Many people who have never looked into the matter for themselves assume that Scripture clearly says God created everything in 144 hours, just 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. Given the scientific implausibility of such a position, many people reject the Bible without seriously considering its message.
Ross pans biblical creation because of its “scientific implausibility”. Can anyone else think of other things (besides creation) recorded in scripture that are scientifically implausible?
Exodus 14:21-22 The waters of the Red Sea parted at God’s command (scientifically implausible)
Matt 1:18 Virgin gives birth (scientifically implausible)
Luke 24 Jesus rose from the dead after 3 days in the grave (scientifically implausible)
There are many other examples of “scientifically implausible” events that God brought about for his glory. So for Dr. Ross to hinge his argument on the “scientifically implausible” account of creation, brings his unbiblical old earthism into serious question.
If one cannot trust God’s account of creation, why should they trust his ability to forgive rebellion? The same Creator, Jesus, provided his own body as the vessel to take on God’s wrath for sin, so that salvation for mankind could be achieved. Trusting the Creator (even if that account of creation seems implausible) is faith. And without faith, it is impossible to please God.
Ross gives an example “One physician I know, though hungry for spiritual truth, ignored the Bible and the Christian faith for years because he couldn’t get past some believer’s insistence that the Bible’s first page taught a recent 144-hour cosmic creation.”
Could this physician get past a virgin getting pregnant?
Could this physician get past complete & instantaneous healing of a quadriplegic man?
Could this physician get past the resurrection of a body after being dead for 3 days?
The problem for this physician and with others who reject the miracles of the Bible (including creation) is not miracles, but the God of miracles. If miracles could be explained naturally, they wouldn’t be miracles that bring glory ONLY to God. God revealed his great power over nature, and by having faith in God’s revelation, we praise Him.
To close chapter 3 Dr Ross says:
Now is the time to make every effort-short of compromising either the words of the Bible or the facts of nature-toward a peaceful resolution.
As I spoke about in my review of the Introduction, Ross again erroneously claims that the “facts of nature” have the same authority as God’s eternal Word. All facts are interpreted according to one’s worldview. So, if Ross assumes modern academic paradigms are the highest authority, he will use that framework to interpret scripture. But as I’ve already said, nature has been subjected to corruption (Genesis 3, Romans 8), and so any interpretation one gets from observations of nature are also subject to that corruption. Trying to elevate the corrupted “facts of nature” over God’s eternal Word is an exegetical no-no!
The debate on the age of the earth has been ongoing for epochs…or at least for 150 years since Charles Lyell worked to “free the science from Moses.” I’ve addressed this particular issue many time before, and while not an issue of salvation, it has great importance for Christians in the area of biblical interpretation. So, while people can still be redeemed and not understand the intricacies of biblical hermeneutics, it is still important for maturing Christians to learn to correctly understand the revelation of God as intended.
So, if the age of the earth is not an issue of salvation, why does it seem to bring such division? The division comes from how to interpret the Bible. If the Bible is the Word of God, then it should be the epistemic authority. Typically, it is those that are identified as youth earth creationists or biblical creationists that take this view. The Bible is authoritative, and outside sources are subject to what God has revealed. If the Bible is just a collection of loosely-affiliated religious writings then there can be other authorities (culture, scholarly paradigms, other historical documents) that can OVERRULE biblical texts. This is typically how old earth believers tend to view the Bible. They typically say, “We believe the Bible to be true” but then they immediately say, “Genesis needs to be interpreted differently than written because science proves it to be wrong.” See what happens there? They hold interpretations of evidence in authority over scripture, so that the Bible gets re-interpreted when the materialist assumptions of the foundation of the current scholarly paradigm. Below is an example.
Recently, I came across a blog that attempted to build a case that God’s Word can somehow accommodate billions of years and even evolution.
Sadly, this blog post starts out with an equivocation fallacy, and it’s a very common one, so the author, Candice Brown (CB hereafter) is probably just quoting from someone else who uses this particular mantra.
I remained convinced that science and religion were not compatible
The equivocations are that
1) science = old earth or evolution
2) religion = young earth
However, science is the systematic study of nature through observation & experiment. So, science is a method, not an entity. Science measures evidence. Evidence is analyzed by people with presuppositions. The combination of presuppositions and science can be used to make conclusions. Someone who has the presupposition that the universe is old will use the tool of science to conclude that the universe is old. How would someone get the assumption that the universe/earth is old? For the last century, all universities have taught that the universe is old because of the work of Lyell, whose stated purpose was to “free the science from Moses”. This quote is a mutiny from the clear teachings of the Bible, which Lyell hated. So, all of today’s professors have been taught that the universe is old. Should someone raise doubts about this, they are figuratively and well as (sometimes) literally expelled from employment and teaching/learning at university.
CB continues in her blog post with the idea that the Earth appears to be very old. She’s not wrong. It does look to be thousands of years old. That is a REALLY long time, and the maximum time that can be historically verified. Were the earth to be millions of years old (or older), the mountains would, at the very least, be rounded smooth by wind/water erosion. And if the earth were more than 10 million years old, the continents would have been ground into the sea by wind/water erosion based on current erosion rates.
A common response to the erosion problem by old earthers is “Well, you forget about the concept of continental uplift. As continents collide, the continents are being continually recycled up.” There are reasons that show why this does not help the old earther:
This concept has already been factored into the erosion rates
The fossils are still there. Since the rate of continental erosion limits their age to (at most) 10s of millions of years, then the fossils would have long ago been eroded along with the rest of the sedimentary layers if the recycling of uplift has renewed the continents. Since there are still fossils, the continents are young. Old earthism is falsified.
CB also quotes Reasons To Believe (an old earth organization) saying that humans emerged somewhere around 150,000 years ago. This number is counter to the biblical genealogies in Genesis 5, against the population growth statistics, and against the latest research in genetics, which show an increase in entropy. The latest work in genetics confirms exactly what the Bible revealed in the biblical genealogies that have been repeated in 1 Chronicles 1 and Luke 3. The human genome accumulates hundreds of mutations in each generation that natural selection cannot remove since natural selection works on the phenotype level and not the genetic level. Since humans have not gone extinct, old earthism is falsified.
CB continues with:
In order to dispute this evidence, Christians must make several leaps, such as believing dinosaurs and humans co-existed
The evidence is strongly in favor of humans co-existing with dinosaurs, but most people are unaware of the evidence. The links below are not comprehensive, but provide strong justification for the facts that dinosaurs and humans co-existed in the past.
While not necessarily man with dinosaur, soft-tissue being found in dinosaur bones falsifies the mantra that the dinosaurs went extinct 65 millions years ago. At most, the bones are only a few thousand years old. The link of this text shows over 100 “ancient” bones that contain soft tissue. Old earthism is falsified again
CB goes on to dispute the clear teaching of the days in Genesis to be of the 24-hour variety.
Much like the English word love has five meanings in ancient Greek, the Hebrew word yom יום (translated day in Genesis) has four meanings, one of which indicates not a twenty-four hour period, but an age of time
Biblical creationists are well aware of this meaning of the Hebrew word yom, and there are several reasons why the context of Genesis 1 demands they be literal days, and not figurative ones.
God spoke to Abraham using analogies for incredibly large numbers, so it’s not that Hebrews were simple people and could not understand numbers greater than 10 as old earthers would contend. Gen 22:17 “I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore.” To describe a more consistent way that God would have communicated the many epochs of days, were old earthism to be true, would be for Him to have used language where He already shows His intention to communicate large numbers. But He did not. God instead chose to perform his creative works in 6 days as He said.
There are contexts (plurality, modifying words, suffixes) in Hebrew for yom to mean more than a day, but none of these contexts are present in Genesis 1.
The biggest obstacle that old earthers must overcome to inject their biases into the biblical text is to somehow justify the curses of sin (death, suffering, and thorns) as being present in creation PRIOR to the rebellion of mankind. When they insist on this, it becomes an issue about the gospel. Invariably, when I ask old earthers to justify their position on this, I get either “well, it’s only spiritual death” or “I just interpret the Bible differently than you.”
God declared his creation “very good.” Since creation is very good, there could not have been disease, bloodshed, and harm. Isaiah 11 and 65 confirm this. Harm, disease, and bloodshed prior to sin is unbiblical and therefore old earthism is falsified
In Genesis 3:17-19 God said to Adam “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree…to dust you will return.” The curse of sin resulted in both spiritual and physical death. Both Romans 5 and 1 Cor 15 are strong confirmation. So the debate is: Did death bring mankind into the world (old earthism) or did man bring death into the world (YEC). The Bible clearly answers that man’s sin brought death into the world. Death before sin is unbiblical and therefore old earthism is falsified
Biblical interpretation is not an arbitrary function. When people interpret the Bible to mean whatever is popular in culture (homosexuality, old ages, contrary historical documents), then the body of Christ is divided and suffers.
Christians should be united. And the unity should center around God’s revelation in scripture and its fulfillment in Jesus. Jesus confirmed the testimony of Moses (Luke 16) and confirmed the historical nature of Genesis (Mark 10:6). So, God’s people should not be divided about the age of the earth. They should be united around a healthy understanding of the Bible, so that Jesus can be glorified.
We can trust God with our future because we can trust his revelation about the past.
Well, as it turns out, proverbial rabbits are found all of the time in layers much “too old” for them. The problem is that people do not change their view based on conflicting evidence…they evolve their interpretation of the evidence to fit their view.
In an article entitled Radiometric Backflip, Volume 37, Issue 1, Creation Magazine describes just such an example. Here’s an example where the “science” (based on absolute radio metric dating) proved suggested that the rock layers of the Santo Domingo rock formation were 200 million years old (Nature 417 (6892):936-938, 27 June 2002). But when footprints of sandpipers were found in layers of soil underneath the 200 million year old layers, scientists were able to scrub away 175 million years to make the data fit with the idea that sandpipers evolved about 37 million years ago. It must have taken quite a bit of soap to scrub away 175 million years that fast.
And this is not an isolated case. A hominid fossil, KNM-ER 1470 was found beneath soil that had originally been absolutely dated at over 200 million years old. Once the fossil was found, Richard Leakey requested a re-test. Not surprisingly, the NEW absolute dates of between 2-5 million years fit perfectly in the range that was needed to perpetuate the evolutionary myth. What happened to the original 200 million years? They were donated to a local charity for all we know.
So no amount of evidence will change someone’s mind regarding origins. This is why it is so important for Christians to be familiar with presuppositional apologetics. Everyone has presuppositions that define how we interpret evidence. So, the argument is not over evidence; the argument is over which presuppositions can correctly account for the preconditions of intelligibility. Only Christianity can account for intelligibility
Christians presuppose that there is a Creator God and that he revealed himself through the Bible, through creation, and in Jesus. Those who presuppose that there is no God are reliant on billions of years and a creative mechanism (evolution by natural selection and random mutation) to explain the origin and development of life.
We can trust God’s Word about history, and since it is a reliable history book (and the revealed Word of God), we know that we can trust God at his word regarding salvation and our future hope (Romans 8.)
You might have heard the mantra, “Creationists are stupid or wicked because they hate science or don’t understand that genetics proves evolution.” If not, a quick web search will confirm that this mantra is prevalent.
Rather than believing the mantra, the scientists at the Institute for Creation Research have been doing actual scientific work that proves quite the opposite. In this article, you can see that scientific predictions by creationists are confirmed by the actual data, and the predictions that evolutionists expect are incorrect by several orders of magnitude.
Pay special attention to the charts below that come from the article, as they tell the story.
At the end of the article, the author also answers the anticipated objections from the evolutionists. So, instead of the mantra holding weight, the evidence actually points towards biblical creation being the most reliable model.
The Bible is ultimately trustworthy and is the standard for authority. If we start with the pre-supposition that the Bible is the revealed Word of Almighty God, then we can expect his creation to coincide with the facts of his revelation. As scientific study progresses we continue to find this to be true.
Mitochondrial Eve/Y-chromosome Adam. This line of reasoning is complicated, but I’ll do my best to be brief. Mitochondria is a component in the cell that is passed on only from the mother to her daughter. And since mutation rates are measurable (from grandmother to mother to granddaughter), the idea that a mitochondrial eve (the first woman) can be calculated to have existed at a certain point in time. The calculated age of the mitochondrial eve is about 6000 years ago. There are some evolutionary calculations that say the mitochondrial eve is dated to have existed 250,000 years ago. But the calculations are based on the assumption that mankind and chimpanzees evolved from a common ancestor, and the mutation rate comes from that assumption rather than the measurable one (from grandmother to granddaughter). The measurable rate fits the Biblical data very well, but it does not fit the evolutionary assumption at all.
Y chromosome Adam is a similar line of reasoning except that it measures the decay rate of the y chromosome, which is passed on only from a father to his son. When these mutational rates are measured and extrapolated back in time, the date fits perfectly with Noah having lived about 4500 years ago. So, while Y-Chromosome Adam does not refer to the historical Adam, the scientific research makes sense when read from a biblical perspective.
The results of these genetic studies fit perfectly with the predictions of a young-earth creation timeframe but make no sense when millions of years are added to the mix—the clocks simply cannot have been ticking that long.
Yet again, the scientists at ICR show clearly that the Bible’s historical account of the first pair of humans is verified by today’s science.
Third, studies reveal genetic “clocks” that confirm the Bible’s timeline of a recent creation. Every generation, sperm and egg cells incorporate over 100 DNA copying errors. These errors, or mutations, gradually build up. This means you have at least 100 more mutations than your parents, 200 more than your grandparents, 300 more than your great-grandparents, etc. Wind back the mutation clock far enough and we arrive at Adam and Eve, whose DNA was created error-free. At this rate, humanity wouldn’t last for even 1,000 generations.
ApoloJedi 
