Fossils and Faith

Do you see a neck on this Tiktaalik fossil? Image from

Do you see arms and paws or hands?

Fish hands diagram from here.

Tiktaalik wrist and hand

Do these artist's renderings really show the details of the fossil? Or are they merely what the paleontologist and artist want to be there?


Fossil debunking video.

Under the title “Dinosaur Hoax,” this unnamed young debunker of evolution triumphantly proves in a three-minute video that so-called dinosaur fossils are no more significant than random pieces of smashed-up plaster. You can spackle the bits back together any way you choose, she says; therefore, dinosaurs are a fabrication.

This woman almost has a point. The following images are from Georgia Life Traces. and have been shrunk (but will be somewhat larger if you click on them). Follow the link to see them full size. The first image is captioned, "A rare piece of dinosaur bone that actually looks like a bone..." while the next one is, "You probably spotted the big chunk right away, but how about the smaller ones that tend to blend in with the non-dinosaur-bone rocks around them?" and the third one is of  a negative cast of a dinosaur track. For this latter, I can kind of see it, if I squint right.

How much of paleontology is based on faith? How much, as the speaker on the video asks, is based on the millions of dollars the paleontologists receive*?

I visited Drumheller, Alberta (link to their museum) almost twenty years ago. A paleontology/tourism group was offering to take people into the hills to look for dinosaur fossils. I joined them, had a great time but found  nothing in the ground. We did pass a huge claw that the guide told us was aT-rex foot-claw fossil. The mineral that had replaced the bone was iron and the guide told us such fossils were so delicate that there was no point in carrying it away - it would crumble at the touch. This is nearly the sum total of my personal experience with fossils. Wait. I also have spent time at Craig Leith Provincial Park. There are many fossils from 400+ million years ago there.

So I am certain that fossils are real, which puts me ahead of the woman in the video.

But are those tiny details correct?

After several fruitless minutes, I have given up on trying to find a long video of a glass-walled beehive. I wanted to demonstrate the 'expert's eye'. At university I was required to spend something like ten hours studying such a bee hive. For the first half hour I only saw a squirming mess. In the second half hour I saw one waggle dance (the dance bees use to communicate where a pollen source is). In the second hour, I saw ten waggle dances and in the following hours I saw them every time I looked. We upper year students would sometimes call a freshman student over and ask them to point out a waggle dance. They saw none. Then we would point out the dances one after another that they had missed entirely.

In my home district of Muskoka, there are many beautiful lakes and it is the perfect distance from Toronto so many wealthy families from Toronto and points south have cottages there. I grew up on those lakes and for many summers as a high school and university student, I worked as a carpenter's assistant on the lakes. I remember being out one summer day with another university student, this one from a drier part of Ontario. He asked me about a recurring whine or high pitched hum we heard through the day. Without needing to think about it, I told him that was the hydraulics of a boat's Inboard/Outboard motor adjusting the trim. This was natural and obvious to me and completely new to him.

I do take the pronouncements of paleontologists on faith to an extent. I have difficulty seeing the various bones described in Tiktaalik's neck and fin. And yet, the people who criticize their claims usually haven't spent time with that specific fossil nor can claim to have spent enough time studying fossils in general to have an 'expert's eye'.
A good example of this is mathematician Fred Hoyle's description of archaeopteryx as a fake. He had no background in paleontology and appears to have misidentified modelling rubber as a suspicious chemical that pointed to fraud. The best counter argument for his claim is that at this time, a total of nine archaeopteryx fossils have been found, some with even better feather impressions than the one he examined. There is more at the link.

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* The question of whether the speaker on the video is sincere or satirical is still open. If anyone cares, paleontologists do not make millions of dollars, ever.

Fossil evidence

In a previous post, I wrote about what evidence we should expect to find and whether gaps in the evidence were deal-breakers.  in brief, I tried to show there are places where we shouldn’t expect a lot of evidence (Smaller plants and animals are generally less likely to fossilize, as are soft bodied plants and animals.  Soft body parts, such as organs are less likely to fossilize.  Chemical traces are similarly fragile and their lack does not mean they never existed).  This isn’t to mean that there is no evidence for evolution or that we should accept evolution, or any scientific theory, on bad evidence.  Only that pointing out a lack of evidence in one area does not mean other similar areas are also lacking.

Here’s an example.  I personally don’t know what transitional fossils there are between dinosaurs and mammals.  Similarly, I don’t know what early carnivore might have transitioned into canines, felines and mustelids (the group containing weasels, otters, wolverines and more).  Partly, this may be due to my own ignorance as I have not dug into evidence or fossils in these areas.  On the other hand, there is excellent, finely graduated evidence for transitions between fish and amphibians. There are good transitionals between an ancient land mammal and whales.  There are so many fossils showing a transition from dinosaurs to birds that I personally don’t know which ones best show bird ancestors.

I blamed my own ignorance above but I also see ignorant people on Twitter claim there is no evidence for fish to amphibians.  I wish they would investigate where they lack knowledge before proclaiming it wildly to make a claim.  I have admitted my own ignorance above but not as a claim or to promote a conclusion.

Alright, to the evidence!

1: Fossils

First, it should be noted that fossils are found in assemblages that support an ancient Earth and evolution over a long period.  There are (very few) fossils of soft bodied organisms that pre-date the Cambrian Explosion.  In 2014, in the Cambrian fossil beds, a vertebrate fish was found, the Metaspriggina. This early fish was jawless.  Another, similar fish existed: Haikouichthys. The Pikaia, a chordate, also lived during the Cambrian.

I have heard and read the claim that all phyla were present during the Cambrian so they must have been created.  Again, there are fossils older than the Cambrian era and a phylum is a big group.  I have given examples of a chordate and two vertebrate fish but there are no jawed fishes, no amphibians, no reptiles, no birds, dinosaurs, mammals, crocodiles, or turtles.  Sharks don’t have bones the way other vertebrates do so I am uncertain on this point, but I believe there are no examples of them, either.

So, we have a period of sealife only, a period where, among vertebrates, only amphibians existed.  A period of dinosaurs, a period of giant mammals, then a period, continuing now, with humans.  There are animal groups that bridge some of these eras - sharks, turtles and crocodiles existed with and even before dinosaurs- but the groups I first named are discrete.  In one group of fossils, there are no land vertebrates.  In another group, there are dinosaurs but no large mammals or people.

We don’t need to stick to vertebrates.  Another famous group of animals that existed at one point and not with animals of other periods are the Ammonoidea.

The evidence I have given is, I would say, weakly supportive of evolution.  This is a broad strokes, a long distance look, at the evidence and at this scale we can only say that a primitive group of fish existed, then more advanced fish, then amphibians, then other terrestrial vertebrates.

While it offers only weak support to evolution, it seems, ah, the first nail in the creationist coffin.  Comparing the broad strokes of the fossil record to the creationist claim that all creatures were created in one week and that specimens of all such species died in a single year during the flood shows great conflict.

I’m describing it thus to emphasize the difference between support for one explanation with conflict for another.  If a piece of evidence appeared that conflicted with evolutionary accounts, that would not mean that creationism must then be correct.  On this blog I primarily deal with Biblical Young Earth Creationists, but Hindus have their own creation beliefs as do other religions and there are probably other propositions as well.

Transitional Fossils

What is a transitional fossil?

It is:

• A snapshot of the existence of a single individual of a population
• It has features of two distinct groups
• Almost entirely lacking in organic molecules.
• Without DNA, it is impossible to say if it is the direct ancestor or not (a grandfather or a great-uncle)
• What they show is that a transition from group to group is possible .

In finding one, or a few, specimens, much can be determined of how the creature ate and lived, but not the range of its species’ survival.  Statistically, a fossil is likely to be made when the species is at peak population and geographic spread.  But when did the first individual of this group appear?  When did the last go extinct?  We can’t know.  This means that the fossil Archaeopteryxs, which are found later in the geological records than true birds appear, might still be the ancestor to true birds.  To my knowledge, scientists do not think so but the placement of the fossils is not definitive.   Archaeo has feathers but also a long bony tail and teeth.  there are other features which belong to one group or the other but are a little technical for me. Since Archaeo, many dinosaurs have been found with feathers.  Yet another new feathered dinosaur was recently found.

Some fossils do contain some organic molecules but these have so far been too degraded to run any tests suitable for identification or DNA comparison.

To be completely fair, transitional fossils do not mean that creatures must have transitioned from one species to another, but only that it is possible. Many creationists plaintively ask, "What good are feathers on an animal that can't fly?" From Creationtoday:

Reptiles have four legs, while birds have two legs and two wings. If the front legs turned into wings, the evolutionist has to believe that somewhere in the evolutionary spectrum they had to be half-leg, half-wing. This means, during that time, the creature couldn’t run or fly, and had a serious survival problem.

In this post, I am discussing evidence here, not arguing against specific claims, but briefly: Dinosaurs are not reptiles, many dinosaurs move on two legs.  One of the most famous dinosaurs has tiny, nearly uselessly small arms (T rex) which might be good evidence for evolution on its own.  There are lots of birds that have wings and run well but cannot fly.

Dr Kevin Padian, at the famed Dover Intelligent Design Trial, displayed some remarkable presentation slides on bird evolution that even show how the feathers evolved. His other slides are at the same site and show more transitions. The Fish to Amphibian transitional series is wonderful at least partially due to a creationist joke.

Creationist: There is a huge gap between A and Z.Evolutionist:  We found fossilized M.Creationist: There are now two big gaps.Evolutionist: We found fossilized F.Creationist: There are now three big gaps.

….

Padian’s slides show a full five or more transitional fossils between fish and amphibians.  Around the time of the trial, a new fossil was found, Tiktaalik, which filled in even more of the space between fish and amphibians.

Just last year, researchers raised a group of Senegal fish, bichirs, out of the water to see how they would adapt.  They already possessed gills and lungs and learned better how to walk and wriggle around out of water.

I should have a post on DNA evidence for evolution soon.

Evidence is a funny thing.

Here are a series of Tweets that have had extra details removed.  Most of the excised details are of the original poster's ID and the IDs she was responding to.

Tami ‏@Tam...yama  Jul 27

Genetic entropy &  information & code in DNA refute biological evolution.

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No mechanism exists that adds novel function info to DNA that allows, say, fish to evolve to amphibians or ...

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.. reptiles to birds ... or invertebrates to veryebrates. So my rejection of evolution is EVIDENCE-based.

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Here is my attempt at a full-length response regarding evidence.  I believe the results of the Lenski experiment show how a duplication mutation followed by local mutations can add novel functions to DNA.

Evidence is a funny thing.

I want to start this discussion with some examples of events where we don't expect evidence of their occurrence.  I will start with New Testament examples so even before that, let me start with a reminder that where evolution is concerned, neither I personally nor the theory of Evolution is anti-Christian or anti-religion.  The Roman Catholic Church has long accepted evolution with a wonderful sentence on the subject from Pope John Paul II.
 "The convergence, neither sought nor provoked, of results of studies undertaken independently from each other constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory."

In addition, around 13,000 (13,008 signatures, as noted on my Birthday - probably not related) clergy in the USA have signed a letter stating that they see no conflict between their religious beliefs and the theory of Evolution.

OK, miracles in the New Testament where we do not expect evidence.  First, the miracle of the Loaves and Fishes.

Jesus Feeds the Five Thousand13 When Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place. Hearing of this, the crowds followed him on foot from the towns. 14 When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed their sick.
15 As evening approached, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late. Send the crowds away, so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food.”
16 Jesus replied, “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.”
17 “We have here only five loaves of bread and two fish,” they answered.
18 “Bring them here to me,” he said.
19 And he directed the people to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people.
20 They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over.
21 The number of those who ate was about five thousand men, besides women and children.

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It would be crazy for anyone, believer or not, to go to Bethesda, apparently on the Jordan River,  and look for evidence of the miracle but let's imagine someone tried.  They might find fish bones - but this is on the side of a river, so bones would hardly be surprising.  Maybe, if we wanted to stretch a point to a ridiculous extent, we could imagine looking for the bones of a thousand or so fish, all in the same location and all with enough good DNA in them to show they were somehow clones of each other.  That might show they were perfectly replicated in the miracle.
This excludes the possibility, though, of God choosing to make the fish pleasing each individual taste so all had their favorite, whether it be bass, trout, carp or well, fish that actually live in the Middle East rather than my native Canada.
So, we have a situation where finding the (far-fetched) evidence would defend the claims of the miracle but not finding the evidence does no injury to those claims.
The same might be said regarding evidence of Mary's virginity during her pregnancy.  'nough said.
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ADDED LATER:
Snopes on The Lost Day (This is about the claim that NASA engineers working to organize their satellites for long periods of time, had made a computer program to plan for a hundred or a thousand years.  But the computer broke down and the reason was, there was a missing day.  This is crazy as Snopes explains)

Regardless of the amount of time involved, the discovery of a "missing" period of time remains implausible. If the sun had indeed stood still for a day a few millennia ago, we would have no way of determining that fact through astronomic observations today. We have no frame of reference, no cosmic calendar or master clock to check against to see if we're overdrawn at the Bank of Time. The concept described here would be like giving someone a non-functioning clock and asking him to determine how much time had elapsed since the clock had stopped running. One could note the positions of the hands on the dial and make a reasonable guess about what the time of day was when the clock stopped running, but without knowing whether that time was A.M. or P.M., and without knowing the calendar date on which stoppage occurred, one could not possibly make any reasonable estimate about how long ago the clock stopped
Read more at http://www.snopes.com/religion/lostday.asp#I5UKJbwmB6WfiB9k.99

AIG agrees as does ChristianAnswers.
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The point is, a lack of evidence for an event is not evidence of a lack of that event.

So now we turn to transitional fossils and their apparent lack.
As before, although I just said we would look at evidence, let's first look at what 'transitional fossils' are or should be if they exist.  A transitional fossil is an example of a once-living creature that has features of two different groups.  I will use 'Archaeopteryx' as an example to demonstrate what a transitional fossil is and isn't.
archaeopteryx appears to have characteristics of both dinosaurs and birds.  There are some features that are too technical for me to comment on but a toothy beak (dino), long, bony tail (dino) and feathers (bird) are good starting points.
Was Archaeopteryx the actual transitional species?  There is no way to be sure but it seems likely not.  The stony remains that hold the shape of the original bones do not have DNA and I wonder if full DNA would even help - we would need good exemplars of several dinosaur species DNA to compare it with.  The stony remains can only tell us that an animal existed that had the features expected of a transitional species.  Is Archaeopteryx the grandfather or the great-uncle of modern birds? Impossible to say.
For one thing, it appears that Archaeopteryx is too young.  There are more fully bird fossils deeper and older than Archaeopteryx.  Does this mean Archeop (please forgive the short-form, I am becoming tired of the full name.  Expect more of the like to come.) didn't exist before birds.  No.  a transitional fossil is like a single photograph.  I have a photo of me paddling a canoe in Georgian Bay dated to 1999 but I existed for 32 years before that and at least 16 -as of this writing - more after that.  A transitional fossil doesn't lock in the full period of a species' existence.  And we wouldn't expect it to.  The more common a species is, among other factors, means a greater likelihood of fossilization.  When a species first evolves and as it goes extinct, the numbers are going to be smaller.

Now for the 'other factors' mentioned in the paragraph above.  Fossils are rare.  This is not a desperate hope stated by paleontologists to explain away the claimed lack of evidence but a fact.  Let me defend this fact.
First, soft bodied and small animals are less likely to be fossilized.  bones, especially large ones, are more likely to last long enough to be buried in sediment and be fossilized.  A soft bodied animal or soft tissue of a bony animal is more likely to be eaten or rot away.  Such fossils are found but in lesser numbers.  This is a (n entirely reasonable) fact.

Second, many animals die where fossilization is unlikely.  Yes, I did choose the 'weasel-word' "many".  I can't say whether this is a majority or not, but i believe it is.  It is at least a large number, however else you define it.  Fossilization in a jungle is rare - the warm, humid condition encourage the life of ants and other scavengers even smaller.  a remarkable fact I recently learned is that the first Chimpanzee fossil ever found we found only eight years ago (in 2006).  To my knowledge, there are only around six chimpanzee individuals that have fossilized that we know of.  Another example is that of buried soldiers from World War 2.  Many died and were buried in France and after decades past some Americans have wanted their heroes to come home.  The graves were dug up but often no bodies -and seldom even cloth or belt buckles - are found.  Forty years after a large bodied vertebrate, buried below the active biological layer of soil and the remains are gone.

In the TV show for the book, Your Inner Fish, Dr Niel shubin describes fossil collecting in the American North-East coast.  At one place with huge tides, he described going onto the sea bed at low tide, finding many new fossils, trying to collect a few before being forced away by the returning tide. The next day, many of the fossils seen the day before are worn away and new ones are visible.  The life of fossils on the rock surface in this region can be measured in days or hours.

I haven't actually defended evidence of evolutionary change in this blog post but I hope I have defended the state of evidence and shown that the fossil evidence, weak as it might be (I think it is actually pretty good although that might be the subject to a later post), is satisfactory and not a deal-breaker for evolution.

more feathered dinosaurs

Sci Am has the details.  Below is an image from the link - deliberately shrunk a little - if you want full quality, follow the link.

Were feathers added to Archaeopteryx fossils?

Dr Walt Brown says yes.  From the Center for Scientific Creationism:

Archaeopteryx means ancient (archae) wing (pteryx). But the story behind this alleged half-dinosaur, half-bird is much more interesting than its fancy, scientific-sounding name or the details of its bones. If Archaeopteryx were shown to be a fraud, the result would be devastating for the evolution theory.

Since the early 1980s, several prominent scientists have charged that the two Archaeopteryx fossils with clearly visible feathers (the Berlin and London specimens) are forgeries.1 Allegedly, thin layers of cement were spread on the mating surfaces (slab and counterslab) of two fossils of a chicken-size dinosaur, called Compsognathus (komp-SOG-na-thus). Bird feathers were then imprinted into the wet cement.

This apparently is from Brown's 2008 edition of In the Beginning; compelling evidence for creation and the flood (the link is to a different edition).

Things go wrong in the first paragraph.  If Archaeopteryx were shown to be a fraud, scientists would continue to use all the other feathered dinosaurs that have been found. Flying Dinosaurs has a long list of feathered dinosaurs.

From the Smithsonian:

In 2012, paleontologists found that a T. rex relative, Yutyrannus huali, had filamentous feathers. If a relative had feathers, why not the king of reptiles itself?
Until a specimen is found with preserved imprints of feathers, though, the jury is out.

Carl Zimmer has more:

Now Archaeopteryx is sinking back into the crowd of primitive birds and feathered dinosaurs. As Ed Yong has ably explained, a fresh wave of fossils are coming to light. They reinforce the argument that paleontologists have agreed on for a couple decades now: birds evolved from a lineage of dinosaurs called theropods. But it’s less clear now how exactlyArchaeopteryx fits into that evolution. It might still be closely related to the ancestors of living birds, or there might be non-flying theropods that were more closely related. Combine this with the recent discoveries of heavily feathered dinosaurs–feathered down to their feet, in fact–and the possibility emerges that dinosaurs evolved into flyers more than once. We look up in the sky today and see the results of only one of those transitions.

National Geographic goes even farther.

Over the past two decades, discoveries in China have produced at least five species of feathered dinosaurs. But they all belonged to the theropod group of "raptor" dinosaurs, ancestors of modern birds. (Related: "Dinosaur-Era Fossil Shows Birds' Feathers Evolved Before Flight.")

Now in a discovery reported by an international team in the journal Science, the new dinosaur species, Kulindadromeus zabaikalicus (KOO-lin-dah-DRO-mee-us ZAH-bike-kal-ik-kuss), suggests that feathers were all in the family. That's because the newly unearthed 4.5-foot-long (1.5 meter) two-legged runner was an "ornithischian" beaked dinosaur, belonging to a group ancestrally distinct from past theropod discoveries.

"Probably that means the common ancestor of all dinosaurs had feathers," says study lead author Pascal Godefroit of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Science in Brussels. "Feathers are not a characteristic [just] of birds but of all dinosaurs." (Related: "Dinosaur Feathers Changed With Age.")

So already Brown seems to be in trouble.  On to the second paragraph. "Several prominent scientists" seems to be light on actual paleontologists. Fred Hoyle and N. Chandra Wickramasingh are mentioned.  They are both mathematicians and astronomers but have no obvious background in the study of fossils.

At The War For Science, they note that no such cement has been found by other researchers.

Palaeontologists that examined the London Archaeopteryx arrived at a quite different conclusion - “Proof of authenticity is provided by exactly matching hairline cracks and dendrites on the feathered areas of the opposing slabs, which show the absence of the artificial cement layer into which modern feathers could have been pressed by a forger.”.

War For Science quotes (above) from this Science Mag article.

For more information, have a look at Kevin Padian's slides from the 2005 Dover Creationism trial. I used Chrome's highlighter extension to highlight some of the text near the slides which I feel carry all the relevant information.