The Creation Debate-Part 11

By: Dr. John Ankerberg, Dr. Duane Gish, Dr. David Menton and Dr. Kurt Wise; ©2002

Is archaeopteryx a hoax? What about transitional forms? What can we learn about the evolutionary process in the fossil record?

Editor’s note: In June 1990 The John Ankerberg Show taped a series of interviews with men from several branches of the sciences regarding the evidence for creation. For technical reasons we were unable to air these interview. Nevertheless, we have decided to re­lease portions of these interviews in a series of articles so you could read the arguments that were being made at that time—more than a decade ago.

Considerable effort has been made to quote the gentlemen correctly. We have at­tempted to find the correct spelling of the scientific terms used. However, the reader should keep in mind that this is a transcription of oral interviews. Mistakes in spelling and in the technical language should be laid at the feet of the editor.

The Creation Debate – Part 11
Feathers – Part 3

Dr. John Ankerberg: Dave, some have charged that the fossils of archaeopteryx are a hoax, that they’re a fraud. Do you think there is any truth to that?

Dr. David Menton: Sir Fred Hoyle, I guess, has been the main protagonist there. He has reason to believe that, or he thinks he has reason to believe, that what we have here is really just a reptilian skeleton that somebody has rigged, rather like the Piltdown hoax, in a case of hominid delusion, to look like a reptile with feathers. And he cites as evidence, if you look at the two halves of some of these fossils, that the two halves really don’t match and that they’ve merely been gimmicked up by making some sort of impression with per­haps with some sort of bird feather, modern bird feather, on a matrix that’s been sort of smeared over the surface of the reptile.

Well, you know, the hoax goes a little further than that. There are two lines of evidence in the skeleton alone that we’re dealing with the bird, so you would have to trick that up as well. Whatever else you can say about archaeopteryx, it does have a wishbone. Now, I am not aware that any reptiles, fossil or living, have a wishbone, where the collarbones are fused to support the shoulders in flight. They actually bend in and out as the bird flies, taking up the strain of flight. Also, birds have pubic bones that face to the rear, rather than to the front as in most other vertebrates. Kurt, maybe you can correct me on this. But I am not personally aware of other animals, reptiles for example, that have a rear-facing pubic bone.

Dr. Kurt Wise: Bird-hip dinosaurs.

Menton: They do have that?

Wise: That’s why they call them bird-hip dinosaurs.

Dr. Duane Gish: I might add this, Dave. Practically every research that has been done on archaeopteryx last ten years, the features investigated turned out to be bird-like rather than reptile-like. So I think Hoyle is simply wrong. You mentioned the pubis had been re­constructed in the last few years in a bird-like fashion rather than intermediate as John Ostrom had done. The otic region is bird-like and when they dug the skull out of the lime­stone, the London specimen, and studied it turned out to be bird-like not reptile-like. The tail, the ankle area, turned out to be bird-like and many other features that have been investigated in the last few years, and in every instance turned out to be bird-like. And furthermore, I believe, since Hoyle published that paper they discovered another fossil of archaeopteryx which also had feathers. So I think he’s just simply wrong on his suggestion.

Menton: I quite agree.

Ankerberg: Let’s summarize this then. Where are we at this point?

Wise: Although we have focused on the transition between dinosaurs, reptiles and birds, what we’ve seen here is actually reflective of something we see whenever we look at the origin of any major group. Because we find that when we try to even imagine the sequence that evolution must have gone through in order to produce this particular phylum or class, we find it very difficult, nigh unto impossible, to construct a scenario that’s reasonable, where we can produce the ultimate complexity of the entire organism so that it functions at all times. It somehow has to have the characters in the process of development and yet somehow integrated into the whole organism so that the whole organism works. That challenge has never been met for the origin of any major group. You can imagine some­times the intermediates here and there, but to construct the actual series, even in a hypo­thetical sense, to have produced any one of the major phyla or classes from any other has never been done.

Ankerberg: How about the pictures we see in some of the books, some of the muse­ums, like the horse series or the man series? I think they’ve got a fish series as well. That seems to be a hypothesis; it’s a drawing, an idea. But you’re saying what they cannot imagine is the mechanisms to bring that kind of complexity.

Wise: Each one of those series is within the major groups we’re talking about. Each one of those series is one horse to another horse to another horse—one elephant to another elephant to another elephant—one camel to another camel to another camel, so on and so forth. We’re talking about relatively small changes within the groups that we’re talking about.

Sometimes you might have seen transition depicted between land animals and whales or something like that. Again, you can imagine individual intermediates sometimes, but then trying to get down to the nitty-gritty in determining how each one of those would have functioned, and how they could have survived, and how it is that you went from A to B, and then B to C has never been done.

So in some of what we have gone through so far, we lack any fossil evidence of the transition between these groups that evolutionary theory demands, so we have no evi­dence. We lack the evidence in the first organisms of real intermediate. Okay we have a combination of characters which is somewhat intermediate, but we don’t have, if you look at any one of the individual characters, they are not themselves intermediate. It’s a fully functional organism. And thirdly, we can’t even imagine the sequence whereby these or­ganisms could have arisen.

So we lack the evidence, we lack any experiment which has been able to produce any one of these major groups from any other, and we lack even a way, even an imagined scenario, that’s viable.

Ankerberg: That’s the negative case in terms of looking at the evidence in view of the evolutionary theory, but what’s the positive case for the creationist side when you look at the fossils?

Wise: In a more literal understanding of the fossil record, I would say that the fossil record indicates that major groups of organisms, the phyla and classes, came into exist­ence independently of one another without common ancestor, that’s their polyphyletic origin. That’s the positive evidence from the fossil record. That’s what it says when you look at it literally.

The other thing is something that David brought up, and it’s something that you can do in any one of the major groups, is to show that each one of these groups is so incredibly complex in the coordination of characters and how the organism works as a whole, not just individual characters, that’s complex enough, each one of those characters is so complex that it seems to indicate we have a designer.

But then on top of that you have to somehow coordinate those characters into a func­tioning organism and that implies an even stronger case for a designer. So the creation case is built on a more literal interpretation of the fossil record. There is no evidence of the intermediates, and, the fact that the organisms, when they do come into existence, are so complex, it seems to mandate a designer.

Ankerberg: Dave, you had an illustration using bats.

Menton: One of the arguments that I think has been raised by both creationists and evolutionists, regarding transitional organs (we’re not talking transitional organisms now, we’re talking about a transitional organ like a half-feather, or a half-jaw, or what­ever), is what functional use would there be for the organ as it’s going through its tran­sition from A to B.

One might look at bats, for example. These, of course, are flying mammals. They fly by a mechanism rather different than the birds do. They don’t take advantage of feathers. They have a large membrane that extends between the fingers of their hand. They basi­cally fly with their hands. And one could imagine a small perhaps mouse-like mammal slowly evolving into a bat.

One of the things apparently that would be necessary is that from about the waist on down the whole pelvic girdle turns and faces the opposite direction. In addition, the digits, or so-called fingers of the forelimbs would get longer and longer. A web would develop between them. It’s easy to imagine having long fingers and a web that perhaps are fly­able—that could contribute to flight—but not having the other features in place, such as the center of balance to fly, such as the navigational requirements of flight, such as the weight reduction of flight, the coordinated movements of flight. Indeed, you can imagine an animal halfway between a small non-flying mammal and a bat that was neither fish nor fowl. That is, it could no longer walk well, it could no longer breed well, it no longer could eat with any real efficiency, had difficulty either walking or flying. What would be the selective advantage along the way for each of the steps?

How would you slowly develop sonar in the bats? When bats appear in the fossil record, they again appear, as so many others fossils do, fully formed. There are no pre-bats that I’m aware of. The bones of the face appear to give evidence of a sonar mechanism. They’re shaped to funnel in sound to the ear. Everything is in place. The pre-bat we might reasonably expect to find in the fossil record is not there. But if you try to anticipate what this pre-bat would look like, it is very difficult to do this. It’s very difficult to say why, when you’re halfway along there would selective advantage to these halfway stages.

It leads, I guess, some evolutionists to propose that evolution would sort of store up abunch of changes and maybe not express them for awhile, then all of a sudden turn them loose, pre-adapted as it were, and that you would sort of select for the whole package all at once. Certainly for flight you have to select for a very large package of coordinated fea­tures, involving balance, involving weight reduction, involving muscles, involving bones, involving navigation, and its difficult to imagine flight.

Ankerberg: It’s in that sense that you’re saying that not only is the evidence not there, but the theory to concoct that pathway between the two forms, the one that’s growing into the new one, they haven’t even got the theory for that.

Menton: Right. Even when you tell people, “Let your imagination run free; never mind, science, never mind experiments, just allow your mind to be free.” Even there we have difficulty coming up with scenarios that require no proof, no evidence, just invent scenarios.

I have read scenarios about the origin of whales. They’re believed to have evolved from perhaps the cattle, others suggest other organisms. In any event again a terrestrial mam­mal begins to frequent the water, the ocean, presumably the nares, or nose would move to the top of the head, the body size would increase, the mouth would get large. There are all kinds of scenarios that can be imagined, but again it is difficult to imagine what would be selected for each step of the way. Remember you have to have value as you move along.

Evolutionists point out that proteins don’t jump into existence fully formed, that you sort of just keep adding a few amino acids on the end, and maybe the protein takes on some new function. And so, instead of having to wait for the entire protein succinate dehydroge­nase we could find that, as we started out, there were other uses for it along the way. Maybe having nothing to do with the Krebs cycle. And in this way, they could sneak up on it and the probability then presumably is better than if he had to get the whole thing in one shot.

Ankerberg: But your point is, that while they are growing, how are they existing? What are they doing? How do those other in-between forms help them to get to that next stage?

Menton: Absolutely. Imagine a cornea, that’s a little window in the skin that we look through. What good is the cornea without an eye to look through the window? On the other hand, what good is the eye without a window to look through, or cornea?

Gish: I might add, we were talking about the bat, the oldest known fossil bat, found in what’s called eocene rock, therefore dated by the evolutionists at 50 million years, this fossil bat was essentially identical to the modern bat. As a matter of fact, instead of the structure of the skull, they were able to discover it had this echolocation mechanism found in many modern bats. It was in every aspect, modern, and there are absolutely no traces of anything ancestral to that bat.

Dr. David Menton received his Ph.D. in cell biology from Brown University. Dr Wise’s doctoral degree in paleontology was completed at Harvard.

Dr. Gish received a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley.

Read Part 12