Flower Explosion Blows Evo Cred

If a new estimate of flowering plant origins is not retracted,
you can stop believing evolutionists now. They’re nuts.*

*This is not to imply that evolutionists were not already nuts. A new claim, though, drives their nuttiness into the ground.

The origin of flowering plants was already a huge embarrassment to evolutionists. It has long been called “Darwin’s Abominable Mystery” since King Charley himself was baffled by their sudden appearance in the fossil record. Up to now, evolutionists with their Deep Time mythical diagram put the explosive origin of flowering plants—classified as angiosperms—at 100 million Darwin Years ago, in the Cretaceous age of dinosaurs, although some stret-t-c-h-h-h-ed that estimate back to 145 million Darwin Years. Would you believe they were 200% off? How about 300% off? And the old ones look just as modern as living ones?

A better question is whether any of the evolutionary time estimates has credibility. If the new claim is not retracted quickly, evolutionists will find themselves in a whole new thicket of thorny questions.

A new discovery shows major flowering plants are 150 million years older than previously thought (The Conversation, 30 Aug 2022). Byron Lamont from Curtin University in Perth, Australia is one of the culprits who detonated the bombshell rethink. Bouncing off the discovery of a flowering plant called Phylica in the buckthorn family (identical to living ones) in Burmese amber, they just tripled its date of first appearance. The fossil hunters had written in Nature Plants on 31 Jan 2022:

We report the discovery of two exquisitely preserved fossil flower species, one identical to the inflorescences of the extant crown-eudicot genus Phylica and the other recovered as a sister group to Phylica, both preserved as inclusions together with burned plant remains in Cretaceous amber from northern Myanmar (~99 million years ago). These specialized flower species, named Phylica piloburmensis sp. nov. and Eophylica priscastellata gen. et sp. nov., exhibit traits identical to those of modern taxa in fire-prone ecosystems such as the fynbos of South Africa, and provide evidence of fire adaptation in angiosperms.

Byron had assisted in the peer review of that paper. Now, he joined forces with Tian-hua He at Murdoch University (also in Perth) to make the rubble of Darwin’s Abominable Mystery bounce.

A major group of flowering plants that are still around today, emerged 150 million years earlier than previously thought, according to a new study published today in Trends in Plant Science. This means flowering plants were around some 50 million years before the dinosaurs.

The plants in question are known as the buckthorn family or Rhamnaceae, a group of trees, shrubs and vines found worldwide. The finding comes from subjecting data on 100-million-year old flowers to powerful molecular clock techniques – as a result, we now know Rhamnaceae arose more than 250 million years ago.

It was already outrageously absurd to imagine these modern-looking plants being so old, thriving nearly 100 million years under constant “selection pressure” to evolve but not evolving at all. But 300 million years? Come now, let us reason together.

Cred Fail

Some Darwinists had better go to battle with these Perthians, or else nobody is going to believe anything the Darwin Party says from now on. Maybe the AP and the gullible science reporters in university press offices will, but this is too much for thinking people. The evolutionists have blown their cred* big time.

*This is not to imply that evolutionists had not already blown their cred. The new claim, though, blasts it to smithereens.

“Subjecting data” to “powerful molecular clock techniques” is a form of torture. The data will say anything you want, no matter how absurd, to get you to stop. Some in the Darwin Party feel uncomfortable with these molecular clock techniques (24 March 2022). They think fossils should do the talking without duress.

So do Byron and Tian-hua really “know” what they claim to know? Not when imagination rules evolutionary “science.”

It was previously believed that Phylica evolved about 20 million years ago and Rhamnaceae about 100 million years ago, so these new dates are much older than botanists could possibly have imagined. Since Rhamnaceae is not even considered an old member of the flowering plants, this means flowering plants arose more than 300 million years ago – some 50 million years before the rise of the dinosaurs.

Take a breath and realize the import of this new claim.

• Everything the Darwin Party has said about the origin of flowering plants on their mythical timeline is wrong. This pushes angiosperms back to the end of the Carboniferous and beginning of the Permian.
• All the dioramas of dinosaurs are wrong; they should show dinosaurs munching on flowers, watermelons and coconuts.
• All the evolution textbooks are wrong.
• Phylica was already endowed with the ability to germinate after fires, so evolutionists must believe that some evolution had occurred after whatever primitive angiosperm ancestor had appeared. Further, they teach that angiosperms have undergone a spectacular radiation in forms and traits since their first appearance.
• Organisms like Phylica can go for 260 million Darwin Years and not evolve at all. So much for the Myth of Progress.
• All those presumed “selective forces” for the last 300 million Darwin Years (asteroid impacts, volcanoes, mass extinctions, wild climate swings) did nothing to the buckthorn family. While amphibians morphed into sauropods, shrews into whales, and mice into human beings in far less time, buckthorns just sallied forth, unfazed by The Force.
• Paleontologists never saw the flowering plants in their dinosaur fossil digs that must be there. Maybe they weren’t expecting them, so they didn’t look.
• If flowering plants were really thriving 300 million Darwin Years ago, ecological relationships on land and even in the sea should have been profoundly affected in ways Darwinists had not considered before.
• If flowering plants were around that long ago, the entire biosphere should have been influenced in ways that paleoclimate analysts had not considered before.
• Darwinism and neo-Darwinism don’t work. If they explain spectacular change and stasis by the same mechanism, they explain nothing at all.

In short, everything you know is wrong—if you had believed the evolutionists. Global science sold the public a bill of goods. They never knew any of this stuff. The “molecular clock” data is bunk. It’s built on the assumption of evolution over millions of Darwin Years. Unlike visible clocks, the molecular clock is not even right twice a day!

So do the Perthians show any regret or shame for having caused such an upset to Darwin Party credibility, whatever was left of it? Not at all. They are rather proud of it. Their paper begins triumphantly,

A new fossil discovery reported by Shi et al. changes our understanding of the biogeographic history of the cosmopolitan family, Rhamnaceae. Flowering shoots of the African genus Phylica (Rhamnaceae) dated at 100 million years ago (Ma) imply a 250 Ma origin of the family in fire-prone Gondwanan vegetation that enabled overland dispersal to all continents where it is currently widespread.

Source: Lamont and He, “Fossil flowers of Phylica support a 250 Ma origin for Rhamnaceae,” Trends in Plant Science, 30 Aug 2022.

One cannot change one’s understanding if there was no understanding to begin with.

So will the Darwin Party censors shush up the Perthians for upsetting such a big apple cart? Probably not. In our experience, Darwinism (the Stuff Happens Law) tolerates nuclear attacks on its web of belief. The reason is twofold: (1) Stuff Happens Theory is unfalsifiable. (2) When you have the power to censor anyone not wearing the D-Merit Badge, you have no worries. You can even evolve a Precambrian rabbit. In their drunken stupor under the influence of Darwine, evolutionists actually like new twists on their grand creation myth. It brings rip-roaring laughter.

It’s up to reasonable observers to alert the public to the corruption of thinking in the Darwin Industry.

Exercise: Watch for the Perthian story in the popular press. See if any mainstream reporters criticize it.