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By Jon A. Covey, B.A., MT(ASCP)
Edited by Anita K. Millen, M.D., M.P.H., M.A.

Let’s start with learning what a nova is and go from there. According to one idea, a nova is a star that suddenly ejects some of its matter, flares up and emits a tremendous amount of light that is about 10,000 times brighter than a normal star. This lasts for a few days or weeks and then fades away. The expanding shell of ejected gas may be visible telescopically for several years. Another idea is that novae are white dwarfs belonging to two-star (binary) systems. The companion star is a red giant which loses some of its matter to the dwarf. This influx of matter is heated up and flashes away as an expanding shell. [Abell]

What are Supernovae and Remnants?

A white dwarf star that acquires too much matter (possibly from a companion red giant) becomes unstable and explodes is a supernova. When the star’s mass exceeds that of the sun by 1.2 – 1.4 times, the star begins to degenerate and collapses. The star explosively releases the enormous gravitational energy the collapse generated. [Abell, p. 393-394] Alternatively, a supernova occurs when a star uses up all its fuel and cannot produce enough heat and pressure to maintain the weight of the star’s envelope, the star collapses and then explodes. The explosion propels the outer shell of the star into a rapidly expanding gas mass, leaving behind a pulsating star (a pulsar) such as the Crab Nebula of 1054 A.D. [Abell, p. 393-394] Davies says that the term “supernova remnant” refers to the huge cloud of expanding stellar debris that hurtles outwards from the origin at an initial velocity of upwards from 7,000 km/sec.

We can observe new supernovae visually. They are extremely bright, but after a short while, they can be seen only by radio wave telescopes. George Abell says that supernovae may occur in our galaxy at an average rate of between 30-50 years and that they are commonly observed in other galaxies. From this, one can calculate the number of supernova remnants that should be observable.

Craig Bracy mentioned that one could argue that possibly after 6,000 years supernova remnants (SNRs) are no longer observable. I was faced with this objection by some evolutionists on a CompuServe forum. I was about to reply to this objection when an astronomy buff chimed in saying, “And there are nebula that are significantly older than 6,500 years (modern detectors can detect a nebula that is about 150-200,00 years old. After that it has become too dim and diffuse).” Of course, I wanted to know which nebula were significantly older than 6,500 years and he replied that his Astronomy and Scientific American magazines were still packed and he would give me a reply when he unpacked them. He still hasn’t unpacked them, but he agrees that we should be able to observe SNRs well beyond 6,500 years. Initially, he thought I was referring to SNRs in the visible light range only, but when I explained to him that radio telescopes can observe them far longer, he agreed.

There are two things I would like to mention about supernova remnants (SNRs), contrary to what Hugh Ross said on Greg Koukl’s Stand To Reason program on KBRT AM 740 in March 1996. Hugh said that SNRs would be too dim to observe after 6,500 years. First, if there are any SNRs older than 6,500 years we would be able to observe them, and second, if stellar theory is correct, the number of first, second, and third stage SNRs we observe are consistent with a universe only 7,000 years and not with an older universe. Second, Hugh browbeat the caller’s source for this information, Keith Davies. The caller remarked that Davies had also reported that there weren’t enough detectable SNRs in our galaxy if it really was 10-15 billion years old. Hugh decided Davies didn’t have a very good grasp on big bang theory, missing Davies’ point altogether (perhaps because Hugh wants to push his big bang idea). The following comes from Keith Davies’ report in the Proceedings of the Third International Conference On Creationism 1994.

Time Limits for Observing SNRs

Supernova remnants go through three stages. In stage one, SNRs release prodigious quantities of energy. For a short while, a supernova can outshine an entire galaxy and releases enough neutrinos to power all the stars in a galaxy for several years (about 100 billion stars). The total radiative energy expended per second for second stage SNRs is about 1037 ergs. [Cioffi ] This computes to over 3 million years before a SNR radiates half its initial energy. Radio telescopes can easily detect SNRs during this stage. If we could see radio waves, we would see hundreds of luminous objects several times the diameter of the moon. The actual diameters of SNRs can be very big with older ones perhaps 300 light years across. If that doesn’t impress you, think about this. We could take every star in the our galaxy, about 200 billion, and fit them within a volume having as a radius out to the Pluto’s orbit without them touching. [Van Flandern] You could easily place every star in the known universe within the remnants boundary of one older supernova.

When supernovas enter the third stage they begin to thermally radiate, and they continue expanding to about 650 light years.

Expected Number of SNRs

How many supernova remnants should we expect to see based on t = 25 years (the shorter time span between supernova mentioned by Abell)? If the universe is only 7,000 years old, the number of supernova remnants actually seen for each stage is near the theoretical number that should be seen. Which universe (old or young) do these facts supports? Examine the table below and come to your own conclusion.

SNR Stage	Number expected Old Universe	Number expected Young Universe	Actual # seen
First	~2	~2	5
Second	2,256	258	200
Third	5,033	0	0

The final example is the SNR population of the Large Magellanic Cloud. The observations have caused considerable surprise and loss of confidence….” [Cox]

“Why have the large number of expected remnants not been detected?” [Clark]

“Major questions about these objects that should be addressed in the coming decade are: Where have all the remnants gone?” [National Research Council]

They aren’t there yet. The universe isn’t old enough to have the expected number.

References

Abell, George O., 1984, Realm of the Universe, Saunders College Publishing, New York, pp. 389-390.

Cioffi and McKee, 1988, Supernova Remnants and the Interstellar Medium, Colloquium Proceedings, eds. Roger and Landeck, CUP, p. 437.

Clark and Caswell, 1979, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 174:267.

Cox, D., 1986, Astrophysical Journal, 304:771-779.

National Research Council, 1983, Challenges to Astronomy and Astrophysics working documents of the Astronomy Survey Committee, p. 166, National Academy Press.

Van Flandern, T., 1993, Dark Matter, Missing Planets & New Comets, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, p. 181.

By Jon Covey, BA, MT (ASCP)
Edited by Anita K. Millen-Covey, MD, MPH, MA

If this world were created in six standard days, modified by the curse after Adam’s sin, and mauled by a global flood, what would it look like today? If this world, which many evolutionists claim, were the result of uniformitarian processes over billions of years, what would it look like? If this world were the result of multi-continent catastrophes, as evolutionary neo-catastrophists suggest, what would the aftereffects be? How could we decide which theory was nearest the truth?

A report in the journal Science concluded that 540 million years ago the supercontinent Rodinia suddenly cracked apart. The plates comprising the earth’s crust then moved and rotated much more rapidly than previously thought. Almost simultaneously, a new supercontinent, Gondwanaland, formed. [Kirshvink]

Supercharged Plates

The beginning of the Cambrian, about 540 million years ago, was a time when animal life seems to have exploded, perhaps associated with or following changes in the composition of Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. Kirschvink et al. compiled paleomagnetic data from several continents and suggest that this was also an unusual time for plate tectonics. The data imply that all of the major continental plates rotated and moved rapidly during the Early and Middle Cambrian.

For example, Australia evidently traversed about 90 degrees in latitude within 30 million years. The authors suggest that the motion can be explained by rapid rotation of Earth’s mantle and lithosphere. [Brooks]

Heralding the report, The Los Angeles Times said this event might have set off the most prolific explosion of life in the planet’s history. [Cole] The Times said that the dramatic diversity of life that suddenly appeared in the fossil record about 530 million years ago–the so-called Cambrian explosion–produced the ancestors of virtually all living things on Earth today. Researchers have not been able to explain this sudden appearance of so many disparate body plans. Obviously, Joseph Kirschvink (a Cal Tech geologist) and his colleagues think the sudden movement of crustal plates sparked the previously inexplicable explosion of life:

We propose that rapid continental motions during the Cambrian period…occurred during the same time interval as the Cambrian evolutionary diversification and therefore the two events may be related. [Kirschvink]

The Times quotes Kirschvink as saying:

Life diversified like crazy about a half-billion years ago, and nobody really knows why. When we started assembling a real picture, it suddenly became apparent that this burst of motion was synchronous. The continents were moving at the same time…. That was the key insight.

The Times says Kirschvink speculates that relatively sudden transportation of species living in warm regions to cold ones, and vice versa, would have forced the kind of rapid adaptation to changing environments that drives evolution. He says that emerging traits are more likely to survive in small inbreeding populations, which is a great script for increasing diversity. This is in keeping with one of Stephen Jay Gould’s versions of punctuated equilibrium (please don’t ask which one), which might be in keeping with George Gaylord Simpson’s concept of quantum evolution. [Simpson, 1983]

According to evolutionists, the best way to get diversity of life is to kill as much of it as possible. This seems to be the theme of David Raup’s Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? (1991) Do your level best to wipe out life and life will respond by evolving a richer smorgasbord of delectable creatures.

Back to Eyewitness Observation vs. Speculation

Both creationists and evolutionists have speculated about the separation of Gondwanaland into the current arrangement of continents. Creationists begin their speculation based on an eyewitness testimony. Moses, leader of the Children of Israel, reported that God told him He created the earth and caused dry land to appear out of the waters. According to Moses, God said, “Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear.” [Gen. 1:9] Since the waters were gathered into one place, the land must have been also in one place. Later testimony says that the earth was divided many years later. [Gen. 10:25]

Creationists say diversity follows pre-existing disparity of the many created body plans (phyla). Art Battson’s has a series, On the Origin of Stasis. His work shows that the fossil record is contrary to the standard evolutionary explanations. Evolutionists state that diversity proceeded from a single common ancestor. The Cambrian fossil record is a record of disparity involving as many as 75-100 different phyla. The disparity seen in the early Cambrian represents almost every phylum that has ever existed. Duane Gish, in all his public debates with evolutionists, says that the sudden appearance of many new life forms at the beginning of the Cambrian is what we would expect if creation is true. This fact bothers evolutionists, and they have long been looking for an explanation for the sudden appearance of such a rich and varied fossil record.

Evolutionists speculate how all the diversity of the Cambrian came about. Kirschvink evaded the real problem. Where did the disparity come from? Once the disparity exists, it is not difficult to explain the great diversity. We creationists explain the present diversity after the Flood based on basic animal kinds taken aboard the ark. Rapid diversification took place after the Flood when the animals returned to the land. Ken Ham asks, “If there was a worldwide flood, what should we expect to see?”

Then he asks, “What do we see?”

Billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth.

Many evolutionists regard the Bible as myth and allegory. Strange that after all these years, scientists who rejected catastrophe and embraced uniformitarian geology, sometimes for no better reason than to deny the Bible, are now embracing a catastrophic scenario to explain geology and evolution. This is strange because creationism teaches that the world’s geological features and species diversification happened in a few thousand years. The difference is evolutionists believe these things took place in sudden spurts, each separated by millions of years.

Creationists speculate that the Flood produced the fossil segregation patterns, e.g., trilobites in the Cambrian, dinosaurs in the Jurassic, etc.

Evolutionists note five major periods of mass extinction in the fossil record. Raup refers to these periods as mass killings. [Raup] He mentions that the best documented of the Big Five came at the end of the Cretaceous (when the dinosaurs died off). He says:

Also, sediments from the Cretaceous are widely distributed because it was a time when continents were flooded by shallow seas, leaving a good marine record on the present land surface. [Raup, p. 66; my emphasis]

The Floodwaters came mainly from the ocean as a result of violent upheaval by plate tectonics and volcanic eruptions (part of the fountains of the great deep). This initiated rapid, runaway subduction of the oceanic crust deep into the mantle, and upwelling of melted mantle which filled the ocean basins with hot magma and created unimaginable quantities of steam. The displaced ocean waters swept over the continents and deposited marine sediments on all the continents.

here are more marine sediments on the land than land sediments. The five mass killings are the result of major depositions from transported biomes driven by plate tectonism during the Flood. The seemingly rapid diversification that followed each mass killing is nothing more than continued, but lesser, deposition of sediments containing the multitude of diverse species. The fossils of the five major killings and the periods of lesser killings that followed them represent the organisms living immediately prior to the Flood’s onset. The fossils from most of the geological periods represent Flood kills in which creatures were buried suddenly, preserving their remains.

ICR Scientists Develop Catastrophic Plate Tectonic Theory

Several years ago, Steve Austin and his colleagues, at the Institute for Creation Research, worked out a model of the global flood based on catastrophic plate tectonics. Now evolutionary geologists have decided that the breakup of the original supercontinent was catastrophic, although not on the scale suggested by Austin and his colleagues. [Austin]

The Cambrian explosion represents the initial stages of the Flood when the first layers of marine sediments were laid down on the continents after the ocean waters swept across them. Probably, in those initial stages, the continents were together. This probably explains why geologists such as Derek Ager (see The Nature of the Stratigraphic Record, 1993)are able to trace distinctive deposits over several continents often separated by wide ocean basins. Some of these widespread deposits come from later geologic periods, meaning many millions of years according to evolutionary reckoning. If the early Cambrian marks the beginning of continental redistribution, how can the same deposit of sandstone or limestone bridge several continents? At some point, one has to say that regardless of whatever tremendous catastrophes distributed those deposits, the widening ocean basins would prevent multi-continental involvement from the same event.

According to Austin and other ICR scientists, creationist catastrophic plate tectonics theory began in 1859 when Antonio Snider proposed that rapid plate movement occurred during the Flood. Evolutionists attribute the theory of plate tectonics to Alfred Wegener in 1915 (very few ever mention Snider). [Tarbuck] Modern plate tectonic theory hangs on the ideas of continental drift and the uniformity of present processes extrapolated over billions of years.

ICR scientists begin their explanation with a pre-Flood earth consisting of core, mantle, and crust. There were two types of crust: continental and oceanic. Oceanic crust was made of denser materials (mafic) than continental crust (sialic).

As the Flood began, gigantic slabs of ocean floor broke loose from their moorings with the continental crust and slid beneath the continents (perhaps the result of asteroid bombardment that disrupted the earth’s crust). These slabs deformed the mantle. This produced heat and decreased the viscosity of the mantle around the descending oceanic slabs. The more liquid (less viscous) mantle allowed the plates to fall faster and faster. This created more heat, increasing mantle flow. They called this self-feeding process thermal runaway. By the time the slabs reached the earth’s core, about 60 days later, their speed was about five meters per second.

John Baumgardner, one of the ICR scientists, ran a computer program to simulate this process. As the slabs fell through the mantle and generated heat (the slabs remained relatively cool), great plumes of molten mantle rose up to the earth’s surface and erupted through enormous fissures, ejecting unimaginable quantities of fast-moving lava, which ran into ocean basins. This heated the ocean water, increasing evaporation. The water vapor from the ocean added to the rain already pouring down from the water above the “firmament,” and later became the source of moisture for the ice age snows.

Certainly, much of what creationists say is speculative, but they have an advantage. God, who was perpetrator of the Flood (called Jehovah’s Genocide) [Morris] and its only surviving eyewitness, told Moses what happened. Although many scientists disregard this, observation is a necessary step in the scientific method. God saw the Flood and Moses recorded what God told him.

The creationist catastrophic plate tectonic model is tied to the Flood. It has explanatory power and predictive success. It clarifies certain Scriptures and explains some physical data that the conventional plate tectonic theory doesn’t explain.

---

References

Austin, S. A., J. R. Baumgardner, D. R. Humphreys, A. A. Snelling, L. Vardiman, K. P. Wise, “Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: A Global Flood Model of Earth History,” Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Creationism, R. E. Walsh, ed., Pittsburgh, Creation Science Fellowship, Inc., pp. 609-621, 1994.

Brooks, H., “Supercharged Plates,” Science 277:453, 1997.

Cole, K.C., “Shift in Earth’s Crust, Diversity of Life Coincide,” The Los Angeles Times, p. A3, July 25, 1997.

Kirschvink, J. L., R. L. Ripperdan, D. A. Evans “Evidence for a Large-Scale Reorganization of Early Cambrian Continental Masses by Inertial Interchange True Polar Wander,” Science, 277:541, 1997.

Morris, S., Los Angeles Harbor College physics professor, speaking in behalf of evolution at our meeting for June 1993. J. A. Covey spoke in favor of creation at this meeting.

Raup, D. M., Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck?, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, p. 13-14, 1991.

Simpson, G. G., Fossils and the History of Life, New York, Scientific American Library, pp. 166-172, 1983.

Tarbuck, E. J., and F. K. Lutgens, The Earth: An Introduction to Physical Geology, 2nd edition, Columbus, Merrill Publishing Company, p. 392, 1987.

By Kurt Howard, M.S.
Edited by Jon Covey, B.A., MT(ASCP)

My physical geology professor said, “Regarding uniformitarianism, you can take it with a grain of salt.” After reviewing geology texts on the subject of turbidites, I am following the courageous professor’s advice. To paraphrase his words, I am taking uniformitarianism with a grain of sand, for the philosophy of uniformitarianism states that sedimentary layers form over many millions of years, while much recent research has shown that turbidites form within a few hours.¹

Geologists believe that turbidites are sandstone beds resulting from turbidity currents occurring sporadically and often catastrophically underwater. These underwater currents loaded with varying amounts of sediment, move rapidly down even slight slopes along the ocean bottom for great distances. They originate from underwater slumps or slides often triggered by earthquakes or storm surges. Modern turbidites represent the redeposition of sediments deposited on continental margins by floods and mud- and sand-laden rivers. Ancient turbidites may represent the redeposition of sediments produced during a catastrophic worldwide flood, flowing as turbidity currents into basins that formed during massive tectonic upheavals and mountain-building events.

Turbidity currents are only one of many processes which redistribute material on the earth’s surface or underwater. There is a continuum of sedimentary flows which are classified arbitrarily according to particle size. These include avalanches, mudflows, lahars (from glacial meltwater), and volcanic tuffs. Most of these processes occur both on land and under water. Turbidity flows involve mostly sand to silt sized particles and occur only under water. They are density flows, since the dense sediment-laden current sinks to the bottom of the ocean (or lake) and travels along the bottom for long distances, covering thousands of square miles uniformly, sometimes hundreds of meters thick.

In 1972 Burgert identified several lower basal Tapeats units as turbidites in Grand Canyon’s Cheops Bay. Dr. Ariel Roth, a geologist at Loma Linda University’s Geoscience Institute, suggested that 30% of all sedimentary rocks in Grand Canyon are turbidites. Some geologists suggest that 50% of the world’s sedimentary rocks might be turbidites. If this is true, and it will take much field work to confirm, it will greatly strengthen the case for a global flood. A review of the scientific literature through on-line database search commands reveals thousands of articles on turbidites for the last few years. From 1940 to 1965, geologists identified a very massive type of turbidite bed that they named flysch. A flysch generally forms in a geosyncline: a very large, long trough or basin that has folded and faulted at the perimeter of continents.

The Appalachians are an uplifted geosyncline according to Tarbuck and Lutgens. Flysch deposits are tens of thousands of meters thick, about ten times thicker than non-flysch turbidite layers. An ancient turbidite in the Great Valley of California is this thick. Graywacke is the sandstone present in flysch turbidites and has a relatively high amount of clay or mud, sometimes earning the name of dirty sandstone. However, clay predominates in flysch deposits, and the graywacke layers are interbedded in the clay. Flysch is found all over the world and is dated mainly from the Paleozoic era (about 225-570 million years ago).

Modern geologists discarded the terms flysch sediments and geosyncline because rapidly formed megathick flysch is incompatible with uniformitarianism and long ages. However, in the last few years, the number of geologists abandoning the classical uniformitarian discipline and adopting the new catastrophism is almost a shock to observing creationists. Geologists are finally beginning to grudgingly agree with us creationists about the nature of the stratigraphic record, which is a record of major catastrophic events and not the slow year-by-year buildup suggested by uniformitarianism. Flysch deposits might be the sedimentary results of a global flood. The idea of geosynclines is unpopular because most geologists believe in plate tectonics.

Graded bedding is one of the main features of turbidity currents, in fact the terms are almost synonymous. Normal graded bedding is present in beds where the grain size is coarse at the base and gradually becomes fine at the top. However, graded bedding is only part of the turbidite sequence that Bouma identified and it is the popular model for turbidite deposits.² The Bouma sequence consists of the following five levels going from the bottom of the bed to the top. Level A is massive or graded sandstone, sometimes having pebbles or mudripup clasts at the base, Level B is plane laminated sand. Level C is crosslaminated sand sometimes with ripples. Level D contains plane laminated silt or clay and Level E is non-laminated mud.

Each level represents different flow conditions or velocities. Levels D and E represent suspension deposits. While these five levels are the ideal, all five levels are not always present, depending on distance from the source and the nature of the source material. Investigation of fossils associated with turbidites often indicates that levels A, B and C contain benthonic (bottom dwelling) microfauna that dwell in shallow water and live on the continental shelf Levels D and E, on the other hand, contain deep marine microfauna such as radiolarians which settled out of suspension. This supports the understanding that the sands traveled in a turbidity current from shallow areas down to the deep marine continental rise or deep-sea basin.

Muds of Level D and E, containing deep sea microfauna are believed to have settled from fine clay-sized material in suspension following the deposition of the sand turbidity current. Turbidites are common all over the world. The first underwater flow that was attributed to a turbidity current occurred on the continental shelf off the coast of Grand Banks, Nova Scotia in 1929 . An earthquake triggered a turbidity current that over a period of several hours successively snapped transatlantic cables lying on the continental shelf Modem turbidites have flowed the full length of Lake Mead, where the gradient is only 1: 1000, supporting the view that turbidity currents can flow hundreds of kilometers from their source. Since geologists generally agree that the sandstone part of a turbidite (Levels A-C) settles rapidly, i.e., in tens of minutes, the logical question is to ask how long does it take for the mud in Levels D and E to deposit from suspension.

Uniformitarian evolutionists believe that the sedimentation rate for the muds is very slow, requiring tens or hundreds of millions of years for the formation. Holroyd discusses the problems that arise from this model.³ Holroyd says that the sedimentation rate for the uniformitarian model is very slow: a few micrometers per year for a 200 meter stratum assumed to be 50 million years old. At that minuscule rate most organisms of any size would rot and be scavenged long before they could be buried and fossilized. Many evolutionists recognize this problem and opt for periods of rapid sedimentation followed by long periods of non-sedimentation. The problem here is that when there is cessation of sedimentation erosion begins, causing gullies and channels and plant growth develops soils. Most flysch and turbidite deposits, however, show apparently continuous deposition and rarely show evidence of erosion. Furthermore, no layers of ancient soil with roots and other evidence of vegetation are found. This supports the view of rapid deposition of the entire flysch or turbidite formation. The widespread presence of turbidite deposits represents a fertile field for flood geologists not encumbered with uniformitarian and evolutionary bias to reinterpret the evidence of the rocks and uncover the truth of Earth’s early history.

THE FOSSILIZATION PROCESS

In A New Look at the Dinosaurs, Alan Charig, Curator of Fossil Amphibians, Reptiles and Birds at the British Museum of Natural History gives the standard explanation for how animal remains become fossilized. He says:

“…when the dinosaur had died near a river or in a swamp it stood a much better chance of being preserved. Its body might sink into the mud on the spot, or floodwaters might sweep it into the river to float downstream and end up on a sandbar, on the bottom of a lake or even in the sea. The flesh would decay and the bones would gradually be covered by sediments–such as mud or sand–which are always accumulating in such places.”⁵

Atheist Immanuel Velikovsky wrote: “When a fish dies its body bloats on the surface or sinks to the bottom and is devoured rather quickly, actually in a matter of hours, by other fish. However, the fossil fish found in sedimentary rock is very often preserved with all its bones intact. Entire shoals of fish over large areas, numbering billions of specimens, are found in a state of agony, but with no mark of a scavenger’s attack. “The explanation of the origin of fossils by the theory of uniformity and evolution contradicts the fundamental principle of these theories: Nothing took place in the past that does not take place in the present Today no fossils are formed.”⁶

Which man, Velikovsky or Charig, more accurately describes the nature of the fossil record?

POLYSTRATE FOSSILS AND CATASTROPHIC GEOLOGY

Individual fossils that traverse two or more sedimentary strata are polystrate fossils (poly meaning many; strate referring to strata or layers). In Lompoc, California, the fossil skeleton of a baleen whale was uncovered in a diatomaceous earth quarry. The Chemical & Engineering News report says, “The whale is standing on end in the quarry and is being exposed gradually as the diatomite is mined. Only the head and a small part of the body are visible as yet. The modern baleen whale is 80 to 90 feet long and has a head of similar size, indicating that the fossil may be close to 80 feet long.”⁷

Does this mean that many feet thick of diatomaceous earth represents either a major catastrophic event, such as a turbidity current, in which the whale was suddenly buried and was rapidly fossilized or does it mean that the remains of the whale spent an unknown length of time exposed to the elements, scavengers and decay processes while it was slowly buried by dying diatoms and silt before it fossilized. I can argue that it was buried suddenly and rapidly because many such polystrate fossils, from trees to trilobites, have been found all over the world. The best explanation is that they were buried rapidly. The evolutionary explanation is that the organisms were first slowly buried and fossilized in the usual manner, eroded out of the layer in which they were entombed, and then reburied by later periods of sedimentation in an upright position.

I don’t believe such fossils stood upright, perpendicular to the plane of sedimentation while they were reburied over long ages. This would have had to have happened many times and is very unlikely. Additionally, the above report on the whale says, “The diatomaceous earth must be taken from around the fossil with great care because the bones are fragile and disintegrate quickly when exposed to air.” This renders it even less likely this whale was ever previously uncovered.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

John Blasdale asks: The article “Melting of wet lithosphere, ” Nature 358 (7-2-92), pp.20-21, enclosed in relation to my comments on seamounts, states that the addition of only a small amount of water (0.4%) reduces the melting point of the rocks on the lithosphere by a couple of hundred degrees–see p. 20, last paragraph. So, would the Earth have been flooded with lava if the water of the Flood had drained into the lithosphere? Or where else might the water have gone? And–if the water is said to have come from the lithosphere, why wasn’t Noah’s Earth flooded with lava instead?

–John Blasdale, Whippany, NJ

John, a Christian evolutionist and my friend, is asking where all the water for the Flood came from and where it went after the Flood was over. He does not believe Noah’s Flood was a global flood. According to the Bible, some of the water for the Flood came from the moisture held in a vapor canopy surrounding the Earth. No one knows how much water came from the rain, but some suggest that there had to be an upper limit on the quantity because of the amount of heat that would be released as the water vapor condensed into rain due to the latent heat of vaporization. Too much condensation would release too much heat and everything aboard the ark would die. The Bible also says that the fountains of the great deep burst open. An unknown amount of water came from these fountains. From what the Bible says, we do know that the water was 22.5 feet higher than all the high mountains over the whole earth.

We know that before the flood, it did not rain, but a mist (or flow) used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground. This mist was not dew, for dew would not provide enough water to keep things alive, nor would it provide enough run-off to keep the four rivers outside the Garden of Eden flowing. Two of those rivers are the Tigris and the Euphrates. Some suggest that the mist came from a system of underground reservoirs called aquifers. The physical characteristics of these aquifers are not known. How the water was stored and how the aquifers were replenished is also unknown. We do know that the Bible says there was a mist, robust enough to water the whole surface of the earth. The aquifers might have been a pressurized, worldwide sprinkling system with the pressure supplied by geothermal heat. Every kilometer in depth, the temperature rises 30°C.

Some speculate that when the fountains of the great deep burst open, the isostatic equilibrium of the continents was disrupted because the sudden burst of water and lava out of the earth was so great (The video, Evidences: The Record and the Flood produced by Loma Linda University geology professors through Geoscience Research Institute, has an excellent depiction of this. The video is available through Geoscience, Box II 19 Hagerstown, NM 21741 for $29.95 plus $4.50 shipping). This caused the continental land masses to bob downward and the oceans completely flooded the land surface. Because continental rock is less dense than the rock beneath it, the continents rose up again and the water rushed back into the ocean basins. Another creationist Flood model results from a computer model John Baumgardner produced, which shows runaway plate subduction. Drs. Steve Austin (ICR), Kurt Wise (ICR), Russ Humphreys (ICR) and Andrew Snelling (CSF) join Baumgardner in this model.

The mud flows and turbidity currents from all this would have been prodigious, fully capable of laying down immense conglomerates such as the Shinarump which covers an area of 100,000 square miles to a uniform thickness of about 50 feet. Some feel that the massive ejection of water and lava out of the earth evacuated gigantic underground chambers. The ceilings of these chambers then collapsed, giving the ocean basins even greater depth than before. Most of the water is in the deeper ocean basins and in the polar ice caps (no pre-Flood polar caps). Blasdale is aware that lava deposition is abundant all over the world. Anita and I like to drive on our vacations, and we have seen lava outcroppings and thick layers of lava throughout vast areas of the Western United States, from Colorado to Washington. It seems that it is everywhere, but it is much more abundant and extensive in certain areas such as the Mesa Basalt, which covers most of Oregon and parts of Washington, California, Idaho and Nevada. We know there are at least 50,000 extinct volcanoes, and some of these produced lava flows which may have covered more than 1.5 million square kilometers (580,000 sq. mi.) such as the Deccan Traps.⁸

The world of Noah’s day was inundated by water according to God’s eyewitness report in the Bible. Whether it was likewise flooded by lava, we do not know, since the Bible didn’t make a report on that, but there is lots of lava around. In another issue of Creation in the Crossfire, we mentioned that worldwide volcanism at the onset of the Flood and for many years afterwards may have helped set the stage for an ice age. The Bible says Noah’s world perished by water, but the volume of molten rock released when the Earth’s crust was ruptured as the great fountains of the deep burst forth was probably extensive. I know evolutionists assume that these extensive lava formations were the result of volcanic eruptions over millions of years, but there is no way to establish this. My friend, like most people, thinks that radiometric dating can show how old a lava rock is, but radiometric dating is extremely unreliable.

There are many assumptions which must be made, for example, how much daughter product was present when the rock formed, and there are many pitfalls in the dating process itself that compound the problem. When independent labs can vary as much as 100-500 million years for the same rock unit, something is very wrong. That kind of variance is not tolerated in clinical labs, why is it tolerated in geology labs? Why are geochronologists willing to overlook this or cover up the many discordant results, all the while publicly proclaiming great accuracy and precision for radiometric dating? (See Unreliability of Radiometric Dating)

Blasdale thinks young earth creationists are totally wrong about Noah’s flood, otherwise we would find fossilized terrestrial remains mixed with marine fossils. There are such mixtures. Harold Coffin writes, “The Tuscarora and Pocono sandstones in the Eastern United States, the Chinle and Moenkopi formations (which lie just above and below the Shinarump Conglomerate), and many other beds are even more extensive in area. Some are marine–that is, they contain marine fossils and thus might be more readily compared to modem ocean basins or shelves. Others, however, are either land or mixed marine and land formations, which are difficult to explain except by a catastrophe.” {4} There are numerous instances when the so-called oldest fossils are found with the alleged youngest fossils. Evolutionists attempt to explain this as an artifact due to erosion and relithification of the fossils so that the older fossil appears in the same rock as the younger. This is what they call contamination. I call it contamination too, but it is contamination that took place when marine and terrestrial animals were mixed together during the Flood. David Raup, curator at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago thought it funny that creationists kept trying to get their explanation of the perceived order of the fossils in the geologic column reconciled with the Flood. In a letter to Nature, Raup writes:

“One of the ironies of the evolution-creation debate is that the creationists have accepted the mistaken notion that tile fossil record shows a detailed and orderly progression and they have gone to great lengths to accommodate this ‘fact’ in their Flood geology.⁸

ONE FINAL NOTE: from what we’ve covered concerning catastrophic events, one cannot conclude that the flood waters were a homogenous, turbid mixture. That has been one mistake made by most theistic evolutionists who reject the global extent of the Flood.

Resources

1 Allen, J.R.L., 1991, The Bouma Division A and the Possible Duration of Turbidity Currents. Journal of Sedimentary Petrology, vol 6 1, no. 2, p. 291-295.

2 Bouma A.H., 1962, Sedimentology of some Flysch Deposits Amsterdam, Elsevier, p. 168

3 Holroyd, E.W., 1992, Comments on the Fossils of Dinosaur Ridge. Creation Research Society Quarterly. v. 29, no 1, p. 6-13. [Anita and I had the joy of driving past this ridge in August during a rain storm . Too bad we didn’t stop and look around–ed. Yeah. I’m a wimp!

4 Coffin, Harold G. and Robert H Brown, Origin by Design, Review and Herald Publishing Association, Washington, DC, pp. 87-89, 1983, This book is available through Master Books 1-800-999-3777..

5 Charig, Alan, A New Look at the Dinosaurs, Facts On File, Inc., 1983, p.27

6 Velikovsky, Immanuel, Earth in Upheaval, Dell Publishing Co., Inc., New York p.209. This reference is for the paperback edition, not to be confused with the Doubleday and Co edition., 1955.

7 Reese, K.M., “Workers find whale in diatomaceous earth quarry,” Chemical & Engineering News, p. 40, Oct. 11, 1976. This report says that each discovery at the quarry is turned over to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County to be used for public display and research at the museum. Members of our sister organization were able to handle these remains recently.

8 Krishnan, M.S., Geology of India and Burma, Madras, Higginbotthams, p.536,1968.

9 Raup, David M., Nature, 17 July 1981, p.289

By Jon Covey, B.A., MT(ASCP)
Edited by Anita Millen, M.D., M.P.H., M.A.

There are six known Archaeopteryx fossil skeletons in the world and one fossil feather. In 1956, before some of these skeletons had been recognized as Archaeopteryx, Adolf Portmann, a world renowned zoologist, said that these skeletons “are documents without which the idea of evolution would not be as powerful.”{1}

According to Portmann then, the evidence for evolution would be flimsier if it were not for these six skeletons.

In April this year, Dr. Robert Kofahl and I took part in a videotaped minidebate with biologists Gus McCarthy of Cal State, Dominguez Hills and Ron Kroman of Cal State, Long Beach. Exasperated, Dr. McCarthy asked what we would accept as an intermediate if not Archaeopteryx. Did it have to be 40% reptile and 60% bird, or 30%, or what??? I understand Dr. McCarthy’s frustration, because I too was once an evolutionist, and I thought creationists were either mental midgets or had brain damage.

Biologists should be more cautious about their claims. For instance, evolutionists promulgating the idea that the coccyx is a vestigial{2} organ have led surgeons to think they could be removed with impunity in patients who were having trouble with them. In our present litigious atmosphere, any surgeon who removed a coccyx, thymus or other organ based on the idea that it was vestigial and therefore unnecessary might get sued by a patient who suffered the after effects.

This being the case, one day biologists might find themselves being hauled into court by surgeons who had acted on this false information and had themselves been sued by dissatisfied patients. Although at one time more than 180 bodily parts were considered vestigial, we know now there are none; they are all necessary. It was due to ignorance that they were thus listed.

Likewise, biologists should be more cautious about what they call examples of transition. I won’t talk about the hoax of Piltdown Man, or the concoction of Nebraska Man based on a single tooth from an extinct pig. Once upon a time, the famous horse series, which is still on display at many museums, was claimed to be a perfect example of an evolutionary sequence, but these creatures are related to one another because they are similarly-shaped animals, not a series of transitions.

Dr. Duane Gish, Associate Director of the Institute for Creation Research, had this to say about this famous series:

“Horses comprise one of the most interesting mammalian groups as far as the question of origins is concerned. Almost all students are familiar with the story of horse “evolution,” beginning with Hyracotherium (Eohippus), a dog-sized “horse” with four toes on the front feet, passing via straight-line evolution through three-toed varieties, and ending with the modern one-toed Equus. But while subscribing to the evolution of the horse in general, J.B. Birdsell proclaims that “much of this story is incorrect.” Others hold the same view. George Gaylord Simpson, for example, has declared that several generations of students have been misinformed about the real meaning of the evolution of the horse.{3} The authors believe that the evolution of the horse is much more complicated than usually portrayed, and is more like a series of bushes, perhaps, than like a tree.”{4}

The problem is that many of the animals in the horse series lived at the same time, making it difficult for them to be the ancestors of one another. The rib counts of each type don’t jive with the supposed evolutionary progression. The claims for Archaeopteryx might one day succumb to similar problems, especially now that many other odd-ball birds have been discovered. As a group, they might all face the same problem of evolutionary sequencing as did the “horses.”

There is some question about whether Archaeopteryx, supposedly 150 million years old, is really the ancestor of birds. Bones of a modern bird were found in the same geological strata as Archaeopteryx by James Jensen.{5} In Science News, John Ostrom, a leading bird paleontologist, stated in response to this report: “It is obvious we must now look for ancestors of flying birds in a period of time much older than that in which Archaeopteryx lived.”{6}

Recent discoveries at the Dockum Formation near Post, Texas by Sankar Chatterjee pushed back the date of the earliest known bird to 225 million years ago based on evolutionary reckoning. Two crow-sized birds he calls Protoavis date 75 million years older than Archaeopteryx.{7} They have several features in the skull and shoulder which are more birdlike than Archaeopteryx.

Archaeopteryx couldn’t be the ancestor of birds if a more “modern” type bird than has been found in rock 75 million years older. Some paleontologists, including Ostrom,{8} already felt that Archaeopteryx wasn’t on the main line to modern birds before Protoavis was discovered. If Protoavis is more birdlike, then it would be even less of what one would want as transition form. Controversy over Protoavis has been bubbling for the last six years, and last year it surfaced in full color on the cover of the August 17, 1991 issue of Science News (a very worthwhile magazine).

Concerning Chatterjee’s long-winded paper on the bird published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Ostrom says, “Sad to say, for all its length, little support for the claim is to be found in the paper.”{9} He suggested that Chatterjee make the bones available at “the Natural History Museum laboratories at the Smithsonian Institution where it can be the subject of detailed and independent scrutiny.” It seems that is just what he has done, but at another location, for there are other paleontologists who have been able to study it firsthand. Larry Martin, paleontologist at the Museum of Natural History at the University of Kansas, says, “There’s going to be a lot of people with Archaeopteryx eggs on their face.”{10}

Details of archaeopteryx

In his book The Neck of the Giraffe—Where Darwin Went Wrong, evolutionist Francis Hitching had much to say about Archaeopteryx. He explains that every one of its supposed reptilian features can be found in various species which are undoubtedly birds.{11} Hitching brings up the following points, first presenting the usual claim and then giving some counterexamples found in modern birds:

1. It had a long, bony tail, like a reptile’s on which feathers grew.

While it is generally true that reptiles have tails, and birds appear not to, the detailed position is more complex. In embryo, some living birds have more tail vertebrae than Archaeopteryx does, which later fuse to become an upstanding bone called the pygostyle. The bone and feather arrangement on a present-day saw shows striking similarities to Archaeopteryx. According to one authority, there is no difference in principle between the ancient and modern forms: ‘the difference lies only in the fact that the caudal vertebrae are greatly prolonged. But this does not make a reptile.’

2. It had claws on its feet and on its feathered forelimbs.

But so do some modern birds, such as the hoatzin in South America and the touraco in Africa. The ostrich of today, which also has three claws on its wings, has been suggested by some experts to have more supposed reptilian features than Archaeopteryx—but nobody, of course, considers the ostrich a transitional form.

3. It had bony jaws lined with teeth.

Modern birds do not have teeth. But many ancient birds did, particularly those in the Mesozoic, and there is no suggestion that these are intermediates. It is just as convincing to argue that Archaeopteryx was an early bird with teeth [I would say it is only an extinct bird with teeth and was contemporaneous with what are now called “modern” birds].

4. It had a shallow breastbone that would have given it a feeble wing beat and poor flight.

Modern woodcreepers such as the hoatzin have similarly shallow breastbones, and this does not disqualifying them from being classified as birds. And there are, of course, many species of bird, now and in the past, which are incapable of flight.

In any case, recent examination of Archaeopteryx’s feathers at the Smithsonian Institution has shown that they are the same as those belonging to many modern accomplished fliers. ‘This implies at the very least that the beast could glide at some speed and lays to rest the notion that the feathers evolved as either heat insulation or as an aid to trapping insects.’

5. Its bones were solid, like a reptile’s, not thin or hollow like a bird’s.

Another idea that has been drastically revised. The long bones of Archaeopteryx (wings, legs) are known now to have been both thin AND hollow. It is still debated whether they were ‘pneumatized’ like a bird’s, i.e., containing an air sac.

6. It predates the general arrival of birds by sixty million years.

Until 1977, Archaeopteryx was uniquely early in the fossil record. But in that year, archaeologists from Brigham Young University discovered, in western Colorado, a fossil of an unequivocal bird, in rocks of the same period as Archaeopteryx. Professor John H. Ostrom of Yale University, who positively identified the specimen, commented: ‘It is obvious we must now look for the ancestors of flying birds in a period of time much earlier than that in which Archaeopteryx lived.’

This discovery much weakens the case for Archaeopteryx as an intermediate, and makes it that much more likely that the creature was just one of a number of strange birds living at that time. Professor Heribert-Nilsson commented forcefully that ‘they are no more reptiles than the present day penguins with their wing-fins are transitional forms to fish.’{12}

Sinornis: New Bird on the Block

EVOLUTIONISTS WING IT WITH A NEW FOSSIL BIRD cries the headline in Science magazine. “Sinornis provides…the transition from the primitive wing of Archaeopteryx to a specialized wing more like that possessed by modern birds….15 million years after Archaeopteryx lived. Sinornis had a modified wrist bone like that of modern birds, with a groove that let the wrist bend sharply back, so the wing could be tightly tucked in during flight or rest. And while Archaeopteryx had three long, claw-tipped fingers that apparently did double duty in flying and grasping prey, Sinornis had greatly reduced claws, and small hands with a sturdy middle finger, which served as the anchor for important flight feathers.”{13}

Sereno and Chenggang present the technical report on which this commentary was made (pp. 845-848), which I wanted to criticize but “time’s winged chariot has hurried near.” At least some still are convinced that Archaeopteryx is the great granddaddy of all birds and that Sinornis is a slightly modified descendant, but it is likelier that Archaeopteryx is simply another type of bird, like the Dodo, that has become extinct. Concerning Protoavis, Archaeopteryx, Sinornis, and others like them, they are a group of similarly structured birds, but in the final analysis, which will take years, it may be decided that they really don’t represent an evolutionary sequence just as the “horse” series doesn’t.

From the creationary perspective, these birds lived at the same time and died in the same global flood at almost the same time—within hours or days of each other. Let’s consider how this could be true.

Why Six archaeopteryx Fossils in the same Area?

The immense mud flow that occurred two years after the Mount St. Helens eruption eroded a channel into solid bedrock, up to 140 feet deep, within a few hours, producing a canyon system one fortieth the size of Grand Canyon. Dr. Steve Austin dubbed it the Little Grand Canyon, and even the rangers there and some evolutionary geologists have adopted the name. The material from that mud flow went into the Columbia River choking it, and the river had to be dredged to allow shipping to resume. That flow was very powerful, yet it is very tiny compared to the magnitudes of the flows that would have been part of a global flood. These flows would not mix with one another (In next month Crossfire, a friend working on his geology masters degree and I explain why), causing mixing of marine and terrestrial organisms, contrary to the claims made by opponents of a global flood. By and large, they would remain segregated. This segregation has lead evolutionists to suppose that the geological strata represent vastly different ages.

Let’s suppose a flock of Archaeopteryx were resting somewhere, temporarily free from the increasing inundation of the flood waters. Not far away, an unconsolidated limestone slurry breaks loose as the result of an earthquake or enormous tsunami or whatever and rapidly buried the birds. A few of the flock managed to take to the sky before they were overcome and managed to fly a short distance away before they fell exhausted and drowned. They were later buried by another mud flow after their bodies partially decomposed. The enveloping mud subsequently turned to rock and the bird remains fossilized; later one is discovered and called the Maxberg specimen. The six Archaeopteryx fossils come from one region: the Solnhofen limestone.

In the Scientific American article “Archaeopteryx,” Peter Wellnhofer describes the six specimens and their graves:

“The geological conditions that led to the formation of the Solnhofen limestone explain the exceptional preservation of the Archaeopteryx fossils. During the latter part of the Jurassic period, the area of what is today the southern Franconian Alb was a tropical lagoon divided into various basins by submarine reef complexes. North of this lagoon was the landmass of what is now central Germany; south of it was the Tethys Sea.”

” The region was not a South Seas paradise: the water in the lagoon was too salty and contained almost no oxygen. It was therefore inhospitable to most forms of life. Occasional storms caused floods that flowed over the southern reef barriers and carried multitudes of marine animals and plants into the basins. These died quickly in the lagoon waters, sank to the bottom and were promptly buried by layers of lime-rich mud.” [How does he know? Was he there?]

“Plants and animals from the northern landmass and its outlying islands also reached the lagoon at Solnhofen. These lands were home to many types of life: conifers, cycad ferns, ginkgo trees, insects, dinosaurs and Archaeopteryx. Tropical storms could have brought flying creatures [or the conflagration of a global flood divinely revealed by a truthful God who was there] to the lagoon by blowing them out to sea; currents could also have carried plants and animal carcasses there. Because almost no carrion feeders or microorganisms lived in the salty lagoon [he wasn’t there and doesn’t know this], dead organisms decayed little before fossilizing in the lime-rich sediments.”{14}

Predictive Power of Creationism

The Bible tells us the world perished by water. A Christian evolutionary friend asserts that creationism has no predictive power and evolution does. If one reviews Creation in the Crossfire articles, one could see that predictions have been made. I just made predictive assertions about the burial of the Archaeopteryx specimens. Someone may say that my prediction doesn’t prove anything, that’s my point. Evolutionary prediction don’t prove anything either. However, the Bible constrains what we can predict. If the Flood is true, we should see billions of fossils buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth, and this is what we see. We predict we would see herds of mammals, schools of fish, forests, and other large groupings buried together, and that’s exactly what we see.

We predict that bottom dwelling marine creatures would be buried together and would seldom be found in the same rocks as the mobile vertebrates. That is exactly the way it is. The Cambrian rocks have no vertebrates (although there are some, but evolutionists explain this as contamination due to reworking of sedimentary rocks—creationists would explain this as partial mixing of different streams of Flood waters).

We predict animals inhabiting the plains regions would be buried together. What does the fossil record show? Large herds of animals are found buried together, sometimes with skeletons complete and unmolested. In the famous bone bed at Agate Springs, Nebraska we can see many thousands of fossil mammals: rhinoceros, camel, giant boar, and many others buried together. A whole herd of fossilized hippopotami was found entombed in a mountain cave. Even larger gatherings can be found in Canada and other parts of the world. At Dinosaur National Monument, park rangers confess that the fantastic wall of dinosaur bones was the result of a colossal local flood.

Immanuel Velikovsky, an atheist and avid anti-creationist (much admired by my father-in-law), was also a blatant catastrophist and was shunned by dogmatic uniformitarian geologists. He believed that the past had periods of geological and astronomical upheaval unparalleled by anything ever admitted by geologists until recently. Velikovsky recognized the telltale aftermath of cataclysmic events on a scale that we would term a Biblical spectacle, and he even explained certain biblical events in natural terms and as the result of natural catastrophes. He remarks on the geological monstrosities in this way:

“Petrified bones of reptiles, birds, and mammals are often found in large unbroken areas; and since it is quite difficult to describe such areas as wading places, another explanation of the origin of fossils is sometimes offered: the animals were drowned and buried in inundations of large rivers. This explanation seems for certain cases generally closer to the truth than the wading theory; however, the size of the continental areas covered by floods imply catastrophic events on a large scale, and such events, far beyond what is observed on seasonally overflowing rivers today, again contradict the principle of uniformity.”

These things speak of gargantuan floods of Biblical proportions (and Velikovsky even says so). The huge Sicilian hippopotamus beds have been mined as a source of charcoal. On the other hand, the vast buffalo herds that once populated the Great Plains region in the United States were killed by the millions and left no fossil remains. Very few fossils are being formed in the world today because organisms are only rarely buried rapidly by mud flows which produce the conditions needed for fossilization.

There are tremendous marine fossil graveyards containing billions of fish (some seen swallowing smaller fish or caught in death throes by the cataclysmic event which enveloped them). There are billions of clams and other bivalves with shell halves still tightly closed (meaning they were buried alive) which can be found, but these things aren’t happening today. A global flood would be fully capable of producing such formations through events such as turbidity currents—the main subject of another Creation in the Crossfire article. These things may not prove global flood happened, but they do give it credence.

Creationism also predicts that billions of creatures with no transition forms would be found in the aftermath of the flood since the Bible teaches God created all the animals in a few days and not gradually over eons. Many in the Judeo-Christian community want to interpret the six days of creation as six eons. Their argument is an argument from silence. They also say that Noah’s flood was not global. The Bible says God created all the living creatures in less than six days: not much time there for gradual transformations. If their interpretation is true, that God created all things through a process of evolution, they should be able to point to unmistakable transition forms. They face the same problems as the atheist evolutionist. However, if God created all the kinds of living creatures in just a few days and then later destroyed the world by a global flood, we should find the remains of fully formed creatures with no transitions. This is what the paleontological facts show.

Resources

1. Wellnhofer, Peter, “Archaeopteryx,” Scientific American, p. 77 (1990).
2. “Vestigial structures are those that formerly were better developed and functional but have become of little or no use.” General Zoology by J.E. Wodsedalek, p. 450, (1963).
3. Simpson, G.G., The Major Features of Evolution, Columbia Univ. Press, New York, p. 259 (1953).
4. Gish, Duane, “The Origin of Mammals,” Impact, No. 87, September 1980, p. iii goes into more detail. Acts, Facts and Impacts subscriptions are available from the Institute for Creation Research, PO Box 2667, El Cajon, CA 92021 at no charge. There is more detail on the horse series in Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No, also by Dr. Gish (call 800-999-3777 to order).
5. “The Oldest Fossil Bird: A Rival for Archaeopteryx?” Science, 199:284, (1978).
6. “Bone Bonanza: Early Bird and Mastodon,” Science News, 112:198 (1977).
7. “Fossil bird shakes evolutionary hypothesis,” Nature 322:677 (1986).
8. Ostrom, John, “Origin of Birds,” lecture for MACUB Conference at Iona College, New Rochelle, New York (1983).
9. Ostrom, John, “The bird in the bush,” Nature 353:212 (1991).
10. Anderson, Alun, “Early Bird Threatens Archaeopteryx’s Perch,” Science, p. 35, 5 July 1991.
11. Hitching, F., The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong, Ticknor & Fields, New York, p. 34 (1982).
12. ibid., pp. 33-34.
13. “Evolutionists Wing It With A New Fossil Bird,” Science, 255:796 (1992).
14. op cit., p. 73
15. See Men of Science—Men of God for a fuller discussion of who these scientists were and what they believed. This book is available for sale at our meetings or by calling Master Books at 1-800-999-3777.

By Jon Covey, B.A., MT(ASCP)
Edited by Anita K. Millen, M.D., M.P.H., M.A.

Meteorologist Michael Oard’s new book, An Ice Age Caused by the Genesis Flood, is worth reading because it harmonizes evidence for an ice age with the effects of the Genesis Flood. It is an excellent book and can be read and understood even by high schoolers willing to make the effort. I believe this book, even with any flaws it might have, is a book just as revolutionary as was Dr. Henry Morris’ The Genesis Flood. (Oard’s book, Master Books (800) 999-3777)

“To produce an ‘ice age’, the snow must accumulate year by year, change to ice, and advance down to 37°N latitude in the central United States. More summer cooling than 12°C is likely required. As a result of this temperature criterion, an ice age is extremely difficult to account for, especially when only present processes are allowed (p. 6).” Additionally, the ocean had to be much warmer than the average 4°C of today.

We have far too little space to present fully why the Flood scenario is a more reasonable cause for an ice age than any uniformitarian explanation, as Michael Oard says in the above quote. However, in his book, he explains how the ocean was warmed by Flood events and why a warm ocean is essential for the development of an ice age.

Strong absorption of solar radiation by water vapor in the vapor canopy that enshrouded the earth before the Genesis Flood maintained a universally warm climate by reradiating the absorbed heat and heating the ocean (p. 6). The Genesis Flood rain released latent heat from the vapor canopy and heated the ocean. Latent heat is the heat stored in water vapor that is needed to change the state of water from a liquid to a gas. Some creationists think Noah’s ark would have been dangerously overheated by this process (p. 28), but the actual amount of water and heat in the vapor canopy may not have been very great.

When the fountains of the great deep erupted (presumably the 50,000+ known volcanos and seamounts-submarine volcanos) (p. 29), gargantuan lava flows and titanic volumes of hot water and lava gushed out of the depths of the earth and further heated already warm oceans. A warm ocean (above 30°C) would have generated enough water vapor for unusually severe winter snow storms for many years. Even if the oceans had originally been 4°C, which is the average ocean temperature today (p.29), 50,000 active volcanos would have raised the average oceanic temperature and greatly reduced the sunlight because of the ash and aerosols they expel. Volcanic dust and aerosols act as an inverse greenhouse by reflecting solar radiation back to space and allowing heat to escape from the earth. The Krakatoa eruption, in 1883, injected about 100 million tons of dust into the stratosphere. The impact on weather was noticeable for several years afterwards. The effect from the eruption of Tambora, in 1815, was so great that 1816 was called “the year without a summer”. There were massive crop failures that year, due to frost.(p.34)

The Necessity of a Genesis Flood for an Ice Age

Genesis Flood events supplied the necessary conditions for an ice age, producing an ocean filled with warm water and creating a plentiful source of water vapor for heavy winter storms. Multiple volcanic eruptions (the fountains of the great deep mentioned in Genesis) filled the sky with volcanic dust and gaseous aerosols (p.29), yielded cooler summers by blocking out much light and heat from the sun and allowed snow packs to survive from winter to winter. The warm ocean kept the winter marine air relatively warm, so that more moisture could be transported to the cold land masses for snow storms.

Cooler Air Holds Less Moisture

Uniformitarian geologists can envision a period of cooler summers, so that snow packs can survive. In his 1979 Arctic and Alpine Research article, “An Energy Balance Model of Potential Glacierization of Northern Canada”, L.D. Williams used a computer model to determine how much colder summers must be to preserve snow from winter to winter. The results showed that temperatures had to be 10-12°C lower than average. Cooler summers, however, will have a weakening effect on winter storms. The ocean would be colder and generate less water vapor. Also, the atmosphere’s water vapor carrying capacity is inversely affected by colder temperatures as the graph shows.

Colder summer temperatures alone will not preserve snow packs if the sun’s radiation is not partly blocked as well, because the melting of snow results more from solar radiation than from warm air temperature, as Paterson showed in his book The Physics of Glaciers, 2nd ed., 1981, p. 313. Summer snow cover in north-eastern Canada would cause drier conditions there, and the storm tracks would move further south because of the concomitant expansion of the polar anticyclone – a high pressure system in which the winds blow outward.(p.12) According to Ruddiman and McIntyre (Science 204:173-175, 1979), growth of extensive bodies of ice also implies expansion of the polar anticyclone normally positioned over ice cover in the far north. They say that the expansion of dry cold air would reinforce the normal high-Arctic aridity and slow or stop the rapid growth of ice sheets unless opposed by other parts of the climatic system – by which they mean a 1 to 2°C warmer temperature for the North Atlantic Ocean, which they believe occurred during the first half of glaciation.

In summary, without a warm ocean less snow would fall in the winter and cooler summers alone could not produce an ice age, as the above graph shows. This is why Ruddiman and McIntyre suggested that the ocean was 1-2°C warmer at the beginning of the ice age. This might give a temporary increase in snow, but only for a short time. According to an extensive analysis of sea-surface temperatures for 120 years, Folland and Kates discovered ocean surface temperatures trailed air temperatures by only 15 years.(p.8) Subsequently, the severe decline of water vapor would produce snowless winters, which would be compounded by cooler atmosphere unable to carry much moisture. Oard says that the lack of an abundant supply of moisture is probably the most serious difficulty for uniformitarian ice age theories. (p.55)

Uniformitarian Evolutionists Proffer a Multitude of Theories

One ice age researcher, J.K. Charlesworth, author of The Quaternary Era, remarked 35 years ago, “Pleistocene phenomena have produced an absolute riot of theories ranging ‘from the remotely possible to the mutually contradictory and the palpably inadequate’.” More recently, in “Ice Ages: A Search for Reasons”, from Winters of the World, Brian John reminisced on Charlesworth’s comment and said, “Things have become even more confusing since then….” In other words, evolutionary uniformitarians have no reasonable explanations for an ice age based on present processes. Indeed, they cannot even explain why we have our present ice sheets. Our present climate can maintain them, but it could not produce them.

Oard says, “The picture that emerges at the end of the Flood catastrophe is a barren world with no trees, plants, animals, or birds (except in the Ark). All air-breathing, land-based animals had died and were fossilized, or were in the process of being fossilized, in the sediments of the Flood. The oceans would be about 40 meters higher than today, because the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets had not yet developed. The newly-formed stratosphere would contain a thick shroud of volcanic dust and aerosols, due to the extensive volcanic and tectonic activity during the Flood. It probably was a dark, depressing world. The oceans would be uniformly warm. Conditions would then be established for a second, much-lesser catastrophe – a post-Flood transition to the present-day climate. This would be a post-Flood ice age.”(p.31)

Snowblitz: The Ice Age Starts

Oard says that a snowblitz is what would have occurred after the Flood, and it would have engulfed a far larger area than that envisioned by the most radical proponents of the snowblitz theory. He says that a snowblitz is the concept that a snow cover or an ice sheet develops over large areas all at once, instead of in local mountainous areas, from which it subsequently flows outward. Oard says that in the post-Flood snowblitz, storms would often develop near the southeastern coast of the United States and move northeastward. These storms would be greatly magnified versions of present-day “northeasters” that wrack the eastern seaboard every year.(p.60)

Rick Balogh, professor of geology and science at Antelope Valley College, gave us an excellent presentation. Video tapes of his presentation is available. He gave permission to publish any of the material appearing in his handout, A Christian Apologetic for Creation and the Flood, for which we are very thankful.

Does Fossilization Require Millions of Years?

By Rick Balogh, MS

Have you ever observed the process of petrifaction (replacement of the normal cells of organic matter with other minerals)? According to evolutionary doctrine, petrifaction requires much time, usually millions of years, but how much time is really needed in this process? Have you or anyone else ever observed the formation of petrified wood? Evolutionists say that the petrifaction of wood takes a very long time, but like the rapid formation of stalactites and stalagmites under the Lincoln Memorial, chemical and physical conditions determine how long it will take to fossilize something. Time plays only a small part in the equation. Consider this excerpt from Scientific American of March 23, 1889, page 181:

“There is a well known petrifying stream of water at Knaresborough, Yorkshire, England, three miles from Harrowgate, the well known sanitarium. It is a cascade from the River Nidd, about 15 feet high and twice as broad, and forms an aqueous curtain to a cave know as Mother Shipton’s Cave. The dripping waters are used for the purposes of petrifying anything sent to be hung up in the drip of the water ledge, which flows over, as it were, the eaves of the cave. This ledge of limestone rock is augmented unceasingly by the action of the waters which flow over it. This cascade has an endless variety of objects hung up by short lengths of wire to be petrified by the water trickling over them, as sponges, books, gloves, kerchiefs and veils, hunter’s cap, fox, cat, dog, bird, boots, etc., just as fancy prompts people to seek petrifying results. A sponge is petrified in a few months, a book or cap in a year or two, cat or bird a little longer….One cat shown in the museum had the head broken off at the neck showing the whole was limestone throughout, with not a trace of organic structure of the original cat.”

Recorded in scientific american of March 17, 1855, page 211:

“On the 20th of August, 1847, Mrs. Phelps, wife of our informant, Abner P. Phelps, died, and was buried at Oak Grove, in Dodge Co. On the 11th of April inst., she was taken up to be removed to Strong’s Landing. The coffin was found to be very heavy, and the body to retain its features and proportions. After its removal to Strong’s Landing, a distance of some 45 miles, the body was examined, and found to be wholly petrified, converted to a substance resembling a light colored stone. Upon trial, edge tools made no more impression upon it than upon marble. In striking upon the body with metal, a hollow singing sound was produced….The ground in which she had been buried was a yellowish loam, and the body lay about three feet above the lime rock….A few years ago a lady died in the neighborhood of Felicity, in this County, and was buried in the orchard on the farm. About four years, after she was disinterred, for the purpose of removal to a public graveyard, she was found to be completely petrified, being as solid as stone and fully as heavy. Every feature was distinct and perfect.”

Not only are there examples of rapid petrifaction, but there are also examples of fossils that were preserved remarkably well and not petrified. Consider this statement from Jame E. Francis’ article “Arctic Eden,” Natural History, January 1991, p.57 and 60:

“The remains of lush forests near the North Pole give a glimpse of the Arctic’s subtropical past….Despite the passage of 45 million years, the wood retains its original color and is still flexible and burns easily. I quickly discovered that my geologic hammer was useless for collecting samples of the fossil wood; the next season I came better prepared with wood saws.”

How do you think a magnolia leaf would change as the result of having been buried for 17-20 million years? Consider this remark from Nature, V.344, April 12, 1990, p. 587:

“When rocks containing these fossils are cleaved open, the freshly exposed leaf tissues are often bright green or ‘deep autumnal’ in colour, though they rapidly curl away from the substrate as they oxidize and dry out.”

The author say that it was even possible to isolate the DNA of the leaves:

“But even the most optimistic estimate of the longevity of this molecule would not have predicted that fragments of substantial length would survive after tens of millions of years at the bottom of an ancient lake.” (p. 587)

THINK! Does petrifaction require lots of time or just the right conditions? The same could be asked of many processes to which evolutionists have assigned long ages: mountain building, the bending and buckling of geologic layers, the deposition of sediments many kilometers thick, and deep canyon formation.

Does the Geologic Column Represent Hundreds of Millions of Years?

Long before the discovery of radioactivity and radiometric dating of rocks, the hundreds of millions of years of time needed for the deposition of the geologic column was reasoned as shown below, which is taken from James Dana’s book Manual of Geology, 1880, page 591:

“The rate at which coral reefs increase in height affords another mode of measuring the past. From calculations elsewhere stated by the author, it appears that the rate of increase of a coral reef probably is not over a sixteenth of an inch a year. Now, some reefs are at least 2,000 feet thick, which, at one sixteenth of an inch a year, corresponds to 384,000, or very nearly a thousand years for five feet of upward increase….The use of these numbers is simply to prove the proposition that Time is long, – very long, – even when the earth was hastening on toward its last age.”

This reasoning is based on the principle of uniformitarianism which can be summarized as “the present is the key to the past.” That is, the rate of sediment accumulation measured today can be used to determine how much time was needed for the geologic column to be deposited assuming the same rate was acting then as today. This is a big assumption which cannot be tested. Was anyone there to verify the sedimentation rate then? God was, but He asks Job:

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell Me if you have understanding.” (Job 28:4)

This question of “Were you there?” may seem trite but it serves to remind us that unless someone was there to accurately record just what happened, we simply have conjecture. Is a guess always correct, sometimes correct, or never correct? Only God was there to observe the deposition of all rock layers, everyone else is simply guessing.

Let’s imagine that you are standing at the base of a cliff where rock layers are clearly visible. Can any conclusion regarding time be deduced from what you see?

THINK! There is obviously an order to the deposition of layers. The one on the bottom must have been deposited before the one immediately above and, so on, to the top layer. This is obvious, common sense reasoning that does not require verification by someone who saw the layers form. Of course, there is the possibility that God created them instantly that way, but if we confine our possibilities to the natural, excluding the supernatural, we can accept this as fact.

Evolutionists go through similar reasoning based on the fossils. They see similarities in anatomical structures and the seeming order in which fossils are found in the geologic column and conclude that evolution occurred. How does their reasoning differ from that which we have used for deciding that the oldest layer is at the bottom of our imaginary pile and the youngest is at the top? The deposition of sedimentary layers has been observed many times (the geologic activities at Mount St. Helens provided us with a remarkable natural field model of significant volcanic and aqueous depositions, as well as deep canyon formation), we can repeat the process at will, and we can even predict certain characteristics that will form during the deposition. The French creationary geologist, Guy Berthault has conducted such experiments and next month we will look at his work in this area. The evolutionary process, however, has never been observed, it cannot be repeated at will, and we cannot predict which characteristics would evolve. Furthermore, it is important to realize that the order of rock layers says nothing about the length of time for deposition.

THINK! When a fish dies is it immediately buried and subsequently become fossilized as silt slowly covers it? Of course not! It is more likely to float than sink and to be eaten by scavengers. There is a great abundance of fossil fish, whole schools that were obviously buried rapidly in the midst of their daily activities, some caught in the act of swallowing other fish, indicating clearly that huge submarine mud flows or turbidity currents overtook them and instantly buried them. A beautiful fossil specimen of one fish swallowing another is seen on the cover of Creation Research Society Quarterly (CRSQ), vol. 26, June 1989.

THINK! Fossil trees have been discovered in several localities around the world whose trunks vertically span rock layers for dozens of feet, such as this photo shows (from CRSQ, vol. 14, p. 153, December 1977). Similar photos and drawings are seen in Why Not Creation, edited by Walter Lammerts (CRS), 1970, pp. 153-155 and in Neglected Geologic Anomalies by William Corliss, 1990, pp. 254-260.

What do you think—slow or rapid burial? Could the flood of Noah’s day have been responsible for depositing the geologic column? If so, the time period of its formation would be months, not hundreds of millions of years.

By Jon Covey, B.A., MT(ASCP)
Edited by Anita Millen, M.D., M.P.H., M.A.

The sunburst pattern of alpha-damage trails produces a spherically colored shell in the granite crystals around the halo center.

Dr. Robert V. Gentry worked as a guest scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) for twelve-and-a-half years (’69-’82) through National Science Foundation grants. Gentry’s work showed that the Earth’s granite was never in a molten condition, because polonium pleochroic halos survive only in solid rock and the half-life of polonium is much too short to survive a multimillion-year cooling time. His results seem to indicate that the Earth was created instantaneously, in a cool condition. If true, it is clear evidence for creation. Gentry documents his evidence in Creation’s Tiny Mystery, available through Earth Science Associates, Box 12067, Knoxville, TN 37912-0067 (This book contains copies of Gentry’s reports in scientific journals and an intriguing narrative about the scientific community’s response to his published findings.

When a radioactive atom decays, it emits alpha particles with a characteristic energy from its nucleus. In hard, crystalline rock, millions to billions of alpha particles are propelled in all directions through the rock’s crystal lattice a specific distance from the radiocenter, which contains the radioactive isotopes. The greater the energy, the farther the particles will travel through the rock. These alpha particles damage the surrounding rock crystals, creating discolored halos. It is possible to identify which isotope was responsible for which halo simply by looking at the fingerprint-like series of concentric spherical halos produced and measuring each halo’s radius.

Polonium has three very short-lived isotopes Polonium-218, has a half-life of 3.05 minutes, Po-214 a bare 164 microseconds, and Po-210 a longer 138.4 days. Because their half-lives are so short, they could not endure long enough to make halos if the rocks had originally been molten–or even hot, because halos persist only in stable, solidified rock. Had Gentry not discovered that there are uncountable trillions of polonium halos with no uranium sources near them, there would be no evidence that the Earth was never molten.

Not long after Gentry had published some of his results in the various scientific journals, some scientists became aware of the implications of the presence of polonium pleochroic halos not associated with uranium. They understood that any free polonium within a magma mass would have decayed away long before it cooled sufficiently to allow halo registration, although Gentry had only hinted at the implications, because he was not given the freedom to elaborate. Despite journalistic restrictions, it was fairly clear that Gentry had physical evidence contrary to modern geological theory concerning formation of the earth and its basement rocks.

Dr. Gentry further suggests that granite cannot be synthesized by any natural means, either in the laboratory or in the deep, underground batholiths and magmatic intrusions and dikes, nor in the lakes of lava cooling after volcanic eruptions. Rhyolite (granite’s chemical analog) forms instead. A few attempts have been made to synthesize granite, but none has been successful.

Helium and lead retention in zircons

During his stay at ORNL, Gentry discovered an important piece of evidence for a recent, sudden creation of the earth. He took granite drill core samples (drilled by the Department of Energy in New Mexico during the 1970s) from 3000 feet to 15,000 feet and analyzed the zircons for lead and helium concentrations. Lead and helium are both relatively loosely bound in the zircons, helium more so than lead. This means that with sufficient time and effects of temperature, lead and helium concentrations in the zircons should be depleted in predictable ways. Gentry found virtually no difference in lead concentrations and much more helium than should have been present, regardless of the depth from which the sample was taken. This was surprising since temperature increases with depth, so that the helium and radiogenic lead would be driven out of the rocks at depths of two to three miles after several billion years. Instead, the concentrations observed are consistent with a planet only thousands of years old.

by Cliff Lillo

The Illustrated Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, Abridged and Introduced by Richard E. Leakey, 1979. Hill and Wang, New York. 240 pages.

Charles Darwin had many strange beliefs, some of which are pointed out in the book review on the next page. One of the strangest may have been his belief that the Eozoon existed in countless numbers and certainly preyed on other minute organic beings. The Eozoon were later shown to be nothing more than crystalline formations.

Many of Charles Darwin’s mistakes are admitted by Richard Leakey in this abridged edition of Darwin’s most famous work, but he, nevertheless, claims that “Darwin’s genius transcends the century . . .” on page 13. Regarding the book. He says in his Introduction:

It was an important book in Darwin’s time and it remains so today, for the theory of evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology and Darwin’s book forms the foundation of that theory, p. 9.

Leakey does not wish to discredit Darwin in any way when he points out Darwin’s errors and he frequently tries to explain away the differences between Darwin’s views and those of modern evolutionists. Yet when he does tell us is that in many ways Darwin was wrong!

In his Introduction Leakey says:

Sometimes . . . when subsequent research has shown Darwin’s discussions to be wrong. I have added short explanatory notes . . . p. 12. 13.

Darwin brought many different kinds of information to bear on the question of evolution, among them: heredity and variation, fossils, geological formations, geographical distribution, embryology, taxonomy and homology . . . Since Darwin’s time, there have been advances in all these individual disciplines, and some have changed beyond recognition in the past century. p. 21.

Expressed in other terms, in each of the areas mentioned, Darwin wrote his opinion but there has been change of thought over the years in the scientific community, and, in some cases the change is beyond recognition from previous views.

We must give Leakey credit for pointing out Darwin’s mistakes, but I believe that a creationist would have done it differently. Leakey uses an Introduction to the book, comments within some chapters, and comments under his illustrations to tell us of Darwin’s errors. Still, in reading Darwin’s text. It is easy for the reader to forget that Darwin was wrong when he says that science has not yet proved Lamarck in error about spontaneous generation, wrong when he says that changes in habit can be inherited, and wrong when he says that use or disuse of an organ can be passed along from parent to child, etc. Leakey lets Darwin’s statements continue to be expressed unchallenged in the text of this abridged edition. As a creationist. I would have put parenthetical statements immediately after each wrong statement by Darwin, such as. “He is wrong here because . . .” Leakey’s illustration captions present another problem, in that they give some present beliefs and facts, which the reader accepts, causing him to accept the text in the same way. Leakey wants us to admire tins self-trained naturalist, who took his observations about God’s beautiful creation and extrapolated small differences within species to the preposterous conclusion that no Creator was necessary, or even existed. What does it take to discredit a man like Darwin?

Here is what Leakey says about spontaneous generation:

. . . in Darwin’s time it was widely believed that . . . “spontaneous generation could occur, since tiny creatures could be observed under the microscope, in liquid in which vegetable matter had been infused. . . . At the very time The Origin of Species was published, Louis Pasteur was conducting his experiments demonstrating that spontaneous generation did not occur . . . but Darwin still kept an open mind on the subject as late as 1872. p. .35.

It should be noted that the sixth and last edition of The Origin of Species was published in January 1872. Darwin says:

Lamarck, who believed in an innate tendency towards perfection in all organic beings, seems to have felt this difficulty so strongly that he was led to suppose that new and simple forms are continually being produced by spontaneous generation. Science has not as yet proved the truth of this belief, whatever the future may reveal, p. 91, 92.

To Darwin, science had not yet proved the truth of spontaneous generation but a scientist, Louis Pasteur (who was also a Christian) had already proven it to he fallacious!

Darwin was also wrong about variability with domestication. Leakey says:

Darwin’s idea that domestication can, in itself cause greater variability to arise between individuals is now known to be wrong . . . Gene recombination and mutation are what give rise to variation, and these will occur at the same rate in the wild as under domestication. But in the wild, variation will usually be far more ruthlessly weeded out. p. 50.

Darwin thought that habits could be passed from parent to child. He says on page 50, “Changed habits produce an inherited effect . . .” Leakey counters this with, “Characters acquired by an individual during its lifetime cannot be passed on to its offspring.”

Darwin believed that the use or disuse of an organ would be inherited. His statement was, “I think there can be no doubt that use in our domestic animals has strengthened and enlarged certain parts, and disuse diminished them; and that such modifications are inherited.” p. 95. Is this true? If a farmer cut off a cow’s tail would her descendants be unable to swish their tails? Would they be born without tails? Leakey says.

Although Darwin wrongly thought that habit and the effects of use or disuse could be inherited, he did nut regard the inheritance of such acquired characters as essential to his theory. In the first edition of The Origin of Species there was less emphasis on this subject, but Darwin later gave it more prominence to answer criticisms that there had not been enough time for so much evolution to have occurred merely by the accumulation of random variations, p. 50.

Darwin’s and Leakey’s comments regarding variations due to chance are also significant. Darwin said, “I have hitherto sometimes spoken as if variations were due to chance. This, of course, is a wholly incorrect expression . . .” page 95. In contrast, Leakey wrote, “Genetic variations are in fact. ‘due to chance.’ since the form they take is not influenced by the environmental conditions.” p. 95.

One of Darwin’s claims concerned the “eozoon.” (i.e., “dawn animal.”) Darwin says,

The Eozoon belongs to the most lowly organized of all classes of animals but is highly organized for its class: it existed in countless numbers and certainly preyed on oilier minute organic beings, which must have lived in great numbers, p. 164.

What made Darwin think that the eozoon was carnivorous? How did he determine that it preyed on anything at all? The eozoon was not an animal, not even a plant. This is what Leakey has to say about this:

He [Darwin] believed that numerous fossils of a tiny creature, which was given the name Eozoon, were present in certain Precambrian strata in Canada. But these were later shown to be nothing more than crystalline formations, p. 34.

These are only a few of the many wrong statements by Darwin that Leakey has admitted in this hook. Creationists are urged to get the book just to see how wrong Darwin was. The book should especially be read by theistic evolutionists. Since they do accept the reality of God, when they are shown that the basic theories of Darwin are wrong they may also accept the realities of Creationism.