Shoving Fossils Onto Darwin’s Timeline

Fossils do not tell a Darwinian story unless they are forced into his narrative.

Dinosaurs

Jurassic dinosaurs trotted between Africa and Europe (Phys.org). People probably hadn’t thought that T. rex had to be a long-distance swimmer. How, then, did tracks of tyrannosaur-like dinosaurs get across oceans? Darwin, we have a problem! Similar dinosaur tracks have been found on two moyboy paleo-continents named Gondwana and Laurasia. This should not be. In order to rescue dinosaurs for Darwin, Spanish evolutionists got creative with their storytelling (evidence not required), adding some futureware and vaporware.

To confirm these data, the group of researchers stresses that more studies are needed, especially to answer an important question: how did the dinosaurs pass between Laurasia and Gondwana? “The answer is problematic because geological studies indicate that there was a deep sea between the two continents,” stresses the scientist.

The presence of the same species in such distant places forces scientists to propose dispersal routes between continents during the Mesozoic, the time during which dinosaurs lived. These large animals were thus able to move between Africa and Europe on land masses with short emersion periods and through southern Italy and the Balkans or through Iberia (what is nowadays the Iberian Peninsula).

In this case, selection pressure is acting on the evolutionists, forcing them to evolve more fantastic stories.

How life blossomed after the dinosaurs died (Science). Once upon a time, a very finely-tuned asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs but saved the butterflies. That’s the common Darwinian tale. In order to keep the scenario intact, Elizabeth Pennisi allows Darwinians to shove things around. She finds a group of storytellers in Corral Bluffs, Colorado, using divination techniques on fossil skulls inside a concretion. It takes several tries to perceive the vision. They return, studying 6,000 leaves and numerous bones of small animals. What they conclude from their divination exercise can only mean one thing: that Darwinism went on a high-speed burst of creation after the asteroid hit.

Plants and animals came back much faster than thought, with plants spurring mammals to diversify, the team reports online in Science this week. “They get almost the whole picture, which is quite exciting,” says functional anatomist Amy Chew of Brown University. “This high-resolution integrated record really tells us what’s going on.”

It doesn’t take much to excite Darwinists. Even falsification can do it, because they love the challenge of rescuing Darwin from evidence.

Shoving pieces of pollen and volcanic dust into their predetermined slots on the geologic column, Ian Miller and Tyler Lyson invent a “palm period,” a “pecan pie” period and a “protein bar period” on their chart to get their colleagues’ mouths watering before lunch. They grin, feeling they have fostered a coherent evolutionary scenario on the listener, provided they are allowed to turn up the evolutionary supercharger and play with the temperature dial at will. After lunch, the guests enjoy the sermon on climate change.

At New Scientist, Ruby Prosser Scully swallows the protein bar in one gulp without checking the label:

This growth spurt coincided with the appearance of the first legume – which Lyson calls the “protein bar moment” – since it probably provided the calories needed to drive this rapid growth.

When the researchers looked back through the climate record, they found that these three bursts of mammal evolution seem to coincide with temperature increases of about 5°C. This suggests that the rise of mammals was helped along by a more tropical climate that enhanced plant growth and hence increased the food supply for animals, says Lyson….

Having such a detailed picture of the way ecosystems recovered after the last extinction event may help us predict what will happen following the sixth mass extinction, which some experts believe is happening now as a result of rapid climate change, says Gregory Webb at the University of Queensland, Australia.

Mammals

Mammals’ complex spines are linked to high metabolisms; we’re learning how they evolved (Phys.org). Vertebral spines are common on many fossil mammals. The question is not whether they evolved, but how they evolved, because as Phillip Johnson had shown, evolution is predetermined as the only explanation they will accept. From that premise, evolutionists feel free to shove fossils into the miracle column.

Mammals’ backbones are weird. Compared to other four-legged animals like reptiles, mammal spines are a complex mix of sections of differently-shaped bones. Our Frankenstein’s monster backbones are a key component of mammals evolving the ability to move in a bunch of different ways—compare a cheetah running, a person walking, a bat flying, and a whale swimming.

It’s a bunch, all right (what teenage Darwin convert wrote this? Frankenstein, really?). Well, however the backbones evolved, it “was marked by big, dramatic evolutionary changes,” the young disciple writes. Those chance mutations must have come in a burst of cosmic rays, pregnant with evolutionary gemmules. Mammals received these gifts cheerfully, spending them on high metabolisms as well as monster backbones. Stephanie Pierce of Harvard feels free to pile on the miracles: “and some changes in in backbone complexity evolved at about the same time that other features associated with a more active lifestyle evolved, like fur or specialized muscles for breathing.”

To impress readers, the divination experts show how it all works out on their computer program. The miracles occur in “quick bursts, rather than a super-slow, gradual pathway,” they say. If this sounds confusing, it’s because evolutionary divination is only clear to the wizards who have had the proper training.

“This study helps us answer an age-old question—how did life become so complex?” says Jones. By looking at this example system, we show that discreet changes, when added up over the millennia, can produce what seems at first glance to be a long-term trend. The evolution of complexity is, dare I say it, complex!”

Everything looks nice and neat on the Darwin timeline because the fossils were shoved there.

One of the reasons that Inquisitors in the 16th century banned Bibles in the common language was to avoid confusing the peasants with the contradictions between what the Bible said and what they saw the priesthood doing and teaching. Only the experts, they warned, were able to read the Scriptures correctly and without confusion. Will a day come when modern Darwinists will ban the reading of Origin of Species for similar reasons? It goes to show that details like the rate of evolution (slow and gradual vs punctuated or rapid) are far less important than maintaining the foundation of naturalism.