The Creation Debate-Part 8

By: Dr. John Ankerberg, Dr. Kurt Wise and Dr. Steve Austin; ©2002

Is the fossil record adequate? Are there gaps that would still allow for the evolutionary model? Drs. Kurt Wise and Steve Austin help us to see the evidence.

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 8
The Fossil Record – Part 2

[The previous discussion involved the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record]

Dr. Kurt Wise: I think it’s important to extend this claim to all phyla and all classes. Because in fact not only is it true that the major invertebrate phyla and classes lack inter­mediates or ancestors and a good ancestral series in the record, but that’s also true of every phylum in the record, whether you’re talking about bacteria, whether you talking about algae, whether you’re talking about plants, fungi, they all lack the nice ancestral line to run up to them.

In fact there is a gap between them and any proposed ancestor. A gap that’s reflective of the gap that exists today. We have a grouping of organisms today with gaps between the major groups that is reflective of the fossil record—very same thing you see in fossil record. It’s consistent with the idea that in fact, the major groups of organisms, all phyla and all classes, had independent polyphyletic origins, that they came into existence suddenly and independently, without ancestors.

Dr. John Ankerberg: From what you’re saying, it would seem that what George Gaylord Simpson (who was at Harvard and who has now passed away), what he said makes sense. He said, “The reason for abrupt appearances and gaps is not the imperfection of the fossil record. With over 200 million catalogued specimens of about 250,000 fossil species, many evolutionists/paleontologists argued that the fossil record is sufficient. In part, the role of paleontology and evolutionary research has been defined narrowly because of a false belief, tracing back to Darwin and his early followers, that the fossil record is woefully incomplete.”

According to Gaylord Simpson, “actually the record of sufficiently high quality to allow us to undertake certain kinds of analysis meaningfully at the level of the species.” It goes on, “It remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and fami­lies, and that nearly all new categories above the level of families appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known gradual, completely continuous transitional se­quences.”

Wise: It’s often been argued as counter-claim to the claim we just made. We just made the claim that there never were any intermediates between the major groups. Many people have claimed that’s because there is a lack of evidence in the fossil record—the big gaps in the fossil record. As Simpson maintains and as others have maintained since Simpson’s quote there, the fossil record is, in fact, very adequate.

We talked about the Cambrian explosion—well, immediately before the Tommotian as part of the Cambrian—we have the Ediacaran fauna. Now these are in rocks, inside these rocks are found creatures that have no hard parts, they are soft-bodied organisms. It has been argued by some that the reason we don’t have ancestors to the Cambrian inverte­brates is because the fossil record is very bad and we didn’t preserve those things, mainly because they didn’t have any shells. Well, we have the Ediacaran fauna that preserve soft-bodied organisms, indicating that if ancestors were there, they should have been pre­served. And there are many other examples throughout of the fossil record of this same sort of thing.

Ankerberg: Do many people bring up objections in this area?

Wise: I guess you can always say that. I guess it’s commonly claimed that there are gaps here and there; maybe this tiny little gap that appears in the Cambrian is enough to have allowed for the origin for such and such a group.

Dr. Steve Austin: Some evolutionists have claimed that the reason that we have the abrupt appearance of life in the lower Cambrian strata is because there is an erosional break there of some maybe immense duration where the fossil evidence has been re­moved for the origin of life. Over the years, especially since Darwin talked about the imper­fection of the record and possibility of erosional breaks, geologists have become quite confident that we have a thick sequence of strata there that should show the development of simple multi-cellular organisms without much hard parts into the multi-cellular organism with hard parts, so we realize that we do have an adequate fossil record in many cases.

Ankerberg: So up to this point, we are saying that the physical evidence for the cre­ationist theory is there and the physical evidence for the evolutionary theory is not there.

Austin: Yes. The creationist would propose abrupt appearance and then once some­thing appeared it stayed pretty much the same. And that’s what I see. I’m an empiricist. I look at what is there and it seems to me like it’s an adequate record of the abrupt appearance and continuity of life forms.

Wise: Now, let’s go one step further. We have the group in place. Let’s look at the oldest fossil in that group. And let’s see if that fossil is the kind of organism that you would expect to be the ancestor for the whole group. In point of fact, it’s only very, very rare that that first fossil is a fossil that you might even propose is an intermediate between that group and any other. One of the very few examples, and there are less than probably half a dozen of these examples among the major phyla and classes, is archaeopteryx.

The failure, though, of each of one these intermediates, so-called intermediates, the ones that are the oldest representatives of the given phylum or class, is that although they are intermediate in their combination of characters, for example, you look at archaeopteryx, and you have a creature that looks like a bird, in fact it’s classified as a bird, primarily because it has feathers, it has wings, it functions therefore, as a bird. That’s generally how you define a bird, at least if you’ve only got bones and feathers.

But in addition to that, you’ve got characters that are rarely found in birds, among birds. You have teeth, and you have claws and the wings. Now you occasionally find them among birds, but the fact that we find these characters which exist in reptiles, or the ancestors of birds, specifically the dinosaurs, it’s thought that since archaeopteryx sits here as the an­cestor or the oldest bird, it has characters that are in common with birds, very commonly with birds, but also some characters that are more commonly found among reptiles.

The problem is that the teeth and the claws or any other character you find on archaeop­teryx seems to be a fully functional character. In other words, it is not a half-formed, or a half-lost tooth, or a half-formed or a half-lost claw, it seems to be a functional claw, a func­tional tooth, and a functional feather. And in fact that is the characteristic of all these. Even if that first fossil is one that you might say looks like an intermediate, it fails in a major way for being an intermediate because, although it’s an interesting combination of characters, something we might call a mosaic or a chimera, the characters themselves are not interme­diate.

(Dr. Kurt Wise completed his doctoral degree in paleontology at Harvard. Dr. Steve Austin received his Ph.D. (Geology) at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, in 1979.)

Read Part 9