Darwin's Enigma: Ebbing the Tide of Naturalism

Author:Luther Sunderland
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Religion, Religion & Science, Chrisitian
ISBN: 9781614582076
Publisher: New Leaf Publishing Group
Published: 1998-08-01T15:28:48+00:00

This is a rather confusing explanation of why there are no transitional forms to be found either among the living or fossilized organisms. If every living organism had an ancestry that consisted of an unbroken lineage connected to a single-celled organism, it should make no difference whatsoever if man has decided to call the various stages along the way by different names. Just as the organisms within a species can be connected, so should the different species, genera, families, orders, classes, and kingdoms be shown to be connected. That is a specific prediction that obviously should be made from the theory of common-ancestry evolution if it were a truly scientific theory. If all life had a common ancestor, how could it be “illogical” for one family to be ancestral to another family? Every organism in the continuum between a single cell and man is a member of one of the various families. Webster’s dictionary says that “ancestral” means “derived from an ancestor.” Since the theory of evolution, as Dr. Eldredge speaks of it, holds that all life came from a common ancestor, there is no conceivable way that the English language could be distorted to permit one to correctly state that no family could be ancestral to another family. Certainly some lower family should be ancestral to every higher family if evolution actually occurred.

The author made the following reply to this statement by Dr. Eldredge: “Somehow the family that dogs or cows are in had to arise. You think there are transitions at the species level, but do you know of any at a higher level? That is really what it is all about when you get down to it. Where did even a vertebrate come from? That would be easy to recognize.”

Dr. Eldredge replied that if you took cats and dogs, the closest that he would ever put it was that you had two separate families and the closest relative was some other one like, say, hyenas. Hyenas (Hyaenidae) and cats (Felidae) are the closest relatives because they might share some similarities that are not shared with any other group. He concluded, “Now you might suspect that you have the ancestor by this line of reasoning.” He also used the example of the supposed human ancestor, Australopithecus africanus. The skull of that was very difficult to assess for he had tried and tried when he was working as an anthropologist to find a particular feature that would have allowed him to say that it shared a specialized resemblance with, say, Australopithecus robustus as opposed to Homo habilis. He said that some people say, “Ah ha! It’s an ancestor.” But he said that he did not know if it was an ancestor or not. He said, “There is no way to really come to grips with it logically.”

Dr. Eldredge should have stated that there was no logical way to harmonize the scientific evidence with the theory of common-ancestry evolution since no connections between any basically different groups of organisms could be documented with fossils.

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