The Case for Evolution

Who doesn’t love dinosaurs? My introduction to them came when my mother bought me a set of children’s encyclopedias. Maybe I was around four years old? I fell in love! Then, when I started to school, the library had books on dinosaurs. I was in heaven!

Many decades later the internet came along. When Facebook got started, I found science-oriented groups to join, and I learned more about dinosaurs. And I’ve found so many wonderful videos and documentaries online at YouTube and other streaming sources. I’ve learned more about paleontology, anthropology and geology in a few years than I did my entire life before then.

The Emergence of Paleontology

Humans have been fascinated by fossils for tens of thousands of years (I’ll cover that subject in future post), but it wasn’t until the 1600s that the serious study of fossils emerged as an infant branch of science. Initially, it was an offshoot of geology. Then, in 1822, a French zoologist named Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville coined the term “paleontology”, firmly establishing a new scientific field.

At first, it was a niche science indulged in by a few wealthy individuals. Travel was slow and expensive, beyond the means of most people.

In the mid-1800s, there was an uptick of interest amongst the general public as museum collections grew and the first dinosaur park opened.

From the time the first movies appeared in the early 1900s, dinosaurs became a popular theme, further titillating the public interest.

In the last hundred years, public fascination with dinosaurs has continued to grow, and the field of paleontology has exploded into dozens of specialties covering not only the age of dinosaurs, but the pre-dinosaur and post-dinosaur eras. Travel has become fast and (relatively), much cheaper, meaning more digs around the world, and more people participating in those digs. Countless millions of fossils have been found, and the number just keeps growing.

Young Earth Creationism

I’ve mentioned on this blog that I grew up in a Young Earth Creationist environment. It wasn’t a brainwashing thing, though. The subject didn’t come up very often, and when it did, it wasn’t really cut-and-dried. Most church people around me accepted that the Earth is a few thousand years old. Some people were open to an old Earth, as in billions of years old. But even some of the old Earth believers decided that H. sapiens was a separate special creation. I don’t remember anyone ever arguing about the age of the Earth, or whether or not “Man came from monkeys”, or trying to force others to change their views.

The Internet is different. Young Earth Creationists (YECs), are everywhere! They’re vocal and argumentative. Some believe dinosaurs existed at the same time as humans. Some are convinced that dinosaurs never existed (fossils are a hoax!). None of them believe in evolution. All of them have some wild ideas about science. As in, they reject scientific theory which is based on sound evidence, and provide their own interpretations. YECs aka evolution deniers have no critical thinking skills, are willfully ignorant, and make the most ridiculous statements in a debate about evolution, like some of the following examples:

•Some point out the Piltdown man

They use this as proof that scientists are easily fooled. But if they would bother to learn the entire story of the Piltdown man, they would know how weak their argument is.

At the time of the Piltdown man hoax, archaeological anthropology was a new science. The perpetrator of the hoax, Charles Dawson, would not let anyone examine the skull too closely. Many scientists were skeptical that it was genuine, and the debate raged for a time. After Dawson died, researchers finally got hold of the skull for close examination. The consensus was almost immediate. It was a fake. In recent decades, with modern technology, all the details of how it was created came to light.

It’s a funny thing. Science deniers can crow about scientists getting fooled, and at the same time, they themselves are easily fooled by conspiracies that are effortlessly disproven. They don’t see their own hypocrisy.

•A pig tooth was declared to be an extinct species of human.

More “proof” that scientists are easily fooled? Like Piltdown, this was when that branch of science was in it’s infancy. They did not have our modern technology. Nevertheless, it was quickly identified as belonging to a peccary. It was an understandable mistake. Humans, bears, pigs and some other species all have bunodont molar teeth which resemble each other, and it takes a close examination to identify the difference. The badly worn tooth in question was properly classified after close scrutiny.

•There is no evidence that humans evolved from lesser forms. All the primitive human bones ever found would fit in a shoebox.

Get with the times! That may have been true in the early 1800s, but paleontologists have found thousands of bones from ancestral and related primitive human species. The human evolutionary chart is slowly becoming more and more complete. The evidence speaks for itself.

•If evolution was true, why don’t we see an animal giving birth to a new species?

Oh, that’s rich. Those asking that question believe in “kinds”, as I covered in THIS post. So you believe that after the Great Flood, “kinds” were giving birth to or hatching out new species. Yet, when disputing science, you deny that it can happen that way? There goes that hypocrisy thing again. Science deniers using that as an argument are trolls. They know how stupid it sounds, but they find it cute to sling it around as an accusation.

It takes millions of years for a species to transition into a new species. Not just one generation; it involves gradual changes over long periods. There is no clear line where one species becomes a new one. It happens too slowly.

•Evolution is not observable; therefore it can’t be true.

Actually, it IS observable. But that’s such an involved subject, I’m saving it for a future dedicated post.

•Carbon-14 Dating is not accurate and can’t prove that the Earth is old or that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago.

Radiocarbon dating, or carbon-14 dating, was first developed in the late 1940s at the University of Chicago by a man named Willard Libby, which triggered archaeology’s “radiocarbon revolution”. Like all brand new technologies, it was a bit crude at first. But, like all technologies, it was improved and refined and upgraded until it has become an outstandingly accurate dating tool. Today, C14 labs use high emission mass spectrographs, a remarkable technological advancement.

It hasn’t stopped with C14 dating. All kinds of stunning technologies have been developed to date just about everything. Even rocks can be dated! But each dating method only works on certain types of things in certain circumstances. If a particular dating method is used for the wrong thing, the results will be erratic. YEC fraudsters take advantage of this fact to deliberately try to fool the scientists. Yes, YECs, I’m talking to you. You declare that science is a fraud, but you commit your own frauds to fool your own followers! I’m touching on two examples:

YECs sent some recent lava from Mount St Helens to a lab to be dated via the Potassium-Argon isotope method. Potassium-Argon is only accurate if the sample is AT LEAST 100,000 years old. Of course the result was wrong. But YECs love to brag how the 30 year old rocks dated to several thousand years. Therefore, they say, it can’t be proven that lava can be millions or billions of years old. In other words, YECs commit fraud and then lie about it.

In another case, YECs submitted Mesozoic dinosaur bones for radiocarbon dating. Of course, this method doesn’t work on inorganic fossils, and doesn’t work on organic remains older than 50,000 years. The deceitful YECs gleefully announced to their audience that the bones dated between 9,000 and 42,000 years. What they didn’t mention was the letter from the lab that informed them that the date was coming from the varnish which had been applied to the bone for display, and not from the bone itself.

•Evolution can’t be true, because transitional fossils have never been found.

Geez. Anyone who thinks this is living in a cave. Oh, wait, they’re willfully ignorant, which is pretty much the same thing. So many transitional fossils have been found!

The Proof is Out There

As I said above, many transitional fossils have been found. And more are being found all the time. The evolutionary record is gradually filling in. It’s nowhere near complete, and probably never will be. It’s like having a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing. Assemble what you have, and you can see what the overall picture is, even though some of the finer details are wanting.

Look at this wonderful infographic illustrating the evolution of birds. (Click the image to enlarge it).

This is a masterful exemplification of bird evolution from the earliest forms. As more transitional fossils are found, the picture will become even more complete.

That’s only birds. Enough fossils have been found to create similar charts for other groups of animals. The case for evolution, including that of humans, is undeniable. Except to science-deniers who prefer hoaxes and conspiracies to truth.