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Apr. 28, 2005 Let me say in the beginning that I am as atheistic as one can be, 100% confident that there is no God, in any ordinary acceptation of the word ‘God’. The nonexistence of God is a self-sufficient fact. So the truth or falsity of the theory of evolution has nothing to do with religion, as far as I’m concerned. If evolution should be proven false, God would not automatically pop back into existence. There’s no God, regardless of evolution’s career. That said, let me say also that when I first heard of evolution, in my teens as I recall, I accepted it immediately as self-evident. In fact, I wondered why it took men so long to enunciate the theory. In reality, it turned out, some of the ancients thought along similar lines, perhaps without the precision of modern science, and people like Goethe had similar ideas. So the idea is not as modern as it may seem. I’ve read Darwin, but that was years ago. Since then, I have gone laboriously through several college textbooks on zoology, botany, genetics and anatomy. But I am not a biologist. I have no equipment or laboratory, no specimens or fossils. All I can do is read textbooks, or nowadays visit websites, reading what the experts have to say. And, of course, they are practically all of one accord: evolution is a fact. However, now I have begun to wonder. I suppose the theory probably is fact, and that eventually I’ll be thoroughly convinced, but the gaps in the fossil record don’t fit very well with the theory of evolution as propounded by Darwin, though Darwin himself realized this. If the fossil record were complete, it seems to me that you should be able to select any two species from the animal kingdom, for example, Equus caballus (horses) and Branta canadensis (Canada geese), and set up two fossil sequences that would take them back to a common ancestor, however remote in time. So if you followed the equine line backwards in time to the point of their branching and then moved forward in time along the anserine line, you would have a continuous succession of fossils, varying only minutely from specimen to specimen, which if filmed and reeled fast like a motion picture, would present a dramatic transformation, by imperceptible degrees, of a horse into a goose. But apparently, no such pedigree ever exists. We have horses, horses, horses, and geese, geese, geese. In fact even the equine line, which is supposed to be a breathtaking model of evolution at work, is characterized by discrete jumps, rather than continuous evolution. As for geese, sure, they’re related to ducks and swans, no doubt about it, but is there any kind of record that will link them to dogs, fish or butterflies. If you can’t set up a sequence, how can you say be certain they’re related? Mathematical probability simply will not allow the fossil record always to be absent during the periods of transition. The usual answer is that there was a sudden burst, and evolution proceeded at such a rapid pace for a short period of time that no fossil record was left. Supposedly, the ancestor animal lived 10 million years unchanged and the descendant animal has lived 10 million years unchanged, with only 50 thousand years in between. That’s why we don’t have the transitional fossils. But where is the evidence that this is the case? To me this seems like a mere rationalization for a lack of evidence for gradualism. You might as well say that one day a cow gave birth to a moose, and that that’s evolution by macromutations. But wait! Now, at last, we have a fossil record that is gradual and smooth, just as a fossil record should be. It goes like this whale—pakicetid—anthracothere--hippopotamus. I trust that everyone knows what whales and hippopotamuses look like, so let me just unveil artists’ conceptions of a pakicetid and an anthracothere: http://www.cetacea.de/palaeocetologie/pics/pakicetus.jpg http://animal.discovery.com/news/briefs/20050207/gallery/whalehippo_zoom.jpg Apparently, the anthracothere is a deus ex machina. Paleontologists, noting an auricular similarity between whales and hippopotamuses, hypothesized that whales are an offshoot of the order Artiodactyla, which includes hippopotamuses, pigs, tapirs, cattle, deer, antelopes, goats, sheep, camels and others. In fact, a new superorder, called Cetartiodactyla, has been intercalated into mammalian taxonomy. With acceptance in the scientific community, then, there will be a single order, Cetartiodactyla, with the two currently accepted orders being deprecated. The problem with linking whales and hippopotamuses directly, though, is that this entails a 40,000,000-year gap in the fossil record. So anthracotheres were brought in to fill the gap, becoming the missing link between pakicetids and hippopotamuses. Daunting names like ‘pakicetid’ and ‘anthracothere’ become much less intimidating when we put them into plain English. ‘Pakicetid’ means ‘Pakistan whale’ and ‘anthracothere’ means ‘coal animal’. Anyway, the otic argument is the crux of the whole matter. The ear of the pakicetid resembles that of the whale and the hippopotamus in such a way, supposedly, that an hereditary link becomes inexorable. We’re still left with a 10,000,000-year gap between whales and pakicetids, but that, presumably, is not as important. This is not all as cut-and-dried as one might suppose. At one time, it was supposed that hippopotamuses were most closely related to pigs and tapirs, and our instincts agree that hippopotamuses, pigs and tapirs do resemble each other more closely than they resemble deer, sheep, cattle, camels and antelopes. In the days when this view was still held, it can only be supposed that zoologists made eloquent arguments for the relatedness of pigs and hippopotamuses. Now with the new pakicetid argument, the older arguments are merely dismissed out of hand. So it’s obvious that they were not as infallible as their adherents then maintained. Who’s to say that the otic argument will not be similarly dismissed nonchalantly in another decade? This is a judgmental proof, depending on opinion and acceptance. This is not a proof of the kind that exists in mathematics, which everyone must accept willy-nilly. Anyway, as I say, I am not a biologist. I don’t have access to the fossils. I have no way of judging. But looking at those artists’ conceptions, I am not at all convinced that a whale-to-hippopotamus evolution has been proved with hard, fast evidence, and makes an impressive case for evolution as a whole. You’ll have to go some to convince me that this is gradualism, with just a few missing fossils that we may expect to appear in the future. Incidentally, a Yahoo search turns up 300 to 400 search results for the word ‘anthracothere’, and the great majority of these have to do with this very hypothesis, which was enunciated about a year ago. Why is it that anthracotheres were such obscure beings until a need for them was felt? ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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