People who militantly defend evolution (AKA evolutionists) like to look down their noses on the “lay” public and smugly drone on about how science is the key to knowledge, how evolution is the most rigorously tested theory in science, and how they only go where the evidence leads. If that were true, why do they feel the need to tell lies to support their theory? I'm not talking about a mere difference of opinion – like how I believe the earth is around 6,000 years old and they think it's 4 billion years old. I'm talking about continuously repeating things that are objectively false. The sad thing is, many members of the public have heard these lies repeated so often, they assume they are true.
I've written series in the past where I list 5 or 10 of some of the most egregious examples but I'm not going to write a series now. Instead, I'm going to visit this topic from time to time and make each, entire post about a single lie. If you want to read all the posts published under this topic, click “lies evolutionists tell” in the label cloud in the left column.
Have said that, on to the next lie!
99.9% of all the species that have ever lived are extinct
According to Wikipedia, “More than 99% of all species that ever lived on Earth, amounting to over five billion species, are estimated to have died out.” You'll have to excuse Wiki's bad grammar. What they're trying to say is, more than 99% of an estimated five billion species that have lived on Earth have died out. But even while I can correct their bad grammar, the lie remains the same. //sigh//
I've heard people citing this statistic so often and for so long that I once believed there certainly must be some evidence for it. However, there's an old joke that says, 87% of all statistics are just made up. When estimating the number of extinct species, the 99.9% figure definitely falls into the “made up” category. Let's look at some actual numbers.
According to National Geographic, “Scientists have estimated that there are around 8.7 million species of plants and animals in existence. However, only around 1.2 million species have been identified and described so far, most of which are insects.” Of course, there are certainly some species that exist and haven't been discovered. How many? I've heard estimates ranging into hundreds of millions that might exist. Lately, however, estimates have been trending noticeably downward – probably less than 10 million species total.
When we look at the fossil record, there are substantially fewer species that have been identified. When you search Google, you'll invariably run into the “estimated 5 billion” number all the time but actual named species are only a few hundred thousand. Here's an estimate from PNAS.org, “Most fossil species are invertebrates and, like most living species, are defined strictly on the basis of external morphology. About 192,000 invertebrate fossil species were known in 1970, and at least 3,000 more are named every year. Therefore, at least 280,000 have been named by now.” Of course, there are also vertebrate species so let's be especially generous and say there are 500,000 species known only from their fossil remains. Is that fair? Then let's move on.
The objective facts, then, are these: 10 million living species and 500 thousand extinct species. There is NO fossil evidence for the other 4.9+ billion species evolutionists claim existed. NONE. The absurdly high number is born out of their belief in billions of years of earth's history which virtually demands billions of species to fill in all the gaps.
In his book, The Origin of Species, p. 234, Darwin said this, “But, as by this theory [of evolution] innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them imbedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?” Why, indeed?! Perhaps it is because fossilization is such a rare event. Perhaps they lived but the fossil record is so incomplete there just aren't any remains of them left to find. Or perhaps the fossil record is remarkably complete and the species never existed!
I was watching a YouTube debate a few years back and the evolutionist trotted out the alleged “whale sequence” as evidence for evolution. Given that fossilization is supposed to be such a rare event, I remember thinking how unlikely it should be for such a complete series to exist. Suddenly, another realization hit me that pokes another huge hole in the story of evolution.
According
to FossilWiki,
“More
than 40 specimens of Tyrannosaurus have been identified, some of
which are nearly complete skeletons.”
I
find it incredibly odd that 99.96% of all the species that have
supposedly lived left no fossils yet this particular species has left
dozens. I mean, what are the odds? It doesn't stop there, though.
On HumanOrigins.si.edu,
we read, “Australopithecus
afarensis
is
one of the longest-lived and best-known early human
species—paleoanthropologists have uncovered remains from more than
300 individuals!”
If
you agree that it should be unlikely to find t-rex fossils by the
dozens, you'll agree it's downright queer that we find A.
afarensis by
the hundreds! Keep in mind too that these are larger, terrestrial
creatures – the least likely to fossilize; we find trilobite
fossils by
the millions!
If evolutionists are right, why are some species so over-represented
in the fossil record when billions of other species aren't found at
all?
https://unsplash.com/@picsbyjameslee
As I've said, the billions of species claimed by evolutionists are merely a consequence of their belief in an old earth yet their claims don't square with the facts. What we observe in the fossils is the exact opposite of what evolutionists allege. They say there have been billions of species, the vast majority of which left no fossilized individuals. What we observe are relatively few species abundantly represented by dozens, hundreds, or even millions of fossils. The observable, testable evidence is better explained by creation: the earth is thousands of years old, most of the species that have ever lived are still alive, and the fossil record is remarkably complete yet shows a glaring lack of transitional forms.
There is no longer any room for billions of years in the fossil record. The storytelling is over. Their billions of species is a lie. What we observe (aka, “the evidence”) is much more consistent with a recent creation and a catastrophic flood.
Kurt Wise offered a somewhat different argument for your position, noting that the fossil record for extant mammals and mollusks are pretty good: 99% of known living species of mammals from Europe, and nearly 77% of known mollusk species from the southern California coast are also found as fossils. From an old-Earth perspective, of course, this is like supposing that, since we can assemble a nearly complete collection of newspapers published a month ago, we must likewise have nearly everything written down in the Roman Empire. It's easier to find relatively new stuff than relatively old stuff; this probably explains the abundance of Australopithecus spp. fossils.
ReplyDeleteAs for the rest, there is a single known (admittedly spectacular) fossil of the nodosaur Borealopelta. True, it was only recently discovered, but then, that itself may be indicative: if the fossil record is so complete, why do we not have scores of fossils of it dating back a century or more? The nodosaur Hylaeosaurus may be known from only a single (badly damaged and incomplete) fossil (some other fragmentary armored dinosaur fossils have been assigned to it, but this is disputed), even though it was discovered 180 years ago and is one of the first three dinosaur fossils named. Why some fossil species are abundant and others are very rare is certainly a mystery, but I'm not sure it's a greater mystery for evolution than for creation. What explanations will you offer for the relative abundance of good fossils of Tyrannosaurus vs. the handful of scraps of Spinosaurus, that is not available to conventional, "evolutionist" paleontologists?
I've pointed this out before: we don't find modern mammalian species in the same rock layers as non-bird dinosaurs (we don't even find modern bird species in those layers), or modern marine mammals in the same layers as the marine reptiles of the Mesozoic. Whales and ichthyosaurs are both diverse groups, adapted to various watery environments; why are they not found together? None of those 99% of modern European mammals mentioned by Wise have yet turned up in, say, the Permian fossils of Karoo Supergroup (estimated, on the basis of sampling, to contain some 800 billion fossils of extinct vertebrates). Much the same is true of those three-fourths of modern left coast mollusks: their fossils show up in Cenozoic rocks, not Mesozoic or Paleozoic, where fossil species unknown in the modern world exist.
None of this is consistent with a young Earth or a global flood. Now, because of this phenomenon of "faunal succession," plus the relative paucity of species in these rocks not containing modern species, plus the fact that new, previously unknown species are being discovered almost daily (note that all of Wise's 99% of extant European species must have already been discovered before, e.g. Borealopelta was), lead paleontologists to suppose that a great variety of unknown species existed in the prehistoric past.
Steven J,
DeleteYou're aware of the creationist position that most fossils were formed at the time of the Flood. Animals today rarely leave fossils. The critter dies, its body is scavenged or decays, and there's seldom enough left after a few days to even become a fossil. So I don't expect to find “modern” species in the fossil record. What we find are representatives of ancestral kinds that were buried at the time of the Flood and bear resemblance to what we see today.
As you've already noted, many animals we see today are represented in the fossil record. Maybe most of them are. You can find a list of examples on Wiki at this link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_fossil#Examples
I believe fossils tend to be found WHERE the animal lived rather than WHEN. Of course, this isn't absolute. Animals could be carried by the rising and falling waters and end up being buried together. You've certainly noticed that dino skeletons are always found associated with marine fossils in the same layer. The usual explanation is a “shallow inland sea” or “local flood.”
My main question, though, has never been answered: why are some species abundantly represented when the alleged 99% of others aren't? We have a few hundred thousand extinct animals found among the fossils, a few million living species – many of which are also found among the fossils, and unfounded claims there have been billions of more species that have left no trace.
Thanks for your comments and for visiting. God bless!!
RKBentley
I'm a little confused by your reply because, as I noted, we do find modern species in the fossil record. I assume you mean that as a young-Earth creationist, you don't expect to find modern species in the flood deposits, which are usually equated more or less with the Mesozoic sediments. But it's not just that we don't find Puma concolor alongside Styracosaurus; it's that we don't find any members of the cat family alongside non-bird dinosaurs. It's the same with dogs, bears, etc.: no modern carnivoran mammals, no caniforms, certainly no members of the dog family. If you expect to find representatives of modern "kinds" there, "kinds" need to be drawn at least as large as Linnaean orders (you're a member of the same order as a ring-tailed lemur or tarsier -- although the primates of the late Cretaceous seem to be quite small and primitive).
DeleteAs for why some species are abundantly represented while the alleged 99% of others are absent? I live in Illinois. The Field Museum in Chicago has an impressive collection of dinosaurs and fossil mammals, but none of them were collected in Illinois. Our most famous fossil is the enigmatic Tullimonstrum, which is, er ... maybe a chordate, or even a branch of primitive vertebrates, of some sort, but it's weird. Anyway, there are no dinosaurs found in Illinois rocks, and apparently no mammoths, mastodons, or moose, either.
From an "evolutionist" standpoint, this is not too surprising: the bedrock in Illinois is mostly Paleozoic, from before the dinosaurs, and sediments from the Mesozoic were either never laid down or eroded away long ago. We know from fossils in other eastern states that there were dinosaurs in the eastern United States, and almost certainly a variety of them in what later became Illinois, but no trace survives, because the sediments in which their fossils would have rested did not survive. And huge swaths of the Earth are like this, or, conversely, have Mesozoic sediments buried under later ones, so the dinosaurs are inaccessible. A lot of those immense numbers of extinct species lived in areas that didn't leave a fossil record.
But how would a young-Earth creationist/Flood-geologist account for this? Surely the dinosaurs and mammals that lived in Illinois in Noah's day would have died in the Flood; why were none of them buried here?
One reason you don't find many mammals in the layers is because most could swim.
Delete