What is the Fossil Record? - Dr. Kurt Wise (Conf Lecture)

 

This lecture is from our 2017 'Is Genesis History?' conference. We invited a number of scientists and scholars to teach in-depth on the creation and flood model.  Here, Dr. Kurt Wise shows us powerful evidence for the historicity of Noah's Flood from the fossil record.

If you'd like access to this and over 70+ video lectures on geology, hermeneutics, astronomy, biology, archaeology and more, please visit ☞ https://bit.ly/2WsUHx1 to view, stream, and/or download MP4 files of the lectures themselves and download PowerPoint PDF's from most of the lectures.

Dr. Kurt Wise earned his BA in geology from the University of Chicago, and his MA and PhD degrees in paleontology from Harvard University. He founded and directed the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College and taught biology there for 17 years. He then led the Center for Theology and Science at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for 3 years, before founding and directing the Center for Creation Research and teaching biology at Truett McConnell University for the last 7 years. His fieldwork has included research in early Flood rocks in the Death Valley region, late Flood rocks in Wyoming, and post-Flood caves in Tennessee.

If you have questions about dinosaurs and the fossil, the solar system, rock layers, and the historicity of Genesis, be sure to check out our documentary, 'Is Genesis History,' which features Dr. Kurt Wise and 12 other scientists and scholars. You can also visit our website: https://bit.ly/3idgpi7.

For more information on Dr. Wise, please go to https://bit.ly/2zUN3U9.

My name is Kurt Wise. I'm going to talk about the fossil record. This particular presentation is different from

the two presentations I'm giving on paleontology and the Flood later on today,

in the electives. There is very little overlap between the two.

This is going to focus on some major features of the fossil record

as it relates to the question: how was the fossil record formed? Basically, the theme is

that the major features of the fossil record, the big features of the fossil record, are better explained by deposition or formation

in the Flood of Noah then by any other explanation.

And so first of all, there's the issue of how a fossil is formed at all.

Let's say that you're an organism that has a special desire to become part of the fossil record.

Is there something you can do to make that happen? What can increase your chances of making this happen?

So the question is: how do you become a fossil at all? One of the first challenges

if you are an organism that's interested in that is you've got to avoid the carnivores.

Critters that are out to get you. Out to eat you. Because typically, the carnivores will consume you and crunch you up

into little pieces and alas, you're not part of the fossil record as a consequence.

So for the most part, carnivory usually takes an organism out of the running

for being a fossil. Perhaps you can do something about that while you're still alive.

But you got another problem which you probably can't do anything about once you're dead.

You've also got a group of organisms known as scavengers that are designed to consume you as well.

And of course, this is all part of the design, both in carnivory and in scavenging,

to take the components of living organisms and break them up into primary building components

that could be used by other organisms to build other organisms. And so it's a design in the system to make sure

that we don't accumulate dead debris, and at the same time have plenty

of nutrients for the next generation of organisms. And in the modern world,

this process of carnivorous and scavenging is actually rather efficient in taking out most organisms,

preventing them from becoming fossils at all. The consequence of this,

for example, you can take even catastrophes that occur in the present,

and I'll take one anthropogenic catastrophe, which was the near extinction of the buffalo.

The bison in North America. They were killed by the millions, literally,

and left to rot. So in those circumstances, we've killed them.

We usually didn't do anything other than maybe strip their skin off and left the carcass.

Leaving the carcasses in the open, again, literally by the millions.

But to my knowledge, there's not a single fossil known from any of that devastation.

And that's because the scavengers took out 99.9% of all evidence of those living things.

The point is that in this world, for somewhat obvious reasons,

this process of scavenging is supposed to be efficient at taking out organisms.

So, how do you get around this? Well, the best way to get around it really is to get your carcass buried

so that the scavengers can't find it. Although there are scavengers designed to find those things

in the sediment, so you've probably got to get buried a good piece

before you can finally get away from the scavengers. But alas, the problem still is not over

because for the organisms that do in fact get buried, the organisms that do escape both carnivory and scavenging,

there are other organisms designed to decompose bodies beyond that.

You know, optimally you want to get the body into the anoxic zone where there's no oxygen.

Most scavengers require oxygen, so they're not going to be living even if they tried burrowing down there.

They're not going to be able to survive in those depths because,

at the surface of the sediment, if you don't get buried too far,

you've got a zone where oxygen is available due to burrowing of organisms primarily.

Also, in the sediment itself, there are decomposers designed to decompose organics

in the shallow burial zone. Again, they're extremely efficient, but alas,

if you do get beneath that zone, and I was I've already referred to the fact

that that zone in most shallow marine environments is

on the order of 30 feet into the sediment. You've got to get buried

at an extremely great depth to get beneath these burrowers. These borrowers go down quite a ways to oxygenate

the sediments and decompose the organic matter. But even, alas, if you can in fact get to that point

where you're below the oxic zone and there is no oxygen in there, sure it’s no longer possible for the aerobic decomposers,

scavengers and carnivores to get you, but alas, there's bacteria that already reside within you,

and within any organism, that will begin the process of decomposition, even in the anaerobic environment.

Anaerobic decomposition is much slower than aerobic decomposition,

but they've got a lot of time. They're buried deeply and they're not probably going to get disturbed over time.

And again, it's just extremely unlikely that any organism at all would make it

into the fossil record in the modern world situation. You add to that that once, let's say,

you survived somehow the process of anaerobic decomposition

and you still exist. Now if your dream is to get into a museum drawer preserved as a fossil

and not be destroyed, you've also got to get back up to the surface again

so that somebody can find you. And yet, how do you get to the surface?

Well, the rocks around you are eroded away so that you’re brought to the surface in that fashion.

But if it erodes too far, you're taken out by the erosion process. So you've got this extremely delicate situation

if you really want to be a fossil. It just seems like it's impossible to ever make it happen.

As a consequence very few organisms

in the present world, under present processes, ever would make it and ever can make it

into the fossil record. So in what I might call a “conventional perspective” on this,

where most fossils are formed under conditions we experience today, and that would be the uniformitarian understanding

of the origin fossils, you would expect that because slow deposition dominates in the modern world,

you would expect that fossilization is extremely rare and that fossils would be more often poorly-preserved.

If they did make it, you're only going to get a very poor preservation in that process.

On the other hand, I'm going to contrast throughout the presentation these two perspectives.

Forming fossils in a modern world situation versus a conceptual basic intuitive understanding

of a Flood with lots of deposition, very rapid deposition. Burying your fossils very quickly in a Flood scenario.

No specific details about it, but just kind of what might you expect under those circumstances.

Because the Flood is burying lots of organisms very deeply,

hundreds of feet in the matter of probably hours or days, there’s not too much likelihood

that you're going to get nailed by a carnivore before you’re subsumed.

The scavengers have very little opportunity to nail you. And it's too deep for the aerobic decomposers

and the diggers and that sort of thing to get to you. Anaerobic decomposition is about the only thing

you have to fear under these circumstances. And the burial is so great, and the organisms so many,

that you might expect that even anaerobic decomposition is only going

to get a small percentage of the organisms. So you might expect that under those circumstances,

just an intuitive level expectation of a Flood theory, that you would have fossils being very common,

and overall, very often well-preserved. As a matter of fact, you might expect,

and this is going to be another thought we're going to come to in a moment, that maybe even a large percentage

of the organisms would actually get preserved as fossils. This is a mind-boggling concept

here compared to the conventional wisdom. So in terms of the quality of fossil preservation overall,

you might expect that in Flood Theory, you'd have common well-preserved fossils, but in Conventional Theory fossils would be rare

and poorly-preserved. What do you actually see? I'm a little biased.

I got out of the car a couple of days ago at a Cracker Barrel.

My wife went one direction toward the Cracker Barrel, and my attention was diverted immediately to something

underneath the tree in the island there. Beneath the tree there was a bunch of rocks there.

And alas, I thought I saw, from 15 or 20 feet away, some fossils in the rocks.

I walked over there. There were thousands of fossils! I mean, a slab of rock, the first one I saw,

probably had 500 individual fossils on that single rock.

And as I looked around, all of them had fossils. In many rock deposits,

many rocks, you can find fossils by the billions.

I've been more recently working with some vertebrate fossils. My training is an invertebrate paleontology.

In invertebrate paleontology, fossils are abundant. Vertebrate paleontologists get

really excited when they see 16 or 20 specimens.

I can go up to a rock outcrop with just my pockets and put 700 specimens in my pockets.

I have a problem with dinosaur fossils. If I'm on a plane trip to wherever I'm going.

I can't take even one bone back with me. It's too big. So with vertebrate fossils, there are fewer of them.

But a friend of mine, Art Chadwick, is working on a dinosaur site. He's taken out one thousand dinosaur specimens every year,

from one layer. He's been doing that for 20 years. Since 1996 he’s taken out

over a thousand bones every single year. And we estimate that he can be doing

that at that site for the next 50 years and hardly make a dent on that.

So even vertebrate fossils, even though they were far less common than the invertebrate fossils,

there are many of them. Extraordinary numbers of them.

Overall, it’s kind of hard to find a rock, in fact, that doesn't have fossils in it.

And so overall, it seems that the Flood Theory intuitively fits the observation

of the fossil record a little bit better than the conventional model. A second issue, which I've already referred to,

at least I warned you that it was coming, is the issue of the completeness of the fossil record.

What percentage of the organisms that once lived do we have fossils for?

Or in this particular case, I'm going to make it a little more specific. Of all of the species that ever lived in the past,

how many of them do we have a record of in the fossil record? How many species have been preserved as fossils?

And I'm going to first begin with trying to calculate that, or estimate that, from conventional theory.

What would conventional theory expect on this particular issue?

Now we’re looking at the animal fossil record

from the Cambrian all the way up to the Tertiary.

What this is, how do I say it, is a species abundance curve.

It's a taxonomic abundance curve. This is initially done at the family level for marine organisms.

And what you get is a very low diversity, very few families of organisms are found in the early Cambrian.

But the number of families increases through the Ordovician, reaching the maximum of a plateau that stays

somewhat constant through what's called the Paleozoic, drops rather precipitously,

and increases again through the Mesozoic, and continues to increase to the present.

And again, initially, this was done at the level of families.

Jackson Koski did this a number of years ago, back in the 1980s. He then spent the rest of his life just

before he died actually having successfully done this for genera in the fossil record

and gets basically the same curve, the same form of curve.

So overall, this is a diversity diagram as a function of time.

And of course, the conventional dates are here on the bottom.

It's from this curve that we can then estimate the true density,

or the expected completeness of the fossil record.

Here's how the reasoning would go. If, in fact, let's say for the sake of argument we had two species

that existed for the entire duration of the record: Species A and Species B.

The diversity curve would be flat, and it would be two across the entire history of life.

How would we go from this curve to a calculation of the number of species that existed in the past?

We know the number of species, that's two. How would you do this? What you would do is take the area under the curve,

which is two, times 600 million to get twelve hundred million-year species.

Okay, that's an interesting unit. What does that unit mean?

And then, we would divide by the average species duration.

The average species duration is 600 million years. This species has a species duration of 600 million years.

The other one has a species duration of 600 million years. So if you divide the area

under the curve by 600 million years you get two, which is the right answer.

You get to two species. We're going to do the same thing with this curve. We take the area under the curve.

We integrate under the curve to get a number of taxa

times million years. And then we divide by the average species duration.

The average species duration is about 25 million years when you go through all of the work to figure

that out in the fossil record. So when you do that calculation, it's actually possible from this to determine the estimate of

how many species lived in the entire duration of earth history if that curve represents the actual diversity

of taxa through time. The total number of species which have ever lived is something in excess then,

by this calculation, of 50 billion. 50 billion species, at least, have lived.

Because we're going to assume for the moment that the record that we do have is incomplete.

But there's a minimum based on the record we do have of 50 billion species

that have ever lived in the fossil record.

We've only named, to date, about a quarter million fossil species.

Okay, so we can then calculate the number.

How many of all of the species that have ever lived in the past do we actually

have a fossil record of, just simply by taking one-quarter million and dividing it by 50 million?

And so we've had far less than 1%, I mean far less, than 1%.

And again, there's more than 50 billion species,

so this it's going to be far less than far less than one percent of all the species

that have ever lived that are known as fossils. And this is a common statement. This is a statement I heard in my very

first paleontology course at the University of Chicago. “ Far less than one percent of all the species

that have lived do we have fossils for. ” So what is the completeness of the fossil record with respect to species?

Far less than one percent of all the species have ever lived are known as fossils.

And, I'm going to put a parenthetical note in here, creationists have bought this. Creationists have just simply quoted that and said, “Alas,

far less than one percent of all the species that ever lived are found in the fossil record. ” And bunk!

That's garbage. That is calculated on the basis of the assumption that the fossil record is representing 600 billion years

of time, and so on. But conventional theory would expect

that the species-completeness of the fossil record is extraordinarily low.

Far less than 1%. So let's now look more properly at a Flood model concept.

And again, I'm just going to do it intuitively. I might expect a pretty high percentage.

Now it's probably not going to be very high for certain organisms, for small organisms that have no hard parts.

But if we restrict it to the seven animal taxa that are easily preserved in the fossil record,

which is most of that curve, the Sepkoski curve, that I showed you, then I would expect it's probably not far away

from being true to say we've got a hundred percent of the species

preserved from the world that was before. At least, the world as it existed right at the time of the Flood.

We probably have an extremely good sample. If I'm going to be conservative,

I'll say it's 50% or something like that. But anyway, it's a whole lot. It's at least four orders

of magnitude higher species preservability than the conventional model would expect.

So there's our expectations. There's quite a bit of difference between those two.

How do we test between the two? There's a simple way to test it.

We've got living species today. Let's figure out how many living species we have today have a fossil record.

And by the way, that seems like it's obvious in one sense, but that's even going to be a little low because the species

that live today, in the conventional wisdom, were only on the average halfway through the species duration

of the species that live today. So we're only giving it half a chance to collect living species in the fossil record.

But even then, just a rough estimate of these the quality of the fossil record would be

that there are this many mammals in Europe, for example.

And Kurtén, back in the 70’s, was in Europe.

He simply went, “ Here's how many mammal species are in Europe. ” And how many

of the European mammal species have a fossil record in Europe?

70 %! 70% of the living mammal species in Europe have a fossil record in Europe.

When you ask the question of if they have a fossil record anywhere on the planet, it raises to above 80%.

Jim Valentine did the same thing for mollusks.

His dissertation was on fossil clams and that sort of thing in Baja, California.

So it was easy for him to count how many clams and snails

and stuff like that were in Baja California living today. And then how many of them have a fossil record

in Baja California? 75% of the living species have a fossil record.

That suggests the fossil records is pretty good, somehow. This is not what we would have expected intuitively,

but somehow the fossil record is picking up a very large percentage of species,

and in places after places and tax after taxa,

we're getting extremely high preservation rates for species.

That does not fit the conventional theory at all. It is much more within the lines

of the catastrophic theory of rapid burial of organisms.

Another issue I want to talk about is disparity and diversity. The conventional wisdom,

as you well know, is that organisms evolve through time in somewhat small steps,

either gradual change or stepwise change. It really doesn't matter for our purposes here.

The point is to get great disparity, and disparity is a measure of how different things are.

So the question here would be if you start with a bacterium, how do you get something as different as a human

and an oak tree? How do you go from a bacterium to something really different,

and something really different from that? You can't do it by hiccupping

and jumping over to the oak tree in conventional theory.

You have to do it step, by step, by step, by step. Okay, takes a long time,

and it takes a lot of steps. In these steps, you've produced a bunch of species along the way.

If you count how many species we have, we’re increasing the species as we go up the tree.

In order to get a wide tree, which would represent great disparity,

you've got to have lots of branches come up. You must increase the diversity of organisms in order to get

to great disparity. So in the fossil record, you should see low diversity at first,

increasing diversity with time. Which, if you remember from that diagram that I showed you,

is roughly what we see there at the beginning of the fossil record. It's increasing in diversity with time.

That's what you would expect with the evolutionary tree. But this is a little different.

This is asking what about disparity, a measure of disparity. Number of taxa doesn't tell you disparity.

For disparity, you got to look at how different they are. In order to get great disparity, you need lots of time,

and diversity will increase before disparity. This is actually an argument by Stephen J. Gould.

A disparaging argument. He was disparaged by it.

Conventional theory is that high diversity must come before high disparity.

You just can't do it any other way. You can't poof disparity into being in evolution.

You can poof it in creation, but you can't poof it in evolution. Okay, and so now in the Flood concept,

however, let's think about that. It’s not creation, it’s Flood. Thinking only Flood here. Let's say we took our present earth and had a Flood come in

and take it out. Let's make it simpler. Let's take our organisms that are right here

where we're at. Let's say a big wave comes in, picks up all the organisms, plants and animals,

and it sort of dumps them. Let's say we have a high preservation rate. So we're going to preserve most of them.

What's going to be the disparity? Disparity is extremely high.

We have oak trees. We have humans. We have bacteria. We have a wide variety.

We have full disparity. You sample any community in the world,

any community, just any one community in the world, and you've got high disparity. You've got the full disparity

of life in just about every community of the world. So every grab of the real world

by the Flood will preserve high disparity. What about its diversity though?

It's got high disparity, but there's probably only a few hundred species all total,

with plants, animals and the whole bit. So you might have the full disparity,

but out of 1.8 million species in the world, you have a very low diversity.

So the Flood, I would expect, in the very first moments, you're going to get complete disparity.

You're going to get the full disparity of life, but a very low diversity.

So in the Flood Theory, we would expect low diversity at the base of the Flood where,

at the same time, you would have high disparity. So that disparity would actually come,

should actually come, before diversity. So the two models have opposite expectations.

You have high diversity comes before disparity

in conventional model. And high disparity comes before high diversity in the creation model.

What do you actually see? The observation is, you already got the idea here,

but from the beginning, the fossil record shows extremely high disparity

with low diversity. Stephen J. Gould, disparage, wrote a whole book on one fossil layer

which is very close to the base of the Cambrian known as the Burgess Shale.

In that book, he focuses on the arthropods that are preserved

in the Burgess Shale. He kind of ignores the trilobites. So if you take the non-trilobite arthropods in the Burgess Shale,

there are 21 species. 21 species of non-trilobite arthropods.

Of those 21 species, if you try to put them

into modern classes of arthropods (that’s the next classification down from phylum arthropoda),

there's only five modern classes of arthropods. But there's 20 classes of arthropods in the Burgess.

21 species representing 20 classes. It's extraordinary!

Not only is the diversity low compared to disparity, it's only one more species than there are classes.

But there's more disparity there than there is in the present! So the very oldest,

and it's a beautiful deposit that does an extraordinary job of preserving things.

So much so that you can dig through the fossil and do internal anatomy of the organism.

You can work down through the layers and get the layers of the organism. I mean you're destroying the organism as to do it,

unfortunately, but it's just spectacular preservation. So we're preserving everything in there.

And what we're seeing is extraordinary disparity with very low diversity.

When the spiny-skinned echinoderms come in, the very oldest echinoderms, as a phylum, there are,

again, more classes of them in the very oldest deposit

than there are in the present. And so rather

than there being high diversity before disparity, Stephen J. Gould disparaged the fossil record in saying

that it has extremely high disparity before diversity, and what we see subsequent is decimation,

the literal old meaning of decimation. To decimate. “ Deci,” would mean “10th.

” It’s to wipe out. It’s for a Roman legion to go in and fight and be decimated

that only 1 out of 10 make it. It is decimated.

Okay? That's what the fossil record shows. We have this extraordinary disparity and subsequent

decimation to the present. The present is a decimated world

compared to the world of the past. Not the expectation of Conventional Theory,

but the expectation of Flood Theory. Another issue: the order of first appearance.

This is an issue I was challenged with all the way through my training as a paleontologist.

I heard multiple times that the fossil record preserves evidence of evolution.

The fossils appear in the order that evolution predicts. Heard this over and over again,

and I didn't have time to deal with it while I was when I was going through. I waited until I finished.

So in the summer following the completion of my doctorate I sat down

with seven of what I thought were the best evidences of evolution to see if, in fact, there was a creationist understanding

or reinterpretation of them. And this is one of them. See order first appearance. I was finally able to address this issue.

In Conventional Theory, we would expect that the order of first appearance

should be the same order as the branching order of evolution. The very oldest branches on the evolutionary tree

should show up at the bottom of the fossil record. And then subsequently as you get later branches,

there should be later fossils. It’s as simple as that. What would you expect in Flood Theory?

Probably, at least if we just do an intuitive, “Let’s not think about this very deeply,” you just pick

up the organisms of the earth and just dump them into the earth,

you might expect random, at least with respect to evolutionary theory.

If you thought about a little bit more you might expect--and it was commonly believed by creationists

from way back--that the Flood isn't an instantaneous picking up of everything on the earth.

It transgresses onto the land. So you might expect that it's going to preserve things in the ocean,

bury things in the ocean first, and then work its way up onto the land, burying things from sea to land.

You might expect that to be a second-order pattern. So there's a contrast.

How do we test this? Testing this is not easy. But the idea first is

to create an evolutionary tree of everything, which nobody's ever done.

Nobody did before I did it. Everybody thought I was crazy to do it. Now it’s a little bit easier

with different methods we have now with computers and so on. We can do this more effectively.

But at the time, it was a matter of going through all of the organisms of the planet,

from bacteria, to protists, to just the whole kitten caboodle.

And figuring out a complete evolutionary tree. This is only part of the tree. It contains the viruses,

the archaebacteria, the eubacteria, and then there’s another part of the tree.

It’s here. There’s another branch. It keeps on going. This is only part of it

because this is basically all of the protista,

and the algae, and then the fungi.

We still have two other branches--the plants and the animals--to add in here. I just can’t put it on one--

well I could, but you know, it’s hard enough to read as it is. Here’s the plant groups.

And then the animal groups. So think of all those things on one big tree. One BIG tree.

And this is only bringing it down to Orders. So this is the Kingdom,

the Phyla divisions in the plants, the Classes and the Orders.

So we’re not talking about the families and the genera. Just down to the level of Order.

So now that I have an evolutionary tree, I can now determine an order of branching.

For example, the phoronids are supposed to have evolved, if the evolutionary tree is accurate,

before the brachiopods and the hyolithids after that. The mollusks,

some of these things we couldn’t resolve at the time. The annelids last of all.

So you’d expect phoronid fossils to be found before brachiopod fossils, and those found before hyolithid fossils and so on.

And that’s the simple interpretation of what I’m about to do here. So we create an order of branching of the tree,

compare that with the order of appearance of organisms in the record,

and what you end up with after you do this hideous amount of work, is that 95% of the lineages--if you started from the base

and went all the way up through all the possible lineages--95% of the order

of fossil appearance is random with respect--in order words, I can’t reject the null hypothesis of randomness

with respect to evolution. There is no correspondence between the order of evolution

and the order of fossils. There’s at least of Orders on up.

There’s nothing there. But, you know--and 95% with an alpha

of 5% you would say that there’s nothing left to explain. But that 5% is intriguing.

It’s hard to let go of that. What about the 5%?

And I think it’s valid to reject the 5% and say we don’t have to worry about it.

But the 5% that’s left, which includes the plants, the vertebrate classes

are a sea-to-land transition.

The evolutionary order happens to be a sea-to-land order;

the fossils in fact do follow a sea-to-land order.

So it might actually not be evolution, but the Flood.

In any case, the general order of first appearance of organisms in the fossil record

of higher taxa is at the first order approximation random with respect to evolution.

And the second order is a sea-to-land transition, exactly what the Flood would predict.

Another issue is a change up section question.

In Conventional Theory we have evolution occurring. So, in theory,

A evolves into B while sediments are being deposited, so you would expect

that under these circumstances you should find A in a lower sedimentary layer, lower strata,

and B in higher strata, and then the intermediates in between.

Continuous change that is assumed in Conventional Theory,

and if you’re speaking of a divergence speciation event,

or taxonomic origination event of some sort of another, then you would expect that should show up as a divergence of morphology

from a common ancestor position. So you would not just expect what creationists call “transitional forms” in between,

but you would expect divergence in morphology as a function of stratigraphic position.

That’s the prediction of the Conventional Theory. What about Flood Theory?

We have the three organisms, A, B, and C,

that I formally had evolving from one another in Evolutionary Theory.

If we’re thinking about Flood Theory, we’re thinking these three organisms lived at the same time.

They were sampled by the fossil record, tossed into the fossil record, if we assume for the moment they were put in a sort

of random position with respect to them in the fossil record.

The species A was sampled by the fossil record--kind

of picture it as something reaching out to sample something and preserving fossils--it might sample A for a period of time,

but it’s always sampling A. So you would expect that A might be found at several layers as A,

A, A, A, A. And meanwhile it’s sampling B, but always sampling B.

So it would be preserved in the record as B, B, B, B, B. And likewise with C.

In a Flood model, you might expect that what you’d actually see is taxon A being preserved

unchanged through some range of the stratigraphic record.

And C through some range, B through some range. All showing no change

because they’re being sampled from the same population. So you would expect stasis and abrupt appearance.

Stasis means that a given taxon remains unchanged as you go up the sequence,

and abrupt appearance means when you find A, you find A, and there’s no transition from A to anything else.

There’s a from A to anything else. They abruptly appear and they abruptly disappear,

and they're in stasis while they're in existence in the fossil record. Now you probably recognize these terms.

I've stolen the terms from Stephen J. Gould. And again, another disparaging summary--disparaging

from his point of view--of the fossil record.

What he was most famous for was observing that in the fossil record of species stasis

and abrupt appearance is primarily what you see.

So whereas we would expect continuous change and divergence of taxa in Evolutionary Theory,

you would expect stasis and abrupt appearance in Creation Theory. And what you actually observe is stasis and abrupt appearance.

Now Steve Gould argued for stasis and abrupt appearance of species.

This is a general argument for stasis and abrupt appearance of all taxa,

genera and families and so on all the way up. What Steve is known for arguing for is this on a species level,

and he spent most of his life trying to make this argument. He more or less won the argument.

The paleontological world ultimately accepted this claim, reluctantly.

Reluctantly because it didn’t fit. It simply doesn’t fit

what you’d expect in Evolutionary Theory. It wasn’t necessarily that they understood that it fit a Flood model,

but it does. In fact, I came into Steve’s office one day and said, “Hey Steve, I’ve just made punc eq (punctuated equilibrium)”--which

was Steve Gould’s explanation for stasis and abrupt appearance in light of Conventional Theory.

I said, “I’ve just made punc eq akin to a creationist theory. It’s this. It’s this idea, okay?

You want to hear? ” He says, “ Well, that’s interesting. ” So he admitted to me at that moment

that “you’re theory does explain more paleontological data than mine,

but I can’t go there. I can’t really believe that because, of course, that’s a Flood and that’s a God that judges” and all of that sort of thing.

Later in his life, again, from his graduate school years, for a number of years, he’s known for arguing

for stasis and abrupt appearance of species. But he recognized early on, no one in paleontology cannot recognize this,

that this same feature describes not just species,

but every taxonomic level. Most disturbingly would be things like Phyla and Classes

and so on and so forth. And there’s a paper he wrote later in his life

where he said, you know, it’s interesting that the same pattern of stasis

and abrupt appearance we see in species seems to also be true

at higher taxonomic levels, at all taxonomic levels.

We have developed a theory for explaining a species’ stasis and abrupt,

but we do not have a theory in evolution to explain the higher-level stasis

and abrupt appearance, and he called for a revolution.

He called for evolution to find a solution to this because this is a big huge problem for evolution.

In his last book that he wrote, literally finished on his deathbed,

he--the whole book is devoted to that issue.

We have to find the evolutionary theory to explain this because it's not just true at species level.

It's true at every single taxonomic level and there is no evolutionary explanation for that.

So here is a general pattern of the fossil record which fits a flawed model comfortably and is

extraordinarily challenging for the conventional model. Another issue is the issue of stratomorphic intermediates,

which is somewhat related to the last one. A little more specific. A strato-morphic intermediate is

a stratigraphic intermediate and a morphological intermediate. “ Strato,” from strata; “morpho,” from morphology.

It is an intermediate that is both in an intermediate position in the strata

and an intermediate position in morphology. iIf in fact evolution is true,

that A evolves into B, or if A evolves into C and goes through B to get there,

then it should be that you will have a stratum

that has A. Above it should be a stratum with B, and stratum with C. B,

then, would be the stratomorphic intermediate. It’s stratigraphically between A and C,

and it’s morphologically between A and C. That’s what you’re looking for if you’re an evolutionist.

If you’re an evolutionist, you would expect stratomorphic intermediates.

This is what--I hate the term--but this is what creationists call a “missing link.

” Okay, to use the term, by the way, is to buy into the evolutionary model

because you’re basically saying that there is something that is missing. So you’re implying that there really is something.

It’s a really bad idea. It’s like Burger King saying, “We’re the second best!

” But then everyone goes, “ What’s the first best? ” So they think of McDonald’s.

You don’t do an advertising campaign where you make the people think of your competitor. That’s dumb!

Okay, Pepsi did the same thing. Starts a commercial with the Coke

and shows the person drinking Coke and goes “Ew! ” Then he goes through all sorts of things to get a Pepsi

and he’s like “Ahh! ” What do I think after I watch that commercial? I don’t remember anything after the Coke.

I just think of Coke. They just advertised for Coke. That’s stupid! Okay? Creationists should NOT call these things “missing links,

” because they’re advertising for evolution. They’re thinking as an evolutionist.

They’re getting everybody to think, “Oh! There’s links to be missing. ” NOOO!

Then you have to say missing links don’t exist. What? This is weird.

Anyway, sorry, I’ll get off my soapbox here. What evolutionists are looking for are

stratomorphic intermediates. Yeah! That's what we want! Okay, so in Evolutionary Theory/Conventional Theory,

you would expect there should have been organisms

that are intermediate. But remember, what's the preservation rate of the fossil record?

It's less than one percent of all the species. So let's say you have two organisms and you

have a thousand species in between the two. If your preservation rate of species is far less than 1%,

you might have one in there. So is it fair to say

that we’ve got species A and species B, that you should expect to find the stratomorphic intermediate

between the two if they are similar to each other? It's not fair. This is not a valid argument against evolution.

You're burning Straw Men, okay? This is sad.

Now on the other hand, if you're talking about a transition between major groups that requires hundreds of transitions,

now you're talking a little more fair. Okay, because if in fact you've got 3,000 transitions

that must be made to get from A to B, then you would expect to find several stratomorphic intermediates in between.

So they would expect them to be rare, relatively speaking,

seeing as less than 1% of all of them would be preserved, and in some groups

that are very well preserved the preservation is high. For example, with clams and gastropods,

things with shells that get preserved very well. You might expect these even to get towards the common.

At least one in every ten in many of the well-preserved groups. What do you expect in Flood Theory?

Well, you might say, “ Well, I wouldn't expect anything of that nature.

” Meh, careful. Here’s a question for you:

which of these--assuming they did evolve--which of these evolved from which?

Somebody give me an answer. Start where?

You want to start at the bottom. You went backwards from what I suggested.

Okay, so that's a possibility.

Could it be that way?

How about that way? How about that way?

I'm trying to make a point here. when you have multiple organisms.

How do you know which one was the starting one? Even if you know

what's most similar to what and the most likely lineage, and you know if you got A,

you know B is somehow connected to it. But which one’s first? Was A first or B first?

How do you know? You don't know polarity. As a result, if you've got one, two, three, four, five,

six different things in the fossil record, if you've got a possibility

that it could start from this one, or this one, or this one, or this one,

or this one, or this one, and it could go in any number of directions,

then what do you think the possibility is that if you randomly throw these puppies

into the fossil record into some random order? Might you expect sometimes for the order to end up

in a stratomorphic intermediate order? An impossible order?

Since any of them could end up being intermediate, in a theoretical sense,

a random distribution of organisms will land you in a stratomorphic intermediate condition every once in a while.

This is because we do not know in Evolutionary Theory, we do not know a priori,

what evolved from what? Did humans evolve from apes? Or apes from humans?

We would not know that except with the fossil record.

It’s only post hoc. In a theoretical level, you might expect the bacteria are going to come

before eukaryotic organisms. You would expect one-celled eukaryotic organisms to come

from multicellular eukaryotic organisms. But did the fungi evolve before the plants?

Or did they evolve after the plants? Did they evolve before the animals?

When you get to the birds and the dinosaurs, is that the birds that evolved into the dinosaurs?

Or the dinosaurs into the birds? You would not know that except from the fossil record.

So evolution is post-dictating the evolutionary order.

It can't predict. It's got maybe three or four basic predictions and that's about it.

It can't make any further predictions. It does it post hoc. It does it based

on the order actually seen in the fossil record. Given that, there is a possibility

that a certain percentage of the time stratomorphic intermediates might actually be thrown into place

if in fact the order is random. So the observation, the comparison here,

it's hard to differentiate between these two, but rare to common versus extremely rare.

There may not be much of a distinction between it. But in most groups, it's none.

In fact, 95% of the fossil record is shallow marine invertebrates. How many stratomorphic intermediates are known

or claimed among the shallow marine invertebrates?

Not a single stratomorphic intermediate is known

in the clams, the snails, all these well-preserved--six of the seven well-preserved phyla

in the fossil record have zero stratomorphic intermediates. All claimed stratomorphic intermediates involve two claims

in the plants, and the rest in the vertebrates. That’s it.

And that is a very small percentage of the fossil record. The vertebrates are about 5%--actually the plants are

about 5% of the fossil record, and the vertebrates less, far less, than 1% of the fossil record.

So almost all of the stratomorphic intermediates are in two... well, all of them, are in two groups.

The other groups, which are better preserved, have zero

stratomorphic intermediates. So I would suggest a little bit more in the direction of the Flood here than evolution.

Issue of complexity.

Intuitively, Evolutionary Theory would expect relatively low complexity. It's really difficult to explain high complexity.

In the Flood, you could have extremely high complexity if that's already there in the world.

And of course, you already know the complexity of organisms in the fossil record is truly extraordinary.

My favorite example are the trilobites. Here's some that we can actually take X-ray photos.

We got the parts, and it's really cool. They got a locomotive system, which is amazing.

They get a respiratory system. They get a circulatory system. They got a nervous system. And in their nervous system, they have these incredible eyes.

There's a problem with hard lenses, like a lens like I'm wearing to correct my vision.

It's fine when you're close to the center of the lens,

but as you get further and further away from the center of the lens it's difficult to focus.

In fact, it's basically impossible to focus the rays on the focal point. So you have fuzziness

around the edge, which is called optical aberration, spherical aberration, in hard lenses.

There are ways, however--we found two solutions to solving that by creating the lens in a particular shape,

a bizarre shape. There's two different shapes that have been found: a surface which is somewhat sinusoidal here,

and a very much different surface. They were discovered respectively by two 17th century scientists:

Hygens and Descartes. And so here's one example of Huygens solution.

And in trilobites that use hard lenses, there are two lenses,

two hard lenses, put together with slightly different indices of refraction.

They’re using Huygens’ solution to the spherical aberration.

That's mind-blowing. This is just amazing!

Are you kidding? Wow! That is the complexity

that again--they just blow my mind! The complexity in the fossil record is extraordinary.

There's a further issue that these trilobites are doing this. And compound eyes.

There's an advantage to compound eyes. You see motion very effectively,

far more effectively than simple eyes. And the eyes of these trilobites are designed,

in some cases, to wrap around their head. There are some that wrap around the head even

to the bottom of the head. So we've determined that they have overlapping three-dimensional vision

on some of these things in a 360 degree zone. All the way around them.

Underneath them. Over them. 360 degrees, overlapping, two-dimensional, three-dimensional, vision.

And with the advantage of the compound eyes, being able to see motion,

and in each individual lens seeing without spherical aberration!

This is, like, unnecessarily, amazingly perfect! It is the most extraordinary optical system we know

of in any organism on the planet. They're dead now! They’re killed in the Flood!

The complexity of organisms is truly spectacular.

And I'll go quickly through this. There's another issue, maybe I’ll have it in another talk.

Organisms do a very efficient job of bioturbating the sediment,

getting rid of lamination in the sediment in the modern world. Lamination does not persist.

The lamination that Steve was talking about in his talk. You go down days, weeks,

months after the sediment has been deposited and there ain't no lamination left.

It's been bioturbated by organisms. And again, in the shallow marine world, 30 feet beneath the surface,

complete homogination. And because of this, you would expect

that in a Flood model where you bury things very quickly, even if there were burrowers there to bioturbate,

if the sedimentation is too rapid, the burrowers aren't going to be able to destroy the lamination.

So you would expect that in Conventional Theory,

most of the sediments of the world should be bioturbated, heavily bioturbated.

Basically no lamination found in any sediments, especially shale because the little critters

LOVE digging in the mud. And in Flood Theory, you would expect laminated sediments.

And what you actually find are that laminated sediments dominate. I mean, it's

extremely difficult to find a bioturbated settlement. There are things called bioturbated sediments,

but when you look at it more closely you realize they are not bioturbated sediments. So the very existence of the commonness

of lamination suggests that the Flood model is fitting the data better.

So whether you're talking about the rate of preservation, species completeness, diversity coming before disparity,

or disparity before diversity, first appearance order, change up section, stratomorphic intermediates, complexity,

or bioturbation, I would suggest that the Flood model explains the major features the fossil

record much better than the conventional model does.

Thank you.