Now, ever since I can remember, the educational system has taught me and my peers about evolution as if it were fact. I remember seeing the picture that depicts ape's rise to man, learning about fossils and how of course 'we all used to be fish' even in primary school. When I got to my first year of secondary school, my science group was named the 'Darwin group' and I remember learning about the survival of the fittest, watching the same video of the Galapagos islands over and over again while trying not to fall asleep staring at the pictures of Darwin that adorned the walls of our classroom.
I never stopped to question it. The theory made sense, we were shown an example of two that seemed to qualify it, and besides, I was more interested in boys than biology. I believed unquestioningly in Darwinism until I read "The Case for a Creator" by Lee Strobel. Strobel is an investigative journalist and former atheist who, upon his wife's conversion to Christianity, decided to speak to some of the world's most esteemed scientists in order to try and answer what he thought was a question with an obvious answer - has science disproved God?
The first part of the book concentrates on Darwinism and whether it's really as fool-proof and untouchable as the world is being led to believe. The scientist that Strobel interviews for this part of the book is Jonathan Wells, PHD, PHD, who has a doctorate in molecular and cell biology, a doctorate in religious studies, has worked as a research biologist and wrote in many scholarly journals and articles, as well as authoring a book 'Icons of Evolution' that examines the key things that we are taught in school about evolution and finds them to be 'either false or misleading'.
The definition of evolution is that 'all living creatures are modified descendants of a common ancestor', not, as so many people believe, the assertion that all organisms within a single species are related through descent with modification, which all scientists will agree is a fact. Below are some examples of things the majority of us have been taught in schools that Wells has found to be false.
#1 The Stanley Miller experiment
In 1953 Stanley Miller shot electricity through an atmosphere like the one on primitive earth and created amino acids, the building blocks of life, the implication being that life could be created naturalistically, leaving no room for a creator, or 'God'. However, Miller used a hydrogen-rich mixture of methane, ammonia and water vapour to simulate the atmosphere of the early earth, but it has since been proven that the atmosphere on early earth was not like this at all but was instead made up of carbon dioxide, nitrogen and water vapour. When the experiment is repeated using a more realistic atmosphere, it is not amino acids that are produced but formaldehyde and cyanide - molecules that kill embryos - not exactly the right substrate for the origin of life!
Shockingly, none of this is in modern day textbooks so students everywhere are being taught information that is not misleading, but downright false.
#2 Darwin's 'Tree of Life'
One of the most iconic Darwinian images is his sketch of the 'tree of life' to illustrate his theory that all living creatures have a common ancestor. Darwin claimed that variation was a slow process and that 'no great or sudden modifications were possible' (remember this, it's important!). However, even in Darwin's day, the fossil evidence showed the opposite to this, which Darwin actually acknowledged. He believed that future fossil discoveries would vindicate his theory but that hasn't happened. Instead, scientists have uncovered information about 'the Cambrian explosion'. The Cambrian is a geological period that began 540 million years ago. Prior to this explosion, only jellyfish, sponges and worms were around, but suddenly, with this major explosion, hundreds of new species were born suddenly, out of nowhere, fully developed, that completely disproves Darwin's above quote. Descent from a common ancestor is true within certain species', such as the cat family of cats, tigers, lions etc., but the higher in the taxonomic hierarchy you go, at the level of the major animal groups, the evidence found just does not support Darwin's hypothesis.
Ernst Haeckel's comparative drawings of embryos, often described as among the best evidence for Darwinism, are also not what they appear. Haeckel's images depict the embryos of a fish, salamander, tortoise, chicken, hog, calf, rabbit and human side by side in order to emphasise the striking similarities between them, obviously implying that Darwin's theory of a common ancestor is correct.
However, the similarities were faked. Yup, that's right. Faked. When you compare the drawings to photographs, the similarities seem to dwindle. In some cases, Haeckel even used the same woodcut to print embryos from different classes because he was so confident of his theory that he felt he didn't have to draw them individually. In other cases he doctored the images to make them look more similar than they really were. This was exposed in the 1860s when his colleagues accused him of fraud.
His drawings, though, are still used in upper-division textbooks on evolutionary biology, even though Steven Jay Gould of Harvard says that they are 'the equivalent of academic murder'.
Another problem with the drawings is that Haeckel cherry-picked his examples, showing animals that were more similar than he ones he omitted. For example, he used a salamander to represent all amphibians rather than a frog which looks very different. Also, Haeckel claimed the drawings depicted the earliest stages of development when in fact they showed the mid-point of development. This is relevant because Darwin claimed that similarities in the EARLY stages are evident of a common ancestor but embryologists discern that vertebrate embryos look very different in the early cell division stages, more similar in the mid-stages and then begin to look very different again. By drawing embryos at their midpoint and claiming that they were instead at their earliest stages in order for the results to agree with Darwin's theory, there is no doubt about it - Haeckel was manipulating the experiment in order to gain the results he wanted.
When Darwin wrote 'The Origin of Species' he was well aware that fossil records failed to substantiate his theory. He attributed this problem to the fossil record being incomplete and predicted that future fossil discoveries would vindicate his theory. Sure enough, two years later, scientists discovered the archaeopteryx, thrilling Darwin's supporters. surely this 'missing link' between birds and reptiles would be the first or many fossil discoveries that would validate Darwin's claims.
However, Wells asserts that the archaeopteryx is anything but half-bird, half-reptile, saying 'It's a bird with modern feathers and birds are very different from reptiles in many important ways - their breeding system, their bone structure, their lungs and their distribution of weight and muscles. It's a bird, that's clear. Not part bird and part reptile.' Palaeontologists are agreed that the archaeopteryx is not the ancestor of modern birds. Larry Martin said that it is not an ancestor of modern birds but a member of a totally distinct group of birds. Even ardent evolutionist Pierre Lecomte du Nouy says 'We are not even authorised to consider the archaeopteryx as a true link.'
Since then scientists have been desperate to find the missing link between birds and reptiles, at almost any cost. A few years ago the National Geographic society announced they had found a link between birds and dinosaurs and showed an animal with the tail of a dinosaur and forelimbs of a bird, calling it the archaeoraptor, before a Chinese palaeontologist proved that someone had glued a dinosaur tail to a primitive bird - it was a hoax!
Wells said 'fakes are coming out of the fossil beds all the time because the fossil dealers know there's big money in it.' This has been backed up by ornithologist Alan Feduccia, a evolutionary biologist who said 'Archaeoraptor ia just the tip of the iceberg. There are scores of fake fossils out there and they have cast a dark shadow over the whole field. When you go to these fossil shows, it's difficult to tell which ones are faked and which ones are not. I have heard there is a fake fossil factory in northeast China, in Liaoning Province, near the deposits where many of these recent alleged feathered dinosaurs were found.'
Another example is that of the dinosaur 'bambiraptor', with added feathers and the artificial eyes used on stuffed eagles to make it appear more birdlike. Yet another forgery is that of the 'ape to man' illustrations that are the ultimate icon of Darwinism.
More recently discovered, Dubois' excavation would have disqualified the fossil from consideration by today's standards. In 1939, two experts, Ralph von Koenigswald and Franz Weidenreich revealed that Java man was a normal human being and Ernst Mayr from Havard also classified Java man as human in 1944. The femur didn't actually belong with the skullcap, and the skullcap itself, according to Sir Arthur Keith was distinctly human. A 342-page scientific report by 19 evolutionists also concluded that Java man played no part in human evolution.
Henry Gee, science writer for Nature, concluded that 'the conventional picture of human evolution is a completely human invention created after the fact and shaped to accord with human prejudices.'
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