Darwinians Excuse Out-of-Order Fossils
Because Darwinism is built on philosophical naturalism, evidence can be moved around as needed.
Evolutionists never seem worried about out-of-place fossils. Why is that? The reason is that the philosophy of naturalism is the driving force that keeps Darwinism going. Darwinians think like this: (1) Naturalism must be our worldview. (2) Darwinism seems to be the best theory within naturalism. (3) If problems are found in Darwinism, there isn’t any competition, so we can just shuffle parts of the story around. This non-falsifiable strategy allows them to believe in the Popeye Theory of Evolution (17 Aug 2019), the Cambrian explosion, and any other rearrangement as long as naturalism is preserved. Even a Precambrian rabbit could probably be accommodated by a sufficiently talented just-so storyteller.
New fossil pushes back physical evidence of insect pollination to 99 million years ago (Indiana University at Bloomington). A fossil in amber has just doubled the evolutionary age of insect pollination.
The newly reported fossil is described Nov. 11 in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The fossil, which contains both the beetle and pollen grains, pushes back the earliest documented instance of insect pollination to a time when pterodactyls still roamed the skies — or about 50 million years earlier than previously thought.
The paper, published in PNAS, is titled “Pollination of Cretaceous Flowers.” After stating that the oldest known insect pollinator previously dated from 42 million to 45 million Darwin Years, while the new one is twice that (99 million), they conclude, “Our finding thereby extends the known geological range of direct evidence of insect pollination of angiosperm by at least 50 million years.” Darwinian dating can stretch twice its length in an instant. The reaction seems to be, ‘Well, how about that? (yawn).’ The Darwin worship service continues without interruption.
Scientists find eternal Nile to be more ancient than previously thought (University of Texas at Austin). Stretchable Darwin Years work just as well in geology as in biology. This is because both fields are wedded to naturalism, and Darwin needs lots of time. In this case, the moyboy age of the Nile River didn’t just double. It sextupled!
The Nile’s unchanging path, however, has been a geologic mystery because long-lived rivers usually move over time. Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have cracked the case by linking the river’s flow to the movement of rock in the Earth’s deep mantle. In the course of their investigation, they found the eternal river to be much older than anyone realized, with the scientists estimating the age of the Nile to be 30 million years – about six times as long as previously thought.
Trilobite mass death display, Wyoming Dinosaur Center (DFC)
The Sirius Passet Lagerstätte of North Greenland: a remote window on the Cambrian Explosion (Journal of the Geological Society). To Darwin himself, the Cambrian fossil record was the most serious evidence against his theory. He hoped more fossils would fill in the gap from the Precambrian to the explosion of complex forms at the base of the Cambrian. They haven’t. The evidence is more problematic for evolution than ever. This huge gap was so powerful to Yale computer scientist David Gelernter, after he read Darwin’s Doubt, he abandoned Darwinism. But today’s evolutionists, wedded as they are to naturalism, can look at Cambrian fossils of exquisite preservation and yawn.
The lower Cambrian Lagerstätte of Sirius Passet, Peary Land, North Greenland, is one of the oldest of the Phanerozoic exceptionally preserved biotas. The Lagerstätte evidences the escalation of numbers of new body plans and life modes that formed the basis for a modern, functionally tiered ecosystem. The fauna is dominated by predators, infaunal, benthic and pelagic, and the presence of abundant nekton, including large sweep-net feeders, suggests an ecosystem rich in nutrients. Recent discoveries have helped reconstruct digestive systems and their contents, muscle fibres, and visual and nervous systems for a number of taxa. New collections have confirmed the complex combination of taphonomic pathways associated with the biota and its potentially substantial biodiversity.
Because naturalism is a given, the 7 authors of this paper do not feel threatened with falsification and shame. Their reaction seems to be, ‘Well, how about that? (yawn).’ Darwinism, the Stuff Happens Law, takes care of it. Digestive systems, muscles, eyes, nervous systems — what’s the problem? They just pop into existence.
The mysterious ‘Tully Monster’ fossil just got more mysterious (The Conversation). A fossil creature discovered 70 years ago in Illinois defies classification. The so-called ‘Tully Monster’ is so weird, biologists do not know what phylum it belongs to, or even whether it is a vertebrate or an invertebrate. The artist renderings in the article show a swimming creature with a grasping mouth on a long neck, and eyes at the end of stalks. One thing that evolutionary biologists have no doubts about, though, is predictable: it evolved.
The Tully Monster was originally discovered in the 1950s by a fossil collector named Francis Tully. Ever since its discovery scientists have puzzled over which group of modern animals Tully belongs to. The enigma of Tully’s true evolutionary relationships has added to its popularity, ultimately leading it to become the state fossil of Illinois.
Update on Dinosaur Soft Tissue
Mechanisms of soft tissue and protein preservation in Tyrannosaurus rex (Phys.org). One of the clearest recent cases of evolutionary immunity from falsification has been seen in the reports about soft tissue discoveries in dinosaur bones. Everyone intuitively knows it is impossible for delicate proteins, blood vessels and DNA to survive for tens of millions of years, but nobody – except creationists – has followed that evidence to its logical conclusion (that the fossils cannot be 66 million years old or older, but must be only thousands of years old).
Micrographs of soft tissue from dinosaur bone published in November 2018, Nature Communications (see 10 Nov 2018).
Over the last 15 to 20 years since reports of soft tissue have appeared (see Real Science Radio‘s list of papers), evolutionists have resorted to extreme storytelling to get the delicate molecules to survive. This latest effort, published in Nature Scientific Reports, with Mary Schweitzer as co-author, engages in convoluted contortions and mumbo-jumbo to find possible ways to stabilize the molecules. The important message, though – the message to take to the bank – is that the paper does not deny that the original soft tissues and molecules are really there. Ignore the jargon and look at the beef:
They used two non-enzymatic, structural protein mechanisms, Fenton chemistry and glycation to demonstrate their possible contributions to preserve blood vessel structures recovered from the cortical bone of Tyrannosaurus rex (T. rex; USNM 555 000, formerly MOR 555). They demonstrated the endogeneity (randomness) of the fossil vessel tissues and the presence of type I collagen in the outermost vessel layers using imaging, diffraction, spectroscopy and immunohistochemistry.
All they talk about are “possible” ways to preserve these tissues. Answers are in futureware: “The researchers envision the demonstrated techniques will contribute to the development of comprehensive mechanisms to consistently retain vascular tissue survival from deep time.” Some day, over the rainbow, they might find a way to keep dinosaurs old. In the meantime, evolutionists keep the faith in Darwin, deep time, and a godless universe.
The philosophy of naturalism must survive, evidence be condemned! Naturalism allows people to disbelieve in God and live the way they want. Evolutionists need Darwinism, because Father Charlie made it possible to become an intellectually fool-filled atheist.