Jun
1
Keeping the Darwinian Narrative Alive
“The formula goes like this: 1. Evolution is true. 2. Here’s how it must have happened. 3. Look, yet more proof of evolution.” — author and biophysicist Cornelius G. Hunter
David Coppedge’s latest article at “Evolution News and Science Today” is sure to cause a stir. Coppedge prefaces it with the following:
“This article will survey recently reported fossil discoveries that evolutionists use to support their tree of life icon. The fossils range from the Cambrian to the Neogene. My aim here is not to question their dates or placement in the standard geologic column, but to examine how fossils are used in the Darwinian narrative. We can compare the behavior of evolutionary paleontologists to overeager churchmen holding a piece of wood said to be a fragment of the true cross. They encase it in a shrine. But then a monk argues that the piece of wood came from the wrong place and time, too early for the cross. Then it becomes reinterpreted as a fragment of the harp that David played for King Saul. Analogously, fossils are only observable in the present, but the evolutionary narrative drives the interpretation of their positions in the story of life’s evolution….”
He then goes on to discuss examples of fossils from different geological periods (Ediacaran, Cambrian, Devonian, Triassic, Cretaceous, Cenozoic) that have been assumed or force-fit to prop up the current evolutionary synthesis model. I have reproduced those from the Ediacaran, Triassic, and Cretaceous to give you examples, but you should read the whole article, which includes source links.
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Ediacaran fossils of the genus Charnia (pictured above), discussed in the Journal of the Geological Society by D. McIlroy, occur in many parts of the world. No skeletal or muscular systems are observed in these frondose specimens that consist mostly of 2D impressions on rock. McIlroy’s interpretation uses the word “might” 15 times, as in: “the Charnia morphotype produced might be functionally plausible as example of an extinct metazoan clade.” (Emphasis added.) Darwinians would sure like to have a transitional form there! It would help bridge the gap between the mysterious Ediacaran fauna and the Cambrian explosion.
Another frondose Ediacaran specimen named Fractofusus is described in Nature Communications by Dunn, Donoghue, and Liu. It looks nothing like a Cambrian animal, but they need it to fit the Darwinian narrative. Interpretation: the fossil provides “a framework for explaining evolutionary transitions between the bodyplans of these members of the eumetazoan stem-group.” A framework is like a plot for a story….
At Phys.org, Justin Jackson depicts an unobserved account of how the bones of a dinosaur in India may have functioned in an unobserved creature brought to imagination by an artist.
“Sun filters through dense stands of cycads and conifers of Gondwana, where a lithe, bipedal predator slowly moves through the Upper Triassic undergrowth. Standing just over a meter tall and measuring about two meters from snout to tail, Maleriraptor kuttyi navigates the terrain with calculated precision. Nearby, early sauropods graze in loose herds, towering only slightly over the small predator as it comes to a halt between concealing ferns — observant, watchful, waiting….”
A story like this is much more likely to get clicks than a jargon-heavy dry paper in Royal Society Open Science, especially when the authors struggled with the interpretation of this dinosaur. For one thing, it was found on a different continent than others of its type. Maleriraptor’s ilium, in addition, illustrates “some degree of evolutionary plasticity among archosaurs” they suggested as they hassled to find its place in a phylogenetic tree. No matter the final consensus, they are certain that it will “shed light on the early evolution of dinosaurs,” they assure readers. They’ll be sure to tell us when the light arrives.
Meanwhile, in Australia, Vera Korasidis from the University of Melbourne tells about “polar dinosaurs” that thrived when Australia was within the Antarctic Circle. Their evolution coincided with the appearance of flowering plants, Korasidis writes in The Conversation. It seems to be a law of nature that any mention of the origin of flowering plants will be accompanied by the phrase, “Darwin’s abominable mystery.” That is the case again here. But her goal was guided by and informed by Darwin regardless.
“My new research with palynologist Barbara Wagstaff, published in Alcheringa, builds on existing knowledge by using plant fossils from bone-bearing sites in the region to explain how the forests these dinosaurs lived in [sic]evolved — and, for the first time, illustrating them in detail.”
Like the monk explaining the piece of wood, Korasidis observed bones in the present, not the unobserved past. The polar dinosaurs and the plants they ate surely lived, but did they evolve?
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Remember, Coppedge’s “aim here is not to question their dates or placement in the standard geologic column, but to examine how fossils are used in the Darwinian narrative.” At the very least, it seems the evolutionist researchers and educators do a lot of “adjusting the speed dial of evolution” and “science-of-the-gaps” hand-waving to smooth over the “difficulties” and assure themselves and their readers that an evolutionary approach has the best answers.
