The Creation Debate-Part 9

By: Dr. John Ankerberg and Dr. David Menton; ©2002

Dr. Menton explains how his hobby of studying feathers has led him to some interesting conclusions regarding the fossil 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 9
Feathers – Part 1

Dr. John Ankerberg: Dave, you have done research into feathers. What did you find?

Dr. David Menton: I have a sort of hobby and a layman’s interest in feathers, and in­deed, in birds in general. It may come as a surprise to a lot of people that birds have, in fact, left a rather reasonable fossil record. Now, we’re not just talking about archaeopteryx that is speculated to be the first bird. Some would argue that there are even substantially older birds found in the record. However, that’s debated.

In any event, it may come as a surprise that the birds have left a fossil record. I under­stand that there is something well in excess of 8,000 species of birds in existence today, and that approximately 2,000 species of birds have been found in the fossil record. Now this may be just a fragment of a bone, it may be an egg, or a portion of an eggshell, it could be a single feather, but nonetheless approximately 2,000 species of birds are there.

Usually fossils are skeletal parts. These are the hardest parts and I guess the reason it’s surprising to find so many bird fossils is that the bird skeleton is very light. It’s a very unique skeleton in that respect. The skeleton, indeed the whole bird appears to be an animal that has been formed to fly. To give you an idea how light the skeleton can be in a bird, the frigate bird, which has a 7-foot wingspan, has a skeleton that weighs the grand total of 5 ounces. This is less than the feathers of the bird would weigh.

Now, evolutionists perhaps are as confident regarding the origin of birds and by implica­tion of the origin of feathers, which I really want to focus on, as they are about anything. They’re quite confident that birds evolved 150 million years ago in the Jurassic. There is some difference regarding what particular reptile they may have evolved from. The Pygopodid reptiles rank high in that category. And because there’s a great deal of confi­dence that birds evolved from reptiles, there is then by implication confidence that the feathers of a bird evolved from the scales of the reptile, both being, as it were, cutaneous appendages. This has led, I think, evolutionists to be somewhat less than objective, at least some of them, regarding the assumed relationship of feathers and reptilian scales. They have emphasized that the two are not very different.

Let me give you a specific example. Gerhard Heilmann in his classic work called The Origin of Birds, said, “The most striking peculiarity of birds is their plumage, which appar­ently has nothing to do at all in common with the scaly covering of reptiles. So much more surprising is it on examining these expressants microscopically, to learn that the feather is nothing but a further development of the scale.” Indeed, he said that the feather may be considered a cylindrical, fringed scale. This has led to a great deal of speculation of how a scale could perhaps get longer and become frayed and eventually form a feather.

I would ask the readers to look at the evidence for a fossil bird to see the evidence for feathers in the earliest known bird, according to evolutionary views, and decide for them­selves whether, in fact, there is an evolutionary precursor for the feather—and I submit there is none—and whether reptilian scales, at least as they exist today, and bird feathers as they certainly existed in archaeopteryx, are, as Heilmann says, not very different.

According to some evolutionists, archaeopteryx would be the world’s first bird, approxi­mately 150 million years old. There are six or seven fossils identified as archaeopteryx. Some of the fossils are just merely feathers. Two have particularly good skeletal compo­nent as well as feathers.

A distinctive feature of birds is the wishbone, as everybody knows who has broken a wishbone at Thanksgiving dinner. And archaeopteryx, like other birds, does have a wish­bone. And as far as I know this is unique to birds. It’s a fused collarbone, and the fused collarbone helps to support the shoulder girdle in flight. Immense forces are brought to bear on the shoulder in flight.

The important thing about the archaeopteryx fossil is that we can see feathers. We see feathers in the wing, feathers in the tail, and in fact, there’s evidence that there are even small contour feathers on the head, even though archaeopteryx is often shown with a scaly head, trying to emphasize its similarity to reptiles.

The feather of a bird has a shaft running down the center. It has a feather vane on either side, and this vane is made up of approximately 400-600 barbs that hook together to give the feather its sort of airplane wing shape.

Feathers are essential for avian flight. They are under control of muscles so that they can be tilted in flight to increase lift, they can open and close rather like Venetian blinds in flapping flight, so that on the upstroke wind can be allowed to pass through the feathers of the wing and on the down stroke the Venetian blinds can close as it were and give a power stroke in flapping flight.

As I say, feathers are unique to birds. They are not found among reptiles, certainly not among living reptiles. And the question is, are they similar to the reptilian scales? I submit that they are not similar in any sense of the word.

If you look at a feather under a scanning electron micrograph, you will see a shaft run­ning upward through the middle of the feather, the vane on either side, and the barbs, which comprise the vane of the feather. Each of these barbs, if it were removed, would look like a small feather in its own right.

When one looks at a reptilian scale, one does not notice an obvious similarity between feathers and reptilian scales. Indeed, developmentally (that is, not in an evolutionary sense, but in terms of embryologic development and in terms of the development of the adult as the scales are shed or as the feathers are shed), there is no similarity in the developmental pattern of a feather and a scale.

I might point out that the entire feather structure is dead, just like a hair, and that it is full of a product called keratin, which of course occurs in human skin and hair as well. And so the cell started out alive but gorged itself with keratin, went through a program cell death, so that when the feather emerges from the skin, like a hair it is a entirely dead structure. It’s like building a ship in a bottle.

The feather grows out of a “tube,” rather like squeezing toothpaste out of a tube except, as the toothpaste emerges it hardens, because it dies. The keratin becomes very substan­tial and strong. The feather emerges from the skin, although down in this tube-like follicle, all of the components of the feather develop from living cells.

Down at the bottom of this tube that we call the feather follicle in the skin, is a ring of cells that grows not only the shaft along one side, but the barbs as well. And this is all rolled into a tube much like a mailing tube. The shaft of the feather runs down one side; there is the growth zone along the base; and the individual barbs are protruding at a steep angle on both sides. The entire structure is rolled into a cylinder and meets on the other side.

The feather then grows out of the skin looking like a thick hair. A shell breaks off the surface of the feather, the cylinder opens up and the individual barbs all hinge down, thus substantially increasing the width of the feather.

It’s in this sense that I say making a feather down inside of a follicle is like a rather extreme case of building a ship in a bottle, then pulling the ship out of the bottle and having all the rigging finally stand up and everything lock into place. Usually, we build the ship outside the bottle and then put it in. All of this is produced, as I say, from living cells, which go through programmed cell death to form a feather.

Nothing remotely like any of this occurs in the reptilian scale. There is no development similarity whatsoever. The only thing we can say that the two would share in common at all is that both are made out of a protein or actually a large family of proteins that we call keratins.

There is no evidence of a pre-feather. Archaeopteryx comes packaged with perfectly modern type feathers. The material in which the fossil has been formed in the case of archaeopteryx, is of such fine grain that it has allowed us to actually see the detail down to the level of the barbs and hooks. And all of this suggests then, that archaeopteryx had a feather structure that was not significantly different from that of modern birds.

More importantly, the feather that exists on archaeopteryx, particularly in its wings, is the type of feather that we associate with flying birds. That is, it is an asymmetric feather vane, one vane is narrower than the other. In birds that do not fly, but hop along the ground, such as the chicken, the two vanes of the feather are approximately equal. But in the flight feathers of the birds that are powerful fliers, one vane on the wing feather would be much narrower than the other vane.

This is the type of feather that we see in the wing of archaeopteryx. All of which is con­sistent with the idea that archaeopteryx was a bird. It had a wishbone, or fused collarbones, like a bird, and does not then represent an intermediate form between reptiles and birds. Rather, it is an interesting bird that is extinct and bears features we no longer see in mod­ern birds, although the digits on the hand of the wing is seen in some modern birds.

All of this is consistent, I believe, with the creationist point of view that birds, like bats and many other organisms, appear suddenly in the fossil record without known ancestral forms. This certainly is true of feathers.

I mentioned, I think, that there are some scales that do have a little ridge on their sur­face, that is instead of being discoid, there would be a little dorsal ridge. Sometimes this ridge protrudes as a point. But it requires a great deal of credulity—certainly much more than I have—to believe that this scale can be gradually transformed by increasing its length beyond that which we see in reptiles into an ever longer keratinized form and that this rod­like structure protruding from a scale could then develop lateral rods that would form the barbs of the feather and that these barbs could form hooks. Certainly nothing even closely approximates that structure on modern reptiles or fossilized reptiles.

The feather and the scale are greatly dissimilar structures, but the feather and the hair are similar in many important respects. Now, why don’t the evolutionists focus on this fact? That, for example, the feather grows out a tube-like follicle in the skin, the hair grows out of a tube-like follicle in the skin. All of the growth matrix where the cells are dividing in the feather is confined to a little dermal papilla down at the bottom of the feather and the same is true of the hair.

This is not emphasized, however, because nobody is suggesting that birds and mam­mals have an evolutionary relationship. Evolutionists do not believe that birds evolved from mammals or that mammals evolved from birds. Yet, I believe, that if one wished to specu­late, you could make a stronger case for a presumed evolutionary relationship of feathers and hair follicles, than you could for feathers and reptilian scales. This is not done because it does not fit the current scenario. I believe that when one looks in detail at the so-called transitional forms, you’re going to find similar problems to this in other fossils as well—that the argument does not stand up to a detailed criticism.

Read Part 10