Creationism2

Defining Creationism
Creationism at its simplest means that God created the universe rather than naturalistic processes. Merriam Webster's defines Creationism as "the belief that God created all things out of nothing as described in the Bible and that therefore the theory of evolution is incorrect." While typically associated with Biblical Christianity, other religions such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism all adhere to Creationism as well in one form or another.

There are two types of Creationism, Young Earth Creationism, that God created the Earth young as seen from a literal reading of Genesis 1, and Old Earth Creationism, an attempt to reconcile the theory of evolution's long timespans with God creating life by inferring God guided the process of evolution.

Microevolution vs. Macroevolution
As a Young Earth Creationist (commonly abbreviated YEC), we distinguish between Microevolution and Macroevolution, both of which are scientific terms/concepts. The University of California's Museum of Paleontology defines Microevolution and Macroevolution as follows:

"Microevolution is evolution on a small scale — within a single population. That means narrowing our focus to one branch of the tree of life. If you could zoom in on one branch of the tree of life scale — the insects, for example — you would see another phylogeny relating all the different insect lineages. If you continue to zoom in, selecting the branch representing beetles, you would see another phylogeny relating different beetle species. "

"Macroevolution is evolution on a grand scale — what we see when we look at the over-arching history of life: stability, change, lineages arising, and extinction."

"Macroevolution generally refers to evolution above the species level. So instead of focusing on an individual beetle species, a macroevolutionary lens might require that we zoom out on the tree of life, to assess the diversity of the entire beetle clade and its position on the tree."

Microevolution is in essence compatible with Genesis 1, since Genesis 1 repeatedly states that God created core categories of life which brought forth after their kinds (Heb. miyn) or species. A Young Earth Creationist believes there were core categories of life which adapted to their environments to become the varieties of life we see today. Thus, Natural Selection, adaptation, and speciation are all perfectly acceptable concepts to the Creationist, who believes life has evolved within God-created categories rather than between from a common ancestor.

Macroevolution is the theory Darwin proposed in On the Origin of Species, namely that "each species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species." Evolutionists infer from Microevolution, Natural Selection, and speciation, that all life came from a common ancestor. Thus Macroevolution is the theory that life evolves BETWEEN core categories of life (e.g. dogs/canines, cats/felines, horses/equines) rather than WITHIN those categories.

Difference in Observability

 * See Punctuated_Equilibrium

However, while Microevolution, Natural Selection, and speciation are all observable, factual processes, the theory of Macroevolution cannot be witnessed today. Finches adapt as finches, as observed by Darwin, but remain finches. Bacteria speciates into other types of bacteria, yet remains bacteria. Moths adapt to bark and change their wing coloration, yet they still remain moths.

What is more, while Microevolution is observable from the fossil record, there are considerable gaps where the presumed changes between core categories of life should have occurred. This led to the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium being proposed to claim that evolution had just magically sped up during periods of geologic time.

YECs see this as a convenient way for Evolutionists to explain why the key evidence needed to prove a common ancestor is missing from the fossil record, a way for Evolutionists to distance themselves from Darwin's now obviously false theory of Phyletic Gradualism while creating a new theory so they can continue believing in a common ancestor.

Catastrophism vs. Uniformitarianism
Strangely, although this new breed of Evolutionist now claims evolution can rapidly speed up, they still insist on ever longer timespans involved in Earth's geologic history, and continue adhering to the principles of Uniformitarianism despite the fact that those principles were proven wrong. At a deeper level, the debate between Creationism and Evolution is really between Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism.

Catastrophism originated first, in the 1800s, the claim that the fossil record was built as the result of nearly instantaneous catastrophes. However, Charles Lyell, frustrated that his mentor and famous geologist William Buckland was using Catastrophism to support the Biblical Flood, invented a new theory called Uniformitarianism, the belief that the Earth is the result of slow, constant, gradual processes such as rates of evolution and radiometric decay.

Thanks to the pioneering work of researchers such as William Smith, geologists in the early 1800s were able to swiftly organize rock formations into a single colossal record of Earth's history. Many geologists saw in this record a stormy epic, one in which our planet had been convulsed repeatedly by abrupt changes. Mountains were built in catastrophic instants, and in the process whole groups of animals became extinct and were replaced by new species.

'Catastrophism,' as this school of thought came to be known, was attacked in 1830 by a British lawyer-turned-geologist named Charles Lyell (1797-1875). Lyell started his career studying under the catastrophist William Buckland at Oxford. But Lyell became disenchanted with Buckland when Buckland tried to link catastrophism to the Bible, looking for evidence that the most recent catastrophe had actually been Noah's flood. Lyell wanted to find a way to make geology a true science of its own, built on observation and not susceptible to wild speculations or dependent on the supernatural... Lyell had an equally profound effect on our understanding of life's history. He influenced Darwin so deeply that Darwin envisioned evolution as a sort of biological uniformitarianism. Evolution took place from one generation to the next before our very eyes, he argued, but it worked too slowly for us to perceive.

Nonetheless, the evidence of Catastrophism has now become too great for the scientific establishment, despite their entrenchment in Uniformitarianism and Darwinism, to ignore. The entire fossil record clearly displays evidence that a mass catastrophe killed the dinosaurs.

"For months I'd been on the trail of the greatest natural disaster in Earth's history. About 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, something killed some 90 percent of the planet's species. Less than 5 percent of the animal species in the seas survived. On land less than a third of the large animal species made it. Nearly all the trees died. Looy had told me that the Black Triangle was the best place today to see what the world would have looked like after the Permian extinction. This didn't look like apocalypse. We saw the first signs of death as we walked into the hills—hundreds of fallen timbers lay hidden in the undergrowth. A forest once grew here. Half a mile (0.8 kilometers) uphill we found the trunks of a stand of spruce, killed by acid rain. No birds called, no insects hummed. The only sound was the wind through the acid-tolerant weeds." -Hillel J. Hoffman, "The Permian Extinction - When Life Nearly Came to an End," National Geographic.

Thus, despite the new grudging acknowledgment by the secular scientific community that Catastrophism is a reality, and that evolution did not proceed through slow, gradual constancy in the past as Darwin claimed, they insist on adhering to the principles of Uniformitarianism. Although Catastrophism, so long abandoned for Uniformitarianism, is now known to be true, Evolutionists refuse to consider that the Earth could be younger due to catastrophes producing our geologic record rather than slow constant processes at work.

The Creationist Alternative
Creationism, in opposition to the theory of evolution, proposes that modern life has microevolved from multiple common ancestors through core species or 'kinds' (Heb. 'miyn') as described in Genesis 1. God told all the species in Genesis 1 to bring forth after their respective species, see verses 11-12, 21-22, 24-25, and 28. Thus there would have been an original canine species from which all canines evolved, one feline species from which all felines evolved, etc. For a rough breakdown of how the Bible categorizes life, see Baramin.

This explains why the fossil record consistently lacks transitional forms, and why microevolution can be readily observed today (life adapting within these core created kinds) yet despite rapid microevolutionary rates we never observe one type of life changing into a completely different type of life.

"People like to point out natural selection and the resulting speciation as evidence of evolution, because there’s a mountain of data to support both of those as testable, observable science. But don’t forget: we define what a species is, and no amount of ash on trees has ever changed a moth, dark or light, into a bee or a bird. They also like to point at bacterial mutation as evidence of evolution, but I have an issue with that, too. We’ve been watching those little guys since the invention of the microscope over 300 years ago, and while they’ve changed genetically and adapted as bacteria, they’ve never evolved into a new, higher form of life. Think about this: if a bacterial generation is 20 minutes, and a human generation is 20 years, then they should be evolving 525,000 times faster than we are. And if it took 3.2 million years for Lucy, the alleged missing link to become modern man, we should expect to see similar evolutionary advancements in bacteria in a period of just six years. Wow. And I’m talking about real evolution. Not just slight alterations to DNA, or building up immunities to this or that, but transforming, actually evolving into something more complex – a brand new form of life. A higher form of life."

-The Brothers Winn

So where did all of the dinosaurs go then? They simply evolved to become today's reptiles, adapting to a post-Flood environment given the collapse of the canopy (see Canopy Theory). They were cursed in Genesis 3:14 by God changing their method of locomotion, so that instead of towering over life as they once had, they would now shrink and have to walk in the dust. (Genesis 3:14) A canopy would help explain why human lifespans drastically and rapidly declined immediately after the Flood (see Pre-Flood Longevity) from lifespans regularly above 900 years (Genesis 5) to today's 70 to 80 year average lifespans with 120-year maximums. (Psalms 90:10, Genesis 6:3)

Under a Creationist model, the Flood was responsible to large extent for creating Earth's geologic layers within a short amount of time. (See Noah's Flood Evidence). Much of the water for the Flood came, however, not from the atmosphere, but from the "fountains of the deep," underground reservoirs which laboratory studies have found may hold as much as five times the amount of water inside the Earth as is on the outside. Furthermore these discoveries are in addition to already-identified fossil aquifers such as the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System, Ogallala Aquifer, and Kalahari Desert Aquifers which contain massive amounts of ancient freshwater locked deep below the Earth's surface. Even aside from mountain growth rates, there is clearly enough water to cover the mountains during the Flood.

The Flood should not be understood as a purely water-based phenomena, either. The tectonic activity associated with the "fountains of the deep" breaking up (Genesis 7:11) would likely have resulted in massive volcanism on an unprecedented scale. The mixing of volcanic ash with water at a global scale would have extinguished most marine life and rapidly fossilized virtually all life it touched. This rapidly instantaneous fossilization is written, repeatedly and consistently, into the fossil record. (See Instantaneous Fossilization)

Furthermore the fossil record and geologic record contain evidence of just such underwater volcanism causing mass extinction. In 2009 it was discovered that an ancient volcano had occurred in a shallow sea near modern-day China, killing marine life around the world and instantly fossilizing life in the immediate area. According to Professor Paul Wagnall who authored the paper, "The abrupt extinction of marine life we can clearly see in the fossil record firmly links giant volcanic eruptions with global environmental catastrophe, a correlation that has often been controversial."

"A previously unknown giant volcanic eruption that led to global mass extinction 260 million years ago has been uncovered by scientists at the University of Leeds. The eruption in the Emeishan province of south-west China unleashed around half a million cubic kilometres of lava, covering an area 5 times the size of Wales, and wiping out marine life around the world... The layer of fossilised rock directly after the eruption shows mass extinction of different life forms, clearly linking the onset of the eruptions with a major environmental catastrophe. The global effect of the eruption is also due to the proximity of the volcano to a shallow sea. The collision of fast flowing lava with shallow sea water caused a violent explosion at the start of the eruptions – throwing huge quantities of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere."

-University of Leeds

Furthermore, a massive Flood combined with volcanic ash would have altered radiometric dates worldwide. (See Radiometric Dating) As noted by Encyclopedia Britannica, volcanic carbon dioxide, dissolved limestone carbonate, and upwelling of deep ocean water all have the effect of producing the appearance of "built-in age" per radiometric dating. That is because volcanoes basically bring up a superheated cocktail of radiometric minerals from deep within the Earth, given that radiometric decay provides the heat source for the Earth's core.

"With correction for radioactive decay during the intervening years, such old samples hopefully would show the same starting carbon-14 level as exists today... It is now clear that carbon-14 is not homogeneously distributed among today’s plants and animals. The occasional exceptions all involve nonatmospheric contributions of carbon-14-depleted carbon dioxide to organic synthesis. Specifically, volcanic carbon dioxide is known to depress the carbon-14 level of nearby vegetation, and dissolved limestone carbonate occasionally has a similar effect on freshwater mollusks, as does upwelling of deep ocean water on marine mollusks. In every case, the living material affected gives the appearance of built-in age. In addition to spatial variations of the carbon-14 level, the question of temporal variation has received much study. A 2 to 3 percent depression of the atmospheric radioactive-carbon level since 1900 was noted soon after Libby’s pioneering work, almost certainly the result of the dumping of huge volumes of carbon-14-free carbon dioxide into the air through smokestacks. Of more recent date was the overcompensating effect of man-made carbon-14 injected into the atmosphere during nuclear bomb testing. The result was a rise in the atmospheric carbon-14 level by more than 50 percent. Fortunately, neither effect has been significant in the case of older samples submitted for carbon-14 dating. The ultimate cause of carbon-14 variations with time is generally attributed to temporal fluctuations in the cosmic rays that bombard the upper atmosphere and create terrestrial carbon-14."

-Edwin A. Olson, Encyclopædia Britannica

This would explain the geologic record excellently - sedimentary rock would be caused by a global Flood, and igneous rock by the concurrent volcanism. Petroleum is formed when large amounts of dead organisms are buried beneath sedimentary rock, exactly what would occur from a global Flood mixed with volcanism when depositing dead plants and animals. Chalk formation would evidence the die-off of marine organisms, and coal formation of plants in a Flood mixed with volcanic activity. As pointed out by Don Stewart and Josh McDowell in Reasons Skeptics Should Consider Christianity fossilization is itself indicative of a catastrophe, as you must rapidly cover dead material to prevent its decay by scavengers, bacteria, and erosion, and there are environmentally-mixed fossil deposits such as coal and lumps of amber with leaves, insects, and coral from all climates and regions of the globe. Also explained would be the extensive evidence of rapid sedimentation, such as large numbers of trilobites fossilized in life position and fossils with food still in their bellies such as the giant mosasaur that had three other mosasaurs in its belly.

Gap Theory

 * See also Gap Theory

While a straightforward reading of the book of Genesis makes plain that human life is only 6,000 years old, the universe and life itself may be older. This can be inferred from the initial verses in Genesis 1 indicating that the Earth, and thus planets with gravity already existed. Furthermore, that the Angels had already been created may be inferred from Job 38:4-7.

Genesis 1:1 ¶ In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

If a day is defined, per Genesis 1, as one evening and one morning (v. 5), then it is technically possible to consider that vast amounts of time passed prior to the 4th day when the Sun was created. The word day is only used to refer to 24-hour days after the creation of the sun in Genesis 1:14. Prior to the creation of the sun it was simply defined as one cycle of darkness and light per Genesis 1:5.

Nonetheless, Biblically-sound Gap Theory cannot justify a purely naturalistic Big Bang or evolution model over vast time scales. Genesis 1 makes clear that the creation of Earth's life occurred within a few 24-hour days. During the 7-day creation week God formed the atmospheric boundary layer in the troposphere (vv. 6-8), continents and seas (vv.9-10), vegetation (vv. 11-13), and the stars throughout the universe (vv. 14-19). Even if one assumes the stars were "null and void" prior to this in the same way Earth was, allowing for the formation of planets and stars earlier, animal and human life are still of recent origin. (Days 5-6, vv. 24-30)

At best, Gap Theory can justify an early date of creation for planetary bodies themselves, but not for animal life. Vegetation, having been created on the 3rd day, could have survived an indeterminate amount of time before the Sun's creation depending on what the original source of light in vv. 3-5 was. It is likely that Jesus, the 'Light of the World' (John 8:12, 9:5) was the original source of light just as He will be the last. (Revelation 21:23-25)

Canopy Theory

 * See also Canopy Theory

Canopy Theory proposes that Earth's atmosphere was thicker in the past, and the Earth was once covered in lush rainforest with higher oxygen levels producing a greenhouse environment perfectly suited for sustaining life. During the Flood, this canopy collapsed as the "windows of Heaven were opened." (Genesis 6:11)

That such a canopy existed is evident from the geologic record. We now know that Earth once had a thicker atmosphere with oxygen levels 50% higher than today's levels (30-35% as opposed to today's level of 21%), resulting in insect gigantism such as dragonflies with 2-foot wingspans. The discovery was made over a decade after Creationist Carl Baugh patented his hyperbaric biosphere in 2001. Fossilized raindrop impressions in ancient volcanic ash likewise show that ancient Earth's atmosphere was thicker than today's.

"For the giant insects that roamed Earth 300 million years ago, there was something special in the air. A higher concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere let dragonflies sometimes grow to the size of hawks, and some millipede-like bugs reached some six feet (two meters) in length, a new study suggests... During the late Carboniferous period (354 to 290 million years ago), however, oxygen levels were much higher than they are now, partly because coal swamps that leaked the gas into the air were very common. 'Back then, there was 31 to 35 percent oxygen in the air,' study lead author Kaiser said. 'Now we have about 21 percent.' That meant insects needed smaller quantities of air to meet their oxygen demands, allowing the creatures to grow much larger."

-Ker Than, National Geographic

Human Population Growth
I have seen a number of Bible critics in the past question how population could have grown quickly enough within 10,000 years to reach today's population. What is ironic is they've never done the math to check for themselves, because population growth at today's rates very definitely indicates a young creation, in fact it's too rapid even for Young Earth Creationists. Even Young Earth Creationists must concede it's gone at most half today's rates.

List of Countries by Population Growth

 * See Human Population Growth

Annual population growth rates today are above 1% in most of the world's countries. Globally population growth is 1.07%. Ultimately 51 of the world's 233 countries have rates above 2.00% and 119, over half of them, have rates above 1.00%. 155 of 233 countries have rates in excess of 0.50%. Surprisingly, many of these countries have very low life expectancies as well, and the higher a country's growth rate, the more disease, death, and war there tends to be in the country. (ranks shown out of 223 countries) The following are the 20 highest annual population growth rates among the world's countries as way of illustration:

Years to Reach 7 Billion Population
At a 1% growth rate (which most countries in the world have) one goes from 8 people (the survivors of Noah's Ark - Genesis 7:13) to 7 billion in just 2,071 years. Human population growth rates seen today are a strong evidence that the Bible is correct that human civilization is young.

Even as seen above, if population growth rates were less than 1/10th as fast as they are today's (0.1% as opposed to 1.07%) the human population should only be 13,690 years old. Even if population growth rates were less than 1/20th as fast as they are today's (0.05% as opposed to 1.07%) the human population should only 41,191 years old. Evolutionists cannot begin to use the principle "the present is the key to the past" to claim human population is millions of years old. Human population growth rates clearly indicate a young Earth, and are part of a broader pattern of microevolutionary rates that are too rapid for an old Earth.

Slower Rates
The Evolutionist will of course argue that population growth rates were far slower than today's rates, but even at rates just 1/5 those seen today, 0.20%, human population still should not be more than 7,000 years old. So what about disease, death, war? Certainly the Black Death and other severe plagues delayed human population in the past, right? Under such extreme circumstances there was likely some delay, but remember, countries with lower life expectancies and greater disease, death, and war actually have HIGHER population growth rates as seen from table 1.

"Evolutionists claim that mankind evolved from apes about a million years ago. If the population had grown at just 0.01% per year since then (doubling only every 7,000 years), there could be 10^43 people today—that’s a number with 43 zeros after it. This number is so big that not even the Texans have a word for it! To try to put this number of people in context, say each individual is given ‘standing room only’ of about one square metre per person. However, the land surface area of the whole Earth is ‘only’ 1.5 x 10^14 square metres. If every one of those square metres were made into a world just like this one, all these worlds put together would still ‘only’ have a surface area able to fit 10^28 people in this way. This is only a tiny fraction of 10^43 (10^29 is 10 times as much as 10^28, 10^30 is 100 times, and so on). Those who adhere to the evolutionary story argue that disease, famine and war kept the numbers almost constant for most of this period, which means that mankind was on the brink of extinction for most of this supposed history. This stretches credulity to the limits."

-Don Batten, Creation Ministries International

The Evolutionist will also argue, as Infidels.org does, that "The human exponential growth rate of the last few hundred years is possible only because of technology" which sounds good superficially until you realize that the countries today with the fastest population growth, rates in excess of 3% annually, are third-world countries such as Lebanon, Zimbabwe, South Sudan, and Uganda - places where there is sometimes not even running water and which are certainly not known for their technology.

Matson's argument in particular is very dishonest though, as he concludes by attempting to claim that "real data" consists of population rates of 0.07% prior to 1650 A.D. So much for "the present is the key to the past." However, even if one were to accept Matson's ridiculous claim of .07% growth rates (which would be less than 1/140th those seen today) humans still would go from 8 individuals to 7 billion in 29,426 years, still far too short for the hundreds of thousands that are claimed by Evolutionists.

For an Evolutionist to argue that human population has been around millions of years they must argue that growth has been at a standstill all that time, and that human population did not begin growing substantially until the past 10,000 years.

Ancient Historical Census Records
Another argument I've seen evolutionists make in debate is that historical records do not support ancient population growth rates near today's levels, which is false. Although there is not much in the way of ancient census data, ancient Chinese census records show a substantial population growth rate from 680 B.C. to 2 A.D., and the 2 A.D. Han Dynasty census is widely regarded as the most accurate example of an ancient census. A 680 B.C. census in ancient China showed a population of 11,841,923 people, whereas the 2 A.D. census showed 59,594,978 people. Thus over 682 years this was a 0.238% growth rate. And at a .238% growth rate one goes from eight people to 7 billion in just 8,663 years.

Ancient Roman censuses likewise show growth too rapid for the millions of years claimed by evolutionists. The 465 B.C. census counted 104,714 people. The 264 B.C. census counted 382,234 Roman citizens. Thus there was a population growth rate of 0.646% over a 201-year period in ancient Rome. At a 0.646 population growth rate one goes just from the eight survivors of Noah's Ark to 7 billion people in just 3,199 years.

Dinosaur Soft Tissue
Soft tissue is consistent with young earth creationism, where a global Flood fossilized life rapidly through massive levels of sediment and underwater volcanism. However, conventional scientific theory has disclaimed the existence of soft tissues which should not still exist after millions of years.

Background
As far back as 1982 a mummified insect was discovered with intact soft tissue. Palaeontologist Mary H. Schweitzer actually had made a similar discovery in 1992, but skeptics argued the tissue was just biofilm, slime formed by microbes invading the bone. In 1998 thousands of dinosaur eggs were discovered with evidence of fossilized skin, soft tissue, intact.

Schweitzer's 2005 Discovery
Contrary to conventional thinking, dinosaur soft tissue was discovered in 2005, including preserved T-Rex blood cells, in demineralized dinosaur bones. The 2005 university press release noted that "Not only is the tissue largely intact, it’s still transparent and pliable, and microscopic interior structures resembling blood vessels and even cells are still present... Schweitzer then duplicated her findings with at least three other well-preserved dinosaur specimens, one 80-million-year-old hadrosaur and two 65-million-year-old tyrannosaurs. All of these specimens preserved vessels, cell-like structures, or flexible matrix that resembled bone collagen from modern specimens. Current theories about fossil preservation hold that organic molecules should not preserve beyond 100,000 years."

By all the rules of paleontology, such traces of life should have long since drained from the bones. It's a matter of faith among scientists that soft tissue can survive at most for a few tens of thousands of years, not the 65 million since T. rex walked what's now the Hell Creek Formation in Montana... She had already seen signs of exceptional preservation in the early 1990s, while she was studying the technical aspects of adhering fossil slices to microscope slides. One day a collaborator brought a T. rex slide to a conference and showed it to a pathologist, who examined it under a microscope. 'The guy looked at it and said, 'Do you realize you've got red blood cells in that bone?' Schweitzer remembers. 'My colleague brought it back and showed me, and I just got goose bumps, because everyone knows these things don't last for 65 million years.' When Schweitzer showed Horner the slide, she recalls, 'Jack said, 'Prove to me they're not red blood cells.'

-Barry Yeoman, Discover Magazine

As Schweitzer earlier noted, "Finding these tissues in dinosaurs changes the way we think about fossilization, because our theories of how fossils are preserved don't allow for this." Schweitzer's original paper took note of the rapid fossilization process at work, stating "To preserve these labile embryonic remains, the rate of mineral precipitation must have superseded post-mortem degradative processes, resulting in virtually instantaneous mineralization of soft tissues." According to evolutionists, that is a 68-million year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex with soft tissue and preserved blood vessels. Creationists at the time quickly pointed out the implications of this evidence in supporting the Biblical account.

Regardless of how the evolutionist community finally decides what to do with this fossil conundrum, the creationists now possess immensely powerful evidence against the well-publicized belief that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago and instead have tremendous support for the biblical timeline of a recent creation.

-Answers In Genesis

Schweitzer's original paper took note of the rapid fossilization process at work, stating "To preserve these labile embryonic remains, the rate of mineral precipitation must have superseded post-mortem degradative processes, resulting in virtually instantaneous mineralization of soft tissues." In 2005 liberal skeptics attempted to question the findings, with Gary Hurd of TalkOrigins suggesting the material just had the appearance of soft tissue and Joe Skulan of the NCSE writing that Creationists were "improperly" seizing on the finding. Schweitzer admitted that she had been afraid to publish her research because of the ridicule she would receive for questioning conventional theory.

A 2005 paper in the journal Science described what appeared to be flexible blood vessels, cells, and collagen-like bone matrix from fossils of a 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex. Mary Schweitzer, the North Carolina State University paleontologist who announced the finding, said her team has now repeated that feat with more than a dozen other dinosaur specimens. To make sense of the surprising discovery, scientists are beginning to rethink a long-standing model of how the fossilization process works.

-Scott Norris, National Geographic

Further Discoveries
TalkOrigins in 2006 attempted to deny soft tissue could be evidence for creationism, claiming that "If dinosaur fossils were as young as creationists claim, recovering DNA and non-bone tissues from them should be routine enough that it would not be news." However, now that scientists are examining fossils for soft tissue, routine is exactly what these discoveries are becoming.

By 2007 the evidence got even stronger following analysis of similar tissue in mastodons showing they were closely related to modern elephants. Critics continued attempting as late as 2008 to prove that bacterial biofilms were the answer rather than preserved dinosaur blood vessels.

Critics said that her claims, which given the millions of years perspective are indeed 'extraordinary', required extraordinary evidence. But this is a cliché; in reality, they just require evidence, and that has been amply provided. Yet the critics demanded additional protein sequencing, super-careful handling to avoid claims of contamination, and confirmation from other laboratories. So Schweitzer and her team set about doing just that when they looked at the leg bone of this hadrosaur encased in sandstone.

Extraordinary measures were taken to keep the sample away from contamination until it reached the lab. They used an even more sophisticated and newer mass spectrometer, and sent the samples to two other labs for confirmation. They reported finding not just collagen, but evidence of two additional proteins—elastin and laminin. They also found structures uncannily resembling the cells found in both blood and bone, as well as cellular basement membrane matrix. And there were, once again, hints of hemoglobin, gleaned from applying hemoglobin-specific antibodies to the structures and seeing if the antibodies would bind to them...

What happens is that 'auxiliary' hypotheses and assumptions are constructed to preserve the intactness of the 'core' hypothesis, in this case what is known as 'deep time'. In simple terms, proteins should simply not have been able to last for these tens of millions of years. So when they are found in specimens dated this old, the paradigm is under serious threat.

-Carl Wieland, Creation Ministries International

In 2009, preserved blood vessels and other connective tissue was found in a duck-billed Hadrosaur. In 2012 molecular analysis decisively proved that soft tissue had been discovered. In 2013 a duck-billed Edmontosaurus was discovered with a head crest made entirely of fleshy soft tissue.

In 2013 a cache of 20 dinosaur embryos of the long-necked Lufengosaurus, according to evolutionists 500 million years old, were discovered inside their eggs including "organic material" (i.e. soft tissue) that may include collagen fibres. The dinosaur eggs were remarkably preserved by being flooded out of their nests and covered with a heavy layer of mud that turned into an 8 inch layer of sandstone. One of the dinosaur embryo discoverers, Reisz, stated that "The nests were inundated by water and basically smothered, and the embryos inside the eggs died and then decayed. And then more water activity moved the bones and concentrated them into a very small area. We only excavated 1sq m of the ‘bone bed’ and we got more than 200 bones." Creation scientists have been pointing out for years that such egg deposits indicate a global Flood.

If the presence of organic material in these embryos is confirmed, the finding will add to the roster of remarkably ancient biochemistry. And while no imaginable mechanism could explain such preservation for millions of years, residual biomolecules sheltered within fossils since being suddenly buried in the global Flood less than 4,500 years ago is a lot easier to swallow. The preservation of proteins such as collagen and keratin, structures such as blood cells, and even bits of DNA are consistent with the young age of the earth, but are unbelievable in a millions-of-years scenario.

-Answers In Genesis 2014 research claims an embryo as old as 500 million years is included among the soft tissue finds. The Institute of Creation Research observed of the embryo discovery, "One problem—collagen decay-rate measurements at the temperature of the fossil’s location in southern China imply a maximum age of fewer than one million years. How could a specimen be 190 times older than its maximum age?"

Given the fact that organic materials like blood vessels and blood cells rot, and the rates at which certain proteins decay, how could these soft tissues have been preserved for ten thousand, let alone 65 million or more, years? These soft tissues have met with hard resistance from mainstream science, and some scientists have even discounted or ignored them. But fresh studies keep finding fresh tissue, making the issue difficult to dismiss. Either the vast evolutionary ages assigned to these finds are dramatically erroneous, or 'we really don't understand decay' rates of the soft tissues and proteins.

-Brian Thomas, Institute for Creation Research

Also in 2014 ancient underwater crustaceans were discovered (an alleged 500 million years old), 100 ostracods "entombed" when a huge layer of mud hit them from above, fossilizing them with their eggs and newly hatched offspring, preserving soft tissue such as delicate eggshells. Ancient ichthyosaurs, huge marine reptiles, have also been discovered entombed in huge layers of flood sediment. As the Scientific American puts it (attempting to hypothesize away the possibility of a global Flood), "Occasionally, there would have been mudflows that cascaded into the water like an avalanche, and the researchers think these mudflows killed the ichthyosaurs. The animals likely became disoriented and drowned, getting sucked into the deep sea, where their bodies were entombed in the sediment, the researchers said."

Preservation by Iron?
In 2013, it was claimed that iron was responsible for the remarkable preservation of blood vessels for millions of years. Experiments showed iron chelation (i.e. removal) could preserve soft tissue for two years. As mentioned on PhysOrg, "Schweitzer and her team noticed that iron particles are intimately associated with the soft tissues preserved in dinosaurs. But when they chelated – or removed the iron from – soft tissues taken from a T. rex and a Brachyolophosaurus, the chelated tissues reacted much more strongly to antibodies that detect the presence of protein, suggesting that the iron may be masking their presence in these preserved tissues. They then tested the preservation hypothesis by using blood vessels and cells taken from modern ostrich bone. They soaked some of these vessels in hemoglobin taken from red blood cells, while placing other vessels in water. Two years later, the hemoglobin-treated soft vessels remained intact, while those soaked in water degraded in less than a week." Naturally Creationists have questioned however whether this can prove millions of years at work.

But can iron chelation preserve soft tissue and even keep it soft for millions of years? While a 200-fold delay in the decay of ostrich blood vessels is certainly impressive, even that level of preservation can’t hold a candle to the 99,800,000-fold increase in chemical stability needed in the millions-of-years evolutionary scenario. Schweitzer quite reasonably makes a comparison to the fixation properties of formaldehyde. Many variables influence the degree and duration of the decay-delaying properties of formaldehyde. But specimens preserved in formaldehyde are not preserved perfectly or permanently. While burial conditions likely influence the efficacy of iron as a preservative in any given bone, there is certainly no reason to propose that iron could preserve the molecular structure of soft tissue for millions of years any more than formaldehyde could.

-Elizabeth Mitchell, Answers In Genesis

Young Carbon Dating of Soft Tissue Censored
In 2012 a team of researchers including Dr. Thomas Seiler, Dr. Robert Bennett, and Dr. Jean de Pontcharra presented evidence at the 2012 Western Pacific Geophysics Meeting in Singapore, August 13–17, showing that carbon dating eight dinosaur fossils produced dates in the range of 22,000-39,000 years old, despite conventional assumptions that no carbon 14 should still exist in the bones. The event was hosted by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the Asia Oceania Geosciences Society (AOGS). However, the abstract and discussion were removed from the conference site, and the entries for the conference discussion are now blank.

The researchers emailed a protest to the conference and were told "Dear Mr. Miller, As a result of comments from attendees at the recent AOGS-AGU (WPGM) meeting in Singapore we have examined your abstract which was delivered in session BG-02. The interpretation which you present in your abstract is that the age of various dinosaurs, previously interpreted as being Mesozoic in age, are less than ~50,000 years. Your report that these ages were calculated using C-14 methods. There is obviously an error in these data. The abstract was apparently not reviewed properly and was accepted in error. For this reason we have exercised our authority as program chairs and rescinded the abstract. The abstract will no longer appear on the AOGS web site. Program Chairs, Minhan Dai, Xiamen University Peter Swart, University of Miami." A rebuttal sent in reply received no response.

The researchers state that "Both the schedule for the August 15, 2012, presentation, abstract and authors’ names are listed in the CD-Rom given to each of the 2000 registrants, so it is possible to prove that our abstract was approved by the conference organizers. We encourage AGU members to protest against the flagrant censorship of our research, and we urge other researchers to C-14 date dinosaur bones from bone repositories around the world and to present papers confirming or challenging our data."

Lack of Transitional Forms
The fossil record as a whole is more consistent with the original predictions of Young Earth Creationism than Darwinian Evolution, lacking throughout the transitional forms needed to prove a common ancestor.

Darwin's False Predictions
Darwin acknowledged four core weaknesses in the theory of evolution, devoting chapters 6-9 to addressing them, first and foremost the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record, which he labeled the "gravest objection which can be urged against my theory." However, Darwin claimed the answer lay "in the extreme imperfection of the geological record", repeatedly arguing that more research of the fossil record would bear out his theory - which it never did.

Firstly, why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?

...Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.

...That our palæontological collections are very imperfect, is admitted by every one. The remark of that admirable palæontologist, the late Edward Forbes, should not be forgotten, namely, that numbers of our fossil species are known and named from single and often broken specimens, or from a few specimens collected on some one spot. Only a small portion of the surface of the earth has been geologically explored, and no part with sufficient care, as the important discoveries made every year in Europe prove.

...From the foregoing considerations it cannot be doubted that the geological record, viewed as a whole, is extremely imperfect; but if we confine our attention to any one formation, it becomes more difficult to understand, why we do not therein find closely graduated varieties between the allied species which lived at its commencement and at its close.

...If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life all at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of descent with slow modification through natural selection. For the development of a group of forms, all of which have descended from some one progenitor, must have been an extremely slow process; and the progenitors must have lived long ages before their modified descendants. But we continually over-rate the perfection of the geological record, and falsely infer, because certain genera or families have not been found beneath a certain stage, that they did not exist before that stage.

...Consequently, if my theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Silurian stratum was deposited, long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably far longer than, the whole interval from the Silurian age to the present day; and that during these vast, yet quite unknown, periods of time, the world swarmed with living creatures. To the question why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer.

Punctuated Equilibrium

 * ''See also Punctuated Equilibrium

Moving the Goalposts
The theory known as 'Punctuated Equilibrium' was originated by the paleontologists Stephen Gould and Niles Eldredge in their paper Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism because the fossil record did not show evidence for Darwin's original theory of phyletic gradualism, gradualistic evolution, and only showed steady microevolution in the fossil record for long periods, then sudden emergence of brand new species as though suddenly created. Today Punctuated Equilibrium is the predominant theory on Evolution.

"Still, if evolution is gradual, there should be a fossilized record of small, incremental changes on the way to a new species. But in many cases, scientists have been unable to find most of these intermediate forms. Darwin himself was shaken by their absence. His conclusion was that the fossil record lacked these transitional stages, because it was so incomplete. That is certainly true in many cases, because the chances of each of those critical changing forms having been preserved as fossils are small. But in 1972, evolutionary scientists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge proposed another explanation which they called 'punctuated equilibrium.' That is, species are generally stable, changing little for millions of years. This leisurely pace is 'punctuated' by a rapid burst of change that results in a new species and that leaves few fossils behind."

-PBS

A scientific theory, by definition, is falsifiable, it must in other words have a test by which it can be not only proven right, but proven wrong. The primary test Darwin set was transitional forms in the fossil record, and after a century and a half, that evidence is clearly lacking. In Darwin's own words, "If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life all at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of descent with slow modification through natural selection." However, a century later when it became clear that the fossil record was not cooperating with Darwin's claims, Gould and Eldredge pulled a bait and switch. Because the theory of evolution Darwin had proposed was clearly wrong, rather than reconsider the premise of a common ancestor, they simply altered the now clearly-false "theory of descent with slow modification through natural selection" to, in essence, "theory of descent with quick, sporadic modification through natural selection." As Gould and Eldredge acknowledged in their paper:

"Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory. Why, he asked (1859, p. 310), do we not find the ‘infinitely numeral transitional links’ that would illustrate the slow and steady operation of natural selection? ‘Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps is the gravest objection which can be urged against my theory’ (1859, p. 280). Darwin resolved this dilemma by invoking the great inadequacy of surviving evidence (1859, p. 342): ‘The geological record is extremely imperfect and this fact will to a large extent explain why we do not find interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps. He who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record, will rightly reject my whole theory.' Thus Darwin set the path for the new science of evolutionary paleontology: to demonstrate evolution, search the fossil record and extract the rare exemplars of Darwinian process—insensibly graded fossil series, spared somehow from the ravages of decomposition, non-deposition, metamorphism, and tectonism." (pg. 87)

"To Darwin, therefore, speciation entailed the same expectation as phyletic evolution: a long and insensibly graded chain of intermediate forms. Our present texts have not abandoned this view, although modern biology has." (pg. 89)

"Under the influence of phyletic gradualism, the rarity of transitional series remains as our persistent bugbear. From the reputable claims of a Cuvier or Agassiz to the jibes of modern cranks and fundamentalists, it has stood as the bulwark of anti-evolution arguments: 'For evolution to be true there had to be thousands, millions of transitional forms making an unbroken chain' (Anon., 1967-From a Jehovah's Witnesses pamphlet)." (pg. 90)

Unevidenced
The paper begins by arguing against Newtonian inductivism (pg. 84) and claims the proper approach is theory without "patient accumulation of facts", asserting the "cloven hoofprint of theory" is inevitable:

"Today, most philosophers and psychologists would brand the inductivist credo as naive and untenable on two counts: (1) We do not encounter facts as 'data' (literally 'given') discovered objectively. All observation is colored by theory and expectation. (See Vernon, 1966, on the relation between expectation and perception. For a radical view, read Feyerabend's (1970) claim that theories act as 'party lines' to force observation in preset channels, unrecognized by adherents who think they observe an objective truth. (2) Theory does not develop as a simple and logical extension of observation; it does not arise merely from the patient accumulation of facts. Rather, we observe in order to test hypotheses and examine their consequences. Thus, Hanson (1970, pp.20-23) writes: 'Much recent philosophy of science has been dedicated to disclosing that a 'given' or a 'pure' observation language is a myth-eaten fabric of philosophical fiction... In any observation statement the cloven hoofprint of theory can be readily detected.'" (pg. 85)

Gould and Eldredge admitted Darwinian gradualism has been incorrect, and that "an inadequate picture has been guiding our thoughts on speciation for 100 years... because paleontologists, in claiming that they see objectively, have not recognized its guiding sway". A particularly telling quote, revealing they just invented the theory to protect Darwinism rather than through factual examination, is "To extract ourselves from this dilemma, we must bring in a more adequate theory: it will not arise from facts collected in the old way":

"The inductivist view forces us into a vicious circle. A theory often compels us to see the world in its light and support. Yet, we think we see objectively and therefore interpret each new datum as an independent confirmation of our theory. Although our theory may be wrong, we cannot confute it. To extract ourselves from this dilemma, we must bring in a more adequate theory: it will not arise from facts collected in the old way... This issue is central to the study of speciation in paleontology. We believe that an inadequate picture has been guiding our thoughts on speciation for 100 years. We hold that its influence has been all the more tenacious because paleontologists, in claiming that they see objectively, have not recognized its guiding sway. We contend that a notion developed elsewhere, the theory of allopatric speciation, supplies a more satisfactory picture for the ordering of paleontological data." (pg. 86)

Unfalsifiable
The Biotic Message: Evolution Versus Message Theory by Walter ReMine accuses Punctuated Equilibrium of being unfalsifiable, of simply creating an unsubstantiated hypothesis to explain away the growing body of evidence seen from the fossil record that evolution is not constant and gradual, and that transitional forms don't exist. "So is punctuated equilibrium testable? Gould says that a series of fossils showing gradual development of an adaptation would refute punctuated equilibrium. ReMine points out the 'no lose' situation that Gould and company have created here: if the fossils show systematic gaps, then the punctuated equilibrium model of evolution is 'proven', but if the fossils show gradualism, then the standard neo-Darwinian model of evolution is proven. In other words, evolution itself is no longer falsifiable! Punctuated equilibrium and neoDarwinism are both now part of the evolutionists' grab-bag of conflicting theories as Gould and Eldredge now view punctuated equilibrium as an addition to evolutionary theory rather than an alternative."

-Don Batten, Creation

Are There Transitions?

 * See Microevolution vs. Macroevolution

Aside from the isolated, oft-debatable example such as Archaeopteryx, the fossil record as a whole lacks the transitional forms necessary to prove a common ancestor. TalkOrigins likes to point to cases of speciation as evidence for the theory of Evolution, but the vast majority are simply evidence of Microevolution compatible with Young Earth Creationism and Genesis 1. However, the definition of species is itself subjective and arbitrary, so Evolutionists can simply define species however they want to claim evidence of speciation. However, the species in question do not ever become entirely new forms of life, the kind of Macroevolution needed to evince a common ancestor.

'Transitions', Same Species Alive Today
Wikipedia provides a detailed list of transitional forms, the most detailed to be found online. However, many of these so-called "transitions" in the fossil record are just the same types of life we see today. For example:


 * There are ancient snails and nautiloids (e.g. Ammonoidea, Nautiloidea) which are similar to snails and nautiloids seen today.
 * There are ancient octopi (e.g. Palaeoctopus, Proteroctopus, Vampyronassa) which are strikingly similar to octopi seen today.
 * There are ancient cockroaches (Aphthoroblattina), butterflies (Archaeolepis), spiders (Attercopus, Eoplectreurys), bees (Melittosphex), ants (Sphecomyrma), and leaf insects (Eophyllium), similar to insects today.
 * There are ancient eels (Pikaia, Conodont, Anguillavus) and bony fish (Coelacanth, Guiyu) such as those alive today, in fact the Coelacanth is still alive.
 * There are ancient sharks (Cladoselache) and stingrays (Cyclobatis) which are apparent as similar to what we see today.
 * There are ancient catfish (Corydoras Revelatus), seahorses (Hippocampus Sarmaticus, Hippocampus Slovenicus), flatfish (Amphistium, Eobothus), perch (Palaeoperca), sunfish (Eomola), boxfish (Eolactoria, Proaracana), and moonyfish (Psettopsis, Pasaichthys). All of them are visibly similar to fish we see today.
 * There are ancient iguanas (Gangiguana), chameleons (Anqingosaurus), geckos (Cretaceogekko), lizards (Hylonomus, Paleothyris), and alligators (Ventastega, Tulerpeton), the latter which may include the famous Tiktaalik. Many could pass for species alive today.
 * There are ancient frogs (Triadobatrachus, Prosalirus, Vieraella), salamanders (Eocaecilia, Gerobatrachus, Najash), turtles (e.g. Odontochelys, Proganochelys), snakes (Eupodophis), and amphibians (Tseajaia, Proterogyrinus, Westlothiana) similar to species we see today.
 * There are ancient birds (Anchiornis, Archaeopteryx, Confuciusornis, Eoalulavis) including penguins (Waimanu), ducks/loons (Colymboides), parrots (Mopsitta), falcons (Masillaraptor), hummingbirds (Primapus), albatrosses (Ichthyornis), and flamingos (Elornis).
 * There are ancient bats (Onychonycteris).
 * There are ancient rabbits (Eurymylus).
 * There are ancient pandas (Ailuropoda microta).
 * There are ancient deer (Heteroprox), camels (Protylopus), and antelope (Eotragus).
 * There are ancient squirrels (Purgatorius).
 * There are ancient orangutans (Sivapithecus).
 * There are ancient hippos (Kenyapotamus).
 * There are ancient pangolins (Eomanis).
 * There are ancient tapirs (Heptodon, Hyrachyus).
 * There are ancient elephants (Eritherium).
 * There are ancient swordfish (Eurhinodelphis).
 * There are ancient otters (Puijila Darwini, Potamotherium).

It is a little-known reality that the same types of life we see today exist in the farthest reaches of the fossil record, and are being somewhat disingenuously claimed as evidence of transition from a common ancestor by Evolutionists. Life then was much the same as life now, the exact same types of life existed, which is exactly what a Creationist would expect to see in the fossil record if God created core categories of life at the dawn of time. Evolutionists simply INTERPRET the evidence to fit their belief in a common ancestor.

Early Bipedal Humans

 * See Hominid and Pre-Flood Longevity

If Young Earth Creationism is true then one would expect to see modern bipedal humans who walk upright, similar to modern man, at the very base of the human family tree, which is exactly what we find. Recent discoveries have shown that, contrary to prior claims, the earliest hominids walked upright and were similar to modern man, rather than apes. The four oldest hominids, Orrorin Tugenensis, Sahelanthropus Tchadensis, Ardipithecus Ramidus, and Australopithecus Africanus (a.k.a. 'Lucy') are all now acknowledged to be bipedal (upright-walking) with striking cases of complexity similar to modern man.

Bipedal humans moderately dissimilar to current human beings are predicted by Young Earth Creationism because the Bible says God changed human beings from a 900+ year lifespan to the current 120 year lifespan around the time of the Flood. Given the Bible's Genesis 6:3 and chapter 5 genealogies, God transitioned mankind from a 900 year lifespan to a 120 year lifespan. Thus the Young Earth Creationist expects to see human transitional forms in the fossil record, but transitional forms that are similar to modern man, and transitioning by age, rather than from a common ancestor.

Genesis 6:3 And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.

Genesis 5:25-27 And Methuselah lived an hundred eighty and seven years, and begat Lamech: And Methuselah lived after he begat Lamech seven hundred eighty and two years, and begat sons and daughters: And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died.

The following are some noteworthy cases of early hominids similar to modern man:

2000: Orrorin Tugenensis
The discovery of O. tugenensis proved problematic for evolutionary theory because, despite being much older than "Lucy," it walked upright and was "in a more advanced stage of evolution". It also called into question the Savannah Hypothesis and conventional evolutionary theory.

"French and Kenyan scientists have unearthed what they believe to be the oldest remains of a hominid, or ape-man, ever found. Although the fossils themselves have not been dated, the rock in which they were discovered is known to be six million years old... 'Not only is this find older than any other previously known, it is also in a more advanced stage of evolution,' KPE palaeontologist Dr Martin Pickford told a news conference in Nairobi."

-BBC News, "'Oldest' Ape Man Fossils Unearthed," 2000. "This indicates a divergence between Hominidae and Gorillidae that dates back to a substantial period prior to 6 Ma, and we estimate about 8-7 Ma for this event. If so, then the discovery of Orrorin refutes all hypotheses in which humans diverged from apes later than 7 Ma, including most of the recent estimates by molecular biologists who tend to think of the divergence as having taken place later than 5 Ma, and even as recently as 2.5 Ma. In other words, the much vaunted 'molecular clock' seems to be telling us the wrong time. The fact that Orrorin is found with other fauna that indicates a wooded to forested environment, tends to refute the 'savannah' hypothesis of human origins. It seems more likely now that bipedalism originated from an arboreal ancestor, rather than via a knuckle-walking ground dweller similar to chimpanzees. Thus, previous palaeoecological and palaeoenvironmental scenarios of human origins will need to be reconsidered in light of the new data."

-Martin Pickford, GeoSciences, "Fast Breaking Comments," 2001.

2002: Sahelanthropus Tchadensis
Once again, the term "bush" is used to describe the implications of an early ancestor. With Orrorin tugenesis, S. tchadensis remains by far our oldest discovered fossils, and like O. tugenesis, it shows evidence of early bipedality, rather than similarity to apes.

"When I went to medical school in 1963, human evolution looked like a ladder," he [anthropologist Bernard Wood] says. The ladder stepped from monkey to man through a progression of intermediates, each slightly less ape-like than the last. Now human evolution looks like a bush. We have a menagerie of fossil hominids - the group containing everything thought more closely related to humans than chimps. How they are related to each other and which, if any of them, are human forebears is still debated... Based on this, we might have to question some species' place in the hominid club. If Australopithecus looks more ape-like than a much older fossil, how can it belong to the human family? 'Anything with a more primitive face has to have its membership reviewed,' says Wood. No groups will be expelled on the evidence so far. The real lesson, says Wood, is that appearances are a bad guide to evolutionary relations. Hominid and ape species probably mixed and matched from a set of features, he says, with the same traits evolving independently on multiple lineages."

-John Whitfield, Nature, "Oldest Member of Human Family Found," 2002.

"The reconstruction shows that the opening in the base of the skull through which the spinal cord passes, called the foramen magnum, is oriented so that the neck points downwards. But in apes, such as gorillas, the neck point backwards, explains Dan Lieberman, a palaeoanthropologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a member of Brunet's team. The virtual reconstruction shows that Toumaï probably walked upright with head held aloft. This means that Toumaï's head balanced on top of its spine, suggesting an upright walking stance. 'The evidence certainly suggests that Toumaï was a biped,' says Lieberman... Lieberman, on the other hand, points out that all of the earliest known bipeds, such as the hominid Australopithecus afarensis, which is about half as old as Toumaï, had large neck muscles. 'This work confirms that Toumaï is the earliest and most complete hominid, and suggests that the earliest hominids were bipedal,' claims Lieberman. 'And that's big news.'"

-Jessica Ebert, Nature, "Facelift Seals Standing of Oldest Hominid," 2005.

"What is remarkable about the chimp-sized cranium TM 266-01-060-1 discovered by Brunet et al. is its mosaic nature. Put simply, from the back it looks like a chimpanzee, whereas from the front it could pass for a 1.75-million-year-old advanced australopith. The hominid features involve the structure of the face, and the small, apically worn, canine crowns. Other hominid features are found in the base of the cranium and in the separate jaw fragment. If we accept these as sufficient evidence to classify S. tchadensis as a hominid at the base, or stem, of the modern human clade, then it plays havoc with the tidy model of human origins. Quite simply, a hominid of this age should only just be beginning to show signs of being a hominid. It certainly should not have the face of a hominid less than one-third of its geological age. Also, if it is accepted as a stem hominid, under the tidy model the principle of parsimony dictates that all creatures with more primitive faces (and that is a very long list) would, perforce, have to be excluded from the ancestry of modern humans."

-Bernard Wood, Nature, "Paleoanthropology: Revelations from Chad," 2002.

2009: Ardipithecus Ramidus
The new discovery of Ardipithecus Ramidus, nicknamed "Ardi", dispelled the popular notion that humans once looked like modern chimps, and indeed that we were anything like them. Also, Ardi proves to have very strong evidence of being a biped; an upright walker. One paleontologist, Alan Walker, remarks that "This find is far more important than Lucy", given that it was older than Afarensis, the famous "Lucy." National Geographic's Jamie Shreeve in October 2009 announced that, "If White and his team are right that Ardi walked upright as well as climbed trees, the environmental evidence would seem to strike the death knell for the 'savanna hypothesis'—a long-standing notion that our ancestors first stood up in response to their move onto an open grassland environment." Shortly after this was publicized again in March 2010 by Smithsonian Magazine, the claim that Ardi lived in the woodlands was attacked by Evolutionists because of its threat to the Savannah Hypothesis.

"Move over Lucy. And kiss the missing link goodbye... The fossil puts to rest the notion, popular since Darwin's time, that a chimpanzee-like missing link—resembling something between humans and today's apes—would eventually be found at the root of the human family tree. Indeed, the new evidence suggests that the study of chimpanzee anatomy and behavior—long used to infer the nature of the earliest human ancestors—is largely irrelevant to understanding our beginnings... 'This find is far more important than Lucy,' said Alan Walker, a paleontologist from Pennsylvania State University who was not part of the research. 'It shows that the last common ancestor with chimps didn't look like a chimp, or a human, or some funny thing in between... 'All of a sudden you've got fingers and toes and arms and legs and heads and teeth,' said Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, who co-directed the work with Berhane Asfaw, a paleoanthropologist and former director of the National Museum of Ethiopia, and Giday WoldeGabriel, a geologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. 'That allows you to do something you can't do with isolated specimens,' White said. 'It allows you to do biology.'"

-Jamie Shreeve, National Geographic, "Oldest Skeleton of Human Ancestor Found," 2009.

"The discovery of Ar. ramidus also requires rejection of theories that presume a chimpanzee- or gorilla-like ancestor to explain habitual upright walking. Ar. ramidus was fully capable of bipedality and had evolved a substantially modified pelvis and foot with which to walk upright. At the same time, it preserved the ability to maneuver in trees, because it maintained a grasping big toe and a powerful hip and thigh musculature."

-C.O. Lovejoy, Science, "Reexamining Human Origins in Light of Ardipithecus Ramidus," 2009.

"Detailed descriptions of the skeleton, of a fairly complete 4.4-million-year-old female, show that humans did not evolve from ancient knuckle-walking chimpanzees, as has long been believed. The new fossils of Ardipithecus ramidus — known as 'Ardi' — offer the first substantial view of the biology of a species close to the time of the last common ancestor shared by humans and apes. Like modern humans, Ardi could walk upright and didn't use her arms for walking, as chimps do. Still, she retains a primitive big toe that could grasp a tree like an ape... Ardi's hands and wrists don't show several distinctive chimp characteristics, such as some larger bones and a tendon 'shock absorber' system to withstand bodyweight, says team member Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University in Ohio. The foot, with its big toe sticking out sideways, would have allowed Ardi to clamber in trees, walking along branches on her palms. And her teeth show no tusk-like upper canines, which most apes have for weapons or display during conflict. 'This is a major feature showing that Ardi is not in the lineage of modern chimps,' Suwa says."

-Rex Dalton, Nature, "Fossil Rewrites Early Human Evolution," 2009.

2009: Erectus Walked Upright
Newly discovered footprints cast even further doubt on the belief we once looked like apes, and more evidence for bipedalism in ancient humans.

"Footprints uncovered in Kenya show that as early as 1.5 million years ago an ancestral species, almost certainly Homo erectus, had already evolved the feet and walking gait of modern humans... Studying the more than a dozen prints, scientists determined that the individuals had heels, insteps and toes almost identical to those in humans, and that they walked with a long stride similar to human locomotion."

-John Noble Wilford, New York Times, "Prints Show a Modern Foot in Prehumans," 2009.

2011: 'Lucy' Walked Upright
It was officially announced Lucy, the most famously heralded missing link, was a biped and walked upright, rather than being a tree-climber as previously believed. The discovery probably is influenced by the find of Ardi over a year earlier. Conveniently after the discovery of Ardi, the scientific community realized they had been mistaken, and Lucy like Erectus walked upright after all, instead of being a knuckle-walking ape-like transition as they had claimed.

"An unprecedented fossil foot bone appears to confirm that Australopithecus afarensis—the early human ancestors made famous by the "Lucy" skeleton—walked like modern humans, a new study says... Revealed in 2009, Ardi helped dispel the notion that a chimplike missing link occupied the base of the human family tree. Ardi's 'foot was already a pretty good bipedal foot, although that species retained an opposable great toe.' A. afarensis's foot now appears far more advanced than previously thought, Lovejoy said."

-Brian Handwerk, National Geographic, "'Lucy' Was No Swinger, Walked Like Us, Fossil Suggests, 2011.

"Turns out, Lucy wasn’t in the sky at all; she was grounded just like us. The 3.2 million-year-old skeleton considered a predecessor to modern man had arches in her feet, meaning she didn’t climb trees as previously thought, researchers have found... 'We had this idea that Australopithecus afarensis was part ape and part human and partly still tree-climbing,' said Carol Ward, an MU researcher in the Department of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences at MU’s School of Medicine. Instead, they 'were walking just like we do.'"

-Janese Silvey, Columbia Daily Tribune, "Fossil Marks Big Step in Evolution Science," 2011.

Coexistence Disproves 'Missing Links'
Evolution proponents have been falsely claiming missing links that are now known to have coexisted, making it very unlikely they could have evolved from one another.

"The new fossil evidence reveals an overlap of about 500,000 years during which Homo habilis and Homo erectus must have co-existed in the Turkana basin area, the region of East Africa where the fossils were unearthed. 'Their co-existence makes it unlikely that Homo erectus evolved from Homo habilis,' said co-author Professor Meave Leakey, palaeontologist and co-director of the Koobi Fora Research Project."

-James Urquhart, BBC News

"Two fossils unearthed in Kenya have added a new dimension to our view of life at the birth of our Homo genus. They show that two ancestral human species seem to have lived cheek-by-jowl in the same area, much as gorillas and chimpanzees do today... Spoor and his colleagues argue that this makes it less likely that H. erectus was a direct descendant of H. habilis, instead suggesting that there is a common ancestor yet to find."

-Michael Hopkin, Nature

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica's current dating of Australopiths, the following hominids all coexisted, which it dates as follows (dates YECs disagree with - mya standing for million years ago) :


 * Ar. kaddaba (5.8-4.4 mya) and Ar. ramidus (5.8-4.4 mya) coexisted 5.8-4.4 mya.
 * A. afarensis (3.8-2.9 mya), K. platyops (3.5-3.2 mya), and A. bahrelgazali (3.5-3.0 mya) all coexisted 3.5-3.2 mya. A. africanus (3.0-2.5 mya) coexisted with all but K. platyops at 3.0 mya.
 * P. aethiopicus (2.7-2.3 mya), A. africanus (3.0-2.5 mya), A. garhi (2.5 mya), H. habilis (2.5-1.5 mya), and H. rudolfensis (2.5-1.5 mya) all coexisted at 2.5 mya.
 * A. sediba (2.0 mya), P. boisei (2.2-1.3 mya), H. rudolfensis (2.5-1.5 mya), and H. habilis (2.5-1.5 mya) all coexisted at 2.0 mya.
 * H. habilis (2.5-1.5 mya), H. rudolfensis (2.5-1.5 mya), P. boisei (2.2-1.3 mya), H. erectus (1.8), and P. robustus (1.8-1.5 mya) all coexisted 1.8 mya.

A large number of hominids therefore coexisted at five different time periods as seen from the fossil record, and should not have evolved into one another. Despite this, evolutionists continue claiming hominids which lived at the same time as one another evolved into one another, disregarding the evidence they don't like. The following discoveries of hominid coexistence figured prominently in the media:

2001: Afarensis and Ramidus coexisted
It turns out Lucy (A. afarensis) wasn't alone, but lived at the same time as another australopithecine. The discovery that two hominins that were supposed to be descended from one another, one of them the famous "Lucy", lived at the same time, led for the first time to the phrase "bush" being used instead of tree.

"Now it seems that the fossil species Australopithecus afarensis, which lived from about four million to three million years ago and is best known from the celebrated Lucy skeleton, was not alone on the African plain. Lucy may not even be a direct human ancestor after all. Indeed, the family tree, once drawn with a trunk straight and true, is beginning to look more like a bush, with a tangle of branches of uncertain relationship leading in many directions."

-John Noble Wilford, New York Times, "Skull May Alter Expert's View Of Human Descent's Branches," 2001.

2003: Neanderthal and Humans Coexisted
The finding of three skulls revealed humans and Neanderthals lived side by side, and thus could not be evolved from each other. "Prior to the discovery of these fossils, evidence for the out-of-Africa theory of evolution for modern humans was largely based on the analysis of genetic variation in people alive today. Archaeological evidence from 100,000 to 300,000 years ago was scarce. As a result, another theory that modern humans evolved simultaneously in various parts of the world at roughly the same time from ancient local populations, such as the Neanderthals in Europe, maintained plausible traction. Timothy White, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley, said that the fossils he and his colleagues found in Ethiopia fill this gap in the archaeological record and support the argument that Neandertal was an evolutionary side branch unrelated to modern humans... 'This would signal the importance of culture in these ancient hominids, which should not come as a surprise to us," she said. 'I expect they were much more like us than we have given them credit for being.'" -John Roach, National Geographic, "Oldest Homo Sapiens Fossils Found, Experts Say," 2003.

2004: Homo Floresiensis Lived Recently
The discovery of a diminutive species living on the island of Flores until the past 18,000 years proved difficult for evolutionary theory, because there's no explainable lineage for the new species. As a result, attempts were made to explain the fossil as a modern human suffering from microcephaly, a degenerative disease.

"When the remains of a tiny species of human were discovered on the remote Indonesian island of Flores (as reported in Nature last month1,2), it was clear that the story was going to have far-reaching implications. The one-metre-tall hominids jolted palaeoanthropologists' notions of what it means to be human, and challenged the idea that Homo sapiens has long been the only human species on this planet."

-Henry Gee, Nature, "Kicking the Hobbit Habit," 2004.

"Homo floresiensis, dubbed the 'hobbit' of Indonesia, is once again igniting debate. A skull-scanning study supports the idea that the diminutive individual was not a separate species, but simply a stunted human... The 18,000-year-old fossil stunned the anthropology community when it was discovered in a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003. The young adult female lived relatively recently, yet was unlike any other hominid species known — she was only a metre tall, with long limbs relative to her torso and a tiny cranium compared with the modern humans living elsewhere on the planet at the time. She was reported in Nature as a new and completely unexpected species of human: H. floresiensis. Researchers have since clashed over whether the skull really does represent a different species or merely a deformed Homo sapiens — perhaps the result of dwarfism or microcephaly, a developmental disorder that results in a very small skull and brain... But palaeoanthropologist William Jungers of Stony Brook University in New York isn't convinced by Holloway's conclusions either. 'They note a fascinating similarity in the cranial measurements found in Homo floresiensis and Australopithecus but ignored it in favour of making the microcephaly argument,' he says. 'A weird decision, but hobbit politics as usual.'"

-Matt Kaplan, Nature, "'Hobbit' Just a Deformed Human?," 2011.

2007: Habilis and Erectus Coexisted
Meave Leakey, part of the famous Leakey family, in 2007 made the startling discovery that two of the most major evidences for the human evolutionary tree lived side by side, making it unlikely one descended from the other as commonly believed. This discovery led to multiple major news publications acknowledging the human evolutionary tree now looks like a messy bush.

"A new discovery suggests that Homo erectus may not have evolved from Homo habilis—and that the two may have been contemporaries. The phrase 'family bush' doesn't trip off the tongue the way 'family tree' does, but anyone talking about human evolution had better get used to it. For years, scientists who study human origins have known that the simple model in which one human ancestor evolved into another in a nice, linear fashion is a myth. Instead, starting 4 million years ago, half a dozen species in the genus Australopithecus lived in Africa at the same time. Only one is our direct ancestor; the others were evolutionary dead ends, failed experiments. But experts thought that once the Homo lineage debuted about 2.5 million years ago in East Africa with Homo habilis, things settled down, with habilis evolving into Homo erectus who evolved into Homo sapiens—us—like biblical begats. Two fossils discovered in Kenya suggest that evolution was a lot messier than that."

-Sharon L. Begley, Newsweek, "The Human Family Shrub?," 2007.

"The new research by famed paleontologist Meave Leakey in Kenya shows our family tree is more like a wayward bush with stubby branches, calling into question the evolution of our ancestors. The old theory was that the first and oldest species in our family tree, Homo habilis, evolved into Homo erectus, which then became us, Homo sapiens. But those two earlier species lived side-by-side about 1.5 million years ago in parts of Kenya for at least half a million years, Leakey and colleagues report in a paper published in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature... Overall what it paints for human evolution is a 'chaotic kind of looking evolutionary tree rather than this heroic march that you see with the cartoons of an early ancestor evolving into some intermediate and eventually unto us,' Spoor said in a phone interview from a field office of the Koobi Fora Research Project in northern Kenya."

-Seth Borenstein, Associated Press, "Fossils Paint Messy Picture of Human Origins," 2007.

Where Were the Ape Fossils? Offshoots
Evolutionists were trying to lump all the fossils into the human family tree, which resulted in a severe dearth until now of possible ape fossils. As more evidence of ancient bipedal humans has emerged however, not to mention hominids that coexisted and thus did not evolve into one another as had been claimed, it has had the effect of forcing the scientific community to recognize hominids they once labeled part of the human family tree are really "offshoots" not part of the human lineage.

2005: First Chimp Fossil Found, Wrong Place
For the first time, a chimp fossil was found - which only serves to highlight how frustrating it's been for paleontologists until now that they couldn't find any. After all, it's kind of hard to say we evolved from chimps if chimps don't appear to have existed long ago. It also weakened the Savannah Hypothesis (theory for human bipedality) trying to explain that humans and chimps separated in evolution because chimps stayed in the jungles of western and central Africa, since the new fossils were found east of the Rift Valley.

"Palaeontologists digging in the dusty wastelands of East Africa have discovered the first known chimpanzee fossil. The modest haul of just three teeth is the first hard evidence of the evolutionary path that led to today's chimpanzees. As well as shedding light on chimps, the find throws up new questions about human evolution; it seems that chimpanzees may not have been physically separated from humans as was once thought. That no one had previously found a chimpanzee fossil had long been a frustrating puzzle, comments Sally McBrearty, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, who made the find near Lake Baringo, Kenya, with her colleague Nina Jablonski. Set against the many human fossils found in East Africa, the lack of specimens documenting the chimp's evolutionary story was exasperating... Previous theories suggested that chimps never crossed east of the Rift Valley, but instead stayed in the jungles of western and central Africa. Some even suspected that this physical separation was what set the earliest chimp and human ancestors on contrasting evolutionary voyages. But now McBrearty has stumbled on chimp remains east of this divide. This means we need a better explanation of why and how chimps and humans went their separate evolutionary ways, McBrearty says. The discovery that chimps were living in semi-arid conditions as well as in the jungle seems to blow apart the simplistic idea that it was the shift to savannah that led to humans walking upright."

-Hopkin, Michael, Nature, "First Chimp Fossil Unearthed," 2005.

2009: Longuppo An Ape
In an unusual recantation, Russell L. Ciochan, who discovered the Longuppo fossil, admitted he now believes he and other paleontologists were wrong in calling the fossil of the human lineage, and that he now believes, given the discovery of Homo floresiensis, that his fossil is of an extinct ape. He does so to try and explain where the mysterious "Hobbit Man" could have come from, since there otherwise remains no explanation for its unusual appearance in the fossil record.

"For many years, I used Longgupo to promote this pre-erectus origin for H. erectus finds in Asia. But now, in light of new evidence from across southeast Asia and after a decade of my own field research in Java, I have changed my mind. Not everyone may agree; such classifications are always open to interpretation. But I am now convinced that the Longgupo fossil and others like it do not represent a pre-erectus human, but rather one or more mystery apes indigenous to southeast Asia's Pleistocene primal forest... The problem is that no comparable wrist or foot bones are known for H. erectus, making it impossible at this time to exclude a local variant of H. erectus as the ancestor of the Liang Bua 'hobbit'. So our claim of a pre-erectus African hominin living in east Asia fell into a long line of such arguments... But more than a decade after the discovery, with some distance from the subject, the teeth in Wang's lab looked distinctly more ape-like than hominin."

-Russell L. Ciochan, Nature, "The Mystery Ape of Pleistocene Asia," 2009.

2011: A. Sediba An Offshoot
Five papers published in the journal Science revealed how unclear it is to researchers how the fossil can relate to other relatives, given its extreme uniqueness. "But Wood says the species' unique mix of primitive and modern anatomy, particularly its foot, underscores the difficulty in determining whether any fossil represents a direct human ancestor or an evolutionary dead-end with some human traits. 'I think we had this crazy notion that our morphology and our behaviour were so special that they couldn't have conceivably evolved more than once,' he says, adding that the papers 'will make identifying human ancestors a hell of a lot more difficult today than it was yesterday.'"

-Ewen Callaway, Nature, "Fossils Raise Questions About Human Ancestry," 2011.

Earlier in 2010, researchers tried to label it as a member of the human lineage, only to be accused of bias by their fellow researchers. Most controversially, the Director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of Witwatersrand, Francis Thackeray, concluded at the end of the paper that "The new fossil has a suite of characters which confirm that there is no clear boundary between Australopithecus africanus and Homo", which if true, means Africanus might as well just be called a modern human rather than a primitive ancestor. These discoveries have led to the acknowledgement by Leslie C. Aiello, President of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, that a number of prior hypotheses must be rejected on the basis of such new discoveries.

"Most of the recent effort in hominin palaeontology has been focused on Africa and Europe. But the announcement in 2004 of the small hominin Homo floresiensis in Indonesia was a warning that we are naive to assume we know more than the basic outline of human evolutionary history. If H. floresiensis is indeed a surviving remnant of early Homo that left Africa around 2 million years ago, we have to reject the long-standing idea that Homo erectus was the first African emigrant. We also must reject many hypotheses concerning the prerequisites for this emigration, such as a relatively large brain size, large body size and human-like limb proportions. Importantly, we must confront our relative ignorance about human evolution outside Europe and Africa."

-Leslie Aiello, Nature, "2020 Visions," 2010.

2011: New Discovery
A new fossil find from Ethiopia is just the latest in a series of finds that early humans did not evolve linearly from apes. The latest twist shows there were tree-dwelling apes a million years longer than there were supposed to be. This despite the fact that Ardi showed humans were walking upright at the time. "A fossil discovered in Ethiopia suggests that humans' prehistoric relatives may have lived in the trees for a million years longer than was previously thought... The finding will force a rethink regarding the course of early hominin evolution, Harcourt-Smith adds. The addition of a mystery hominin species at this crucial time period suggests that the new species' lineage split from that leading to Lucy earlier in hominin history, and provides further evidence against the idea that modern humans evolved via a linear progression of species from apes."

-Brian Switek, Nature, "Ancient Human Ancestor Had Feet Like An Ape," 2012.

The fossil also reveals that yet another species lived contemporarily side by side with Afarensis, aka Lucy, and that the grasping big toe of the earlier Ardi, a key feature of bipedalism, continued to still exist at the time:

"A newly discovered partial hominin foot skeleton from eastern Africa indicates the presence of more than one hominin locomotor adaptation at the beginning of the Late Pliocene epoch. Here we show that new pedal elements, dated to about 3.4 million years ago, belong to a species that does not match the contemporaneous Australopithecus afarensis in its morphology and inferred locomotor adaptations, but instead are more similar to the earlier Ardipithecus ramidus in possessing an opposable great toe. This not only indicates the presence of more than one hominin species at the beginning of the Late Pliocene of eastern Africa, but also indicates the persistence of a species with Ar. ramidus-like locomotor adaptation into the Late Pliocene."

-Yohannes Haile-Selassie et. al., Nature, "A New Hominin Foot From Ethiopia Shows Multiple Pliocene Bipedal Adaptations," 2011.

Rates of Microevolution
If the world is as old as is commonly claimed, we should see animals today evolving at a rate consistent with this, over thousands and millions of years. That is why it is shocking for the scientific community that the accumulating evidence shows instead that Microevolution occurs over decades, rather than thousands and millions of years. David Skelly of Yale University has observed that the evolutionary rates are far faster than those presumed by evolutionary theory:

"Ecology is being transformed by the recognition that ecological and evolutionary timescales are not easily differentiated. A 1999 review of evolutionary rates by Andrew Hendry and Mike Kinnison (The pace of modern life: measuring rates of contemporary microevolution. Evolution 53:1637-1653) provided the striking conclusion that rates of contemporary evolution are much faster than generally appreciated... Our work reveals that a number of traits including critical thermal maximum, embryonic development rate, and thermal preference behavior all show variation consistent with local adaptation that occurs on the scale of decades and tens of meters. These findings offer a startlingly different picture of interactions between organisms and their environment prompting us to rethink, in larger sense, how we should conceive of ecological assemblages."

-David Skelly, "Rapid Evolution," Yale University.

It also raises the question why, since species can adapt so quickly to their environments, do we only ever see the microevolution compatible with the Bible occurring, and not the macroevolution needed to prove a common ancestor? In 2010 it was discovered that bacterial evolutionary rates could even be accelerated enough to allow major changes in bacteria within a few days. Given such new discoveries, why can't macroevolution be readily observed, where bacteria evolve into a brand new type of life?

Australia's 'Toxic Toad'
In one of the most widely publicized cases of unexpected rapid Microevolution, Australian Cane Toads defied predictions based on evolutionary theory by experts about how they would react after being introduced to Australia. Within decades they evolved longer legs and heat tolerance, running amok and causing havoc for the wildlife; and instituting a national catastrophe for the continent. "The evolutionary processes spawned by the cane toad invasion have occurred in a span of just 70 years. This adds to evidence from the past two decades that populations can adapt quickly when selection pressure is strong. 'We're taught evolution occurs over these very, very long time frames. But in systems like these, it's incredibly fast,' Shine, the study co-author, said."

-John Roach, "Toxic Toads Evolve Longer Legs, Study Says," National Geographic. 'All of a sudden in the last 10 years it changes,' said Skelly. 'They're moving into areas where the physical environment is not like anything in their native range.' That implies that the cane toads have evolved more tolerance for the hotter climates they are now encountering. This is on top of the discovery last year that the toads at the forefront of the invasion had evolved longer legs than those in the interior of their range. The ability of animals to evolve so quickly needs to be factored into invasions, or the dangers of invasive species will likely be underestimated, argue Skelly and his colleagues Mark Urban, Ben Phillips and Richard Shine in an article in the March 28 issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society-B."

-Larry O'Hanlon, "Toxic Toads Evolving Quickly," DiscoveryNews.

Human Evolution
According to the assumptions of evolutionary theory, if evolution always went at the rate that we see today, there should be 160 times more differences between humans and apes. So rather than assume 'the present is the key to the past', scientists then decided that evolutionary rates today have accelerated for some reason.

"If humans had always evolved at this rate, the difference between modern humans and chimps should be 160 times greater than it really is. 'We realized we must be in a transient [phase], that evolution hasn't been going this fast for long in our species,' Harpending said. 'And so we wondered why.'"

-John Roach, "Human Evolution Speeding Up," National Geographic.

"'I was raised with the belief that modern humans showed up 40,000 to 50,000 years ago and haven't changed,' explained Henry C. Harpending, an anthropologist at the University of Utah. 'The opposite seems to be true.'... If evolution had been proceeding steadily at the current rate since humans and chimps separated 6 million years ago there should be 160 times more differences than the researchers found. That indicates that human evolution had been slower in the distant past, Harpending explained."

-Randolph E. Schmid, "Human Evolution Speeding Up," Washington Post.

Italian Wall Lizards
In 1971, scientists introduced 5 pairs of Italian Wall Lizards to a small island off the coast of Croatia. However, the Croatian War of Independence prevented the scientists from returning to the island for more than 30 years. When the war ended, tourism finally began again in 2004, allowing them to return. The researchers were unsure if the lizards would still be alive. Instead, they found the island swarming with lizards, which genetic testing showed to be descendants of their original 5. The new lizards had wiped out native lizard populations by evolving cecal valves, muscles between the large and small intestines, with which to digest native vegetation, an expanded gut structure, as well as a harder bite.

"Italian wall lizards introduced to a tiny island off the coast of Croatia are evolving in ways that would normally take millions of years to play out, new research shows. In just a few decades the 5-inch-long (13-centimeter-long) lizards have developed a completely new gut structure, larger heads, and a harder bite, researchers say... Such physical transformation in just 30 lizard generations takes evolution to a whole new level, Irschick said. It would be akin to humans evolving and growing a new appendix in several hundred years, he said. 'That's unparalleled. What's most important is how fast this is,' he said."

-Kimberly Johnson, "Lizards Rapidly Evolve After Introduction to Island," National Geographic.

Plant Evolution
Contrary to theoretical predictions based on evolutionary theory, genomes for the Angiosperm Silene (a flowering plant) evolved far more rapidly than was expected, as reported in the January 2012 issue of PLoS Biology. Researchers are now trying to find an explanation for why such rapid Microevolution is occurring, and a new model that will avoid such surprises in the future.

"Contrary to theoretical predictions, these genomes have experienced a massive proliferation of noncoding content... The evolution of mutation rate, genome size, and chromosome structure can therefore be extremely rapid and interrelated in ways not predicted by current evolutionary theories... We discuss the implications of the unprecedented mitochondrial genome diversity found within Silene and possible alternative explanations for the rapid genome evolution in this genus."

-Sloan et. al., "Rapid Evolution of Enormous, Multichromosomal Genomes in Flowering Plant Mitochondria with Exceptionally High Mutation Rates," PLoS Biol.

Rodent Evolution
A 2009 study observed that rodents evolve at "unprecedented rates" given climate change and population growth, and that rapid evolutionary change in rodents has been occurring for over a century. The article also notes research on rapid Micrevolution has previously been "infrequently documented", but that despite this, more and more evidence is cropping up for it.

"Our results indicate that over the last 100+ years, rapid morphological change in rodents has occurred quite frequently, and that these changes have taken place on the mainland as well as on islands. Our results also suggest that these changes may be driven, at least in part, by human population growth and climate change."

-Oliver R.W. Pergams and Joshua J. Lawler, "Recent and Widespread Rapid Morphological Change in Rodents," PLoS ONE.

The Problem
If Earth is as old as claimed by evolutionists then the sun should have been 30% dimmer than it is today during life's beginnings, a scenario contradicted by the consistent evidence of liquid water in early Earth's geologic record. The problem has plagued evolutionary theorists since the 1970s and despite constant attempts to refute the paradox (theoretical models proposing that a greenhouse effect or lower albedo could have provided Earth with enough warmth have fallen by the wayside) it nonetheless remains.

Timeline of Developments

 * In 2010 a group of researchers published a paper in Nature proposing that more coronal mass ejections from the sun in Earth’s past led to reduced solar radiation, less cloud cover (a questionable assertion), and thus more sunlight reaching the Earth to heat it. Just one year later in 2011, NASA's Colin Goldblatt and Kevin Zahnle debunked the hypothesis, demonstrating via computer modeling that only half the heat needed to create liquid water on Earth could be generated. Creationist Michael J. Oargh criticized the use of one-dimensional models in attempting to resolve the paradox, i.e. problem for evolutionary theory.
 * In 2016 a team of NASA researchers led by Vladimir Airapetian proposed that solar storms could have provided the requisite heat in ancient Earth.

The Creationist Alternative
As Creationist Danny Faulkner concludes, "Of course, there is a third possibility. Perhaps the Earth/Sun system is not billions of years old and so there has not been a 40% increase in solar luminosity. If Earth were recently created and designed to have the kind of atmosphere that it has now and the Sun has not changed appreciably in luminosity, then the young faint Sun paradox has been resolved. While the early faint Sun paradox does not tell us that the Solar System is only thousands of years old, it does seem to rule out the age being billions of years."

Living Fossils and Lazarus Taxa
A Lazarus Taxon (plural taxa) is a species that goes entirely missing from the fossil record for a long period of time, and then gets found alive today. Living Fossils are considered a subset of this which have changed so little that their ancient ancestors are essentially identical to those living today. However, since the defining of species is arbitrary in itself, the Evolutionist may seize upon the smallest variance in attempting to deny that the species alive today is not what was alive in the past.

The coelacanth and Laonastes are not the only ‘Lazarus’ organisms living today. The rare South American opossum-like marsupial Dromiciops gliroides (known locally as ‘Monito del Monte’) is a member of a ‘clade’ (Microbiotheria) earlier thought to have become extinct more than ten million years ago.10,11,12 And the fossil ant Gracilidris, thought to have died out 15–20 million years ago, has recently turned up alive and well in Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina. These and the hundreds of other known examples of ‘living fossils’ (e.g. tuatara, salamander, horseshoe crab, and the Wollemi pine) prompt the question: why is there no ‘record’ of them leaving any fossils for all those ‘millions of years’?

-David Catchpoole, "The ‘Lazarus Effect’: Rodent ‘Resurrection’!,"Creation Ministries International.

If the massive amounts of time claimed by Evolutionists were at work, then it makes it particularly tough for them to explain how a fossil can be seen at the beginning of the fossil record which had been written off as extinct for millions of years by science, yet still be alive today. How did it manage to elude observation in the fossil record for these alleged tens of millions of years if the fossil record really is that old?

Coelacanth


Science thought the coelacanth had been extinct for 65 million years. It vanished from the fossil record for an alleged 65 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs, but was found alive in 1938. Coelacanths are claimed to have existed largely unchanged for 375 million years by Evolutionists. Coelecanths have been discovered in two different locations on opposite sides of the Indian Ocean, in the Comoros Islands off the east coast of Africa, and in Indionesian not too far from Australia. The coelacanth was originally discovered by Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer and J.L.B. Smith, and caused a worldwide sensation when announced. The coelacanth genome was sequenced in 2013. Interestingly, the coelacanth is the first vertebrate discovered to lack genes for immunoglobulin-M, an immune system protein that exists in almost all living creatures.

When the study authors sequenced the ancient fish's genome, they found that its genes have been evolving more slowly than the genes of the other fish or terrestrial vertebrates they looked at, including sharks, chickens, and lungfish. In the paper, published April 18 in the journal Nature, the researchers speculate that the coelacanth's relatively unchanged deep-sea habitat, and an apparent lack of predation over thousands to millions of years, means this ancient fish didn't need to change much to survive. Coelacanths live as deep as 2,300 feet (700 meters) below the sea surface, and can reach 6.5 feet (2 meters) in length. Often referred to as a "living fossil," the coelacanth looks remarkably similar to its fossil relatives from 300 million years ago. (See more pictures of this ancient-looking fish.) Scientists had thought the coelacanth (pronounced SEE-la-kanth) had gone extinct about 65 to 70 million years ago until a researcher stumbled on a freshly caught specimen off the coast of South Africa in 1938.

-Jane J. Lee, National Geographic

According to Tim Clarey and Jeffrey Thompkins of ICR, "A recent report, published in Nature,1 on the genome sequence of the so-called living fish fossil, the African coelacanth, has some evolutionists scrambling to defend their story. This is because the coelacanth's DNA is similar to other types of fish and not land animals, thus forcing the evolutionists to postulate that the coelacanth evolved slowly''." Clarey and Thompkins continue, "''The coelacanth has long been hailed as an ancestor to amphibians and other tetrapods as their lineage goes back a supposed 300 million years. However, the exact origin of coelacanths has never been established by evolutionary scientists, the fish just seem to appear in the rocks 'suddenly' like most all fossil organisms." Because coelacanths are so similar to their ancient fossil record counterparts, Creationists question whether they are as old as is being claimed.

As Eric Lyons of ApologeticsPress astutely observes, "Like Gingko trees, coelacanths’ absence in certain rock strata does not mean they were not living during the alleged millions of years it took the rock layers to form; it simply means that they were not buried and fossilized in those layers of rock. More important, consider this truth we learn from living fossils in light of alleged human evolution. Evolutionists assume that humans were not alive in various past ages (purportedly millions of years ago) because human fossils have not been discovered in layers of rock dated many millions of years old. The truth is, however, we have just as much fossil evidence for humans living the past '70 million years' as we do coelacanths and Gingko trees. Could humans not just as easily have been alive when the various rock layers were formed, without leaving human fossils? Simply because human fossils are missing in certain layers of rock does not mean humans were not living at the time those rock layers were formed. Living fossils beautifully illustrate this truth, and cast serious doubt on the evolutionary geologic timetable." New investigation of the coelacanth is currently ongoing.

Laotian Rock Rat
Another "coelacanth moment" occurred in 2005 when scientists in Laos, i.e. Southeast Asia, discovered a remarkable rodent being sold as food at local markets, known locally as the Kha-Nyou, so unique that they initially named it the Rat Squirrel. Shortly thereafter however, an unusually well-preserved fossil called Diatomyidae, which scientists had classified as extinct for 11 million years, was unearthed. Paleontologist Mary Dawson then pointed out that the newly discovered "Rat Squirrel" that had just been classified Laonastes aenigmamus was actually the same Diatomyidae scientists had previously classified as extinct.

Upon discovering the goof, the species was promptly renamed the Laotian Rock Rat. Dawson at the time described the Laotian Rock Rat as the "coelacanth of rodents." The only serious difference between the living speciment and its counterpart in the fossil record were slightly more pointed teeth, leading Dawson to remark, "It looks like possibly one of the things that's been changing in the family is improved cutting of vegetation. But over 11 million years, you'd expect some differences in the structures." In June 2006 a living specimen was captured by retired Florida State University researcher David Redfield. Molecular analysis in 2007 confirmed the existence of a living fossil.

Protulophila
Thought extinct for millions of years, it was discovered in 2014 to be still alive. The tiny sea creature is related to corals and sea anemones. Scientists had previously claimed it originated 170 million years ago and went extinct 4 million years ago until it was discovered.

Pygmy Whales
It turns out the cetotheres, written off as extinct for 2 million years, still live on in the modern-day pygmy whale according to a 2012 study. According to Felix Marx, a New Zealand paleontologist, "The living pygmy right whale is, if you like, a remnant, almost like a living fossil. It's the last survivor of quite an ancient lineage that until now no one thought was around." The research was aided by the discovery of a pygmy whale carcase in 2002 that washed up on a beach, allowing DNA analysis of the elusive creatures.

Euplectella Aspergillum
Glass sponges are living fossils essentially made out of fiberglass that are found worldwide, and in British Columbia grow over the skeletons of their dead ancestors to form huge underwater reefs off the coast of Canada. Glass sponge reefs had been assumed extinct for 100 million years until their discovery in 1999 and announcement to the press in 2007.

"The sponge builds itself, to demanding standards of construction, with silicic acid from seawater that it converts into silica. An article in Science in 2005 described the process under the heading 'Structural Hierarchy from the Nanoscale to the Macroscale.' 'This design,' Whiteside tells us, 'is as elegant, as anything engineers can conceive, and its fabrication -- particularly since the sponge has nothing even faintly resembling a brain, and no raw materials to work with other than seawater -- is beyond the best that engineers can do.'"

-Robert Fulford, "Life In the Nano World," National Post.

It was also discovered in 1999 that the glass sponge rhabdocalyptus "disseminates electrical signals throughout the body through a continuous network of gossamer-fine strands of cytoplasm". Another glass sponge, euplectella aspergillum, more commonly known as Venus' Flower Basket, is so advanced that it is being researched for use by the U.S. Army in nanotechnology and fiberglass application. Its design is also "energy dispersive" so that it can absord considerable weight. As with other species in nature such as cryptochiton stelleri science is researching it for advancement in the field of nanotechnology.

"That hard skeleton is fiberglass. And finding out how nature manufactures glass without furnaces may unlock new cost-efficient ways to make such materials... 'Sponge-inspired [technologies] can have varied applications because it’s a completely new way of synthesizing materials,' said David H. Gay, director of technology at the institute. The way biological organisms such as the sponge make glass differs greatly from modern manufacturing plants, which require great amounts of energy... The Venus’ flower basket may offer up more cost efficient ways to reproduce glass and fiberglass. One attribute Morse noted while holding up the skeleton is how strong it is. The creature makes minimal use of material in this lattice architecture for maximal stress dissipation, he said. 'This is an energy dispersive structure,' he noted. 'Like the inner core of an airplane wing.'"

-Stew Magnuson, National Defense Industrial Association.

Zombie Taxa
Zombie Taxa are essentially species that aren't where they are supposed to be in the fossil record, so science claims that they were washed out of the sediments or rock layers they were supposed to be in, and just got redeposited in the wrong geologic layer. To a Creationist of course this seems a convenient explanation for Evolutionists to use in explaining away the fossil record inconsistencies that would have been created from the effects of a global Flood with mixing of fossil deposits by the Floodwaters. They are variously referred to also as 'Derived', 'Reworked', or 'Remanié' Fossils.

Tacking on Years to Theories
Is the theory of evolution really settled science? Are fossils always found in the correct layers as Bill Nye has erroneously claimed? Not remotely.

Furthermore, when fossils are consistently found in wrong layers and early life proves too complex for evolutionary theory, evolutionists simply adjust the theories by tens or even hundreds of millions of years.

"It may be surprising to learn that evolutionary geologists themselves will not accept a radiometric date unless they think it is correct—i.e. it matches what they already believe on other grounds."

-Tas Walker, Creation Ministries International

1 Billion to 500 Million Years Added to Origins of Complex Life
Early fossils showed early life was more complex at the start of the fossil record than theories assumed, so 1 billion to 500 million years were tacked on to existing theories in 1999.

580 Million Years Added to Origins of Life
The discovery of microbial fossils resulted in 580 million years getting tacked on to existing theories in 2017.

200 Million Years Added to Origin of Worms
Discovery of early worm fossils results in their origins being pushed back 200 million years in 2013.

140 Million Years Added to Origins of Bees and Flowering Plants
The discovery of bees and flowering plants early in the fossil record results in 140 million years tacked on to their origins in 1995.

100 Million Years Added to Origins of Flowering Plants
Another 100 million years were added to theories on the origins of flowering plants in 2013 to account for more early complex fossils.

75 Million Years Added to Origins of Reptiles
The 2018 discovery of an ancient lizard fossil earlier in the fossil record than lizards were thought to exist resulted in 75 million years getting tacked on.

70 Million Years Added to Origin of Feathers
The discovery in 2018 that pterosaurs like the pterodactyl were birds with feathers pushes back the origin of feathers by 70 million years.

65 Million Years Added to Origins of Snakes
The discovery of snakes earlier and more complex in the fossil record means 65 million years get tacked on to existing theories.

60 Million Years Added to Hairy Mammals
The remarkably well-preserved fossil of a hairy mammal was discovered in 2015 showing they existed much earlier in the fossil record than had been predicted by evolutionary models, so 60 million years were then tacked on to said models.

50 Million Years Added to Flowers
Newly discovered fossils of flowering plants in 2018 resulted in an addition of 50 million years to theories on their origins.

40 Million Years Added to Early Life
Fossils discovered in China of early complex life result in 40 million years getting tacked on to existing theories in 2009.

35 Million Years Added to Origin of Bees
The 2006 discovery an ancient bee fossilized in amber resulted in 35 million years being tacked on to theories about the origin of bees.

32 Million Years Added to Origins of Whale Echolocation
In 2014 a remarkable whale fossil showed whales had echolocation before theorists had believed, resulting in 32 million years getting tacked on to existing theories.

30 Million Years Added to Dinosaur Gigantism
The 2018 discovery of giant dinosaurs earlier in the fossil record than they'd been thought to exist resulted in 30 million years tacked on to existing theories.

Tens of Millions of Years Added to Origins of Octopuses
The discovery of complex octopuses earlier in the fossil record results in tens of millions of years added on to existing theories.

20 Million Years Added to Origins of Primates
In 2002, 20 million years were added to theories on the origins of primates,no doubt in response to early complex hominids like Ardipithecus Ramidus, Orrorin Tugenensis, and Sahelanthropus Tchadensis.

700,000 Years Added to Origins of Human Culture
The discovery of ancient atone tools much earlier in the fossil record than they were supposed to exist resulted in 700,000 years tacked on to theories for the origin of human culture.

500,000 Years Added to Origins of Humans
In 2002, 500,000 years were tacked on to theories about the origins of humans in response to a new African fossil discovery.

500,000 Years Added to Human Bipedalism
The discovery in 1995 of early bipedal hominids resulted in 500,000 years getting tacked on to theories on bipedalism.

400,000 Years Added to Origins of Humans
In 2015 a new fossil discovery resulted in the tacking on of 400,000 years to existing theories on the origins of modern humans.

Irreducible Complexity
By irreducible complexity the Creationist refers to aspects of creation that are so complex they indicate a Creator; they are in other words too complex to have arisen from purely naturalistic processes. Darwin himself saw the existence of complex organs/life and instinct in nature as serious problems for his theory, serious enough that he devoted two whole chapters of 'On the Origin of Species' to addressing them, chapter 6, 'Difficulties on Theory', and chapter 7, 'Instinct.'

"In the four succeeding chapters, the most apparent and gravest difficulties on the theory will be given: namely, first, the difficulties of transitions, or in understanding how a simple being or a simple organ can be changed and perfected into a highly developed being or elaborately constructed organ; secondly, the subject of Instinct, or the mental powers of animals; thirdly, Hybridism, or the infertility of species and the fertility of varieties when intercrossed; and fourthly, the imperfection of the Geological Record."

-Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species.

Intelligent Design, as such, is essentially the claim of irreducible complexity that Darwin himself acknowledged was an evidence for Creationism, and a serious problem for the theory of Evolution. The following are some examples of irreducible complexity:

Bombardier Beetle
The most well-known example of irreducible complexity, and one that Evolutionists are doubtless sick of hearing about, is a small little beetle that shoots a fiery concoction from its behind as a defense mechanism. Using a complex firing system with two sets of spray nozzles, the beetles, which range in size from 2-30 mm in length, fire from 2 to 12 rapid blasts of aqueous benzoquinones, oxygen and steam as hot as 100 degrees celsius (212 degrees fahrenheit). The firing rate can be as fast as 500 pulses a second, and the distance as far as 64 feet with remarkable precision. The chemicals vaporize upon contact with the air.

"The spray of bombardier beetles contains p-benzoquinones (10), compounds well known for their irritant properties (11). A single bombardier beetle can discharge upward of 20 times before depleting its glands (6). The discharges are accompanied by audible detonations, and they have been shown to be potently deterrent to a number of predators, including ants (6, 12–15). The spray of bombardier beetles is ejected at 100°C (13). This is because the quinones are generated explosively at the moment of ejection by the mixture of two sets of chemicals ordinarily stored separately in the glands. Each gland consists of two confluent compartments. The larger of these (storage chamber or reservoir) contains hydroquinones and hydrogen peroxide while the smaller one (reaction chamber) contains special enzymes (catalases and peroxidases). To activate the spray, the beetle mixes the contents of the two compartments, causing oxygen to be liberated from hydrogen peroxide and the hydroquinones to be oxidized by the freed oxygen. The oxygen also acts as the propellant, causing the mixture to 'pop' out (16–18). The heat that accompanies the formation of the spray is perceptible (13) and contributes to the defensive effectiveness of the secretion (14, 15)."

-Thomas Eisner and Daniel J. Aneshansley, "Spray Aiming in the Bombardier Beetle: Photographic Evidence," The National Academy of Sciences

Evolutionists like to point out that an initial description of the beetle by Creationist Duane Gish in 1977 was false. Gish mistranslated a German account, and incorrectly claimed the beetles mix chemicals that would otherwise explode without an inhibitor (there appears to be no inhibitor, and hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone when combined do not explode), a description that has been erroneously repeated by various Creationist organizations as late as 1999. Nonetheless, there nevertheless remains the improbability of such complex mechanics in a small beetle coming about through pure naturalistic chance.

"Can you imagine trying to explain all of this intricate design by 'chance evolutionary processes' occurring over millions of years in nature? And yet, evolutionists maintain that there are logical step-by-step explanations for this unique bug’s ability to have a chemical reaction chamber inside its abdomen. The truth is, however, that only intelligent design can explain how the beetle is able to produce the proper chemicals, keep them separate until they are needed, manufacture the right enzymes, and propel the hot mixture into the face of its enemy."

-Bert Thompson and Brad Harrub, "Beetles and Airplane Engines," Apologetics Press

Because there are multiple inter-working parts that would make no sense if evolved in isolation, separate chemicals that must be mixed to achieve their reaction, separate chambers to hold them, and a firing mechanism perfectly suited for the whole process, the bombardier beetle is clearly the work of an Intelligent Designer. Needless to say, secular science has not yet decided how such complexity could have evolved. According to Alex James, Ken Morrison, and Simon Todd "the evolutionary pathway and the phyletic relationships between the different species and tribes is still unknown. Some believe that bombardiers have a monophyletic lineage (i.e. the mechanism evolved only once) and that the paussoids and brachinoids are sister groups. Others believe the mechanism evolved separately in the two families of paussoids and brachinoids."

The bombardier beetle's firing mechanism is advanced enough that it is still "inspiring designers of engines, drug-delivery devices and fire extinguishers", possibly even mini rocket boosters. As recently as 2008 Biomimetics 3000 Ltd. patented revolutionary new technology based on the tiny beetle. In 2014, ATM Machines are being designed to imitate the beetle's unique firing mechanism.

Macropina Microstoma
It will be interesting indeed to see how Darwinists attempt to explain the evolution of a fish with a fluid-filled transparent head and 360 degree rotating eyeballs with green lenses. The 6-inch fish is a member of the Barreleye family and lives over 2,000 feet (600 meters) below the surface where very little sunlight reaches. The fish's unique design results in 360-degree vision, dispelling previous claims that its eyes had 'tunnel vision.'

"Fish didn’t design their eyes any more than humans designed theirs. Nor would nature be a reasonable candidate for designing such highly-specified structures as the barrel eyes, since there have been no recorded instances—in the lab or in the field—of nature’s processes doing anything but wearing systems down. And the more time allowed for nature to 'work' with, the more broken down the systems become, according to observable science. Design features like tubular eyes could not be the result of unaided, undirected natural forces, which have not demonstrated any capacity to develop anything beneficial or unique and purposive. However, barrel eyes are exactly what would be expected in a world created by an intelligent God who equips His creatures for the specific environments in which they live."

-Brian Thomas, "Tubular Fish Eyes Defy Evolution," Institute for Creation Research

Although it was discovered in 1939 scientists didn't know that its eyes could rotate until 2009 when one was captured alive and brought to the surface for study in an aquarium by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Bruce Robison and Kim Reisenbichler used remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to study the remarkable fish, revealing that the fish typically hang motionless in the water, tracking prey with their remarkable eyes until it swims overhead for easy catching.

Lygodium Spider Moth
The lygodium spider moth, discovered in Thailand in 2005, has an unmistakable picture of a spider on its wings. The fern-eating moth of the genus siamusotima is unique in other ways as well, its caterpillar form resembles beetle larvae, and its rear end contains armored sections for protection. The moth was originally discovered by scientists M. Alma Solis and Shen Horn Yen in their search for an enemy of ferns troubling Florida's Everglades, and is being researched as a solution to Florida's fern problem. Evolutionists should have their hands full trying to explain how moths would evolve the exact pictures of spiders on their wings, down to the exact number of legs, and even evolve the images of different modern-day spiders... let alone how the moths would evolve the behavior necessary to avoid fleeing and to deceive spiders once they had those images.

Nor is the lygodium spider moth even the only moth to mimic spiders. Metalmark moths in the genus Brenthia also mimic spiders with great success, to the extent that spiders captured only 6% of the metalmark moths in trials compared to 62% of regular moths, and 14% of the time even backed away from the spider-imitating moths. And it's not just a one-way street, either, the Ladybird Mimic Spider (eresus sandaliatus), Britain's rarest spider, does an excellent imitation of the common ladybug. There are several spiders which mimic ants, also, such as the ant-mimic jumping spider and ant-mimic crab spider.

More Examples of Batesian Mimicry
The following are, like the previously mentioned spider moth, more examples of what's known as Batesian Mimicry, creatures that perfectly imitate other organisms or objects, and stretch the limits of Evolutionary credibility:


 * The macrocilix maia moth gets the prize for creativity by displaying images of two maggots eating excrement on its wings.
 * Flower mantises imitate flowers, and amazingly each imitates a different plant. The pink orchid mantis, mymenopus coronatus, perfectly imitates its namesake.
 * The amazing tree stump spider, poltys illepidus, does an impeccable imitation of a broken tree stump, as does the buff-tip moth, phalera bucephala.
 * The pupae of the swallowtail butterfly while brown imitates bird poop, and then turns green with black eyespots and imitates snakes.
 * There are a number of dead leaf mantises that imitate decaying leaves, some even have the decay spots on their wings.

Public Opinion
Young Earth Creationism is currently the dominant view held by most Americans. According to Gallup's most recent June 2014 polling, 42% of Americans believe God created man in present form within the past 10,000 years (Young Earth Creationism) while 31% believe humans evolved with God guiding (Old Earth Creationism) and 19% believe humans evolved but God did not play a role in the process (Secular Evolution). This is down from 46% in 2012 and the all-time high of 47% last set in 1998.

The 2012 poll unlike the 2014 poll measured beliefs by postgraduate education level, and intriguingly discovered that while belief in Young Earth Creationism does decline among postgraduates, 25% of postgraduates and 46% of college graduates still believe in Young Earth Creationism. A June 2007 Gallup poll found that only 18% of Americans say evolution, development over millions of years from lower forms of life, is definitely true, and 35% say it is probably true, a total of 53%. However, 39% of Americans said Young Earth Creationism, man created in present form within the past 10,000 years, is definitely true, and 27% that it is probably true, a total of 66%.

Public Policy
Despite all of this, the overwhelming majority of U.S. taxpayer dollars go towards public schools and scientific research that exclusively supports the theory of evolution. Less than $1 billion goes towards private Creationist schools, despite annual federal education spending of $71.2 billion, and state and local education spending of $961.6 billion annually. Efforts are currently underway to remove what few taxpayer dollars go towards private schools that support creationism, as the secular establishment seeks to remove any public funding, however minor, which supports Young Earth Creationism.

The taxpayer voucher programs which secular atheists object to simply allow parents to send their children to schools of their choice using their own tax dollars, and actually saves states money. The Education lobby, which includes taxpayer-funded universities such as the University of California, has spent $294 million, 74% of it on Democrats historically, to pressure politicians to subsidize it. $67 million was spent in 2012 political donations alone by the Education industry, 76% of it on Democrats.

Problems for Big Bang Theory
Contrary to popular belief, Big Bang theory does not fit all the evidence. Major problems still exist for naturalistic theory attempting to explain the origin of the universe.

Accelerating Expansion of the Universe
According to conventional Big Bang theory, the galaxies and planets are all separating from a central blast area or Big Bang, as the universe expands outward from its original explosion point. However, if this were true then the expansion of the universe should be decelerating, and it is not. In fact, the expansion of the universe is getting faster, contrary to all theoretical predictions, and science has been forced to create theoretical, unevidenced constructs called Dark Matter and Dark Energy that supposedly make up 95% of the universe. However, we have yet to find direct evidence for them.

"In the early 1990's, one thing was fairly certain about the expansion of the Universe. It might have enough energy density to stop its expansion and recollapse, it might have so little energy density that it would never stop expanding, but gravity was certain to slow the expansion as time went on. Granted, the slowing had not been observed, but, theoretically, the Universe had to slow. The Universe is full of matter and the attractive force of gravity pulls all matter together. Then came 1998 and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of very distant supernovae that showed that, a long time ago, the Universe was actually expanding more slowly than it is today. So the expansion of the Universe has not been slowing due to gravity, as everyone thought, it has been accelerating. No one expected this, no one knew how to explain it. But something was causing it."

-NASA, "Dark Energy, Dark Matter."

If the expansion of the universe were just due to a naturalistic Big Bang, then expansion certainly should not be accelerating. That it does so is consistent with what the Bible says about a Creator who spreads out the Heavens.

Job 9:8 Which alone spreadeth out the heavens, and treadeth upon the waves of the sea.

Psalms 104:2 Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment: who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain:

Isaiah 40:22 It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in: Isaiah 44:24 Thus saith the LORD, thy redeemer, and he that formed thee from the womb, I am the LORD that maketh all things; that stretcheth forth the heavens alone; that spreadeth abroad the earth by myself;

Isaiah 45:12 I have made the earth, and created man upon it: I, even my hands, have stretched out the heavens, and all their host have I commanded.

Zechariah 12:1 The burden of the word of the LORD for Israel, saith the LORD, which stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.

Misunderstanding of Gravity?
The possibility scientists don't want to address is that they could be misunderstanding the basics of gravity and how light travels in space. Dark Energy and Dark Matter are a way to avoid that possibility by claiming there is "extra stuff" that just hasn't been found yet.

"'We have two known, totally unsatisfactory explanations,' said Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago. One possibility is there is no dark energy, and gravity works differently than scientists think. But 'physicists are conservative. We don't want to throw away our theory of gravity when we might be able to patch it up,' Nobel co-winner Riess, an STScI cosmologist, told National Geographic News. 'Basically it all comes down to the fact that there's one relatively simple equation we work with to describe the universe,' Riess said.'Because we see this extra effect, we can either blame it on the left-hand side of the equation and say we don't understand gravity, or we can blame it on the right-hand side and say there's this extra stuff.'"

-Victoria Jaggard, National Geographic

Cosmological Redshift
Cosmological redshift is caused by the expansion of the universe. Light wavelengths change frequencies when traveling through space, in essence light waves appear redder if moving towards an observer, and bluer if moving away from the observer. In essence, the color of light from distant stars is used, based on the presumed speed of light and expansion rate of the universe, to determine how long the light took to travel to us.

However, since redshifts are caused by the expansion of the universe, the 1998 discovery that the universal expansion is faster than previously believed, and may even be speeding up, becomes ever more relevant. Since expansion is what causes redshift in the first place, if the expansion rate was incorrect, then logically redshift-derived ages for the universe were incorrect as well.

Triangulation/Parallax
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/ast99/ast99676.htm

Lack of Antimatter
There should be more antimatter in the universe relative to matter according to conventional Big Bang theory, yet this prediction has not been borne out by scientific discovery. There is far too much matter and not enough antimatter.

"The big bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe. But today, everything we see from the smallest life forms on Earth to the largest stellar objects is made almost entirely of matter. Comparatively, there is not much antimatter to be found."

This is evidence that Big Bang theory is not the correct answer, and that spontaneous generation of matter is not what created life that we see today.

Singularities
The only way to argue for a Big Bang is positing a singularity where, according to Stephen Hawking, all the laws of physics broke down. There still remains no way to argue for a Big Bang apart from a Creator without denying the laws of physics as they currently exist.

"At a singularity, all the laws of physics would have broken down. This means that the state of the universe, after the Big Bang, will not depend on anything that may have happened before, because the deterministic laws that govern the universe will break down in the Big Bang. The universe will evolve from the Big Bang, completely independently of what it was like before. Even the amount of matter in the universe, can be different to what it was before the Big Bang, as the Law of Conservation of Matter, will break down at the Big Bang."

-Stephen Hawking

Planet Formation
In June 2014 a massive planet, Kepler-10c, was discovered weighing twice as much as earth and over twice as large which defies Big Bang theory and has puzzled astronomers accordingly.

"Astronomers have discovered a rocky planet that weighs 17 times as much as Earth and is more than twice as large in size. This discovery has planet formation theorists challenged to explain how such a world could have formed... It was thought worlds such as this could not possibly exist. The enormous gravitational force of such a massive body would accrete a gas envelope during formation, ballooning the planet to a gas giant the size of Neptune or even Jupiter. However, this planet is thought to be solid, composed primarily of rock."

Endogenous Retroviruses (ERVs)
That Evolutionists resort to such an esoteric topic as ERVs shows how horribly their previous claims such as hominid evidence are falling apart. ERVs have become the popular new claim for Evolutionists to make because they are poorly understood in general. Essentially the argument made is that because identical genes exist across multiple types of life (e.g. humans and chimps) that it indicates a shared ancestry. However, this argument fails on multiple counts:

Non-Random Gene Insertion
Retrovirus gene insertion is not entirely random as was once assumed. This point has been made by Creationists Fazale Rana and Shaun Doyle. In other words, to claim vestigial gene sequences prove a common ancestor, one must claim the gene insertion is entirely random, for if not, and it has a common environmental cause, then it could have arisen independently in the various species. Rather than a common ancestor, it could have just arisen in different species through the same cause.

"There is now compelling evidence that integration of retroviral vectors follows non-random patterns in mammalian genome, with a preference for active genes and regulatory regions." -Ambrosi, Cattoglio, & Di Serio, "Retroviral Integration Process in the Human Genome: Is It Really Non-Random? A New Statistical Approach," PLoS Comput Biol.

"It was initially believed that integration of retroviruses occurred randomly, but the advent of technology allowing the assessment of RV or LV integration into host cell genomes has led to a reassessment of this assumption." -Fischer & Cavazzana-Calvo, "Integration of Retroviruses: A Fine Balance between Efficiency and Danger," PLoS Med

"Retroviral integration is not a completely random process but favors promoters and enhancer regions while lentiviral vectors integrate more randomly throughout the entire gene."

-Yi et. al., Current Advances in Retroviral Gene Therapy," Curr Gene Ther.

"But as the name suggests, one of the downsides of the use of MLV as a vector is its propensity for inducing disease-causing mutations – most notably, oncogenic mutations – on insertion into a target genome. These mutations are not randomly distributed in target genomes – in fact, MLV preferentially inserts itself in or near transcription start sites, and this accounts for its tendency to alter gene expression in potentially damaging ways. Why and how MLV does this was unknown until very recently, when at least three groups independently reported that BET domain proteins (BRD2, BRD3, and BRD4, components of host chromatin) interact with MLV integrase and 'guide' it to transcription start sites. BRD protein chromatin binding profiles strongly correlate with MLV insertion sites, and BET domain inhibitors block viral integration. Two of those papers are "Sharma et al." and "Gupta et al." -Stephen Matheson, "BETting On Safer Retroviral Vectors for Gene Therapy." CellPress.

In essence, Evolutionists must argue that ERV gene insertion is entirely random to claim that divergent evolution is occurring from a common ancestor, rather than parallel evolution caused by independent generation of the retrovirus due to an external cause. Perhaps scientists are having so much trouble solving the riddle of ERVs precisely because they falsely assume an ancestral origin rather than the Biblically-derived alternative of independent causation across multiple species.

More Similarity to Other Genera
If these ERV gene sequences only occurred among apes and humans perhaps Evolutionists would have a better argument here, but they do not. Running BLAST searches on ERV sequences reveals strong similarity to other types of life than apes and humans. As just one example, running a BLAST search on the V9H1F4 human ERV FASTA sequence produces the highest non-human scores for anolis carolinensis (the Carolina Anole, a small green lizard), orycteropus afer afer (the Aardvark), and the columbia livia (Rock Dove, also known as the common pigeon). In other words, what Evolutionists are doing is selectively cherry-picking the results by only examining humans and apes, but not other types of life. If you run a full search on various ERVs, it becomes clear that multiple types of life share strong similarity to human ERVs, not just apes.

ERVs Not Yet Understood
It can't be understated just how poorly ERVs are currently understood. One of the best-known ERVs, the AIDS virus, is one of the most dangerous diseases on the planet. Finding a cure for AIDS is one of science's top agendas at this point in time. Needless to say, if ERV causation was as clearly understood as Evolutionists claim, then a cure for such retroviruses would have been more easily discovered by now.

"Endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) are abundant in mammalian genomes and contain sequences modulating transcription. The impact of ERV propagation on the evolution of gene regulation remains poorly understood."

-Edward B. Chuong, Nels C. Elde, and Cedric Feschotte, University of Utah, 2016.

"Endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) comprise a significant percentage of the mammalian genome, and it is poorly understood whether they will remain as inactive genomes or emerge as infectious retroviruses."

-Anai Et. Al., NCBI, 2012.

Inherent Presumptions
To arrive at the theory of Evolution's lengthy ages for radiometric dating, the following presumptions must be made:

"It may be surprising to learn that evolutionary geologists themselves will not accept a radiometric date unless they think it is correct—i.e. it matches what they already believe on other grounds."

-Tas Walker, Creation Ministries International

Parent Isotope Levels Known
First, it must be assumed that the parent isotope levels are known. In essence with radiometric dating you are comparing the ratio of an initial isotope to what it decays into. For example, Carbon-14 Dating measures the levels of Carbon-14 and what it decays into, Nitrogen-14. Carbon-14 has a half-life of 5,730 ± 40 years, so one Carbon-14 isotope decays into a Nitrogen-14 isotope every 5,730 years, give or take 40 years.

However, all of those calculations only work if you know how much Carbon-14 there is to begin with. Carbon-14 in our bodies is essentially the same amount as that in the atmosphere, an atmosphere that produces Carbon-14 naturally. However, in the process you are assuming that the atmosphere works the same way it did millions and billions of years ago that it does today, and that the atmospheric levels of isotopes such as Carbon-14 can be determined millions and billions of years ago. Each minute little speck of Nitrogen-14 is measured as 5,730 years, so a few isotopes difference results in being off by tens of thousands of years.

Evolutionists would have us believe they can be 100% certain what the atmosphere in Earth's distant past was like, even though they have not even been able to make accurate 5-year predictions about what Earth would be like. For example, Al Gore predicted the ice caps would have melted in 5 years, and instead they have grown in both size and volume. Now, to be fair, the Arctic ice cap has decreased, but it has been somewhat offset by the growing Antarctic ice cap, now at record levels in size.

Closed System and Uniform Rates

 * ''See also Catastrophism vs. Uniformitarianism

The Evolutionist must assume a closed system of decay, that nothing is altering the decay process. If unprecedented global catastrophes such as Floods or volcanoes caused the dinosaur extinction this would throw off Carbon-14 dating as well as other dating methods. As pointed out by Encyclopædia Britannica Carbon-14 is not uniformly distributed among today's plants and animals, and there are non-atmospheric sources for Carbon-14. Volcanic carbon dioxide, dissolved limestone carbonate, and upwelling of deep ocean water can all alter Carbon-14 levels, making them appear much older.

"With correction for radioactive decay during the intervening years, such old samples hopefully would show the same starting carbon-14 level as exists today... It is now clear that carbon-14 is not homogeneously distributed among today’s plants and animals. The occasional exceptions all involve nonatmospheric contributions of carbon-14-depleted carbon dioxide to organic synthesis. Specifically, volcanic carbon dioxide is known to depress the carbon-14 level of nearby vegetation, and dissolved limestone carbonate occasionally has a similar effect on freshwater mollusks, as does upwelling of deep ocean water on marine mollusks. In every case, the living material affected gives the appearance of built-in age. In addition to spatial variations of the carbon-14 level, the question of temporal variation has received much study. A 2 to 3 percent depression of the atmospheric radioactive-carbon level since 1900 was noted soon after Libby’s pioneering work, almost certainly the result of the dumping of huge volumes of carbon-14-free carbon dioxide into the air through smokestacks. Of more recent date was the overcompensating effect of man-made carbon-14 injected into the atmosphere during nuclear bomb testing. The result was a rise in the atmospheric carbon-14 level by more than 50 percent. Fortunately, neither effect has been significant in the case of older samples submitted for carbon-14 dating. The ultimate cause of carbon-14 variations with time is generally attributed to temporal fluctuations in the cosmic rays that bombard the upper atmosphere and create terrestrial carbon-14."

-Edwin A. Olson, Encyclopædia Britannica.

Creationists frequently bring up the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. The recent dacite (lava) was collected in 1986, sent to a lab for testing, and returned erroneously old dates including 2.8 million years for K-AR Dating. (Potassium-Argon Dating) TalkOrigins in attempting to refute the claim has only proffered the weak explanation that the laboratory's "equipment cannot accurately measure samples less than two million years old" and the sample wasn't pure enough to be measured.

If the decay rates were altered by such processes the results will be horribly off. Evolutionists attempt to claim they can have 100% certainty that such alteration did not occur in the past, yet we have clear evidence that a catastrophe did kill off the dinosaurs. They cannot on one hand hypothesize that such catastrophes destroyed the dinosaurs, and then deny the effects such a catastrophe would have in throwing off the results of their dating methods. For their dating methods to work they must assume uniform, constant rates over long periods of time, unaltered by mass catastrophes.

Crosschecking Dating Methods

 * ''See also Climategate Emails

The Evolutionist's final resort to the glaring errors in their methods is to assert that they can just cross-check different dating methods to make sure the results are right, methods such as Carbon-14 Dating, Potassium-Argon Dating, Dendrochronology, and Ice Core Dating. However, the obvious problem with doing so is that if they are all error-prone, faulty methods that are equally thrown off by the same things, cross-checking them will not matter. A volcanic eruption, for example, will throw off multiple forms of radiometric dating including Carbon-14 Dating and Potassium-Argon Dating.

The same dating methods used to cross-check radiometric dating methods/proxies, such as Dendrochronology, Ice Core Dating, and Coral Dating are the same ones used by Climatologists to determine the history of the Earth's temperature. As such, these methods are mentioned quite a bit in the Climategate emails, and some prominent Climatologists privately admit within the emails that serious problems exist in all of these dating methods. In essence, Evolutionists are claiming multiple seriously flawed methods can be used to cross-check one another.

"The underlying assumption of our own work has always been that each of the proxies have their own potential problems, and 'multiproxy' approaches are probably the most robust. I don’t have a particular axe to grind about any particular proxy, and recognize that there are some pretty serious potential problems with all proxies, including ice core delta o18 (as you’re aware, these are not clean paleotemperature proxies at all), and Sr/Ca or o18 from corals. There is a good discussion of the strengths and weaknesses in all of the proxies in Jones and Mann (2004): Jones, P.D., Mann, M.E., Climate Over Past Millennia, Reviews of Geophysics, 42, RG2002, doi: 10.1029/2003RG000143, 2004.

-Michael Mann

RE: Agreed completely on value of multiproxy. And yes, a lot of my earlier work was on figuring out how much of the isotopic signal in ice cores is temperature and not other things. The reassuring result was that all the big stuff is temperature, although with a rather bizarrely unexpected calibration. Of the little stuff, stack several cores and you get up toward order of half of the variance being temperature with the rest left for something else. The devil is in the details of when big meets little, as well as what calibration to use. But, there is a pile of data from the 3% of the globe that is ice sheets that have not been assembled properly."

-Richard Alley

"1) Didn't see a justification for use of tree-rings and not using ice cores -- the obvious one is that ice cores are no good -- see Jones et al, 1998. 2) No justification for regional reconstructions rather than what Mann et al did (I don't think we can say we didn't do Mann et al because we think it is crap!)"

-Simon Tett

"It sounded like it is an embarrassment to the tree ring community that their indicator does not seem to be responding to the pronounced warming of the past 50 years. Ed Cook of the Lamont Tree-Ring Lab tells me that there is some speculation that stratospheric ozone depletion may have affected the trees, in which case the pre-1950 record is OK. But alternatively, he says it is possible that the trees have exceeded the linear part of their temperature-sensitive range, and they no longer are stimulated by temperature. In this case there is trouble for the paleo record. Keith Briffa first documented this late 20th century loss of response. Personally, I think that the tree ring records should be able to reproduce the instrumental record, as a first test of the validity of this proxy. To me it casts doubt on the integrity of this proxy that it fails this test."

-Jeff Severinghaus

Genetic Similarity
It is commonly claimed that chimpanzees have 98% genetic similarity to humans with the inferred assumption by Evolutionists that closer genetic similarity means closer ancestry. However, this fallacy is evident in light of the fact that mice are more genetically similar than chimpanzees are to humans, sharing 99% of their genes with human beings (not to mention the fallacy of correlation does not imply causation). If Evolutionists are going to use the argument that more genetic similarity indicates closer ancestry, then they must argue that chimpanzees evolved into mice which evolved into human beings.

How Is the Measuring Done?
It should also be pointed out that it depends on how the measuring is done, and what the terminology used is. Shared DNA does not mean identical DNA. The percentage identical for chimpanzees to humans is actually 70-80% when taking into account the entire genome size and measuring for identicality rather than similarity. Only 29% of chimpanzee proteins are 1 for 1 identical.

"An example of how misleading the 94–98% numbers can be is the fact that the chimp genome has been consistently reported to be about 6–10% larger than the human genome by estimating nuclear DNA content (mass in picograms). This is a process whereby nuclei are extracted from cells in an isotonic buffer to prevent rupture and then passed through a cell cytometer sensor in serial fashion that measures the amount of DNA based on fluorescence. A known standard is used to calibrate the machine. One study reports that the chimp genome contains 3.8 billion base pairs compared to close to 3.2 billion for humans.49 The website ‘www.genomesize.com’ includes a variety of estimates for up to a 10% increase in genome size for chimp compared to human. In confirmation of these cytometry reports, the most recent ‘golden-path assembly’ data released by the ENSEMBL group (joint scientific project between the European Bioinformatics Institute and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute; www.ensembl.org) places chimpanzee at 8% larger than human."

-Jerry Bergman and Jeffrey Tomkins, Creation Ministries International, 2012.

"Evolutionists frequently assert that the similarity in DNA sequences provides evidence that all organisms (especially humans and chimps) are descended from a common ancestor. However, DNA similarity could just as easily be explained as the result of a common Creator. Human designers frequently reuse the same elements and features, albeit with modifications. Since all living things share the same world, it should be expected that there would be similarities in DNA as the organisms would have similar needs."

-David DeWitt, Answers In Genesis, 2014

"Roy Britten, author of the study, puts the figure at about 95% when insertions and deletions are included. Importantly, there is much more to these studies than people realize.... In one of the most extensive studies comparing human and chimp DNA, the researchers compared >19.8 million bases. While this sounds like a lot, it still represents slightly less than 1% of the genome. They calculated a mean identity of 98.77% or 1.23% differences. However, this, like other studies only considered substitutions and did not take insertions or deletions into account as the new study by Britten did. A nucleotide substitution is a mutation where one base (A, G, C, or T) is replaced with another. An insertion or deletion (indel) is found where there are nucleotides missing when two sequences are compared."

-David DeWitt, Answers In Genesis, 2003

Chromosome Pairs
Evolutionists like to claim that humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes (46 total) and apes have 24 pairs (48 total) in claiming a common origin, that the 24th chromosome pair fused in humans. As with many Evolutionist genetic arguments, this commits the fallacy of "correlation does not imply causation," first of all. A degree of similarity does not imply a common cause or origin, in other words. That being said, not all apes have 48 chromosomes. The Capuchin Monkey has 54 chromosomes. The Rhesus Monkey has 42 chromosomes. Yes, gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans do have 48 chromosomes. So do beavers, mice, hares, potatoes, and tobacco. Most humans have 46 chromosomes (which can actually vary from 44-48 given various disorders), but the Sable Antelope and Reeve's Muntjac also have 46 chromosomes. In essence this comes across as cherry-picking based on circumstantial evidence open to interpretation.

Vestigiality
The argument of vestigiality is entirely one of interpretation, and one where Evolution interpretations have been proven false in the past. What an Evolutionist claims is a useless remnant of common ancestry a Creationist will see an alternate explanation for, such as genetic abnormality caused by chemicals and pesticides, or an organ whose purpose we just haven't discovered yet.

The Appendix
The appendix is an excellent example of an organ Evolutionists once claimed was obsolete and have repeatedly attempt to claim as evidence for Evolution, even Darwin asserted this. As recently as April 2007 Douglas Theobald of TalkOrigins explained away criticism of the vestigial view with "most physicians are not trained in evolutionary biology." As noted by the New York Times, "Some experts have guessed that it is a vestige of the evolutionary development of some other organ, but there is little evidence for an appendix in our evolutionary ancestors. Few mammals have any appendix at all, and the appendices of those that do bear little resemblance to the human one." In 1999 it was discovered that the appendix did indeed have a useful purpose in preventing disease.

"For years, the appendix was credited with very little physiological function. We now know, however, that the appendix serves an important role in the fetus and in young adults. Endocrine cells appear in the appendix of the human fetus at around the 11th week of development. These endocrine cells of the fetal appendix have been shown to produce various biogenic amines and peptide hormones, compounds that assist with various biological control (homeostatic) mechanisms. There had been little prior evidence of this or any other role of the appendix in animal research, because the appendix does not exist in domestic mammals. Among adult humans, the appendix is now thought to be involved primarily in immune functions."

-Loren G. Martin, Scientific American, 1999.

Further research has since verified this discovery. As noted by researcher William Parker in October 2007, "While there is no smoking gun, the abundance of circumstantial evidence makes a strong case for the role of the appendix as a place where the good bacteria can live safe and undisturbed until they are needed." Despite this, school biology textbooks continue to falsely teach that it is a useless, vestigial remnant indicating a common ancestor.

"Writing in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Duke scientists and collaborators from the University of Arizona and Arizona State University conclude that Charles Darwin was wrong: The appendix is a whole lot more than an evolutionary remnant. Not only does it appear in nature much more frequently than previously acknowledged, but it has been around much longer than anyone had suspected. 'Maybe it's time to correct the textbooks,' says William Parker, Ph.D., assistant professor of surgical sciences at Duke and the senior author of the study. 'Many biology texts today still refer to the appendix as a 'vestigial organ.'"

-Duke University Medical Center, ScienceDaily, 2009.

Randy Guliuzza of the Institute for Creation Research rightly points out that "Darwinism advocated needless surgical procedures to remove 'vestigial organs'... Darwinian medicine's concept of vestigial organs has also retarded medical research, since there is little incentive to study 'useless' structures. This mistaken belief has permeated even the cellular and molecular levels. Stanford University reported in 1998 on certain white blood cells that heretofore had been largely ignored by immunologists. Why? The 'natural killer' (NK) cells were 'thought by some to be an archaic remnant of the primitive mammalian immune system.'"

Coccyx
The coccyx, or tailbone, is another organ that Evolutionists have attempted in vain to coopt as evidence for a common ancestor. Medical professor David Menton has pointed out since the 1990s that "all true tails have bones in them that are a posterior extension of the vertebral column" and "true tails have muscles associated with their vertebrae which permit some movement of the tail... most modern biology textbooks give the erroneous impression that the human coccyx has no real function other than to remind us of the ‘inescapable fact’ of evolution. In fact, the coccyx has some very important functions. Several muscles converge from the ring-like arrangement of the pelvic (hip) bones to anchor on the coccyx, forming a bowl-shaped muscular floor of the pelvis called the pelvic diaphragm."

"Therefore, while the coccyx has a clear function in humans today, the only reason to claim that the function has been modified is because of evolutionary assumptions. If you believe that humans descended from animals that possessed tails, then there must have been a modification of the tailbone. In contrast, if our ancestor Adam was created by God then there was no modification, and our tailbone is just as it always was. Without the evolutionary presupposition, the evidence that the tailbone is vestigial evaporates."

-David DeWitt, Answers In Genesis, 2008

As noted by the Laser Spine Institute, "The tailbone derived its name because some people believe it is a 'leftover' part from human evolution, though the notion that the tailbone serves no purpose is wrong. The coccyx is an extremely important source of attachment for tendons, ligaments, and muscles, though it is structured quite differently than other parts of the spine."