The Fossil Record Provides Scientific Evidence for Macroevolution

Pro gives us a list of skulls that supposedly belong to creatures "morphologically intermediate between humans and chimpanzees." Until he actually tells us what human and chimpanzee features they each possess, he hasn"t proved his case. Evolutionary theory holds that as animals progressed up the evolutionary scale, they became more capable of surviving. Why, then, is the "inferior" ape family still in existence, but not a single one of the presumed intermediate forms in Pro"s list, which were supposedly more advanced in evolution? Today we see chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, but no "ape-men." Why should every one of the more recent and supposedly more advanced "links" have become extinct, but not the lower apes? There are three distinguishing marks between the anatomical structure of humans and apes: 1) The way the skull is joined to the spine, balanced upright in humans, sloping in apes. 2) Human feet are flat for walking upright. Ape feet are long and curved for grasping branches. 3) Ape teeth are very different from human teeth. Show me a fossil that has feet, teeth and skull posture halfway between an ape's and a human's and I'll be shocked to see it. None of Pro"s skulls fit this criterion - some are human, others are from apes, none are intermediates. Australopithicine skulls B and C are nothing more or less than apes. Australopithicines like Lucy have their skulls joined to their spines like apes, they have long curved hands and feet for grasping branches (longer and more curved than a chimpanzee for instance) and their teeth are those of an ape. Anatomist Zuckerman wrote: "When compared with human and simian [ape] skulls, the Australopithecine skull is in appearance overwhelmingly simian"not human. The contrary proposition could be equated to an assertion that black is white."[1] He also said: "Our findings leave little doubt that .".". Australopithecus resembles not Homo sapiens but the living monkeys and apes."[2] Richard Leakey called it "unlikely that our direct ancestors are evolutionary descendants of the australopithecines."[3] If any australopithecines were found alive today, they would be put in zoos with other apes. No one would call them "ape-men." Similarly, there is nothing to distinguish homo habilis skulls D and E from modern humans. The habilines are calculated to have had a brain about half the size of the average modern human's. But the habilines were also small in stature, so their brain was not small in relation to their body size, like modern pygmies. Neanderthal man was also undoubtedly human. The vivid imagination of evolutionist pictured him as bent over, stupid looking, hairy and apelike. Now it is known that this mistaken reconstruction was based on a fossil skeleton badly deformed by disease. When he described H. neanderthalis in 1875, Hermann Schaffhausen depicted him as a shambling brute, dragging his knuckles along the ground - an ape-man. After half a century of revision, Cave and Strauss were able to announce in the _The Quarterly Review of Biology_ (1957) that Neanderthals sewed clothes from animal skins, used fire for cooking, built shelters and gave their dead a ritual interment which included placing flowers in the grave. Finally they observed that if he were given a bath, a collar and tie, Neanderthal Man would pass unnoticed in the New York subway. Why would chimps outlive the more evolved, more intelligent Neanderthals? Pro"s use of mtDNA sequencing is also no proof of evolution because current scientific research has shown that "morphological and behavioral differences between humans and chimpanzees are predominately due to differences in the regulation of genes rather than to differences in the sequence of the genes themselves."[4] So even with a 27.2 mtDNA sequence difference, Neanderthals would still be the same as modern humans once their genes are regulated the same way, and their behavior suggests that they were. As for the horse"s evolution, Evolutionist Hitching says: "Once portrayed as simple and direct, it is now so complicated that accepting one version rather than another is more a matter of faith than rational choice. Eohippus, supposedly the earliest horse, and said by experts to be long extinct and known to us only through fossils, may in fact be alive and well and not a horse at all"a shy, fox-sized animal called a daman that darts about in the African bush."[5] How could this animal outlive the more evolved intermediates? When skin and tissue is placed on the bones of such creatures it becomes clear that their relationship to modern horses is purely imaginative. What about Philohippus and Merychippus? Even if these are horses, should it surprise us that there are fossils of horses of different sizes and shapes? Even today, horses vary from very small ponies to large stallions. All are varieties within the horse family. Experimentation on mutation shows that mutation always runs into the limits of variation.[6] So by what mechanism did horses evolve? Pro"s mtDNA cannot prove common ancestry with chimps, because these comparisons came about through reassociation kinetics which only uses single-copy fractions of DNA. Many other genes are found in high-copy and low-copy fractions which are left out of the analysis, and virtually the entire genome is now known to be functional in some aspect and the non-coding regions have been shown to provide many critical control features and nucleotide templates.[7] Ebersberger et al did a study in which a large pool of human, chimp, orangutan, rhesus and gorilla genomic sequences was used in constructing phylogenies; he summaries it this way: "For about 23% of our genome, we share no immediate genetic ancestry with our closest living relative, the chimpanzee." "Thus, in two-thirds of the cases a genealogy results in which humans and chimpanzees are not each other"s closest genetic relatives...In accordance with the experimental evidences, this implies that there is no such thing as a unique evolutionary history of the human genome. Rather, it resembles a patchwork of individual regions following their own genealogy."[8] The fossil record is more consistent with sudden creation than evolution. An extensive study done by the Geological Society of London and the Palaeontological Association of England found that life appeared suddenly with no intermediate links between species.[9] In the layers above the Cambrian outburst of life, the testimony of the fossil record is repeatedly the same: New kinds of animals and plants appear suddenly, with no connection to anything that went before them. And once on the scene, they continue with little change. Discover magazine notes one such example: "The horseshoe crab .".". has existed on earth virtually unchanged for 200 million years."[10] Are there any fossils of birds evolving a beak from a reptile jaw? Is there any fossil evidence of fish fins turning into amphibian legs? No, there isn"t. 1 Journal of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, January 1966, p. 93 2 Beyond the Ivory Tower, by Solly Zuckerman,"1970, p. 90 3 Origins, p. 86 4 Georgia Institute of Technology (2011, October 25). 'Junk DNA' defines differences between humans and chimps. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 10, 2012, from http://www.sciencedaily.com... 5 The Neck of the Giraffe, by Francis Hitching,"1982, p. 31. 6 Burke, Molly K., Joseph P. Dunham, Parvin Shahrestani, Kevin R. Thornton, Michael R. Rose, Anthony D. Long. 30 September 2010. Genome-wide analysis of a long-term evolution experiment with Drosophila. Nature, Vol. 467, pp. 587-590. 7 Bergman, J., The functions of introns: from junk DNA to designed DNA, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 53(3):170"178, 2001 8 Ebersberger et al., ref. 30, p. 2269. 9 Should Evolution Be Taught? John N.Moore,1970, pp. 9,14,24; New Scientist, "Letters," September"15,"1983 p.798 10 Discover, "The Tortoise or the Hare?" by James Gorman, October 1980, p. 89.