Return to the Primrose Path of Evolutionary Story-telling

Evolutionary Claim: 

The Geologic Column proves Darwin by documenting life's evolutionary past

Reality Check:

(Unless otherwise noted, quotations below  are from the book by Henry Morris, That Their Words May Be Used Against Them, designated by an an asterisk (*), or from EVOLUTION: The Fossils Still Say NO! by Duane Gish, designated by two asterisks (**). Both books are available from the Institute for Creation Research. Links are to articles and papers on the World Wide Web.)

NOTE: 1

Published experiments falsify Nicholas Steno's 1669 "principles of stratigraphy" as general laws upon which the concept of the Geologic Column is based. This is because Steno's principles neglect the contribution of moving currents during the deposit of sediments, and wrongly assume that rock layers were laid down sequentially all around the globe in still water. 

• Experiments in Stratification  by Guy Berthault
  
• Information about the video  Experiments in Stratification, also by Guy Bertault

Allan, Robin S., "Geological Correlation and Paleoecology," Bulletin, Geological Society of America, vol. 59 (January 1948), pp. 1-10.

p 2
"Because of the sterility of its concepts, historical geology, which includes paleontology and stratigraphy, has become static and unproductive. Current methods of delimiting intervals of time, which are the fundamental units of historical geology, and of establishing chronology are of dubious validity. Worse than that, the criteria of correlation—the attempt to equate in time, or synchronize, the geological history of one area with that of another—are logically vulnerable. The findings of historical geology are suspect because the principles upon which they are based are either inadequate, in which case they should be reformulated, or false, in which case they should be discarded. Most of us refuse to discard or reformulate, and the result is the present deplorable state of our discipline."

• Experiments on Stratification of Heterogeneous Sand Mixture
  by Pierre Y. Julien, Yongqiang Lan, and Guy Berthault

• Experiments on Lamination of Sediments by Guy Berthault

• Sedimentation Experiments: Nature Finally Catches Up! by Andrew Snelling

• Geological Dating Principles Questioned - Paleohydraulic Analysis: A New Approach by Guy Gerthault

This is original work which calls into question some fundamental principles of stratigraphy. We live on old concepts in this domain, and the author’s examination of them by means of the experimental method gives great strength to his assertions.

Jean Piveteau, President of the Academy of Sciences and distinguished paleontologist

I agree entirely with the essentials of your work and am working on formulating them in the most rigorous and clear way. My aim is to assist you in presenting your remarkable discovery, in such a way that the geological world can embrace them unhesitatingly.

Georges Millot, Member of the Institute and President of the Geological Society of France, S.G.F. 

• Does the Geologic Column Prove Evolution? by John Morris

Note 2.

Conventional ages were assigned to rock layers based on the assumption that geologic processes have continued at nearly constant rates for hundreds of millions of years. For example, still-water sedimentation rate estimates on the order of one millimeter per hundred years were used to "measure" the ages of rock strata hundreds of meters thick. 

Recently, however, the notion of uniform rates has been largely abandoned. Many evolutionists now believe the planet has been periodically ravaged by regional and global catastrophes. Yet, conventional ages are still applied... Go figure.

Spieker, E. M., "Mountain-Building Chronology and Nature of Geologic Time Scale," Bulletin, American Association of Petroleum Geologists (August 1956), pp. 1769-1815. Spieker was at Ohio State University.

p 1803
"Does our time-scale then partake of natural law? No….

"I wonder how many of us realize that the time scale was frozen in essentially its present form by 1840? … How much world geology was known in 1840? A bit of western Europe, none too well, and a lesser fringe of eastern North America. All of Asia, Africa, South America, and most of North America were virtually unknown. How dared the pioneers assume that their scale would fit the rocks in these vast areas, by far most of the world. Only in dogmatic assumption—a mere extension of the kind of reasoning developed by Werner from the facts in his little district of Saxony. And in many parts of the world, notably India and South America, it does not fit. But even there it is applied! The followers of the founding fathers went forth across the earth and in Procrustean fashion made it fit the sections they found, even in places where the actual evidence literally proclaimed denial. So flexible and accommodating are the ‘facts’ of geology."

p 1805
"Further, how many geologists have pondered the fact that lying on the crystalline basement are found from place to place not merely Cambrian, but rocks of all ages?" [Emphasis added]

• Uniformitarianism and the Geologic Column by Curt Sewell

West, Ronald R., "Paleontology and Uniformitarianism," Compass, vol. 45, no. 4 (May 1968), pp. 212-218.

p 216
"Contrary to what most scientists write, the fossil record does not support the Darwinian theory of evolution because it is this theory (there are several) which we use to interpret the fossil record. By doing so, we are guilty of circular reasoning if we then say the fossil record supports this theory."

Ager, Derek V., The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1993), 151 pp. Ager was Professor and Head of the Department of Geology and Oceanography, University College of Swansea. He had also served as president of the British Geological Association.

p 32
"That brings me to the second most surprising feature of the fossil record. Alongside the theme of the geographical persistence of particular fossils, we have as a corollary, the abruptness of some of the major changes in the history of life.

"It is both easy and tempting (and very much in line with the other ideas expressed in this book) to adopt a neocatastrophist attitude to the fossil record. Several very eminent living palaeontologists frequently emphasize the abruptness of some of the major changes that have occurred, and seek for an external cause. This is a heady wine and has intoxicated palaeontologists since the days when they could blame it all on Noah’s flood. In fact, books are still being published by the lunatic fringe with the same explanation. In case this book should be read by some fundamentalist searching for straws to prop up his prejudices, let me state categorically that all my experience (such as it is) has led me to an unqualified acceptance of evolution by natural selection as a sufficient explanation for what I have seen in the fossil record. I find divine creation, or several such creations, a completely unnecessary hypothesis. Nevertheless this is not to deny that there are some very curious features about the fossil record."

pp 68, 69
"Uniformitarianism triumphed because it provided a general theory that was at once logical and seemingly ‘scientific.’ Catastrophism became a joke and no geologist would dare postulate anything that might be termed a ‘catastrophe’ for fear of being laughed at or (in recent years) linked with a lunatic fringe of Velikovsky and Californian fundamentalists. But I would like to suggest that, in the first half of the last century, the ‘catastrophists’ were better geologists than the ‘uniformitarians.’"

p 80
"The hurricane, the flood or the tsunami may do more in an hour or a day than the ordinary processes of nature have achieved in a thousand years. Given all the millennia we have to play with in the stratigraphical record, we can expect our periodic catastrophes to do all the work we want of them."

p 98
"It is a problem not easily solved by the classic methods of stratigraphical paleontology, as obviously we will land ourselves immediately in an impossible circular argument if we say, firstly that a particular lithology is synchronous on the evidence of its fossils, and secondly that the fossils are synchronous on the evidence of the lithology."

• Rocks in the Grand Canyon by Curt Sewell

• Megabreccias: Evidence for Catastrophism by Arthur V. Chadwick

3. Another principle upon which the Geologic Column is based is the idea that so-called "index fossils" identify rock layers laid down simultaneously in different parts of the world. This notion is challenged by the existence of "Lazarus fossils" - fossils that appear in rock layers, vanish in higher strata, then reappear in layers assigned much later ages.  

Kitts, David B., "Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory," Evolution, vol. 28 (September 1974), pp. 458-472. Kitts was Professor of Geology, University of Oklahoma.

p 466
"Evolution, at least in the sense that Darwin speaks of it, cannot be detected within the lifetime of a single observer. Darwinian theory, however, is supposed to have, in addition to evolution, other less sweeping consequences which are more amenable to observational test."

p 466
"But the danger of circularity is still present. For most biologists the strongest reason for accepting the evolutionary hypothesis is their acceptance of some theory that entails it. There is another difficulty. The temporal ordering of biological events beyond the local section may critically involve paleontological correlation, which necessarily presupposes the non-repeatability of organic events in geologic history. There are various justifications for this assumption but for almost all contemporary paleontologists it rests upon the acceptance of the evolutionary hypothesis."

p 467
"Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of ‘seeing’ evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists the most notorious of which is the presence of ‘gaps’ in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them. The gaps must therefore be a contingent feature of the record. Darwin was concerned enough about this problem to devote a Chapter of the ‘Origin’ to it. He accounts for ‘the imperfections of the geological record’ largely on the basis of the lack of continuous deposition of sediments."

• How Well Do Paleontologists Know Fossil Distributions? By Michael Oard

• The Geologic Column: Does It Exist? by John Woodmorrape

Welles, Samuel Paul, "Fossils," World Book Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (1978), p. 364. Welles was Research Associate, Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley.

"Scientists determine when fossils were formed by finding out the age of the rocks in which they lie."

Welles, Samuel Paul, "Paleontology," World Book Encyclopedia, vol. 15 (1978), p. 85.

"Paleontology (the study of fossils) is important in the study of geology. The age of rocks may be determined by the fossils found in them."

Ager, Derek V., "Fossil Frustrations," New Scientist, vol. 100 (November 10, 1983), p. 425.

"No paleontologist worthy of the name would ever date his fossils by the strata in which they are found. It is almost the first thing I teach my first-year students. Ever since William Smith at the beginning of the 19th century, fossils have been and still are the best and most accurate method of dating and correlating the rocks in which they occur.

"Apart from very ‘modern’ examples, which are really archaeology, I can think of no cases of radioactive decay being used to date fossils."

Cutler, Alan H., and Karl W. Plessa, "Fossils out of Sequence: Computer Simulations and Strategies for Dealing with Stratigraphic Disorder," Palaios, vol. 5 (June 1990), pp. 227-235. Cutler is in the Department of Geoscience at the University of Arizona.

p 227
"We define stratigraphic disorder as the departure from perfect chronological order of fossils in a stratigraphic sequence. Any sequence in which an older fossil occurs above a younger one is stratigraphically disordered. Scales of stratigraphic disorder may be from millimeters to many meters. Stratigraphic disorder is produced by the physical or biogenic mixing of fossiliferous sediments, and the reworking of older, previously deposited hard parts into younger sediments. Since these processes occur to an extent in virtually all sedimentary systems, stratigraphic disorder at some scale is probably a common feature of the fossil record."

p 234
"Stratigraphic disorder can result from mixing of sediments by physical and biological processes as well as from the introduction of older, reworked hard parts into younger sediments. The extent of disorder in modern and ancient sequences is not well documented; however, the widespread occurrence of anomalies in dated sections suggest that disorder should be taken seriously by paleobiologists and stratigraphers working at fine stratigraphy scales."

• Anomalously Occurring Fossils by John Woodmorrape

Rastall, R. H., "Geology," Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 10 (1949). Rastall was a lecturer in Economic Geology, University of London.

p 168
"It cannot be denied that from a strictly philosophical standpoint geologists are here arguing in a circle. The succession of organisms has been determined by a study of their remains embedded in the rocks, and the relative ages of the rocks are determined by the remains of organisms that they contain."

• The Polystrate Trees and Coal Seams of Joggins Fossil Cliffs  by John Morris

• Polystrate Petrified Trees by Kent Hovind

• What Are "Polystrate" Fossils? by John Morris

Broadhurst, F. M., "Some Aspects of the Paleoecology of Non-Marine Faunas and Rates of Sedimentation in the Lancashire Coal Measures," American Journal of Science, vol. 262 (Summer 1964), pp. 858-869. Broadhurst was in the Department of Geology, University of Manchester.

p 865
"In 1959 Broadhurst and Magraw described a fossilized tree, in position of growth, from the Coal Measures at Blackrod near Wigan in Lancashire. This tree was preserved as a cast, and the evidence available suggested that the cast was at least 38 feet in height. The original tree must have been surrounded and buried by sediment which was compacted before the bulk of the tree decomposed, so that the cavity vacated by the trunk could be occupied by new sediment which formed the cast. This implies a rapid rate of sedimentation around the original tree."

p 866
"It is clear that trees in position of growth are far from being rare in Lancashire (Teichmuller, 1956, reaches the same conclusion for similar trees in the Rhein-Westfalen Coal Measures), and presumably in all cases there must have been a rapid rate of sedimentation."

Rastall, R. H., "Geology," Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 10 (1949). Rastall was a lecturer in Economic Geology, University of London.

p 168
"It cannot be denied that from a strictly philosophical standpoint geologists are here arguing in a circle. The succession of organisms has been determined by a study of their remains embedded in the rocks, and the relative ages of the rocks are determined by the remains of organisms that they contain."

• Polystrate Fossils and Evolution by Bert Thompson and Joe Deweese

4. Even a conventional geologic interpretation of of the rock layers refutes Darwin's prediction and gives the lie to textbook representations of the "Tree of Life" . Darwin's  smooth continuum from first single cells to ever-increasing biological complexity and diversity does not exist in the fossil record. Instead, up to 100 phyla, representing distinctly different body types, appear abruptly in the Cambrian. Of these, only about thirty persist to the present time, while most have gone extinct along the way. 

Raup, David M., "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," Bulletin, Field Museum of Natural History, vol. 50 (January 1979), pp. 22-29. Raup is Curator of Geology at the Field Museum.

p. 23
"Instead of finding the gradual unfolding of life, what geologists of Darwin’s time, and geologists of the present day actually find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record. and it is not always clear, in fact it’s rarely clear, that the descendants were actually better adapted than their predecessors. In other words, biological improvement is hard to find."

p. 24
"Thus, some pterosaurs were larger than all flying birds and even many small airplanes. They achieved this size and were still able to fly because their design was nearly optimal."

p. 24
"Thus, the trilobites 450 million years ago used an optimal design which would require a well trained and imaginative optical engineer to develop today."

p. 25
"The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information—what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic."

pp. 25-6
"So natural selection as a process is okay. We are also pretty sure that it goes on in nature although good examples are surprisingly rare. The best evidence comes from the many cases where it has been shown that biological structures have been optimized—that is, structures that represent optimal engineering solutions to the problems that an animal has of feeding or escaping predators or generally functioning in its environment. The superb designs of flying reptiles and of trilobite eyes are examples. The presence of these optimal structures does not, of course, prove that they developed from natural selection but it does provide strong circumstantial argument."

p. 29
"The dinosaurs died out at the end of the Cretaceous period…. Several other important animal groups also died out at about the same time…. (There is nothing surprising, by the way, in the fact that all these groups died out near the boundary of two periods in the geologic time scale because the boundary itself is defined on the basis of the extinctions.)"

Kemp, Tom S., "A Fresh Look at the Fossil Record," New Scientist, vol. 108 (December 5, 1985), pp. 66-67. Kemp is Curator, University Museum, Oxford University.

p 66
"In other words, when the assumed evolutionary processes did not match the pattern of fossils that they were supposed to have generated, the pattern was judged to be ‘wrong.’ A circular argument arises: interpret the fossil record in terms of a particular theory of evolution, inspect the interpretation, and note that it confirms the theory. Well, it would, wouldn’t it?"

"As is now well known, most fossil species appear instantaneously in the record, persist for some millions of years virtually unchanged, only to disappear abruptly—the ‘punctuated equilibrium’ pattern of Eldredge and Gould."

Davis, D. Dwight, "Comparative Anatomy and the Evolution of Vetebrates," in Genetics, Paleontology and Evolution, edited by Glenn Jepsen, Ernst Mayr, and G. G. Simpson (Princeton University Press, 1949). Davis was Curator, Division of Vertebrate Anatomy, Chicago Natural History Museum.

p 74
"The sudden emergence of major adaptive types as seen in the abrupt appearance in the fossil record of families and orders, continued to give trouble. The phenomenon lay in the genetical no man’s land beyond the limits of experimentation. A few paleontologists even today cling to the idea that these gaps will be closed by further collecting, … but most regard the observed discontinuity as real and have sought an explanation."

p 77
"But the facts of paleontology conform equally well with other interpretations that have been discredited by neobiological work, e.g., divine creation, etc., and paleontology by itself can neither prove nor refute such ideas."

Bengtson, Stefan, "The Solution to a Jigsaw Puzzle," Nature, vol. 345 (June 28, 1990), pp. 765-766. Bengtson is at the Institute of Paleontology, Uppsala University, Sweden.

p. 765
"Paleontologists are traditionally famous (or infamous) for reconstructing whole animals from the debris of death. Mostly they cheat."

p. 765
"If any event in life’s history resembles man’s creation myths, it is this sudden diversification of marine life when multicellular organisms took over as the dominant actors in ecology and evolution. Baffling (and embarrassing) to Darwin, this event still dazzles us and stands as a major biological revolution on a par with the invention of self-replication and the origin of the eukaryotic cell. The animal phyla emerged out of the Precambrian mists with most of the attributes of their modern descendants."

From Creation-Evolution Headlines by David Coppedge

The Mystery of the Ultra-Pure Sandstones   06/27/2003
R. H. Dott, Jr (Univ. of Wisconsin) has a problem.  He’s been trying to explain a geological puzzle for 50 years, and it is still unresolved.  All around the world, sandstones are found that are “remarkably pure” that “seem nonactualistic” (jargon for “They can’t really be there”).  These pure quartz arenites, as they are called, were considered a major puzzle half a century ago, when Dr. Dott was a student.  Some of them “extend laterally over vast areas encompassing one or several states,”  and they cover vast areas of Africa and Arabia, the Great Lakes region, South America, Australia, and more.  These “sheet sands” (as they are nicknamed) are part of a notorious gang: “Together with the origin of dolomite, red beds, black shale, and banded iron formation, they made up a group of seemingly intractable geological problems” (emphasis added in all quotes).
    Dott tells autobiographically, “Having lived literally upon quartz-rich sandstones for almost 50 years, I have come to regard supermature quartz arenites as nature’s finest distillate—almost as remarkable as a pure single malt Scotch whiskey.”  In the July 2003 Journal of Geology, he has written a lengthy paper addressing the mystery of the quartz arenites, and the status of current hypotheses.  It amounts to a veritable State of the Century address to sandstone geologists.  He explains the puzzle in the Introduction:

What is the quartz arenite problem?  Foremost is the extreme compositional maturity of sandstones composed of more than 95% quartz.  Furthermore, the quartz consists almost exclusively of grains of unstrained, single-crystal units.  Very rare lithic [rock] fragments consist only of durable polycrystalline quartz types such as chert or vein quartz.  In addition, the extremely rare accessory mineral suite (generally <0.05% by weight) is dominated by durable zircon, tourmaline, ilmenite, and leucoxene.  Where present, associated conglomerates also consist only of durable clasts of vein quartz, quartzite, or chert.  How can we explain the complete disposal of at least 75% of any ultimate parent igneous or metamorphic rock to yield a residue that is at least 95% quartz sand?

Extreme textural maturity is also characteristic of many, but not all, examples.  A high degree of sorting has always been emphasized, with high rounding being common but not universal.  Both properties imply much abrasion by one or more of nature’s most physically vigorous processes, such as surf and strong eolian [wind] or aqueous currents.

1. Thin, tabular geometry: layers tens or hundreds of meters thick, very flat over vast regions, yet Paleozoic in age – i.e., prior to the emergence of land plants.
2. A paucity of associated shale, in contrast to other sandstones.
3. Interstratified with shallow marine carbonate strata.
4. A lack of volumetrically significant analogues forming today (i.e., nothing on that scale can be seen forming now).  This implies weathering processes orders of magnitude greater in the past.
5. Very rare body fossils, and some burrows.
6. Frosting of the grains, making them rough on microscopic scales.
7. Underlying mature shale high in kaolinite (clay) or illite.
8. Even more pure quartz arenites, even thousands of meters thick, in Precambrian strata.
9. Many of them underlain by paleosols (ancient soils) that show a high degree of chemical maturation.

 

This was an interesting paper about an interesting puzzle that some readers may wish to investigate further.  Does his explanation satisfy you?  Notice how these formations are huge, and exist on every continent.  Notice how thick and flat they are.  Notice how they are interspersed with clays and soils, yet are exceptionally pure, “nature’s finest distillate.”  Notice how they give evidence of being deposited via nature’s most vigorous and energetic forces.  Doesn’t this sound like global cataclysm?  Since catastrophism is back in vogue, should we not follow the evidence where it leads?
    Consider the tremendously thick sandstones in the Grand Canyon that cover hundreds of square miles (some of them much of North America), and the story we reported last year that gives evidence at least one of the layers, the Redwall Limestone, was laid down by a vast sheet of rapidly-advancing turbid water, entraining billions of nautiloids in one day.  Nothing comparable to this is happening anywhere in the modern world.  The present is certainly not the key to the past!  It seems many of the puzzles vanish if we can free our minds from the unnecessary and obstructive assumptions of vast ages and evolution.
Next headline on: Geology.

5. Vast sheets of broken rocks and rock particles covering hundreds to thousands of square miles display evidence of having been transported by deep, fast-flowing water. No parallels are observed in geologic processes at work in the world today.

High-Energy Sediments

An obvious fact of basic geology is that the faster water flows, the larger the rock particles (the coarser the sediment) it will move. Sluggish rivers or small streams will not transport boulders. High-energy sediments (those produced by geologic forces involving large amounts of energy) are abundant in the geological record. Some megabreccias and conglomerates are so coarse that we know of no modern counterparts. Some breccia and conglomerate beds contain clasts many meters in diameter and weighing many tons. ¹

Most of the ancient conglomerate and breccia beds are not channel fills that might be typical of stream and river beds, but broad sheets hundreds or thousands of square miles in extent that only massive movements of water on a large geographical scale could have produced. The author has examined extensive breccia and conglomerate beds in California, east of San Diego; along the Columbia River gorge on both the Washington and Oregon sides; along the John Day River in Central Oregon; in highway cuts between Hope and Princeton, British Columbia, Canada; at numerous sites in northwest Wyoming and southcentral Montana; on the east flanks of the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming; in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River in Arizona; at the top of the Arbuckle Mountains north of Dallas, Texas; along the Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia, Canada; and various sites overseas. The northwest flanks of the Swiss Alps consist of mountains of uplifted conglomerate outwashed from the rising Alps.

[Harold Coffin's Origin by Design, referenced above, is available on a CD as part of The Origins Library. Also included are Ariel Roth's Origins: Linking Science and Scripture, 52 issues of the journal Origins, and more than 22 minutes of video illustrations. For more information, call 800-765-6955, or visit www.adventistbookcenter.com. ]

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