Welcome to evolution. Impossible. A production of Three ABN, Australia television.
Our host is Dr Sven Ostring with special guest Dr. John Ashton and our panel. Hi, I'm Sven Ostring, and you are joining us for another episode of Evolution Impossible, a series where we're exploring whether evolution, the major scientific theory about the origin of life, is even possible.
It's great to have you back on the studio, Ellie. And a new member of our panel is Justin Torossian. Good to have you.
And of course, Morgan Vincent, good friend of mine. Thanks for joining us as well. And of course, it's really good to have Dr.
John Ashton with us once again taking us on this journey with all your expertise and research as well. So it may sound like our discussion is going to be fairly dead today we will be focusing on the remains of animals that are no longer alive. But let me assure you that this is really very interesting.
And what is really surprising is that the fossil record actually supports the Bible and not evolution. Isn't that amazing? So let's jump right into the dig today. And my question for you at the start, John, is this how are fossils actually formed? Right, so the fossils are the remains of animals that have lived in the past and have died and have been preserved in some way.
So normally when animals die or in a plant matter, plant matter rots away, is eaten by bacteria, worms, so forth. Animals similarly eaten by worms, maggots or other animals broken down by bacteria. So they decay fairly quickly.
So, for example, a few years ago, we had massive floods in Queensland. I think an area the size of the state of New South Wales was flooded, but it didn't result in a whole lot of fossilized kangaroos, possums, emus, lizards and so forth. Very true.
So we require fairly unique conditions to fossilize a previously living organism. So tell us, what are those conditions that we need to have for fossilization? Right. So, very quickly, we have to protect that organism from the natural breakdown mechanisms or predators and so forth.
And that usually requires very rapid burial in a way, too, that is going to preserve it from rotting mechanisms and so forth. So very rapid burial is usually the key situation. Now, this requires if you have a large animal, like a big dinosaur or whale or something like that, then you need enormous amount of material to fossilize something like that.
But we find fossils of insects, plants. One of the fascinating things, of course, is that we find fossils of soft bodied animals like jellyfish and octopuses and this sort of thing. So, again, here we require very rapid and we find a covering of the material and burying of the material.
Also we find fossilized footprints and this sort of thing. We know you go walk along the beach, everybody walks along the beach, but it doesn't mean that you're going to leave fossil footprints behind. So it requires pretty unique conditions to do that.
Other types, particularly of wood, can become fossilized by once the wood is buried, it can be prevented by rotting as minerals seep through the rock strata and cell by cell, the material might be replaced by silica. And so this way we can actually observe the structures, the internal structures of animals and plant matter that has lived previously. So that's how we know, for example, about the structure of trilobite eyes and this sort of thing that lived hundreds of millions of years ago.
So it's a fascinating process, but it only occurs under unique situations that enable very rapid burial. And that generally is some sort of really major catastrophe. And so if we consider sort of like the Queensland floods, that was a major area in terms of our life, our current experiences in the world today.
But what buried whales and dinosaurs and all these massive beds of fossils that we find where we have thousands of fossilized creatures? A catastrophic event totally unlike anything else recorded in human history other than in the flood account of the Bible? Very, very interesting. Just wanted to ask you, did you have any questions for John about how fossils are formed and fossils in general? I was interested to know, Dr. Ashton, I read in your book about different graveyards of fossils that have been found, like dinosaur graveyards, and I'm interested to know whether there's ever been human fossil graveyards found and if not, why you think that might be.
Yes, well, that's a very challenging question. We don't find those human fossil graveyards to my knowledge. We find occasionally fossil hominoid species, but they're probably interpreted as being fairly recent, I would say, although they're dated sometimes as a couple of million years old.
But they're isolated skeletons or remains of skeletons that are found. Of course, this is the basis that people argue for the evolution of humans when they find some of these homolog type fossils. But no, we don't find fossil graveyards like that.
But humans are pretty intelligent, of course, but I don't have an answer for that. I was wondering, you brought up in this chapter, it was very interesting that 98% to 99% of the species that we find in the fossil record are extinct. Yes, and I was amazed to hear that because evolutionary theory would suggest that you go from very few and very simple organisms to more complex and more numerous and more complex and more numerous.
But it seems that the fossil record suggests the opposite, that there were many more species existent before than now. And so does that turn evolutionary theory on its head in that sense? And if so, how do your average evolutionary scientists explain that? Well, I don't know of any explanation, but it's true. What we find in the fossil record is a record of fully formed creatures and then they become extinct.
So the picture that is portrayed in the textbooks and the standard books on evolution and this sort of thing is that we have these layers over time. We have these more primitive creatures at the bottom layers, and then as we get up the higher layers, they're more complex. And therefore, this is this pattern of evolution from simpler creatures up to more complex, more advanced creatures over that period of time.
So that's what's portrayed in the textbooks, but what we actually find is very different to that. And I guess it's probably good to understand how this whole concept of geology and paleontology came about if we look at the history, because the history explains the thinking now of how geologists and palantologists have been taught and how they then interpret what they find. So if we go back in the mid 16 hundreds, for example, there was a geologist or a scientist, Steno, and he proposed that the lower layers were older than the upper layers, and that's very logical.
And then he proposed that if there was a volcanic intrusion that went through those, that that had to happen after all those layers were laid down. And, again, that all makes sense. And then there was a guy who was a contractor digging canals around London and Europe, william Smith, in the late 17 hundreds.
And he was very observant. As his men were digging the canals, he noticed, well, look, I've got a layer of rocks here. It might be a mudstone, then a limestone, and then a shale, and then a conglomerate, and then another mudstone.
And he observed the same pattern when he was digging canals over in France. And he also noticed that they had certain fossils in them. And he proposed that from the fossils in a particular layer, you could identify that strata.
And that strata was not just local, it was widespread. So the same strata in England were over there in France. Now, about 30 or so years later, lyle was doing research in the Alps, and he observed all these layers, and that the fossils, again, seemed to be more the creatures seemed to be more complex or higher sort of creatures.
The higher up the layers, they were more complex. And, of course, this meant that they were younger or further along in a timescale. And he proposed that these fossils could be actually used to identify the layers worldwide and a geologic column.
And so hence, they set up this dating system of the columns, was set up that way. So when scientists look at these fossils now, they're interpreting them in terms of these ages. Now, these ages were actually calculated on the basis of the thickness of the deposit.
So if you had a deposit that might be a kilometer deep and had millions of layers, then Lyle proposed, well, that must be millions of years old, because these layers probably represented annual layers coming down. And another geologist, James Hutton, had proposed around again in the late 17 hundreds, that the processes on Earth were millions of years old and had happened very gradually. So when scientists look at this particular situation, this is the way we're taught in university.
I can remember I actually got a high distinction in stratigraphy when I was doing geology. And when we look at these structures, that's how we interpret those fossil layers over a long period of time. Now, when Darwin's theory is superimposed on this, the whole thing is oh well, this is the gradual progression of creatures and that's what's in their mind.
When we step back, though, and we look at it and we find well, hang on, there's actually no evolutionary development of particular animals. So for example, you got trilobites, which are those little sort of like pill bug type creatures that lived at the bottom that have segmented bodies, lots of legs, big head compound, very complex eyes, a lot of genetic code, their digestive system, all this sort of thing. And they're right at the very lower of the Cambrian rocks, which are among the oldest fossil bearing rocks.
And then under them we can find thousands of meters, well, thousands of feet, 1000 meters or so of layers of rock with no fossils in them. So they just suddenly appear fully formed. And it's the same with insects, flying insects that just suddenly appear in the fossil record.
Flowering plants, they just suddenly appear, they don't change and then they become extinct. And this whole pattern, as you talked about earlier, is a pattern of extinction. All these creatures are there, they don't change and then they're extinct and we don't see them again.
And as you say, 98% to 99% of all the creatures that have been preserved as fossils and we know living today are now extinct. It's huge and it's directly opposite to what, as you were saying, to what the theory of evolution would teach. But because scientists are enamored with this gradual progression and that evolution occurred, that thinking is just superimposed and I guess they're just blinded to it and it's never questioned.
So John, where can we go to actually see this geological column? Is there a place that we can see the entire column? No. Well, as far as I know there's no complete section of column. There's a big slab, of course, exposed in the Grand Canyon.
There's a section there on the east face, I think it is, that covers about 300 million years, conventional dating sort of thing. And one of the fascinating aspects of that and again, this fits the Flab model. See, the geology textbooks tell us that there were about five extinction events that occurred, but they spaced them.
There's one extinction event, they date about 450,000,000 years ago, another one about 400 million years ago, another 1250,000,000 years ago, another 1200 million years ago. Another 165 million years at the end of Cretaceous. So the geologists acknowledged that these were global extinction events.
Involving water. Interesting. Involving water.
It's amazing. Right now, okay, they're dated, as we can see, up to hundreds of millions of years apart. But the thing is, if we look at that Grand Canyon section there, we've got 300 million years of parallel layers, conformably, laying on top of one another.
Now, by the word conformably, geologists mean there's no signs of erosion in between. Interesting. This just blows the whole concept of million years away.
I've got to grabway what would the evolutionist explanation be for those layers where there's no erosion in between the layers? Well, I don't think they have one. This is the whole puzzle. And there's a few paleontologists and people that speak out about this, and this is a major problem.
And they recognize, well, hang on. We don't actually see evolution occurring in the fossil layers. We just see animals form.
They stay the same. They don't become extinct. And also, we don't see this erosion occurring in between.
And so the answer they have is runs along the lines, well, these conditions must have been laid down under in some sort of lake. And it was very uniform. It was very contained.
And so over this long period of time yeah, it was just stable for a long period of time. But these same layers that span this period also contain fossils of dinosaurs, great big animals, and all that we know have to be buried under catastrophic conditions. And so this is the major problem that they have.
We've got no erosion in between the layers, and yet we have to bury these animals like big whales, dinosaurs, stegosaurus that are sort of 30 meters long in flood type events. Well, you have to have a massive catastrophic event to bury those things. Incredible.
But the other thing that we find, too, in these layers that are, again, conformably set on one another, we can find cross bedding. Now, cross bedding, if you imagine a sand dune and you're blowing sand over the top of it, you get a layer here and a layer here. And so this layer is on an angle.
And from this angle, we can actually calculate the velocities of the fluid that is causing the dune. Now, the same effect occurs underwater. And from the slope and the study of these bedding angles, or not bedding angle, cross bedding, we can actually calculate the speed of the water.
And the speeds of the water are equivalent to what you get in a tsunami type scenario. The other thing is, too, when we look at these beds that are exposed in the Grand Canyon, like, if you look at the Morrison formation that goes through there, this is a massive formation over one and a half million square kilometers. One half million square kilometers is huge.
It spreads from New Mexico up to Canada. Right. That's a huge sad.
And so we have water that's been carried. The material that has been carried and spread as a thin layer over this massive area of land. This is no little lake sediment sort of settling down.
This is a massive event. And as I said, so the sand textbooks say, we have this massive event occurring at these different times. The other fascinating thing that often isn't portrayed is that if we look at the surface of the Earth, only about 5% of the Earth's crust is sedimentary rock.
That is, rock laid down underwater. So it's a very thin layer. Well, there's a thin layer of crust about the thickness, comparatively, of an eggshell on an egg as the Earth's crust.
But only about 5% of that crust is sedimentary rock. Right. So only a very small percentage of it, but yet 75% of the Earth's surface is covered with sedimentary rock.
And so what it means is that we've got this very thin layer of sedimentary rock spread all over the Earth. Matter of fact, at the end of the Cretaceous, the textbooks tell us the entire Earth was covered by water. Wow.
So you'd sort of think, if it's the Noah's flood scenario so if you were thinking that the Earth was billions of years, you'd think that the sedimentary layers would be much thicker, there'd be more layers than just this small amount that we actually have? Well, I think it's more that what they're saying is that there's got to be gradual processes that have occurred over a period of time and that they're more a series of localized floods. But the other scientific observation that mitigates against that is that we find the same pattern of rock layers all over the world. And so you layer quartzite conglomerates and so forth, the same pattern, same pattern of limestone, this sort of thing.
If there were a whole series of local floods and local lakes and all this sort of thing that laid down all these beautiful parallel layers, you wouldn't expect to find the same ones in Europe, North America, Australia, South Africa, and Asia. Right. And so the evidence is so clear that we had a global catastrophic event, and it buried all these animals all at once.
So this period of time that they spread over 450 mil well, was it from 450 to 65, 400 million years thereabouts, though, all those different extinction events, we have all this overwhelming evidence that it must have been at the same time. Otherwise we'd have massive erosion in between. Massive erosion in between.
Yeah. That's an amazing amount of detail. Morgan, we do want to bring you into the conversation as well.
So did you have any questions for John today? Sure. Yeah. Touching on what we've spoken about so far, just a question surrounding the time frames of the fossils.
Often, science is something to be testable observable, and we can see these large, very large time frames. How do we reconcile that with realizing that was someone there to observe 450,000,000 years ago? Yeah, sure. So this is very interesting.
Those timescales are based on the uniformitarian principle, assuming that the surface of the Earth for millions of years has undergone steady processes. And so when they count up all the layers and that's what they've done, they've looked at sedimentary layers, they've count up how many layers we've got per meter. And then we've got something that's 1000 meters thick.
So therefore it must be so many million years old just by calculation. And that's how the geologic column was essentially dated by Lyle. And this geologists that followed him was simply on the basis of the thickness of the layers.
And there's no place on the earth where the entire column is there. Sections are exposed in different areas. And so they'd measure the thickness in the different layers and they'd say, well, the top of this layer we've got this particular fossil.
That particular fossil corresponds to the bottom of that particular layer. So we're going to put that on top of that. And we kept on adding these.
And we assigned then ages to the particular types of fossils that are used to identify the layers. So that's how the different layers we hear about Jurassic and Audavisian and so forth, jurassic, Cretaceous, all these sort of particular periods, they are characterized by particular fossils that are the key fossils that label those particular layers. And that's how those ages were worked out.
Now, later on, we can talk about radiometric dating. But radiometric dating gives a wide variability of results and generally they can find a result that will match the fossil age. And once that happened, in the 1940s in particular, that more or less cemented these timescales.
But there's a lot of problems with these timescales that we can discuss probably another time. Dr. Ashton, I'm curious to know, taking you to back to the fossils that are found in the different rock layers and the different time periods that they assign to those.
It seems obvious to me from what you've already said, that it doesn't support evolutionary theory. But I'm curious to know what the creationist theory is about, why there's different types of fossils found in the different rock layers and how those animals got separated. Is there a particular explanation to that? Okay, now there's two aspects to that.
And firstly, down the very bottom layers we tend to find creatures that lived underwater and lived at the ocean bottom. When fair enough, that's where we would expect to find them, in those layers. But the other thing is the fossil layers are much more mixed up than we see.
These nice clear outlines, for example. So it's a real simplification of the fossil record. You have this gradual transitional layout.
And earlier on, we need to remember that these key fossils were set up fairly early on, before all the fossils had been discovered. Discovered, yeah. And there were major issues.
For example, they've found fossils, polished rate fossils, for example, in Nova Scotia, where it's a classic example. We've got trees going through a whole series of layers and then inside the trees they find the remains of animals that have been washed in there. So what about the so forth, the explanation that they somehow trees just got jammed in by violent kind of force, volcanic activity just straight down through the geological column? Does that sort of count? Does that make sense or in terms of why the trees all the way through? Well, no, I think studies from what happened after Mount St.
Helens and so forth suggest that, no, these trees are there, they're floating in the water and then they're sort of buried and that's why they tend to be more vertical. But the other thing is, yes, that the fossils are far more mixed up. For example, there are lots of mammals that exist at the same times as dinosaurs.
And in some of the huge fossil beds in Mongolia, for example, we find this we find the fossils of mammals mixed up with the fossils of dinosaurs and this sort of thing. But one of the guys, Dr. Carl Werner, published some books and he did a study of museum displays and he reports that none of his museum displays did he see mammals on display.
With dinosaurs. They were always sort of separate as being occurring later, but yet they mixed up. And this is the thing that they tend to be mixed up much more and clarify and not as separated as often portrayed.
Very interesting. So how would evolutionists explain the fact that you'd have dinosaurs and mammals in the same geological layer? What would their explanation for that be? Well, they have to accept that they had evolved by that stage. Right, aren't they? Look, there are so many problems with the standard paleontological long age interpretation.
There are absolutely massive problems with but they've got nowhere else to go other than the Bible record. I mean, up till the 1830s, 1840s, flood geology was taught in British university, most European universities, and it made a lot of sense. But the attempt to accommodate Darwinian evolution and stretch everything out, we run into a whole lot of problems.
And really the best fit of the data is Noah's flood. Exactly. It fits the data perfectly.
I have one other question for you, Dr. Ashton, just regarding the way fossils are dated. And you mentioned that evolutionists usually use uniformitarianism.
They assume that everything was the same in the past as it is today. And I'm wondering why they use uniformitarianism when they themselves believe in things like ice ages and that kind of thing that would obviously skew those results. Well, that's a question that we will have to look at in our next episode.
And so the fossil record is actually evidence of extinction and not evolution. That's quite an eye opening insight. And with another key beam in theory of evolution and collapsing, where does that leave the theory? I'd highly recommend that you go to your favorite online bookstore and get Dr.
John Ashton's book Evolution Impossible. You know, as Ali was pointing out, there's so many details about the fossils that we just could not talk about. But don't worry, his book is easy to understand.
We'll be continuing our investigation of evolution next time, looking to see whether the fossil record shows the evolutionary links which are needed. Now, if you've missed any of our past programs, you can go to the Throbbian website and watch them there. We look forward to seeing you next time.
Thank you for joining us on Evolution Impossible, a production of three ABN Australia television. If you have any comments or questions, send an email to
[email protected] au or call us within Australia on 024-973-3456.
We'd love to hear from you.
