Evolutionists Flaunt Falsifying Fossils

   If Darwin’s theory were true, would you expect to find fossils that haven’t changed for a billion years?  Would you expect that kind of stasis for organisms that lived in vastly different conditions than today?  Would you expect, furthermore, to find an explosion of diverse forms of life suddenly, without ancestors?  Rather than mourn their fate, evolutionists flaunt these falsifying fossils as trophies of their theory.

Mongolian cells unchanged for a billion years:  PhysOrg reported the discovery of fossil planktonic cells called tintinnids that appear virtually identical to those alive today, but are alleged to be as much as 715 million years old.  Notice the contrast between the empirical evidence and the “maybe” language about evolution in this excerpt:

Now, geologists at MIT and Harvard University have unearthed rare, flask-shaped microfossils dating back 635 to 715 million years, representing the oldest known ciliates in the fossil record. The remains are more than 100 million years older than any previously identified ciliate fossils, and the researchers say the discovery suggests early life on Earth may have been more complex than previously thought. What’s more, they say such prehistoric microbes may have helped trigger multicellular life, and the evolution of the first animals.

“These massive changes in biology and chemistry during this time led to the evolution of animals,” says Tanja Bosak, the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Assistant Professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “We don’t know how fast these changes occurred, and now we are finding evidence of an increase in complexity.”

Cilia are extremely complex organelles of cells – so complex that biochemist Michael Behe dubbed them “irreducibly complex” in his books Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution.  Yet evolutionists find fossils fully formed, working just fine, in the earliest fossil-bearing rocks.  Wynne Parry at Live Science added that “scientists think these organisms were around much longer… Some believe these types of single-celled creatures have been around for considerably more than 1 billion years,” according to one of the Harvard geologists.

Namibian amoebas unchanged under Snowball Earth:  The same Live Science article mentioned amoeba fossils and foraminifera estimated 715 million years old that had to endure the so-called “Snowball Earth” period when the Earth was covered in ice (talk about climate change).  During this time before the mythical “Great Oxidation Event,” conditions on Earth must have been extremely different, yet these cells resemble those found in our warm seas.  These were not dumb, primitive amoebas, either: “They also discovered amoebas that appeared to be building the same sort of shells.”  Apparently, the geologists believe that a little warming and oxygen works wonders: “The discovery of these organisms reveals a possible mechanism by which the oxygen levels in the atmosphere increased, allowing life to become more complex,” a team member said.

Under the Snow, Fireworks:  Commenting on these fossil discoveries, Charles Choi on Live Science made the astonishing claim that during the “Snowball Earth,” evolution was at work lighting the fuse for the Cambrian Explosion.  His headline reads, “Diversity of Life Snowballed When Ancient Earth Was Frozen Solid,” believe it or not.  Yes, “Ancient animals may have started their drive toward explosive diversity back when the Earth was a giant snowball, new research suggests.”  He sets up the problem for the reader:

A startling expansion in the diversity of life forms began about 540 million years ago, early in the Cambrian period. During this apparently sudden outburst, known as the Cambrian explosion, all the major groups of animals seemed to materialize rapidly. Scientists have debated the causes of this great flowering of life for centuries.

Now researchers have new evidence that major groups of animals actually may have existed many tens of millions of years before this seeming flurry of diversity. This early activity helped light the fuse of the later Cambrian explosion.

The conflict in place, storyteller Choi works some Cat-in-the-Hat miracles: “Earth’s early organisms developed the genetic programs for their body plans,” he said, not explaining how a blind, undirected evolutionary process “develops” anything, let alone “genetic programs” for things as complicated as some forty different types of body plans with symmetry, guts, organs, eyes, and limbs, like this foot-long, 50-legged wonder described by Stephanie Pappas in Live Science.  Indeed, we are told on Science Daily, “Half-Billion-Year-Old Predator Tracked: Multi-Legged Creature Ruled the Seas.”  News flash: microbes don’t have legs (cilia don’t count).

What were the microbes developing?  “Developmental toolkits,” according to Douglas Erwin of the Smithsonian.  Masters of disaster, the evolutionists turn a Snowball Earth into a veritable robotics factory: “Researchers have suggested the deep freeze could have spurred the evolution of animals by pumping a surge of nutrients into the oceans.”   

The only data referenced are molecular studies that, given evolution is true, put the evolution of these complex microbes further back in time than earlier believed.  Once that is assumed, they might as well use “might have” to further the tale:

The burst in diversity later seen in the Cambrian might then be due to how traits of animals evolved and interacted with each other while Earth was a frozen orb. This interaction spurred the development of more features, and thus greater diversity. For instance, the advent of multicellular predators might have triggered arms races between hunters and prey, and sponges and burrowing worms around at the time might have altered the landscape in ways that helped other life flourish, just as earthworms do now by churning up soil.

Erwin added a little personification fallacy to his story to ease into the miraculous Cambrian explosion: “The explanation for what happened in the Cambrian lay in how organisms modified their environment,” he said.  It’s not clear that microbes give a hoot about modifying their environment.  Erwin’s story is elaborated in Science (25 November 2011: Vol. 334 no. 6059 pp. 1091-1097, doi: 10.1126/science.1206375), where the authors explain that Mr. Snowball Earth gave them permission to go forth and multiply: “We argue that this diversification involved new forms of developmental regulation, as well as innovations in networks of ecological interaction within the context of permissive environmental circumstances.”

If Mr. Darwin’s workshop can survive a frozen Earth, delivering a world of animal toys in the dead of winter to hopeful environments, then the rest of the calendar must be a piece of cake.  And it is.  Downstream in evolution, the miracles keep coming, emerging quickly and fully formed.

• Of the foot-long fifty-legger mentioned above, Science Daily adds, "Such lifestyles would have been important in shaping early marine communities and evolution during the Cambrian explosion.”
• PLoS ONE:  “Fossilized Biophotonic Nanostructures Reveal the Original Colors of 47-Million-Year-Old Moths.”  The authors note that “The preserved ultrastructure is therefore considered to be extremely similar, if not identical, to that originally present in vivo” (like living ones), even though they confess, “the evolution of such colors and their functions in this group of organisms is poorly understood.”
• National Geographic: “Oldest Antarctic Whale Found; Shows Fast Evolution.  Ancient jawbone suggests whales evolved more rapidly than thought.”
• PhysOrg:  “Johns Hopkins researchers have identified the first ankle and toe bone fossils from the earliest North American true primate, which they say suggests that our earliest forerunners may have dwelled or moved primarily in trees, like modern day lemurs and similar mammals.”

Perhaps most astonishing of the latest evolutionary tales generated from fossil finds is Michael Marshall’s fiction in New Scientist, “Life began with a planetary mega-organism.”  One could not possibly express his account of evolution’s last universal common ancestor (LUCA) in more incredible terms than he does himself in his opening sentences.  He begins in fairy-tale form,

ONCE upon a time, 3 billion years ago, there lived a single organism called LUCA. It was enormous: a mega-organism like none seen since, it filled the planet's oceans before splitting into three and giving birth to the ancestors of all living things on Earth today.

This strange picture is emerging from efforts to pin down the last universal common ancestor – not the first life that emerged on Earth but the life form that gave rise to all others.

The latest results suggest LUCA was the result of early life’s fight to survive, attempts at which turned the ocean into a global genetic swap shop for hundreds of millions of years. Cells struggling to survive on their own exchanged useful parts with each other without competition – effectively creating a global mega-organism.

Lucky LUCA develops organelles without DNA, we are told.  Mother of kingdoms, she divides into archaea, bacteria and eukarya.  We spare our readers all the instances of might have, must have, probably, may have, this-or-that suggests and other fiction words that pepper the mega-tale, let alone the miracle-words emerged, gave rise to, etc.  Does any rational scientist take issue with this evidence-challenged extravaganza?  Only with super-fuzzy kid gloves:

“It’s a plausible idea,” agrees Eric Alm of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  But he says he “honestly can’t tell” if it is true.

Honestly.  Who needs that?  Truth?  That’s no fun.  Marshall leaves us with a pure fictional ending fortified with ignorance: “We don’t know why this happened, but it appears to have coincided with the appearance of oxygen in the atmosphere, around 2.9 billion years ago,” he says, echoing the fairy-tale language of his opening sentence.  “Regardless of the cause, life on Earth was never the same again.”  And everyone lived happily ever after.

You may now throw up.