The discovery eventually launched an international exploration the area the South African hills that started in 2006. This week, the results of the explorations were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).  Robert Reisz of the University of Toronto was the lead author.

Since 2005, ten nests have been discovered at several levels at this site, each with up to 34 round eggs in tightly clustered and carefully arranged clutches. The distribution of the nests in the sediments indicate that these early dinosaurs returned repeatedly (nesting site fidelity) to this site, and likely assembled in groups (colonial nesting) to lay their eggs.

Seven eggs are demonstrated in the image with one of the eggs scrapped open to reveal the underlying embryonic form of the dinosaur skeleton.

“Thus, fossil and sedimentological evidence from this nesting site provides empirical data on reproductive strategies in early dinosaurs”, the report concluded. The reproductive strategies discovered include: 1) repeated returns to the nesting site and 2) grouping of the eggs.

Entitled “Oldest known dinosaurian nesting site and reproductive biology of the Early Jurassic sauropodomorph Massospondylus”, the report was a featured story by the Smithsonian Institute, BBC News, Science Daily, Forbes, and The Huffington Post.

Amazingly, the report then claims that the evidence from the nests “provides additional insights into the initial stages of the evolutionary history of dinosaurs”. While the claim is intriguing, evidence from dinosaur nests cannot be used to validate a presupposed history of evolution.

Evidence for evolution requires transitional links between species, not evidence from nests within a species−typical evolution red-flag spin. In fact the report never even attempt to mention how these nests could even hope to provide evidence of transitional links between dinosaur species.

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin cut to the chase what investigators should be looking for: “We should always look for forms intermediate between each species” Reisz PNAS report just presumes that evolution magically happened, never even mentioning transitional intermediate links.

Simply finding and reporting on fossils is not evidence for evolution.  By using the words “dinosaur”, “fossil” and “evolution” together, the evolution industry is attempting to hoodwink support for evolution−a common trick.

More than 150 years ago, Darwin recognized that the fossil record was not kind to even his theory of evolution -

Why then is not every geological formation [fossil record] 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 serious objection which can be urged against my theory.

The late Stephen Gould in The Panda’s Thumb recognized Darwin’s dilemma noting that the “fossil record had caused Darwin more grief than joy. Nothing distressed him more”.

Isolated evidence from the nests of a single dinosaur species alone cannot provide “additional insights into the initial stages of the evolutionary history of dinosaurs”. What evolution needs are the missing transitional links.

In an attempt to work-around the vacuum of transitional links that Darwin said should be found to exist once the Earth had been fully explored, committed evolutionary paleontologists have resorted to these hoodwinking tricks.

The absence of transitional links to support Darwin’s “slight, successive” gradual evolution changes is undeniable. Niles Eldredge, paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History concluded -

Paleontologists have been insisting that their record is consistent with slow, steady, gradual evolution where I think that privately, they’ve known for over a hundred years that such is not the case.

“It has been the paleontologist, my own breed,” Eldredge opined, “who has been most responsible for letting ideas dominate reality.”

In April 2011, British palaeontologist Howard Falcon-Lang at Royal Holloway, University of London, walking through the GBS building of earth sciences spotted an old wooden cabinet hidden in a forgotten corner and “pulled open the door without breaking it, and found a series of drawers containing hundreds of rock samples.”

Normal enough stuff, until he took one out.

“I held it up to the light and tried to make out the words on the slide and there was the signature: C. Darwin, Esquire,” Falcon-Lang says, adding he could “hardly believe it. My heart was pounding all around my body.”

“Inside the drawer were hundreds of beautiful glass slides made by polishing fossil plants into thin translucent sheets,” Dr Falcon-Lang explained. “This process allows them to be studied under the microscope. Almost the first slide I picked up was labeled ‘C. Darwin Esq.’”

The specimen was a piece of fossil wood collected along the South American coast during his famous Voyage of the Beagle in 1834.

Most of the evidence Darwin used has been well documented, but the samples Howard Falcon-Lang accidentally found had been lost because Darwin entrusted them to a fellow scientist, Joseph Dalton Hooker. Hooker did not number these fossils, a problem now for a warehouse with more that 10 million rock samples. Hooker became a close friend of Darwin.

Hooker had assembled this collection of 314 slides while working for the BGS in 1846. The slides – “stunning works of art,” according to Falcon-Lang, contain bits of fossil wood and plants ground into thin sheets and affixed to glass in order to be studied under microscopes.

John Ludden, executive director of BGS said: “This is quite a remarkable discovery. It really makes one wonder what else might be hiding in our collections.”

The discovery was made in April, but it has taken “a long time” to figure out the provenance of the slides and photograph all of them, Falcon-Lang said. The slides have now been photographed and will be made available to the public through a new online museum exhibit opening Tuesday.

“Scientists are only now starting to study it and understand its scientific importance,” according to Falcon-Lang.

“This is quite a remarkable discovery,” John Ludden, executive director of the Geological Survey, said. “It really makes one wonder what else might be hiding in our collections.” Could the fossil wood specimens be Darwin’s holy fossil grail? Probably not.

In The Origin of Species, Darwin never used fossilized trees to as examples of evolutionary transitional forms. While the specimens Falcon-Lang rediscovered are stunning, the specimens failed to capture a convincing attention of Darwin or Hooker. Historically, little evidence has been gleaned from fossilized plants or from fossilized animals.

Even the infamous evolution of the horse story espoused by Darwin in The Origin of Species was disintegrated in the twentieth century.

Grasping for significance in the wood fossil highlights the problem with the theory of evolution – lack of fossil record evidence for Darwin’s “innumerable transition” links in the fossil record.  In fact, the lack of fossilized transitional links was a known problem in 1834, and the problem continues to persist.

“The distinctiveness of specific forms and their not being blended together in innumerable transitional links”, Darwin argued in 1872 edition of The Origin of Species, “is a very obvious difficulty.” Darwin continued, “Geology [the fossil record} assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against my theory.”

In the words of American evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, “fossil record had caused Darwin more grief than joy.”

In the Presidential Address at the Geological Association, Derek V. Ager dismayed of the fossil record, went on the record to say, “It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student … have now been ‘debunked.”

Senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, Colin Patterson, brings the importance of the fossil record into perspective: “Fossils may tell us many things, but one thing they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors of anything else.”

While Darwin would not be surprised by Gould, Ager, or at Colin Patterson comments, he would be disappointed in the intense interest in the trivial evidence shown by the media.

The evolution industry was once a theory in crisis, now the evolution industry is in crisis without a theory−with believers begging for any scrap of evidence.

Famous British evolutionist Richard Dawkins in Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science on the supporting side simply declares “Feathers are modified reptilian scales.”

More than twenty species of dinosaur have been collected with preserve feathers.

While birds and dinosaurs share a range of common features such as feathers, hollow pneumatized bones, gastroliths in the digestive system, nest-building and brooding behaviors, however, the sharing of features between different species is ubiquitous throughout nature. For example, while the eye of the octopus and human share common features, the octopus is not considered an ancestor to man.

Without fossil record evidence, ancestral relationship is simply speculative, at best. “Among the consensus that supports dinosaurian ancestry [of birds]”, WIKIPEDIA acknowledges, “the exact sequence of evolutionary events that gave rise to the early birds… is a hot topic.”

One of the major reasons for the dinosaur-to-bird evolutionary contention centers on evidence from the fossil record for the dinosaur scale gradually evolving into the bird feather.

Study on the origin of birds began shortly after the 1859 publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Described as a nearly complete skeleton in 1863, a new fossil bird discovery was noted to have reptilian features, including clawed forelimbs and a long, bony tail−part bird and part reptile features.

The bird fossil was named Archaeopteryx lithography−Archaeopteryx meaning “ancient wing.” The Archaeopteryx feather is recognized as one of the most beautiful fossils ever unearthed.

Given the optimal fossil conditions in German limestone, even the finest detail structures of the feather have been preserved. Armed with a combination of dinosaur and bird features, the Archaeopteryx launched the dinosaur-to-bird controversy.  By the sixth edition of The Origin of Species in 1872, Darwin gave credence to the dinosaur-to bird theory -

Even the wide interval between birds and reptiles has been shown by [Huxley] to be partially bridged over in the most unexpected manner, by the ostrich and extinct Archeopteryx.

In the words of evolutionary biologist Alan Feduccia of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Archaeopteryx “may well be the most important natural history specimen in existence … Beyond doubt it is the most widely known and illustrated fossil.”

Analysis of the fine feather details has been central to studying the transitional status of the dinosaur-to-bird theory. The Archaeopteryx quickly became recognized one of the most famous fossils ever discovered.

By the late twentieth century, the verdict on the transitional status of Archaeopteryx was settled. Barbara Stahl in Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution (1974) weighed in –

How [birds] arose initially, presumably from reptile scales, defies analysis.

Alan Feduccia, writing in the journal Science in 1979 , in the paper entitled “Feathers of the Archaeopteryx: Asymmetric Vanes Indicate Aerodynamic Function,” likewise have concluded that the feather was “essentially like those of modern birds” and not a transitional form of the feather.

John Ostrom in 1979 published a paper in the American Scientist, concluding that not only is the Archaeopteryx not a missing link, but that “No fossil evidence exists of any pro-avis. It is purely hypothetical.”

Harvard professor, known as Darwin’s 20^st-century bulldog, Ernest Mayr in 1982, even began to weigh in with caution, backpedaling by calling the Archaeopteryx discovery: “the almost perfect link between reptiles and birds.”

Paleontologist Larry Martin of the University of Kansas declared in 1985 that the “Archaeopteryx is not ancestral of any group of modern birds.”

At the International Archaeopteryx Conference in 1985, Peter Dodson concluded that the Archaeopteryx was a bird capable of flight and published his conclusion in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology: “The general credo runs as follows: Archaeopteryx was a bird that could fly” – not a transitional dinosaur-to-bird transitional link.

Robert L. Carroll, professor of biology at McGill University, in 1997 concluded, “The geometry of the flight feathers of Archaeopteryx is identical with that of modern flying birds, whereas non-flying birds have symmetrical feathers. The way in which the feathers are arranged on the wing also falls within the range of modern birds.”

Henry Gee, the chief science writer for Nature, wrote in 1999 that the missing link status of the Archaeopteryx is only an illusion; a “once upon a time” story.

So what is the truth about Archaeopteryx? Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, may have summed it up best in a letter to Luther Sunderland on April 10, 1979, writing, “such stories are not a part of science.”

Since the Archaeopteryx discovery in 1860, evolutionists have continued to flounder for feathers in the fossil record long after the evidence has been weighed.  No small wonder that WIKIPEDIA opened the discussion of the Origin of Birds with “The origin of birds is a contentious and central topic within evolutionary biology.”

Evolution was once a theory in crisis with speculative evidence, now evolution is in crisis without scientific evidence.

The evolution industry continues with an addiction to old speculations, like the Archaeopteryx, long known to be scientifically bogus.

The Archaeopteryx feather story underscores why evolution is viewed today as only a philosophy, not science.

“On the Birthplace and Antiquity of Man… it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere. But it is useless to speculate on this subject.” Charles Darwin, 1871

On the one hand, speculating on the subject of human origins, was “useless” yet in The Origin of Species, Darwin countered this argument by noting that “We should always look for forms intermediate between each species and a common but unknown progenitor.” Over the past 150 years, then, in the midst of this confusion, evolutionists have continued to look for the intermediate species leading to humans.

With new fossils are continually being found throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe, however, resolving any presumed evolutionary theory on the origins of humans continues to reinforce the long recognized reputation of the evolution industry−constant revision and contention.

Amazingly, the world of paleoanthropology since the publication of The Origin of Species has become a legacy of conflicting personalities and cliquish scientific groups. Some ideas, particularly when they are backed by arguments from authoritative figures in the industry, continue to persist long after they have been proven to be untenable.

In the mid-twentieth century, the evolution debate as to when and where Darwin’s intermediate transitional links gave rise to modern humans diverged from the other great apes became mired in philosophical perspectives−not science.

In particular, one archeologist whose name is synonymous with paleoanthropology, Louis Leaky, was perhaps one of the greatest perpetrators. While Darwin suggested that humans originated from Africa, by the early twentieth century many European scientists were beginning to be convinced otherwise.

In 1912, Charles Dawson presumably discovered a fossil from a gravel pit in the town of Piltdown in East Sussex, England. The new “fossil discovery” was given the named Eoanthropus dawson, now more commonly known as the Piltdown man. In 1913, the Piltdown man was then placed on exhibit in the British Museum of Natural History as fossil for the evolution of humans, even though undermining Darwin’s tenuous out-of-Africa theory.

British scientists, such as Sir Arthur Keith, anthropologist and fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, were so convinced that humans originated in Britain that fossils found in other areas were discredited, especially the South African fossils identified by Raymond Dart in 1925 named Australopithecus africanus. Keith considered Dart’s find, also known by the nickname the Taung Child, as another unimportant species of extinct ape.

In 1938, at the Barkham Manor in Piltdown, Sir Arthur Keith unveiled a memorial to mark the site where Piltdown man was discovered by Charles Dawson. Sir Arthur finished his speech saying:

So long as man is interested in his long past history, in the vicissitudes which our early forerunners passed through, and the varying fare which overtook them, the name of Charles Dawson is certain of remembrance.

Lee Berger, paleontologist from the University of Witwatersrand, suggests that Keith’s philosophy, not science, was the source of his dismissal of the Taung Child.  Unfortunately, over time, as Dart’s colleague Robert Broom began to find more fossil specimens in South Africa, Keith was forced to re-evaluate the Taung Child and his out-of-Europe model of evolution. Then, finally, after decades of display in the museum, in November 1953 the British Museum removed the Piltdown man exhibition because the exhibit was nothing more than an elaborate hoax. The Piltdown man was simply a fraudulent construction of a skull of a man and the jaw of an orangutan.

Nearly a decade later in 1934, a little known American paleontologist from Yale University, G. Edward Lewis, published a paper describing a number of fossil ape species he had discovered in the Siwalik Hills of northern India. Among these apes was a species he named Ramapithecus brevirostris. In 1960, Elwyn Simons pieced together more jawbone fragments and announced the fossils as evidence for the evolutionary origin of humans from ape-like animals.

This out-of-India theory ran in opposition to the more popular out-of-Africa model of human evolution theory espoused by paleoanthropologists in the early 1960s lead by Louis Leaky. In particular, Leaky argued that the series of fossil his team discovered in east Africa later named Kenyapithecus africanus was the evolutionary origin of humans.

Even though Simons’ fragmentary jaw of Ramapithecus was hardly a match for Leaky’s Kenyapithecus, the Kenyapithecus was never been too far out of the woods. Ramapithecus had supporters. During the 1950’s, the renowned paleoanthropologist Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, who along with Joseph Weiner and Kenneth Oakley who had exposed the British Museum Piltdown man fraud, advanced the argument in support of Ramapithecus as the more likely evolutionary origin of humans based on dental arcade.

While the dental arcade of Ramapithecus was V-shaped, similar to humans, by contrast the Kenyapithecus the dental arcade was U-shaped.

During the mid-twentieth century, the Simons Ramapithecus camp versus Leaky Kenyapithecus camp debate raged. Leaky was stuck on the out-of-Africa model largely from Darwin’s vague endorsement of the out-of-Africa model.

Although these two hypotheses were in direct opposition to each other, they were linked by a central anthropocentric principle. Both believed the apes were the evolutionary origins of humans. Perhaps because Leaky followed Darwin’s suggestion, he tyrannically gained the most support.

When confronted with scientific evidence opposing the theory, Leaky was known to attack the individual instead of the evidence. This is best exemplified by an event that transpired at an anthropological conference in Chicago in 1965. David Pilbeam was giving a presentation in which he was attempting to argue that Kenyapithecus africanus was actually a member of the previously identified Dryopithecus nyanzae species. This incident is recounted in Virgina Morell’s Ancestral Passions: the Leaky family and the quest for humankind’s beginnings (1996: 291):

At an anthropological conference in 1965, [Louis Leaky] jumped up and shouted at David Pilbeam, who was giving a presentation, to sit down and shut up… Terrified and appalled, Pilbeam looked around the room for someone to come to his defense. But no one – not even Pilbeam’s thesis advisor or the conference chairman– spoke up.

With chaos and contention abounding in the realms of paleontology, evolutionary scientist focused on evidence from biochemistry and genetics.

In the early 1960s, Morris Goodman, a pioneering biochemist at Wayne State University, caused even greater controversy after discovering that human blood proteins were more similar to chimpanzee and gorilla blood proteins than to apes, like Simons’ Ramapithecus or Leaky’s Kenyapithecus.

From this new biochemistry controversy, anthropologist Sherwood Washburn of Harvard University and Vincent Sarich, biochemist of the University of California, Berkley, suggested that the chimpanzee was evolutionary intermediate species leading to the origin of man, not Simons’ Ramapithecus nor Leaky’s Kenyapithecus.

The battle lines were drawn: Simons against Leaky, and Simon and Leaky against the ranks of Pilbeam, Goodman, Washburn, and Sarich.

The prospects of Ramapithecus as a transitional link to man were finally exhausted in 1982 following a systematic review by anthropologist Milford E. Wolpoff at the University of Michigan. While Simons conceded, Leaky died in 1972 without ever seeing the light.

Amazingly, the remenints of the Leaky saga are still at large, including physical anthropologist Jeffery Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh and president of the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS).

More than 150 years ago, Darwin was on target when he said “it is useless to speculate on this subject”. Since then, paleoanthropological perspectives on presumed evolutionary origin of humans has been laced with a legacy of contention fueled only by philosophy−not science.

In February of 2009, research diver Jiro Sakaue, descending into a dark fringing reef cave in the Pacific Ocean Republic of Palau, discovered a small unusual eel-like fish. The species of the fish has since been named Protaguillae palau. Prot(o) means prototype, first, or original, guilla means eel (a shortened form of Anguilliformes - an order of fish) with palau referring to the discovery location.

The problem for the theory of evolution centers on the fact that this species has continued to exist even though it is recognized as a prototype – the first and most primitive form of the species. According to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, though, as the original species begin to evolve, extinction of the “less improved and intermediate forms of life” should follow. Darwin explains in The Origin of Species:

We have seen that it is the common, the widely diffused, and widely ranging species, belonging to the larger genera within each class, which vary most; and these tend to transmit to their modified off spring that superiority which now makes them dominant in their own countries. Natural selection, as has just been remarked, leads to divergence of character and to much extinction of the less improved and intermediate forms of life.

Darwin’s even infers this concept in the full title of The Origin of Species–The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of the Favoured Races in the Struggle of Life. Accordingly, the favored races are to be preserved while the “less improved and “intermediate forms of life” are not. Darwin explains:

The theory of natural selection is grounded on the belief that each new variety and ultimately each new species, is produced and maintained by having some advantage over those with which it comes into competition; and the consequent extinction of less-favoured forms almost inevitably follows.

For Darwin, “extinction and natural selection go hand in hand” and one “must suppose that there is a power, represented by natural selection or the survival of the fittest, always intently watching each slight alteration … until a better is produced, and then the old ones to be all destroyed.” Extinction is an integral aspect of natural selection.

If Darwin’s theory of natural selection is true, then, the proto-eel should have become extinct, but it didn’t. The evidence for the continued existence of the ancient proto-eel clearly undermines Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

The scientific report of the finding, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society on-line in August headed by G. David Johnson of the Smithsonian Institute, was entitled A ‘living fossil’ eel (Anguilliformes: Protanguillidae, fam. nov.) from an undersea cave in Palau. The comparative morphology and genetic report notes the problem in the opening sentence:

We report the discovery of an enigmatic, small eel-like fish from a 35 m-deep fringing-reef cave in the western Pacific Ocean Republic of Palau that exhibits an unusual suite of morphological characters.

The discovery is certainly enigmatic for a number of reasons. Johnson notes that it is “even more primitive than the oldest known fossil eels”, yet still in existence. Since evolutionists estimate that the family of eels arrived over 200 million years ago, the proto-eel finding demonstrates evidence for stasis, not evolution.

John McCosker, chair of Aquatic Biology at the California Academy of Sciences, sums up the evolution enigma:

The analysis they have performed using morphology and genetics is brilliant and invites as many questions about eel evolution as it solves.

In other words, the eel discovery is a problem for the Darwin’s theory of natural selection. The scientific evidence from morphology and genetics has created an even greater insurmountable problem for the theory of evolution. What should have become part of the fossil record has been swimming around presumably unchanged for over 200 million years. In other words, Protaguillae palau spontaneously came out of the box functioning in perfection. That’s not evolution.

With evidence like this, professors Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini in the book What Darwin Got Wrong have been driven to conclude that “Darwin’s theory of natural selection is fatally flawed. Not only is flawed, even the concept of natural selection is simply an ‘intentional fallacy’.”

Michael Ruse agrees, “the truth is that there is virtually nothing today in evolutionary studies that corresponds to the facts of the Origin.” Even Jerry Coyne of Chicago University Evolution and Ecology Department has been driven to conclude:

We conclude—unexpectedly—that there is little evidence for the neo-Darwinian view: its theoretical foundations and the experimental evidence supporting it are weak.

Reflecting on the significance of this ancient evolution defying eel, is reason to consider the wisdom of Mark Twain:

Loyalty to petrified opinion never once broke a chain or freed a human soul.

National Public Radio (NPR) ran an article entitled “Examining Ancient Fossils for Clues to Human Origins”. The Wall Street Journal chimed in with “Fossil Trove Sheds Light on a Stage of Evolution”. The Boston Globe speculated with the title “Skeleton could be human relative”; TIME with “Rethinking Human Origins: Fossils Reveal a New Ancestor on the Family Tree”. New Scientist ran the article: South African fossils halfway between ape and human.

To name the fossil, a competition was launched in South Africa. Omphemetse Keepile, a 17-year-old student from St. Mary’s School in Johannesburg. Keepile’s winning entry was selected from more than 15,000 submissions in a naming competition sponsored by Standard Bank and Palaeontological Scientific (PAST) in association with Wits University and the Department of Science and Technology. The winning name was Karabo that means “answer” in Setswana.

Once the excitement started settling, questions started circling. Does the fossil evidence really point to Karabo as an ancestor to humans?

In September, the Los Angeles Times hinted of an issue with the discovery with the title “Hominid fossils may shake up the human family tree”. Even the National Geographic response was guarded, weighing in with “Human Ancestor May Put Twist in Origin Story, New Studies Say”.

Paleontologists Timothy White of the University of California, Berkley, and Ronald Clarke of the University of the Witwatersrand’s Institute for Human Evolution in Germany in an accompanying news article published in Science refuted the  claim that A. sediba represents a transitional species on the way up: “Given its late age and Australopithecus-grade anatomy, it contributes little to the understanding of the origin of genus Homo.” Picking up on the story, Time simply reported that “Tim White … believes A. Sediba bears no relationship to modern humans.”

Anthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University noted, “Just because it shares a bit of anatomical morphology with Homo does not mean it is Homo or ancestral to Homo.”

Writing in The Telegraph (UK), science writer Tom Chivers entitled his article “Australopithecus sediba: can we stop calling it a ‘missing link?” concluding “What it is not, however, is a ‘missing link’.”

Within a week of publication, problems with the alleged fossil record gap resolution began to emerge. On top of the new problem list is the estimated dating of Karabo. Donald Johanson paleoanthropologist at Arizona State University and founder of the Institute of Human Origins at the University of California, Berkley, noted in The New York Times that the dating “places the origins of Homo firmly in eastern Africa… prior to the dating of A. sediba.” Presuming the dating is correct, then, this means that humans-like species came before Karabo, therefore the Karabo could not be an ancestor to humans.

Surprisingly, Amina Khan of the Los Angeles Times picked up on the problem: “But the age of the fossils presents a problem. The researchers’ isotopic and magnetic dating showed the fossils were 1.977 million years old, about 300,000 years younger than a Homo habilis fossil that should have been their junior.”

Professor of Human Origins at George Washington University, Bernard Wood, concluded that the original reports are “a watershed in our understanding of human evolution, even if only to demonstrate that things are pretty complex”. Rather than clarifying human origins, Karabo complicates any presumed line of ancestral descent.

Ian Tattersall, paleoanthropologist and a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, resigned to the fact that the fossil evidence will never show the “leap to humans” because it happened “very suddenly”.

Sometimes, things never change. Eminent evolutionary paleontologist Steven Gould noted in The Panda’s Thumb: “The fossil record had caused Darwin more grief than joy.”

News for Karabo got even worse. Later in October, paleontologist Fred Spoor of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology published a critique on the Karabo fossil in the journal Nature.

Rejecting the contention that Karabo is a human ancestor, Spoor wrote that the “evidence seems at odds with the idea that A. sediba was involved in the first appearance of Homo… In spite of certain human-like characteristics – many of which are consistent with tree dwelling – the overwhelming evidence is that Au. sediba was a type of Australopithecine and thus an extinct ape rather than a human ancestor.” Karabo has now been unlinked as a human ancestor.

After more than 150 years since the publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, evidence for human ancestors in the fossil record continues to plague the evolution industry.

Like the Piltdown man, ascribing fossils to human ancestry has been tricky and, at times, even blatant fraud. With the technological advantages now available, the evolutionary value of Karabo has been clearly identified within a few weeks rather than years, or even decades. After promoted as evidence for evolution in the British Museum of Natural History in London, it took more than four decades to uncover that the Piltdown man fossil was simply a manufactured fraud sculptured from the skull of a man and a jaw of an orangutan.

Today, scientists are finding the words of D. V. Ager, past president of the Geological Association, to be even more in vogue: “It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student … have now been ‘debunked.’”

In fact, the discovery was a problem since the Neanderthal skulls are larger than human skulls. Darwin had argued that the advancement of evolution proceeded through “slight, successive changes”.

The Neanderthal fossils created a dilemma for Darwin, how could a larger brain precede a smaller brain? Darwin cautiously noted, that “it must be admitted that some skulls of very high antiquity, such as the famous one of Neanderthal, are well developed and capacious [large]”. For Darwin, the Neanderthal skulls were too large to have preceded humans.

As the fossil evidence for the Neanderthals continued to be discovered throughout Europe, the evidence seemed to point to the Neanderthals as a big game hunter transitional species leading to humans. With the goal of discovering our human evolutionary ancestors, the possibility that the Neanderthals represented a previously unknown ethnic group of humans was marginalized within the evolution industry.

During the twentieth century, at stake is whether the Neanderthals are a transitional species different from modern humans, or simply a human ethnic group.

Darwin, as we know now, was right to be cautious. Technology is answering the question. Just last year, a team lead by Svante Pääbo of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany eroded the genetic difference between the Neanderthals and modern humans after publishing the full Neanderthal genome.

Commenting on the findings, John Hawks, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, told BBC News that “They’re us. We’re them.”

“[T]he really surprising thing for many of us,” noted Professor Chris Stringer, research leader in human origins at London’s Natural History Museum, “is the implication that there has been some interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans in the past.” Since different species cannot interbreed, the Neanderthals can no longer be considered a transitional species.

Gregory Hannon of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Laurel Hollow in New York concluded that the “publication of the full Neanderthal genome is a watershed event, a major historical achievement.” Genetic evidence is clear−the Neanderthals are not genetically distinct from modern humans.

This past week, Bruce L. Hardy of Kenyon College in Ohio and Marie-Hélène Moncel of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris has further eroded the differences between the Neanderthals and modern Humans using anthropological evidence.

In the journal PLoS ONE this past week, Hardy and Moncel in the article “Neanderthal Use of Fish, Mammals, Birds, Starchy Plants and Wood 125-250,000 Years Ago”, further dispels anthropological differences between the Neanderthals and Humans.

Hardy and Moncel dispels the Neanderthal big game hunter myth: the “Neanderthals are most often portrayed as big game hunters who derived the vast majority of their diet from large terrestrial herbivores while birds, fish and plants are seen as relatively unimportant or beyond the capabilities of Neanderthals.”

At the fossil site in Payre, France, after evaluating 182 Neanderthal plant, fish and bird processing tools based in the wear and adhering biological residues on the tools, Hardy and Moncel  concluded that contrary to the once popular big game hunted paradigm, the Neanderthal diet “was quite diverse, including plants, large and small animals, fish, and possibly birds.”

“Neanderthals practiced what has been considered exclusively modern human behavior”,  Hardy and Moncel concluded. In other words, the diet of the Neanderthal is not different from modern Human.

These discoveries using previously unknown technologies continue to erode the differences rather than supporting the concept that the Neanderthals are an ancestral transitional link to human. The evolution industry is now tasked with discovering a better potential ancestral transitional link to humans.

Using state-of-the-art radiological technologies, the papers focused on the comparing the shape and size of the cranium, pelvis, hand, and ankle & foot of Karabo to humans. The fifth paper estimated the date of the fossils mains using advanced Uranium-lead dating technologies.

Within a week of publication, however, problems with the alleged fossil record gap resolution began to emerge. On top of the new problem list is the estimated dating of Karabo. Donald Johanson paleoanthropologist at Arizona State University and founder of the Institute of Human Origins at the University of California, Berkley, noted in The New York Times that the dating “places the origins of Homo firmly in eastern Africa… prior to the dating of A. sediba.” If the dating is correct, then, this means that humans-like species came before Karabo, therefore, humans could not have descended from Karabo. That is a major hurdle for the fossil record gap problem.

Surprisingly, Amina Khan of the Los Angeles Times picked up on the huddle: “But the age of the fossils presents a problem. The researchers’ isotopic and magnetic dating showed the fossils were 1.977 million years old, about 300,000 years younger than a Homo habilis fossil that should have been their junior.”

Paleoanthropologist Fred Spoor of University College London and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany also pointed out that “could not themselves have given rise to Homo [human-like species]” according to Ann Gibbons in an article in Science entitled “Skeletons Present an Exquisite Paleo-Puzzle.”

The gaps in the fossil record continue to be a problem for developing a comprehensive theory of human evolution.  Last year, Science noted Johanson’s concern in the article entitle”Candidate Human Ancestor From South Africa Sparks Praise and Debate.” Johanson said that the “The oldest Homo specimens are scrappy and enigmatic, leaving researchers unsure about the evolutionary steps between the australopithecines and Homo. … The transition to Homo continues to be almost totally confusing.”

Science pined that while “Our genus Homo is thought to have evolved… there are few fossils that provide detailed information on this transition.”

A recent ABC News article agrees, noting that “Scientists have long talked about a ‘missing link’ between very old fossils… There is a gap in the fossil record, so far unexplained. Does Australopithecus sediba help fill the gap? Not on its own, say most researchers…”

“The team says the new species may be the best candidate yet for the immediate ancestor of our genus, Homo,” wrote Michael Balter of the Science staff in an overview piece. However, “That last claim is a big one, and few scientists are ready to believe it themselves just yet.”

Writing in Science in 2010, paleoanthropologist and Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, Tim White, pointed out that “Given its late age and Australopithecus-grade anatomy, it contributes little to the understanding of the origin of genus Homo.” Picking up on the story, Time simply reported that “Tim White … believes A. Sediba bears no relationship to modern humans.”

After reviewing the most recent papers in Science, Professor of Human Origins at George Washington University, Bernard Wood, concluded that the reports are “a watershed in our understanding of human evolution, even if only to demonstrate that things are pretty complex”. Rather than clarifying human origins, Karabo complicates any presumed line of ancestral descent.

Ian Tattersall, paleoanthropologist and a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, resigned to the fact that the fossil evidence will never show the “leap to humans” because it happened “very suddenly”.

After 150 years since the publication of The Origin of Species, the evidence continues to contradict rather than support Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution−a problem Darwin was keenly aware of. As Steven Gould noted in The Panda’s Thumb, “The fossil record had caused Darwin more grief than joy.”

Even while leading paleoanthropologists, including Bernard Wood, Donald Johanson, Fred Spoor, Ian Tattersal, and Tim White, are clearly convinced that Karabo is not a human ancestor the media continues to twist the evidence to support the evolution industry.  The handling of Karabo highlights, again, the anti-science rhetoric of the popular media to support of the evolution industry.

National Public Radio (NPR) ran an article entitled “Examining Ancient Fossils for Clues to Human Origins”. The Wall Street Journal chimed in with “Fossil Trove Sheds Light on a Stage of Evolution”. The Boston Globe speculated with the title “Skeleton could be human relative”; TIME with “Rethinking Human Origins: Fossils Reveal a New Ancestor on the Family Tree”.

The Los Angeles Times hinted of an issue with the discovery with the title “Hominid fossils may shake up the human family tree”. Even the National Geographic response was guarded, weighing in with “Human Ancestor May Put Twist in Origin Story, New Studies Say”.

Ironically, the discovery is raising more evolutionary questions than answers. In fact, despite the media hype, the report in Science points out that only a “Few other researchers are convinced that A. sediba was a direct ancestor of humans.” In other words, contrary to the contention that A. sediba is a human ancestor.

The flurry can be traced back to August 15, 2008 when South African paleoanthropologist Lee Berger’s nine-year-old son, Matthew, stumbled upon a fossilized bone while exploring the hills north of Johannesburg on the Malapa Nature Reserve.

“Sticking out of the back of the rock was a mandible with a tooth, a canine, sticking out. And I almost died”, Matthew later recalling the 2008 event. The fossil belonged to a 4 foot 2 inch male, the skull of which was discovered later in March 2009 by Berger’s team.

In 2010 the skull along with more skeletal reamins were initially described in two papers in the journal Science by Lee R. Berger and colleagues. Sediba means “natural spring”−presuming to be the spring from which humans evolved. According to Berger, “They do represent a model that could lead to the genus Homo”. In total, 220 bones belonging to five individuals have now been recovered in South Africa, an area touted as the “Cradle of Humankind”, conforming to the still controversial “out of Africa” theory of evolution.

A. sediba has since been affectionately re-named as Karabo. The name was selected over 15,000 other South African entry submissions during a naming competition sponsored by Standard Bank and the Palaeontological Scientific (PAST) in association with Wits University. In Setswana, Karabo means “answer”.

At issue, though, what “answer” does A. sediba bring to the table? For researcher Kristian Carlson at the University of Witwatersrand,  “Whether or not it’s on the same lineage as leading to Homo, I think there are interesting questions and implications.” ”Questions” and “implications”, however, are not to be confused with “answers”. For Philip Rightmire of  Harvard University, “Evolution is [now] more convoluted than we thought.” Ironically, Matthew’s finding, rather than having an “answer” to the question of human evolution, applies an even greater centrifugal forces on the current models of human evolution.

Paleontologists Timothy White of the University of California, Berkley, and Ronald Clarke of the University of the Witwatersrand’s Institute for Human Evolution in Germany in an accompanying news article published in Science refutes Berger’s claim that A. sediba represents a transitional species on the way up.

In the wake of the article this week in Science, anthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University noted, “Just because it shares a bit of anatomical morphology with Homo does not mean it is Homo or ancestral to Homo.”

Writing in The Telegraph (UK), science writer Tom Chivers entitled his article “Australopithecus sediba: can we stop calling it a ‘missing link?” concluding “What it is not, however, is a ‘missing link’.”

 A. sediba was soon recognized as a new species and classified with the australopithecines. The most famous member of this group is Australopithecus afarensis, better known as Lucy discovered in Ethiopia in November 1974 by Tom Gray and Donald Johanson.

In analyzing the skeletal features of Lucy, Charles E. Oxnard concluded in 1984 in his book The Order of Man that it “is now being recognized widely that the australopithecines are not structurally … similar to humans.”

In the journal publication Natural History, Stephen Gould, in 1986, took the same stand as Oxford against the human ancestry of A. afarensis: “In short, he [Oxnard] sees Australopithecines as uniquely different from apes and humans, not as imperfect people on the way up.” Later in 1987 in Natural History, Stephen Gould acknowledged that problems with the fossil evidence for human evolution overwhelm any cohesive theory since “we do not know which branch on the copious bush of apes budded off the twig that led to our lineage … no fossil evidence exists at all.”

Ann Gibbons published in the journal Science in 1996 how convoluted the evidence for human evolution has become: “The story of human evolution has lately become as complicated as a Tolstoy novel.”

“They’re going to have to make a stronger case,” said paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson of Arizona State University, who discovered Lucy. Johanson, a friend of Berger’s who has seen the fossils, said the only solution would be to look for more evidence. “I know this is a terrible thing to say,” he said. “But we’d all like to [understand] the shape of the [human family] tree and the positions on the tree — and we really do need more fossils.”
In the 1976 Presidential Address at the Geological Association, D. V. Ager dismayed of the fossil record, and went on the record to say, “It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student … have now been ‘debunked.’”

The fossil record problem continues to be a question mark−not an answer, not a Karabo. In The Panda’s Thumb, evolutionary paleontologist Stephen Gould, feeling the agony noted that in reality, the “fossil record had caused Darwin more grief than joy.”

Last week’s spinning the Australopithecus sediba saga underscores the desperation of the evolution industry to use even Matthew Berger’s inconclusive A. sediba fossil evidence to prove evolution as “a fact”, especially since the topic of evolution has entered center stage in the 2012 Presidential campaign. The fact is, the emperor indeed has no clothes.

Little did Matthew Berger know how his excitement would re-ignite evolution’s primary problem−the lack of fossil record evidence.

“I hear your mom was asking about evolution,” Perry said. “That’s a theory that is out there — and it’s got some gaps in it.”

Writing in The Guardian, an original supported of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution starting in the nineteenth century, liberal commentator Paul Krugman in his column, The Observer, ran crazy with the comment in the article entitled “The Republicans are now the anti-science party, on climate change and evolution, the party’s presidential hopefuls are wilfully ignorant.”

“Mr Perry, the governor of Texas,” according to Krugman, “recently made headlines by dismissing evolution as just a theory’, one that has “got some gaps in it”, an observation that will come as news to the vast majority of biologists.” Really?

Apparently, Krugman is “wilfully ignorant” about the “majority of biologists”. The book, Evolution-the Extended Synthesis published by MIT Press explains in detail why the “gaps” in evolution theory still persist.

The Evolution-the Extended Synthesis was written by sixteen leading scientists from around the world that met in Altenberg, Austria during the summer of 2008. The purpose of the meeting was to develop a new unifying and comprehensive theory of evolution to eliminate the “gaps” as mentioned by Perry. This meeting has been since been popularly called the Altenberg-16 Summit.

What emerged from the summit meeting, ironically, were sixteen different theories rather than a one unifying and comprehensive theory. Today, amazingly there are more “gaps” in the theory  of evolution than at any time since the publication of The Origin of Species by Darwin in 1859.

Kruger, apparently, is not aware of the controversies with the evolution of theories over the past 150 years, including Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, and the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis. No theory, to date, has arisen as an adequate unifying candidate to account for presumed evolution. Today, the field of evolution not only has gaps”, evolution is simply a philosophy without a scientific theory.

Ann Coulter was quick to jump into the debate with the blog posted on Human Events. However, unlike Kruger, Coulter in the post entitled “Liberals’ View of Darwin Unable to Evolve” on August 31^st with substance rather than typical extinct rhetoric produced by the government financed evolution industry.

From the genetic evidence, Coulter points out that scientist now recognize that “the vast majority of mutations are deleterious to the organism.” Krugman, apparently, is “wilfully  ignorant” that mutations, the foundation of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis theory, have been abandoned as a theoretical mechanism for evolution.

Damaged genetic data cannot pave a road to progressively greater complexity as once anticipated by genetic evolutionists during the twentieth century.

As Coulter notes, not only do evolutionists have a problem with the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis theory, they have problem with the fossil record: “We also ought to find a colossal number of transitional organisms in the fossil record — for example, a squirrel on its way to becoming a bat, or a bear becoming a whale,” “But that’s not what the fossil record shows. We don’t have fossils for any intermediate creatures in the process of evolving into something better. This is why the late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard referred to the absence of transitional fossils as the ‘trade secret’ of paleontology.” Krugman, apparently, is “wilfully ignorant” that the fossil record is a problem, not a solution, for the evolution industry.

How did evolutionists end up with a problem rather than a viable theory? Coulter explains: “Darwinists start with a theory and then rearrange the evidence.” Krugman, apparently, is “wilfully ignorant” that starting with Darwin,
the evolution industry has long since abandoned the scientific method. After the sparring, the obvious fact emerges, Krugman, not the Republicans, represent news media “anti-science” journalism.

Never has a theory played such leverage in a national presidential election campaign. Perhaps, Coulter is wrong - the Krugman camp is evolving into extinction.

Go campaign 2012.

Fossils provide the only relevant evidence validate the history of life on Earth. Nicholas J Butterfield, of Cambridge University explains –

Fossils provide the only direct record of ancient life.

The fossil record documents what life was like over the life span of the Earth’s history. In fact, the “inconceivably great” number of connecting transitional links in the fossil record was the litmus test for Charles Darwin’s proposed theory of natural selection –

By the theory of natural selection all living species have been connected…. So that the number of intermediates and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great. But assuredly, if this theory is true, such have lived upon the earth.

While that was the theory, Darwin knew that the available evidence, at the time, did not demonstrate connecting transitional links in the fossil record and actually served as an argument against his theory. In Chapter 10 The Origin of Species, Darwin explains -

In the sixth chapter I enumerated the chief objections which might be justly urged against the views maintained in this volume. Most of them have now been discussed. One, namely the distinctness of specific forms, and their not being blended together by innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty.

At the time, Darwin listed in The Origin of Species two reasons why the fossil record evidence at the time did not support his theory, 1) “natural collections [fossils] have been imperfectly made”, and 2), only a “small portion of the surface of the Earth has been geologically explored.”

Since Darwin’s original observations in the nineteenth century, scientists have been stunned to discover the amazing quality of fossil preservation, even in Cambrian fossils. Nicholas J Butterfield in the paper entitled “Exceptional Fossil Preservation and the Cambrian Explosion” published in Integrative & Comparative Biology, 2003, contrary to Darwin’s argument, found that even Cambrian fossil are of “exceptional preservation”. Butterfield found that the Cambrian fossil “yield exceptionally fine paleobiological resolution.” An example of this level of preservation can be seen in the Leanchoilia superlata,  a Cambrian fossil specimen.

Since Darwin wagered the second argument, in the aftermath of circumventing the Earth for more than 150 years, the “innumerable transitional links” continue to be just as elusive. As David Raup of the University of Chicago explains -

Ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transitions than we had in Darwin’s time.

Stephen J Gould of Harvard University, agrees -

The fossil record doesn’t show gradual change and every paleontologist has known that.

Amazingly, even Douglas Futuyma of State University of New York at Stony Brook, points out the obvious –

The supposition that evolution proceeds very slowly and gradually, and so should leave thousands of fossil intermediates of any species in its wake, has not been part of evolutionary theory for more than thirty years.

In 1976 Derek Ager, past-president of the British Geological Association, in an opening statement at their annual meeting pined “It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student… have now been ‘debunked.’” Niles Eldredge, paleontologist of the American Museum of Natural History, added, “No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. It seems never to [have] happened.”

Since Darwin argued in The Origin of Species that “Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory,” the question is would Darwin believe in his own theory today?

The fossil flight is airborne. However, none of Darwin’s missing transitional links are in the cargo-hold. The time for loading in the cargo has come and gone. The evolution industry worn-out strategy of promoting “new fossil finds with new insights” come too late—the flight is gone. The game is over. No wonder Italian geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti and editor of the longest running biology journal in the world reflecting back on the history of evolution confidently clarifies the record -

There never really has been a scientific theory of evolution.

Gerd B Műller, one of the Altenberg-16 and Professor and Department Head Department of Theoretical Biology, University of Vienna & Konrad Lorenz Institute, in the book entitled Evolution, the Extended Synthesis (2010) published by The MIT Press, explains today’s theoretical evolutionary problem with the evidence from the Cambrian Explosion—extinction, not evolution.

Even though only around 35 body plans (corresponding to major phyla) exist today, estimates are that more than 100 may have originated before and during the Cambrian explosion, indicating that a greater generative potential had existed… This points to the peculiarity of the evolutionary problem of body plan origination.

While an estimated 100 different types of body plans have been discovered in the fossil remains of associated with the Cambrian Explosion, only 35 body plans exist today. The Cambrian fossil record evidence contradicts the basic tenets of Charles Darwin‘s theory of evolution in The Origin of Species.

Underlying the theory of evolution is the concept of “slight, successive” innovative changes over millions of years creating Darwin’s elusive “Tree of Life” from the microbe to man. However, the explosion of new life forms in the Cambrian fossil record clearly contradicts Darwin’s theory. A fact well known to Darwin –

[I]t is indisputable that before the lowest Cambrian stratum was deposited … several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks.

The implication of the Cambrian evidence was “a valid argument against the views here entertained,” in Darwin’s own words. But Darwin countered arguing that once the vastness of the world had been explored, the theory would be vindicated.

In 1872, the British Parliament commissioned the HMS Challenger to explore the vastness of the world searching for Darwin’s “slight, successive” transitional links. After nearly 4 years at sea sailing over 60,000 miles the evidence HMS Challenger the evidence stunning the emerging evolution industry—no transitional were discovered. The report, however, was not released until 1895, long after Darwin had been laid to rest in Westminster Abbey in 1882.

The problem Darwin recognized in 1859 continued to be unresolved in 1895, and now continues unresolved in 2011—more than 150 years later. In the years following the discovery of Gregor Mendel’s laws of inheritance at the turn of the 20^th century, the focus for finding evidence for evolution turned away from the fossil record and towards molecular biology, specifically genetics. Darwinism was replaced by the emerging Modern Evolutionary Synthesis theory.

In the aftermath of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis collapse, however, scientists have returned to the fossil record only to find problems and not solutions to Darwin’s missing “slight, successive” transitional links dilemma.

What is missing, are the body plans found in the Cambrian Explosion—more than 60% of the Cambrian body plans have undergone extinction, not evolution.

Nobel Prize winner, Jacques Monod, explains the dilemma –

[A] curious aspect if the theory of evolution is that everyone thinks he understands it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually, as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Critical of his own work, in a letter to H. Falconer in October 1862, Darwin wrote –

I look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the Origin will be proved to be rubbish; but I expect and hope that the framework will stand.

While the philosophical framework has stood for over 150 years, as Darwin had anticipated, the scientific evidence has undermined the theory. Without fossil evidence, a comprehensive theory of evolution remains an eternal mirage. As Alan C. Love of the University of Minnesota has concluded -

My account also meshes with the recognition that a fully unified view of evolutionary processes may be out of reach.

Evolution, once a theory in crisis, is now in crisis without a theory standing against contradictory evidence—a model of extinction, not evolution.

For Charles Darwin, natural selection was the key natural law driving evolution, as reflected in the title, On the Origin of Species, by Means of Natural Selection. Natural selection was envisioned as the mechanism for the origin of species—evolution.

Darwin declared – “I do believe that natural selection will generally act very slowly, only over long periods of time…. natural selection acts slowly by accumulating slight, successive, favorable variations.” In essence, natural selection was simply founded on a belief.

Darwin was very clear; natural selection was developed as an extension of a philosophical belief in evolution, not the result of scientific analysis of the evidence. Natural selection was not based on scientific observations since Darwin knew that even the fossil record evidence actually contradicted his theory –

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 argued against my theory.

Natural selection, amazingly, was simply developed from fabricated evidence. Darwin explains how this worked –

In order to make it clear how, as I believe, natural selection acts, I must beg permission to give one or two imaginary illustrations.

Darwin was forced to abandon the Scientific Method to propose natural selection as a natural law of evolution even though the Scientific Method had been established in academic circles for more than 200 years by Francis Bacon. Use of “imaginary illustrations” is only suitable for science fiction, not for scientific analysis.

Since the laws of nature are autonomous from human reasoning, the underlying tenet of the Scientific Method in the discovery of natural laws is inductive reasoning, not deductive reasoning. But, Darwin abandoned inductive reasoning. In a letter to Asa Gray at Harvard University, Darwin honestly set his record straight -

What you hint at generally is very, very true: that my work is grievously hypothetical, and large parts are by no means worthy of being called induction.

While Darwin was concerned about his hypothetical deductive approach, he garnered widespread support, anyway. Even his older brother, Erasmus, just a week before the publication of The Origin of Species, consoled Darwin in a letter –

In fact, the a priori reasoning is so entirely satisfactory to me / that if the facts won’t fit, why so much the worse for the facts, in my feeling.

The Origin of Species was certainly not a scientific work based on scientific principles; amazingly, even Darwin makes this point very clear –

I am quite conscious that my speculations run quite beyond the bounds of true science.

As a consequence, during the 20 years while working on The Origin of Species, Darwin developed a litany of contradictions and highlighted in Darwin, Then and Now. In the final analysis, even Darwin recognized fundamental problems with natural selection as a mechanism for evolution -

Natural selection… is by far the most serious special difficulty which my theory has encountered.

Even Charles Lyell, Darwin’s good friend and originator of old earth uniformitarianism with the book Principles of Geology, never endorsed natural selection, much to the distain of Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s 19^th century bulldog. Darwin and Lyell were not alone, 20^th century scientists agree. Conrad H Waddington, a renowned evolutionary paleontologist, spells it out -

There, you do come to what is, in effect, a vacuous statement: Natural selection is that some things leave more offspring than others; and you ask, which leave more offspring than others; and it is those that leave more offspring; and there is nothing more to it than that.

Natural selection is the big Black Box of evolution. No one knows what it is, where it came from, or how it even works. Italian geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti agrees with Waddington -

Natural selection could perhaps be invoked as a mechanism accounting for the survival of the species. But the claim that natural selection is creative of life… can only leave one dumbstruck.

In the 2010 book entitled What Darwin Got Wrong, even “card-carrying” atheists, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Palmarini, came to the very same conclusion –

We have both spent effort and ink… to show that Darwin’s theory of natural selection is fatally flawed.

In the book, The Altenberg 16: An Expose of the Evolution Industry, Suzan Mazar explores the mechanism of natural selection with “esteemed Harvard evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin in a phone conversation what role natural selection plays in evolution, he [only] said, ‘Natural selection occurs.’”

During the interview with Mazar, Lewontin only described the mechanism of natural selection by means of the following capitalism analogy -

Well, that where Darwin got the idea from, that’s for sure… He read the stock market every day… How do you think he made a living?

Mazar, in an interview with Anthony Lima-de-Faria, the award winning Swedish cytogeneticist, posed the question – “You’ve called natural selection ‘the opium of the biologist for over 100 years.’ … So why are most biologists and textbooks and scientific academies still embracing natural selection?”

Lima-de-Faria answered -  “Selection is a political not a scientific concept. At the time of Darwin it fitted perfectly the expanding colonialism of Victorian England.”

Bruce Runnegar, paleontologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, cuts to the chase -

Natural selection is not a mechanism.

Natural selection was then, as it is now, irrelevant to the origin on species and, more importantly, the origin of life.

At the time of the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, the topic of evolution was “in the air”, according to Charles Darwin, all 1,250 printed copies of the book were sold on the first day. The Origin of Species delivered a state of evolution critique on other popular theories.

In the nineteenth century, critiques on theories of evolution raged all the way into the chambers of the British Parliament. To resolve the debate the Parliament commissioned of the HMS Challenger, the largest international expedition ever convened, with the task of finding Darwin’s theoretical “innumerable” transitional links.

Ironically, Darwin was even a critic of his own theory. Based on the known fossil record evidence, in The Origin of Species Darwin argued: “The distinctiveness of specific forms and their not being blended together in innumerable transitional links is a very obvious difficulty”.

Embracing the debate, the British Parliament commissioned the HMS Challenger expedition, even though Darwin had ironically argued that the transitional links did not even exist in the known fossil record,

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 argued against my theory.

Arguments are honorable hallmarks, representative of the pursuit of truth. The Darwin legacy continued into the twenty-first century. During the summer of 2008, Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd Müller convened 16 leading evolutionary scientists at the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Altenberg, Austria to critique and “extended evolutionary synthesis”—an event now known as the Altenberg-16 Summit.

For Darwin, arguments against his theory were expected and accepted . “I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced,” Darwin noted in the Introduction to the 6^th Edition of The Origin of Species, “often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived.”

Stuart Newman, one of the Alternberg-16 and open critic of Darwinism, in an interview with Suzan Mazur notes, notes that debate is essential: “Unless the discourse around evolution is opened up to scientific perspectives beyond Darwinism, the education of generations to come is a risk of being sacrificed to the benefit of a dying theory.”

In the final analysis Newman concedes, “No natural law may suffice to describe the full evolution of the biosphere, human economy, and the human culture.” Newman advocates self-organization to explain the evolution of new species.

Newman’s theory is debatable, and the role of self-organization in evolution has not been widely accepted. Massimo Paittelli-Palmarini of the University of Arizona and co-author of the book What Darwin Got Wrong disagrees with Newman:

Self-organization is of course important component, but not much has been discovered beyond generalities. The immense amount of intricate detail that geneticists and developmentalists have been discovering over the years dwarfs general metaphors like autoevolution and even self-organization.

The point is: debate continues a healthy Darwinian legacy. What are the mechanisms of evolution? No one knows. In the book Evolution-The Extended Synthesis published by MIT Press that summarizes the Altenberg discussions, Massimo Pigliucci highlights the current debate between competing theories of evolution.

While Darwin’s original theory of evolution died at the end of the 19^th century, the Darwin legacy of critique has continued, except within the extreme elements of the evolution industry.

In fact, extreme elements in the evolution industry are actively seeking to silence any challenge to Darwinian evolution. The latest is the firing of David Coppedge, system administrator at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, for challenging Darwinian evolution. Intolerance raises the red flag of McCarthyism.

While the actions of NASA over the firing of David Coppedge are still under review, contact Charles Bolden, NASA’s administrator, to express your outrage over the firing of Coppedge at 202-358-1010 or send an email to charles.bolden@nasa.gov.

Intolerance of arguments by the extreme elements in the evolution industry are clearly anti-Darwinian and anti-science.

Stressing the importance of the fossil record to the theory of evolution Charles Darwin wrote – “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ exists which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”

Evidence for these “numerous, successive, slight modifications” in the fossil record remains a cornerstone to establish scientifically the theory of evolution. Darwin recognized, however, that the fossil record, “not being blended together by innumerable transitional links is a very obvious difficulty.”

Since 1859, the unsuccessful search through the fossil record for the expected intermediate or transitional links has produced a legacy of fraud.

In the journal Science (December 24, 2010), in the article entitled “Altering the Past: China’s Faked Fossils Problem”, Richard Stone highlights the current state of fossil fraud in China: “Specialists and collectors around the world have long decried the flood of sham fossils pouring out of China. But Science has learned that many composites and fakes are now finding their way into Chinese museums, especially local museums. One paleontologist estimates that more than 80% of marine reptile specimens now on display in Chinese museums have been ‘altered or artificially combined to varying degrees.’”

Over the past century, the Darwinian theory of evolution has played a significant role in China. While China was largely isolated when The Origin of Species was published in 1859, forty years later, however, a man by the name of Yan Fu introduced Darwinian evolution into China.

Fu was convinced that China must become acquainted with the philosophy of Darwinism in order that the country might survive by its own power, not relying on uncontrollable events or “destiny”. Fu extended Darwin’s biological theory of evolution to include social evolution, a logical application—Social Darwinism.

Educated in England, Yen Fu eventually became the most famous Social Darwinist in China. His message was well received by the Chinese. The 1890’s were a period of reform for China, a time of scrutinizing philosophies. Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, an influential spokesperson for the reform movement, began to promote Darwinian evolution.

Liang Ch’i-ch’ao fled China when the Manchu Empress Dowager attempted to subdue the reform movement; however, he continued to publish writings that were secretly imported to the people of China. Along with the philosophy of Karl Marx, the Chinese eventually revolted against the Manchu and the result was a constant warring of powers over the next 50 years—“survival of the fittest”.

Poet Alfred Lord Tennyson captured the essence of “survival of the fittest” in the now famous phrase—“Nature red in tooth and claw.”

The now infamous “Archaeoraptor” finding, published in the National Geographic Magazine, November 1999, was a product of China. The amazing fossil discovery, “Archaeoraptor”, a new species that appeared to be part dinosaur, part bird, was claimed to be the long sought after missing link between the two.

Philip Currie of the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada, and one of the scientists involved in the examination of Archaeoraptor for National Geographic, boasted:  “We’re looking at the first dinosaur that was capable of flying.”

Several months later in the March 2000 issue of National Geographic, the magazine published a letter to the editor from Xu Xing, one of the scientists who had first examined and discussed the fossil discovery. The letter stated, “After observing a new, feathered dromaeosaur specimen … [t]hough I do not want to believe it, Archaeoraptor appears to be composed of a dromaeosaur tail and a bird body.”

Tragically, copies of the National Geographic November 1999 issue in libraries worldwide do not have the warning alert.

The “Archaeoraptor” illustrates the problem when the theory dominates a scientific investigation. Darwin touted this same approach in a letter to John Scott in 1863: “I would suggest to you the advantage … let the theory guide your observations.”

Since then, Darwinism has continued, as recommended by Darwin – let the theory guide the interpretation of the facts—an approach incompatible with the Scientific Method.

“Altering the Past: China’s Faked Fossils Problem” by Richard Stone serves as reminder: China, along with the evolution industry, starting with the Piltdown man, has developed a profitable business of re-inventing and selling the “scientific” evidence they “discovered.”

The fossil record has been as a problem for evolution, then and now

B-rex is actually a Tyrannosaurus rex, otherwise known as T-rex, found in Montana and the fossil was re-named after Bob Harmon, the chief preparator of paleontology Museum of the Rockies in Montana. The primary interest in B-rex centered on the discovery soft-tissue and blood vessels in the estimated 68-million-year-old dinosaur.

Since this medullary tissue in the bone marrow is similar to birds, speculations on the evolution of dinosaur to bird once again emerged in the prime time media. The original report was published in the March 25, 2005, issue of the journal Science was entitled “Gender-Specific Reproductive Tissue in Ratites and Tyrannosaurus rex”.

Surprisingly, along with the interest in the dinosaur-bird connection, more importantly, in the B-rex fossil fragments were found cells and tissues that have remained intact with flexibility and elasticity—a characteristic not thought to be possible after lying in the ground 68 million years.

The evidence is shaking up the paleontology world. “I am quite aware that according to conventional wisdom and models of fossilization, these structures aren’t supposed to be there, but there they are,” said Schweitzer in a newswise interview in 2005. “I was pretty shocked.”

Horner, expanding on Schweitzer’s comments said, “I see this as a really important discovery that will change our methods of collecting and study. We can truly begin asking biomolecular questions. The discovery also means that our preconceived ideas about preservation were wrong.”

Scientists are now facing the challenge that either fossil preservation of cells, also known as soft-tissue, for millions years is possible, or B-rex is only thousands of years old—not millions of years.

Since the medullary tissue in the bone marrow of B-rex is similar to birds, after interviewing Horner, Schweitzer and Carroll, Lesley Stahl declared that the “dinosaur-bird connection is largely settled now”—in other words, birds evolved from dinosaurs.

Charles Darwin addressed the dinosaur-bird evolution theory in The Origin of Species: “Even the wide interval between birds and reptiles has been shown by [Huxley] to be partially bridged over in the most unexpected manner, by the ostrich and extinct Archaeopteryx.”

At the time, the newly discovered Archaeopteryx fossil in Germany fueled Darwin’s origin of bird speculation. The dinosaur-bird theory of evolution has been the center of research since the fourth edition of The Origin of Species in 1866,

In the book Historical Geology, Carl Dunbar wrote in 1961 that it would be difficult to find a more perfect link or “cogent proof” of the reptilian ancestry of the birds. To paleontologist Pat Shipman, the Archaeopteryx is “more than the world’s most beautiful fossil … [it is] an icon—a holy relic of the past that has become a powerful symbol of the evolutionary process itself. It is the First Bird.”

As the scientific evidence continued to mount later in the twentieth century, however, the dinosaur-bird theory of evolution had faded into an evolutionary fable.

At the center of the missing link, status of the Archaeopteryx was feather. According to Darwin, natural selection acts only by “successive, slight modification.” The question is how did the reptile scale change by “slight, successive” changes into a feather?

By the early 1970s, paleontologists began to seriously question the “transitional link” status of the Archaeopteryx scale-feather. In the words of Barbara Stahl in Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution (1974): “How [birds] arose initially, presumably from reptile scales, defies analysis.”

Alan Feduccia and colleagues, writing in the journal Science in 1979, in the paper entitled “Feathers of the Archaeopteryx: Asymmetric Vanes Indicate Aerodynamic Function,” likewise have concluded that the Archaeopteryx feather was “essentially like those of modern birds” and not a transitional form of the feather.

From the International Archaeopteryx Conference in 1985, Peter Dodson published his conclusion in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology: “The general credo runs as follows: Archaeopteryx was a bird that could fly”—not a transitional dinosaur-bird.

Since a dinosaur-bird paleontology, molecular biology, or genetic transitional link does not exist beyond the speculations of Horner, Schweitzer, and Carroll, had Lesley Stahl known the larger debate, the more logical declaration would have been, the “dinosaur-bird evolutionary theory continues to be largely disconnected from the evidence.”

The evolution industry continues scrambling to retrofit evidence into the ever elusive evolution paradigm—a philosophical imperative for the 60 Minute intellectual elite.

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin envisioned that “natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favourable variations; it can produce no great or sudden modifications.”

Since 1859, the search for Darwin’s “slight, successive” accumulated actions of natural selection has become a driving scientific and societal phenomenon. In 1872, the British Parliament commissioned the HMS Challenger for first international exploration to discover the “missing links” resulting from natural selection.

Like the HMS Challenger experience, evidence for “slight, successive” evolutionary changes continues to be an elusive pursuit—in the fossil record and now in molecular biology. Darwin’s dilemma deepens with the latest evidence from the Denisova caves in Russia.

In 2008, Russian archeologists working at the site of Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia uncovered a small bone fragment from the fifth finger of a juvenile hominin, initially dubbed as the “X-woman”. A tooth had been previously unearthed in the same cave area.

Interest in the project began to develop momentum. In March of this year, Kate Wong in Scientific America published an article entitled “No Bones about It: Ancient DNA from Siberia Hints at Previously Unknown Human Relative”—hinting at an ancestral evolutionary relationship to humans. Early this year, expectations were running high that the pinky and tooth was eventually going to demonstrate a human evolution link simply by DNA analysis.

To demonstrate the molecular “slight, successive” link to humans, a team of scientists led by David Reich, Richard Green, Johannes Krause along with Swedish biologist Svante Pääbo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany sequenced mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) extracted from the fragment.

The investigators were startled by the findings. Contrary to initial expectations, the report published in the December 23 issue of the journal Nature found that fossilized finger “was not involved in the putative gene flow from Neanderthals into Eurasians” and that the tooth was “distinct from Neanderthals and modern humans”.

“We thought it was a mistake when we first saw it,” Reich wrote. “But it’s real.”

Richard Green of the University of California, Santa Cruz noted: “The story [human evolution] now gets a bit more complicated.”

Evidence from the Denisova finger mtDNA, rather than pointing to “slight, successive” changes in human evolution, highlights a deeper evolutionary dilemma—there are no known “slight, successive” molecular changes accounting for human evolution.

At a news conference, Krause said that the lab, sequencing mtDNA from several samples, was startled to discover the unexpected. “The sequence was similar to humans, but very distinct from humans,” he said. After performing many tests to ensure the results were not an artifact, “I called Svante on his mobile [phone] and told him to sit down.”

Pääbo, who was in the U.S. at the time, said, “It was absolutely amazing. At first, I didn’t believe him. I thought he was pulling my leg…. This was some new creature that has not been on our radar screens so far.”

Professor Chris Stringer, human origins researcher at London‘s Natural History Museum and one of the leading proponents of the recent single-origin hypothesis, remarked: “This new DNA work provides an entirely new way of looking at the still poorly understood evolution of humans in central and eastern Asia.”

Twenty-eight coauthors worked on the paper, including researchers from Germany, Spain, China, Russia, Canada, and the United States. This research was supported by the Max Planck Society, the Krekeler Foundation, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

This highly financed international evolution industry initiative, following in the legend of the HMS Challenger, once again only found new species—not “missing links”. The fossil, now known as Denisova hominin, is “very distinct from humans” and certainly not one of the “slight, successive” human ancestors as envisioned by Darwin.

Evolution once a theory in crisis, is now in crisis without a theory.

Often called the most important scientific book ever, Charles Lyell‘s Principles of Geology published in three volumes from 1830-33, shook prevailing views of how Earth had been formed.

Lyle challenged the premise that the history of the Earth has experienced supernatural and catastrophes events, including Noah’s flood as documented in Genesis. Ironically, Lyell was a graduate of Exeter College, a Catholic institution.

The frontispiece image illustrates the main point of the book: that evidence of the forces of geological change that have been shaping Earth for millennia is observable today—”the present is the key to the past”. The temple columns, with their high-water marks were the evidence Lyell used to propose that the sea levels had changed gradually several times.

Lyell argued that the formation of Earth’s crust took place through countless “sligh, successive” changes occurring over vast periods of time. His “uniformitarian” proposal was that the forces molding the planet today have operated continuously throughout its history. For example, a river valley is explained by the river gradually wearing through the rocks.

Written with clarity and intellectual passion, the book was an instant rage capturing the imagination of contemporaries such as Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alfred Tennyson, and George Eliot. Lyell’s book became the compelling precursor to Darwinism.

In 1831 just before setting sail, Lyell asked Robert FitzRoy, captain of HMS Beagle, to search for erratic boulders on the survey voyage of the Beagle, and gave FitzRoy a copy of Volume 1.  

Robert FitzRoy, captain of the HMS Beagle, convinced “that he would find scientific proof that Genesis was literally true” wanting a like-minded naturalist on board the Beagle to find the evidence.

At the time, Darwin had just graduated from Christ’s College, Cambridge University and studied William Paley’s book on nature entitled Evidences of Christianity. Paley argued: “The marks of design are too strong to be got over. Design must have had a designer. That designer must have been a person. That person is GOD.”

Darwin later recalled in his autobiography, “I am convinced that I could have written out the whole of the Evidences with perfect correctness… The logic of this book as I may add of his Natural Theology gave me as much delight as did Euclid.” Darwin seemed to be the perfect candidate for FitzRoy.

On board, FitzRoy and Darwin started to read Lyell’s Principles. When the Beagle made its first stop ashore at St Jago, Darwin found rock formations which seen “through Lyell’s eyes” gave him a revolutionary insight into the geological history of the island, an insight he applied throughout his travels. By later in October 1832, while in Montevideo, Uruguay, Darwin received a copy of Volume II.

At Bahia Blanca, Darwin discovered a very large and complete fossil. The geological location of the fossil find was problematic – below a layer of white seashells, similar to the layer he found on the island of Santiago. This puzzled Darwin. How could the large fossil be located below an ocean deposit, not above? The evidence contradicted Lyell’s theory of “uniformitarianism”.

Just prior to arriving in Valdivia, Chile, in February 20, 1835, a massive earthquake followed by a tsunami had devastated the town. The damage was extensive. Darwin wrote, “The island itself plainly showed the overwhelming power of the earthquake, as the beach did that of the consequent great wave…. Shortly after the shock, a great wave was seen from the distance of three or four miles, approaching in the middle of the bay with a smooth outline; but along the shore it tore up cottages and trees, as it swept onwards with irresistible force.” Darwin continues: “In my opinion, we have scarcely beheld, since leaving England, any sight so deeply interesting.”

Movements from the earthquake seemed to Darwin to support the concept that South America was very slowly moving and rising above the ocean. This phenomenon seemed to support Lyell’s geological theory that the Earth had been changing incrementally over long periods of time. This was a revolutionary concept.

To investigate South American geology further, Darwin journeyed into the Andes in the spring of 1835. But rather than slow and incremental movements, Darwin wrote in April 1835 that the mountains were the result of violent massive movements acting as “tossed about like the crust of a broken pie”—not the result of gradual changes over long periods of time.

In retrospect, it is amazing that the Darwin even considered Lyell’s “uniformitarian” theory over longer periods of time since Darwin had argued in The Origin of Species that the transitional links did not even exist in the known fossil record: “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 argued against my theory.”

Tragically, despite the lack of any evidence and driven by the philosophy of evolution, drawings of imaginary geological columns, began appearing in textbooks, with the simple species, layered over by the presumed more complex.

These imaginary drawings, however, have even been soundly rejected by evolutionary paleontologists, including Stephen Gould and Niles Eldredge writing, “Indeed, it is the chief frustration of the fossil record that we do not have empirical evidence for sustained trends”

The fact is Darwin’s “slight, successive” evolutionary changes are not found anywhere in the fossil record, Gould continues, “The fossil record doesn’t show gradual change and every paleontologist has known that.”   

World-renowned American biologist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, Douglas Futuyma agrees, “The supposition that evolution proceeds very slowly and gradually, and so should leave thousands of fossil intermediates of any species in its wake, has not been part of evolutionary theory for more than thirty years.”    

Gould gives the fossil record the best evolution spin possible, stating, “Stepping way back and looking at too broad a scale, one might discern some sort of progress in life’s history… But, the pattern dissolves upon close inspection.”

Contrary to the popular opinion proposed by the evolution industry, the fossil record does not support Charles Lyell’s the ”uniformitarian” theory over long periods of time described in the Principles of Geology.

Charles Darwin simply presented an argument in The Origin of Species for evolution. Darwin called it “one long argument”.

Even critical of his own work, in a letter to H. Falconer in October 1862, Darwin wrote, “I look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the Origin will be proved to be rubbish; but I expect and hope that the framework will stand.”

To demonstrate that Darwin’s framework has stood the test of time, in 2008 the journal Nature, launched the following challenge to evolutionists – “Evolution is a scientific fact, and every organization whose research depends on it should explain why… Between now and the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth on 12 February 2009, every science academy and society with a stake in the credibility of evolution should summarize evidence for it on their website and take every opportunity to promote it.”

The intent of the journal was to demonstrate the “reasons why evolution is in effect as much a scientific fact as the existence of atoms or the orbiting of Earth round the Sun, even though there are plenty of refinements to be explored.” 

Of any journal, Nature is certainly the journal to expect the most robust scientific demonstration of evidence for evolution, after 150 years of unprecedented research on the topic. Especially, since Nature was founded in 1869 by Darwin’s inner circle: Thomas Henry Huxley, Joseph Hooker, Herbert Spencer, and John Tyndall. Since Darwin never spoke in public, Thomas Huxley was Darwin’s spoke-person and eventually became known as “Darwin’s bulldog.”

Many of the early editions of Nature consisted of articles written by Darwin’s inner circle who were also members of the X Club, a group of scientists known for having liberal, progressive, and somewhat controversial scientific beliefs relative to the time period.

In celebration of the bicentennial anniversary of Darwin’s birth, in January 2009, Nature published ‘15 Evolutionary Gems’, the document summarizes 15 lines of evidence from papers published in Nature over the past 10 years.

Nature developed three categories, Gems from the Fossil Record, Gems from Habitats, and Gems from Molecular Processes, with five examples in each category. The first gem from the fossil record is entitled “Land-living ancestors of whales” and the first featured evidence was entitled “Whales originated from aquatic artiodactyls in the Eocene epoch of India” performed at the Department of Anatomy at Ohio University by J. G. M. Thewissen, Lisa Noelle Cooper, Mark T. Clementz, Sunil Bajpai, and B. N. Tiwari.

The important evidence for evolution focuses on cranial structures. “Here we show that the Eocene south Asian raoellid artiodactyls are the sister group to whales. The raoellid Indohyus is similar to whales, and unlike other artiodactyls, in the structure of its ears and premolars, in the density of its limb bones and in the stable-oxygen-isotope composition of its teeth.”

The similarity of cranial features, according to the researchers, is apparently enough to justify the title of the paper “Whales Originated from Aquatic Artiodactyls”. The question is whether this artiodactyl evidence really explains evolution. Can similar cranial features alone explain evolution? Most paleontologists say no.

Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, in his 1999 book entitled Evolution, takes a different approach by arguing that inference of ancestry from the fossil record is simply too tricky of a business:

Fossils may tell us many things, but one thing they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors of anything else.

Shocking, for all the evolutionary prestige of Nature, this one study on cranial features represents a premier example to explain evolution. Molecular biologist Michael Denton highlights the limitations of examining only the skeletal remains:

The systematic status and biological affinity of a fossil organism is far more difficult to establish than the case of living form, and can never be established with any degree of certainty. To begin with, ninety-nine percent of the biology of any organism resides in the soft anatomy, which is inaccessible in a fossil.

Nature continues to reflect the original purpose of the journal—promote evolution in the name science without the evidence. As the founding member of the evolution industry, Nature now faces the ominous task of promoting evolution without the convergence of evidence from the fossil record, embryology, molecular biology, and genetics as once anticipated from Darwin’s theory.

Nature needs to explain. Evolution was once a theory in crisis, now evolution is in crisis without a theory.

At Bahia Blanca, Darwin discovered a very large fossil that was complete. The geological location of the fossil find was problematic, however. The location of the fossil was below a layer of white seashells, similar to the layer he found on the island of Santiago.

This puzzled Darwin. How could the large fossil be located below an ocean deposit, not above? Darwin knew this observation contradicted what Charles Lyell had proposed in his Principles of Geology.

By 1859 in The Origin of Species, despite known contradictions with the fossil record, Darwin explained the new unifying theory for evolution—natural selection:

I do believe that natural selection will generally act very slowly, only over long periods of time…. natural selection acts slowly by accumulating slight, successive, favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modifications; it can act only by short and slow steps.

To find these “slight, successive” forms, Darwin suggested, “we should always look for forms intermediate between each species”.

However, the fact was “slight, successive” forms were missing in action, and “[t]he distinctiveness of specific forms and their not being blended together in innumerable transitional links is a very obvious difficulty.”

One of the classic evidences for evolution published in biology textbooks includes a graph of a hypothetical geological column with the primitive species on the bottom, with the column layered over by increasingly more complex species.

Even Darwin would argue that these graduated graphs were fiction: “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.”

Geological column graphics are simply fraudulent attempts by frustrated biology textbook writers to sell “evolution as a fact” without the evidence. These graphics have been soundly rejected by modern paleontologists, including Stephen Gould and Niles Eldredge who explains -

Indeed, it is the chief frustration of the fossil record that we do not have empirical evidence [as seen in the graph] for sustained trends.

The fact is the “slight, successive” changes are simply not found in the fossil record. Gould continues his criticism, stating -

The fossil record doesn’t show gradual change and every paleontologist has known that.

World-renowned American biologist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, Douglas Futuyma agrees with Gould:

The supposition that evolution proceeds very slowly and gradually, and so should leave thousands of fossil intermediates of any species in its wake, has not been part of evolutionary theory for more than thirty years.

Darwin agrees with Gould, noting, “several difficulties here discussed… we do not find infinitely numerous fine transitional forms closely joining them all together.”

To sell “evolution as a fact”, the evolution industry has been forced to abandon original Darwinism and embrace the practice of fraud. A practice the industry has embraced starting with Haeckel’s fabricated embryo drawings.

Evolution is a fact only in philosophy, not as a science.