Evolutionary Paleontologists Ask Wrong Questions

Data that should falsify evolutionary timelines instead is used to launch new storytelling speculations.

When men in white suits are hauling you away in a paddy wagon to the funny farm, that is not a good time to ask how the red in the sirens evolved. Something like that happens among evolutionary paleontologists every time they find soft tissue in fossils they say are hundreds of millions of years old. Their trusted dates just went up in smoke, but all they can think about is how the soft tissue might give them more visions of the bearded Buddha.

Prehistoric pigments reveal how melanin has shaped bird and mammal evolution (The Conversation). Three evolutionists from University College Cork don’t get it. They just popped the cork to celebrate Darwin when they should be weeping. Soft tissue in the form of melanosomes, they admit, has shown up in fossils all over the fossil record.

In the early 1980s, palaeontologists studying 47-million-year-old fossils identified microscopic sausage-shaped structures that looked uncannily like the bacteria found on decaying animal carcasses today. For decades, when similar structures were found in vertebrate fossils, they were interpreted as the fossil remains of decayed bacteria, preserved on the carcasses they were helping to decay.

This quote indicates that none of them expected the material to be actual primordial material from the animals that fossilized. At the time, that was clearly incredible. Too much time had passed. Everything biological should have been replaced by minerals and stone. It couldn’t be primordial; it must be recent contamination from bacteria. Notice how they admit being wrong about part of the story:

Little did we know how wrong we were. In 2008, palaeontologist Jakob Vinther recognised the fossil structures were remarkably similar to melanosomes – granules of the pigment melanin produced in our cells that impart colour to tissues such as skin, feathers and hair. This discovery opened the floodgates for studies of fossil melanin, yielding dramatic reconstructions of the plumage colours of feathered dinosaurs, ancient birds, early fishlike vertebrates and even a fossil mouse.

(Click on the links they provided for the evidence from fossils.) Melanosomes and all protein material in them should be long gone after a few hundred thousand years (a generous estimate), and yet there it is in dinosaur bones said to be over 100 million years old.

Melanin is a complex molecule. It doesn’t just happen. It’s not found in rocks. Wikipedia says, “Melanin is produced through a multistage chemical process known as melanogenesis, where the oxidation of the amino acid tyrosine is followed by polymerization.” It doesn’t just migrate into melanosomes, either. Those are complex organelles. Wikipedia adds,

A melanosome is an organelle found in animal cells and is the site for synthesis, storage and transport of melanin, the most common light-absorbing pigment found in the animal kingdom. Melanosomes are responsible for color and photoprotection in animal cells and tissues.

You can’t just snap your fingers and get melanosomes from inanimate matter. Melanosomes, and the melanin they synthesize, exist for a purpose. They have functions. They need a scientific explanation better than “stuff happens.”

Why, then, aren’t these authors in mourning at the discovery of intact melanosomes in fossils all over the world? Maria McNamara, Tiffany Slater and Valentina Rossi instead are celebrating how colorful their new visions of ancient animals might be to inspire the next generation of artists. The drug that puts them in this euphoric state is the word Evolution:

In a new study [prepare to be hoodwinked] we looked at fossils and modern animals to model the evolution of melanin and its functions. Our study revealed a major transition in melanin evolution coincident with the evolution of warm-blooded lifestyles.

Evolution. Evolution. Evolution. This is the magic word that turns their minds to mush. “The evolution of warm-blooded lifestyles” obliterates all the scientific requirements to account for complex systems such as heat regulation rigorously; no need to think about that, because “it evolved.”

• “Birds and mammals evolved feathers and hair….”
• “Birds and mammals evolved more sophisticated immune systems….”

It evolved. It’s the magic phrase that conjures up anything in biology that is observed, no matter how sophisticated, no matter how challenging it should be to explain by a rigorous process, let alone the Stuff Happens Law. Shlooping along as they shlurp their Darwine, they feel vindicated in writing simplistic little stories like this.

The evolution of birds and mammals has been shaped behind the scenes by intimate links between melanin and our immune systems, how we regulate our internal environment, protect against UV and generate colour.

So who is doing all this sophisticated design, you ask? Who is shaping chance to force uncooperative molecules to create systems that engineers cannot long to imitate? Who is corralling melanin into melanosomes so that they can offer protection from UV light? Who is placing melanosomes to decorate the wings of birds and butterflies with displays of artistic genius? Nobody!

Evolution is mindless and unguided. It has no foresight. It has no will. Immune systems, internal environment regulation, sophisticated color patterns – the very things that should falsify Darwinism all succumb to the presumed explanatory power of the lazy evolutionists’ habitual excuse: the Stuff Happens Law.

Creationists are screaming behind the soundproof one-way glass.