Most Common Phrase in Evolution Media: “Earlier Than Thought”

Major innovations that should have required many millions of years of slow, gradual evolution keep turning up earlier than thought. But who thought?

We coined a new word tontologism (look it up in the Darwin Dictionary) to account for a bad habit of Darwinians. They frequently say, when evidence goes against their previous beliefs, “we thought” – as if we includes the public. For instance, major innovations in evolution keep showing up “earlier than thought” in their terminology, as if everybody thought like Darwinians. Here are a few examples from recent biology and paleontology news to illustrate the Darwinians’ irresponsible attribution of blame, as well as the problems created by pushing evolution earlier than thought.

Walking fish suggests locomotion control evolved much earlier than thought (Science Daily). This example from last month shows authors of a paper having to revise their “thought” (not the public’s thought) about when walking locomotion first appeared. Who is to blame? See quote from the 17 Feb 2018 entry, “The Evolution of the Darwin Fish” where Jeremy Dasen said, “It has generally been thought that the ability to walk is something that evolved as vertebrates transitioned from sea to land.” Generally? Did you think that? The truth is, only Darwinians think that way, but by using a passive voice verb, Dasen has swept you into his fallacy without your permission.

Photosynthesis originated a billion years earlier than we thought, study shows (Astrobiology Magazine). At least this writer provides a subject, “we thought,” but it still leaves the subject unspecified. We might ask, “Who’s we, paleface”? To imagine a complex system like photosynthesis, composed of numerous finely-tuned parts, “originating” a billion years earlier, should be headline news with a title like, ‘Darwinian evolution found to be untenable.’ Instead, Dr. Tanai Cardona, lead author of the study that makes this outrageous claim, waltzes on to commit another tontologism: “My results mean that the process that sustains almost all life on earth today may have been doing so for a lot longer than we think.” Further down, the article supplies a subject, scientists (meaning evolutionary scientists). And yet the “earlier than thought” formula entails a much more serious problem for evolutionists: the replacement of Darwinian gradualism with abrupt appearance:

Previously, scientists believed that anoxygenic evolved long before oxygenic photosynthesis, and that the earth’s atmosphere contained no oxygen until about 2.4 to 3 billion years ago. However, the new study suggests that the origin of oxygenic photosynthesis may have been as much as a billion years earlier, which means complex life would have been able to evolve earlier too.

Cardona goes on to multiply the absurdities he must accept to believe that photosynthesis occurred a billion years earlier than “he” thought. We will point out implicit tontologies in brackets with [T]:

One surprising finding [T; to whom?] was that the evolution of the photosystem was not linear. Photosystems are known [T] to evolve very slowly – they have done so since cyanobacteria appeared at least 2.4 billion years ago. But when Dr. Cardona used that slow rate of evolution to calculate the origin of photosynthesis, he came up with a date that was older than the earth itself. This means [T; to whom?] the photosystem must have evolved much faster at the beginning – something recent research suggests [T; to whom?] was due to the planet being hotter.

“There is still a lot we don’t know [T] about why life is the way it is and how most biological process originated,” said Dr. Cardona. “Sometimes our [T] best educated guesses don’t even come close to representing what really happened so long ago.”

Plants colonized the earth 100 million years earlier than previously thought (Astrobiology Magazine). Most of the time, NASA’s Astrobiology Magazine website is little more than an echo chamber for evolutionary articles written by others. Here they relay another tontologism, this time in a variant form, “than previously thought.” A hundred million years is a huge error for a previous thought. Reading carefully, one can find more hidden tontologies in the article:

The timing of this episode has previously relied on [T] the oldest fossil plants which are about 420 million years old.

New research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, indicates [T] that these events actually occurred a hundred million years earlier, changing perceptions [T] of the evolution of the Earth’s biosphere.

Whose perceptions need changing? Yours? Who previously relied on the timing? You? Did the data “indicate” to you an evolutionary speculation? If so, you are included in the fallacious thoughts. Should you accept responsibility for a group error you were not involved with? In its version of the story, “A new study just rewrote the history book on plants,” Fox News burps out a standard-form tontology almost by reflex:

The arrival of plants on Earth changed the planet and its inhabitants in big ways, and a new study suggests they arrived far earlier than thought. [T] University of Bristol researchers now say that land plants evolved from pond scum about 500 million years ago—a whopping 100 million years earlier than the history books tell us….

Baby Bird Skeleton Could Provide Insight into Ancient Bird Evolution (National Geographic). A less blatant form of tontologism is to specify a subject for “previously thought,” but make the subject more inclusive than it ought to be. For instance, this article about a small, flightless bird fossil appearing in the time of the dinosaurs, earlier than it should appear (127 million Darwin Years), makes this statement: “This shows that birds in the group Enantiornithes were more diverse than paleontologists have previously thought them to be.” The problem is that not all paleontologists are to blame. There are creation paleontologists with PhDs, like Marcus Ross and Kurt Wise, whose reputations should not be tarnished with the erroneous thought.

Science Daily, though, doesn’t even include any subject in its passive-voice tontology: “the developmental strategies of this particular group of ancient avians may have been more diverse than previously thought.” In the Fox News coverage, evolutionary paleontologist Luis Chiappe lavishes in credulity at finding this case of abrupt appearance: “It is amazing to realize how many of the features we see among living birds had already been developed more than 100 million years ago.” He just imagined everyone to be as gullible as he is.

There are three serious issues in these examples that Darwinians should not be allowed to escape from: (1) Tontology as a reckless bad habit in evolutionary writing; (2) Abrupt appearance as a major problem for Darwinians; and (3) Abuse of language to cover Darwinian gullibility, by which we mean habitual use of magic words that such-and-such a complex trait evolved, appeared, originated, arose, developed, arrived, happened or emerged.

Lest that last important fault be forgotten, we coined another mnemonic for it in the Darwin Dictionary: the “poof spoof.”