The Case for a Creator (10 page)

“So the
archaeopteryx
is not an ancestor of modern birds?”

“Not at all. Paleontologists pretty much agree on that. There are too many structural differences. Larry Martin, a paleontologist from the University of Kansas, said clearly in 1985 that the
archaeopteryx
is not an ancestor of any modern birds; instead, it’s a member of a totally extinct group of birds.”
³⁷

So much for the power of
archaeopteryx
to authenticate Darwin’s claims. Even ardent evolutionist Pierre Lecomte du Nouy agrees:

We are not even authorized to consider the exceptional case of the
archaeopteryx
as
a true link. By link, we mean a necessary stage of transition between classes such as reptiles and birds, or between smaller groups. An animal displaying characters belonging to two different groups cannot be treated as a true link as long as the intermediary stages have not been found, and as long as the mechanisms of transition remain unknown.
³⁸

Yet even if
archaeopteryx
had turned out to be a transitional creature, it would have been but a whisper of protest to the fossil record’s deafening roar against classical Darwinism.

“If we are testing Darwinism rather than merely looking for a confirming example or two,” Phillip Johnson said, “then a single good candidate for ancestor status is not enough to save a theory that posits a worldwide history of continual evolutionary transformation.”
³⁹

FRAUDS AND TURKEYS

Paleontologists, however, have been on a frenzy to try to locate an actual reptilian ancestor for birds. Driven by an all-consuming commitment to evolutionary theory, their zeal has resulted in some recent embarrassments for science. Wells was more than willing to regale me with some examples.

“A few years ago the National Geographic Society announced that a fossil had been purchased at an Arizona mineral show that turned out to be ‘the missing link between terrestrial dinosaurs and birds that could actually fly,’ ” he said. “It certainly looked that way. They called it the
archaeoraptor
, and it had the tail of a dinosaur and the forelimbs of a bird.
National Geographic
magazine published an article in 1999 that said there’s now evidence that feathered dinosaurs were ancestors of the first bird.”

“That sounds pretty convincing,” I said.

“Well, the problem was that it was a fake!” Wells said. “A Chinese paleontologist proved that someone had glued a dinosaur tail to a primitive bird. He created it to resemble just what the scientists had been looking for. There was a firestorm of criticism—the curator of birds at the Smithsonian charged that the Society had become aligned with ‘zealous scientists’ who were ‘highly biased proselytizers of the faith’ that birds evolved from dinosaurs.”

Then Wells made a blanket statement that struck me at the time as being too cynical. “Fakes are coming out of these fossil beds all the time,” he said, “because the fossil dealers know there’s big money in it.”

I remained skeptical about that charge until I subsequently read an interview with ornithologist Alan Feduccia, an evolutionary biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. When a reporter for
Discover
magazine raised the
archaeoraptor
fraud, Feduccia said:

Archaeoraptor
is just the tip of the iceberg. There are scores of fake fossils out there, and they have cast a dark shadow over the whole field. When you go to these fossil shows, it’s difficult to tell which ones are faked and which ones are not. I have heard there is a fake-fossil factory in northeast China, in Liaoning Province, near the deposits where many of these recent alleged feathered dinosaurs were found.
⁴⁰

Asked what would motivate such fraud, Fedducia replied: “Money. The Chinese fossil trade has become a big business. These fossil forgeries have been sold on the black market for years now, for huge sums of money. Anyone who can produce a good fake stands to profit.”
⁴¹

Other outlandish incidents occurred at about the same time the
archaeoraptor
fraud was coming to light. Wells was attending a conference in Florida, where the star of the show was a fossil called
bambiraptor
, a chicken-sized dinosaur with supposedly bird-like characteristics.

“Again, paleontologists called it the missing link,” Wells told me. “And, sure enough, the reconstructed animal on display had feathers or feather-like structures on it. The problem was that no feathers were ever found with the fossil! But because scientists said they
should
be there, they were added. And the dinosaur looked even more like a bird because the guy who did the reconstruction used the same artificial eyes that taxidermists put in stuffed eagles.” While there was a brief disclaimer, he added, it was rather cryptically written.

“Then a group of molecular biologists at the conference reported finding bird DNA in dinosaur bones that were sixty-five million years old. Now, that would be pretty exciting! They suggested that this was genetic evidence that birds are closely related to dinosaurs.

“The problem is that the bones from which the DNA was supposedly extracted are from a branch of dinosaurs that had nothing to do with bird ancestry. Furthermore, the DNA they found was not ninety or ninety-nine percent similar to birds—it was
one-hundred-percent
turkey DNA! Even chickens don’t have DNA that’s one hundred percent similar to turkey DNA. Only turkeys have one-hundred-percent turkey DNA.

“So these people said they found turkey DNA in a dinosaur bone—and it actually got published in
Science
magazine! This is just incredible to me! The headline in the magazine said with a straight face: ‘Dinos and Turkeys: Connected by DNA?’ ”

That last story begged the next question: “How in the world do you explain how the turkey DNA got in there?”

Shaking his head, Wells said, “Maybe somebody dropped a turkey sandwich in the dig or there was lab contamination. If I had reported something like this in my grad student research, I would have been laughed out of the room. They would have told me, ‘Go do the test again—it’s contaminated.’

“But for goodness sake, this was taken seriously enough to publish it in
Science
! Even the scientist who reported the finding admitted he was ‘quite skeptical’ of his own work at this point—and yet people were willing to seize on it to support their belief in Darwinian theory.”
⁴²

THE LEGEND OF JAVA MAN

I couldn’t end my conversation without touching on one more icon related to the fossil evidence: the pictures I’ve seen from time to time of a parade of ape-like creatures that morph into modern human beings. In fact, this illustration is emblazoned across the cover of a 1998 edition of
The Origin of Species
.
⁴³
For many, this “ultimate icon” is not just a theory, but an established fact.

“If you go back far enough,” legendary newscaster Walter Cronkite intoned in a documentary on evolution, “we and the chimps share a common ancestor. My father’s father’s father’s father, going back maybe a half-million generations—about five million years ago—was an ape.”
⁴⁴

That kind of certainty about human evolution was engendered in me as a youngster, when I would devour my
World Book Encyclopedia
. One of my favorite entries was “Prehistoric Man,” where I would linger for hours, fascinated by the part-ape, part-human nicknamed “Java man.” Apparently, I wasn’t the only member of this missing link’s fan club. Said the author of a book on paleoanthropology:

Java man is like an old friend. We learned about him in grade school. . . . In fact, the vast majority of people who believe in human evolution were probably first sold on it by this convincing salesman. Not only is he the best-known human fossil, he is one of the only human fossils most people know.
⁴⁵

World Book
’s two-page spread highlighted a parade of prehistoric men. Second in line was a lifelike bust of Java man from the American Museum of Natural History, accompanied by an outline showing his profile. With his sloping forehead, heavy brow, jutting jaw, receding chin and bemused expression, he was exactly what a blend of ape and man should look like. For me, studying his face and looking into his eyes helped cement the reality of human evolution.

The encyclopedia confidently described how Dutch scientist Eugene Dubois, excavating on an Indonesian Island in 1891 and 1892, “dug some bones from a riverbank.” Java man, which he dated back half a million years, “represents a stage in the development of modern man from a smaller-brained ancestor.”
⁴⁶
He was, according to Dubois,
the
missing link between apes and humans.
⁴⁷

And I believed it all. I was blithely ignorant, however, of the full Java man story. “What is not so well known is that Java man consists of nothing more than a skullcap, a femur (thigh bone), three teeth, and a great deal of imagination,” one author would later write.
⁴⁸
In other words, the lifelike depiction of Java man, which had so gripped me when I was young, was little more than speculation fueled by evolutionary expectations of what he
should
have looked like if Darwinism were true.

As a youngster beginning to form my opinions about human evolution, I wasn’t aware of what I have more recently discovered: that Dubois’ shoddy excavation would have disqualified the fossil from consideration by today’s standards. Or that the femur apparently didn’t really belong with the skullcap. Or that the skull cap, according to prominent Cambridge University anatomist Sir Arthur Keith, was distinctly human and reflected a brain capacity well within the range of humans living today.
⁴⁹
Or that a 342-page scientific report from a fact-finding expedition of nineteen evolutionists demolished Dubois’ claims and concluded that Java man played no part in human evolution.
⁵⁰

In short, Java man was not an ape-man as I had been led to believe, but he was “a true member of the human family.”
⁵¹
This was a fact apparently lost on
Time
magazine, which as recently as 1994 treated Java man as a legitimate evolutionary ancestor.
⁵²

THE NARRATIVE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION

Wells listened intently as I described to him how my exposure to misinformation about Java man had paved the way for my eventual wholehearted embrace of Darwinian evolution. The factors that contributed to that debacle, he pointed out, are still quite relevant.

“One of the major problems with paleoanthropology is that compared to all the fossils we have, only a minuscule number are believed to be of creatures ancestral to humans,” Wells said. “Often, it’s just skull fragments or teeth.

“So this gives a lot of elasticity in reconstructing the specimens to fit evolutionary theory. For example, when
National Geographic
hired four artists to reconstruct a female figure from seven fossil bones found in Kenya, they came up with quite different interpretations. One looked like a modern African-American woman; another like a werewolf; another had a heavy, gorilla-like brow; and another had a missing forehead and jaws that looked a bit like a beaked dinosaur.

“Of course, this lack of fossil evidence also makes it virtually impossible to reconstruct supposed relationships between ancestors and descendents. One anthropologist likened the task to trying to reconstruct the plot of
War and Peace
by using just thirteen random pages from the book.”
⁵³

Wells reached over again to pick up
Icons
of Evolution
. “I thought Henry Gee, the chief science writer for
Nature
, was quite candid in talking about this issue in 1999,” Wells said as he searched for the right page. “Gee wrote, ‘The intervals of time that separate fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.’

“He called each fossil ‘an isolated point, with no knowable connection to any other given fossil, and all float around in an overwhelming sea of gaps.’ In fact, he said that all the fossil evidence for human evolution ‘between ten and five million years ago—several thousand generations of living creatures—can be fitted into a small box.’

“Consequently, he concluded that the conventional picture of human evolution is ‘a completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to accord with human prejudices.’ Then he said quite bluntly: ‘To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.’ ”
⁵⁴

Wells put down the book. “In other words, you’re not going to reconstruct human evolutionary history just based on examining the few fossils we have,” he continued. “The only reason anyone thinks the evidence supports human evolution is because Darwinism is assumed to be true on other grounds. If it is, then it makes perfect sense to extrapolate that to human history, which is what Darwin did in his book
The Descent of Man
.