Fish evolved into tetrapods, and eventually, humans: So says Darwinian evolution. The Darwinian story of evolution involves the rise of all the forms of life we see on earth today from non-life, and via an original single ancestor-the first living cell on earth. The alleged transition of life from fish to tetrapod-a walking animal-was the subject of one of the BBC’s “science” broadcasts known as “In Our Time”, first aired on 20th October 2022.
Welcome to my latest critical look at mainstream evolutionary theory. This is a long post: feel free to scroll down to sub-headings.
TAKING A STAB AT LEVIATHAN
I’ve tackled several “In Our Time” documentaries as they relate to the theory of evolution. Producers and participants-experts in their fields-are all in on the Darwinian story. If they were not, they would not have a job or a public voice. Their peers would shun them. They would likely not easily achieve university degrees. They would lose grants and funding, and they would certainly not be allowed to give their opinion openly on the BBC, except in a very controlled and edited way. Such is today’s world of “science”, in which even evolutionary views opposing Darwinism are silenced. However, this blog is my kingdom, and vicious comments as to my intelligence notwithstanding, I can pretty much have free reign when commenting on these anti-God, anti-human claims, and critique such demonic doctrines:
The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons (1 Timothy 4:1).
WHO AM I?
You may well ask who I am to criticise and attack the theories and findings of highly qualified and highly educated and experienced scientists. In answer, I am a nobody in human and particularly in secular terms. I am not a scientist. However, it’s my view and my experience that evolutionism is not true science-it’s theory, hypothesis, and speculation. It’s wishful thinking: the hope and the determination that there is no Creator and therefore no God to answer to. All observation is therefore doctored to fit into the entire godless paradigm. Seen from this perspective-that evolutionary theory is fatally flawed due to intentional bias and an intentional ignorance of simple, obvious evidence to the contrary-it’s often not difficult to find very large holes in these theories and in the evidence presented.
The above image is my own creation, copyright Nick Fisher.
PRIESTS OF AN UNHOLY RELIGION
I don’t claim to have technical evidence to debate the theory that fish evolved into tetrapods, because I don’t have access to the claimed evidence for it. And that’s part of my observation-that we little people on the street are not entitled to handle the claimed holy grails of evolution. They’re all hidden in the evolutionist’s “temple”: his lab, his computer software, and his mind, for his observation and manipulation, and not for ours. It’s a form of religion in which the claimed holy artefacts are only to be seen and referenced by its priesthood. Have you seen, anywhere, a series of fossils clearly demonstrating the transition from fish to four-legged creature? No, you haven’t and neither have I. Since the alleged transition took place over some forty million years, it seems to me that we should be knee-deep in the evidence, but apart from artist’s impressions and state of the art video, carefully prepared from the alleged evidence, it’s all out of our reach.
THE EVIDENCE
The panel featured in this episode (named below) along with the perennial host of the show, Melvyn Bragg, burst into this episode with guns blazing. They have the evidence to back up their claims, they confidently and stridently assert: the evidence that our ancestors were fish. This confidence could, were I to be more narcissistic than I am, seem to be in answer to such attacks as I and others have made on past episodes, in which evidence is at first claimed, but then the opposite is admitted during the show. For example, in the case of photosynthesis, one of the experts candidly admitted that they have no fossil evidence whatsoever to prove their theory that inorganic molecules conscripted a certain bacterium to produce light-processing organelles and cells. Neither, they confessed, does it ever happen now, and so the claimed evolution of photosynthesis-vital to all life on earth, cannot be observed. It’s theory only.
ONCE UPON A TIME
Here’s how Melvyn opens the show:
“Around 400 million years ago some of our ancestors, the fish, started to become a little more like humans”.
Somehow the insistence that our great grandfathers and grandmothers were fish has been swallowed by a majority of people. It’s the king of all magical spells; the story to beat all children’s stories foisted upon the masses, with a threat of accusations of stupidity and ignorance to be poured on anyone who dares to question it.
Melvyn continues:
At the swampy margins between land and water, some fish were turning their fins into limbs, their swim bladders into lungs and developed necks and eventually they became tetrapods, the group to which we and all animals with backbones and limbs belong”.
During this Devonian period of earth’s history, we’re told, fishy body parts morphed into tetrapod body parts, tetrapods being animals with arms, legs, fingers and toes. Later in the episode, the panel confesses to the incredibly profound changes which would be needed to bring this about, both internally and externally. Truly, the frog-to-prince story is not so far-fetched as we thought it was.
Creationist Dr. Jeff Tomkins observes the following:
The supposed transition from water to land would have required the evolution of many novel structures in skeletons, musculatures, neural systems, internal organs, sensory networks, and respiratory systems.
Anatomically speaking, specialized appendages and skeletons along with associated musculatures would need to have formed to support a creature’s body weight against gravitational forces to allow it to move on land. In contrast, fish are highly specialized to live buoyantly in the water, largely avoiding the effects of gravity on movement.
Furthermore, to facilitate respiration, gill breathing would have needed to transform into lung breathing—a radical physiological change in itself—through other highly specialized innovations.
Tomkins also brings to our attention the fact that the Devonian period-the same rock layers supposedly displaying this transition, is “…a point in the rock record when numerous types of unique fish show up suddenly with no evolutionary precursors” (NOTE 1).
In other words, the panel of evolutionists has failed to note that many fish, along with other marine creatures, suddenly appear in the fossil record with no ancestors below. This is powerful evidence for creation, not evolution.
TEXTBOOK SCIENCE
The first member of the panel called to testify tells us that this transition is a “textbook example” of the evolution of life from a common ancestor. Yes, your great grandfather, I mean a generation long before the fishy one, was a bacterium.
He then tells us the following:
“If you look at a textbook on evolution you will see this transition as an example…”
Have you noticed what our expert did not say? He did not say “If you go to your local natural history museum, or even the national natural history museum, you will see examples of series of fossils gradually developing arms, legs, toes, necks, lungs, and so on”. Instead, he tells us to look in a textbook. The textbooks he wants you to look in have been written by other evolutionists and those promoting their theories. In these textbooks you will find diagrams; theory and speculation; artists impressions, and even the odd artist’s mock-up of a fossil fish said to be on its way to walking on land. However, you will see no clear series of fossils demonstrating the fact. Why? because there is none.
The panel does, admittedly, claim during the course of the show that there are fossils demonstrating the change. One expert states that the transition is “recorded in the fossil record”, showing “step by step” the change, as if it were “a stop-motion video”. However, when you listen to the description of the fossil remains they have, and how they deal with them and then interpret the information, and when they name the scant few alleged transitional forms, you come to realize that the claims of “evidence” are greatly and I would say dishonestly exaggerated and highly questionable.
Melvyn asks the panel how far they have got in investigating water to land transitions. The answer is that one of the big changes that has been made in understanding the anatomical transition is:
“…the move from what we think is a fish-like body plan to a tetrapod body plan, with its digits… occurred in primarily aquatic organisms, so it precedes, if you like, a move to land”.
This is not only vague and a non-answer, but a gigantic admission. Notice the “we think”: a common term used by evolutionists when they’re being candid. It slipped out-a weakness in the propaganda. There’s a sneaking realization that those blazing guns don’t have quite the power they were intended to have. “We think” is hardly evidence: at least, not in true science. It’s theory, hypothesis. This weakness in the evidence continues:
“I think we have to think of a variety of different kinds of environments occupied by these fish-tetrapod transitional forms-probably doing a variety of different kinds of habits… in ecological situations… we don’t have precise analogues for today”.
The “thinks” and the “probably” and the things we don’t see today in this testimony don’t make for convincing evidence for the sceptical such as myself. The fact that “I think we have to think” a certain way does not speak of convincing fossil evidence that my great grandfather was a fish. We only “have to think” a certain way if we’ve made up our minds that something is true and then we’re looking for something to back it up with.
Those blazing guns at the start were covered enthusiastically by host Melvyn, but he just can’t help having a sneaking second-thought, because he doesn’t think we’re suitably convinced yet. Perhaps, deep down inside, he isn’t either. Moreover, the answer never really comes.
“So I’m going to ask … this very very difficult question.” …”We have fish and we have tetrapods, and the mystery for us… for you… is more precisely how the one became the other. What tools are at your disposal to discover this?”
FISH FINGERS
Well done Melvyn! How did it happen? How did fins turn into fingers and gills into lungs? While the panel does launch into a concerted attempt to answer this question in the only ways it knows, the explanations are still wanting. One description of how fossil remains become evidence that we were once fish would be, in any honest court hearing, flawed, since it’s so open to subjective bias and reinterpretation. An expert describes how new fossil finds, though mangled and broken, can be studied with x-rays, then patched together and rendered into digital form on a computer. Once there, the information can be rearranged and reinterpreted to produce the desired or expected results:
“…and that gives us a clue as to what the animal may have looked like”.
“May have” looked like? May have? Surely, if the evidence is so overwhelming, we should know exactly what they looked like! The expert continues:
“And that can then feed forward into, well, what did its limbs actually look like?”
Surely the fossil evidence should clearly demonstrate what those limbs looked like! But no,it has to be manipulated, and interpreted, and the experts have to speculate, and hypothesise-though only within the evolutionary bias of their worldview. More than this, how are we to know that they are not simply looking at both a/fish and b/tetrapods, or even something with a little of both, and not at transitional forms at all?
INFORMATION
In all the discussion of the claimed evidence, the panel makes no attempt whatsoever to tackle the problem DNA poses to the entire idea of transition from fish to tetrapod. In Meyer’s Prologue to part one of his book, “Darwin’s Doubt” he discusses the necessity of highly complex chemical information to create functioning DNA. He writes:
“Scientists now know that building a living organism requires information, and building a fundamentally new form of life from a simpler form of life requires an immense amount of new information”.
Where does this information come from? How does the information in DNA alter itself and increase exponentially?
Meyer goes on in chapter one of part one to juxtapose Darwin’s tree of life, in which Darwin claims that every living thing on earth descended from one form, with the actual fossil evidence. Since the transitional forms Darwin admitted to be missing are still missing, the reality is that there is a “forest” of life, in which life forms began and remained separate and distinct throughout the fossil record. Putting it crudely, a dog was always a dog and remains a dog: a worm was always a worm and remains a worm. This again is powerful evidence for creation, not evolution.
The above image is a “Reconstructed skeleton” of Ichthyostega , an alleged transitional form.
TRANSITIONAL FORM?
At the prompting of the host, the panel discuss one of the alleged transitional forms, the Ichthyostega We’re told that this creature was originally seen as just being a land-walking creature. However, says our expert of the evidence, when evolutionists looked again at the limbs with “new digital ideas”, it “Suggests that perhaps the animal wasn’t capable” of pulling its arms and legs, “and he was still moving his legs mainly backwards”. They also decided that his forelimbs were “probably moving like a mudskipper does”.
Again, what we have here is speculation, presented with bias, wrapped up in wishful thinking, and the conviction that this creature was a part of the big transition. They have decided that we evolved: now the evidence has to be found to prove it. And how will you or I ever see the real fossil evidence of this? We will not, unless it’s in the form of a directed image or video designed to convince us of their bias.
Dr Tomkins discusses the weakness of Ichthyostega and others as transitional forms in his article in note 1.
THE LAND-CRAWLING FISH THAT WASN’T
A fish once thought to be a transitional form was found alive and well in the Indian ocean. The Coelacanth was once thought to be extinct and was seen as a prime example of the evolution of fish into land-dwelling animals. It had a special type of lobe fin which, according to secular models of the time, was a transitional form, becoming a legs for the fish to move around on land. However, when the Coelacanth was found alive and not extinct or transformed at all, it was seen to be living at least five hundred feet below the surface, and still swimming. Indeed, it cannot live near the surface, let alone move around on land. A good article on the coelacanth:
https://www.icr.org/article/big-fish-fossil-recalls-big-flop
EXTRA TIME
Well, dear reader, I could go on with word-for word analysis of this In Our Time episode. However, this post is already too long for most of you to handle. Perhaps it will suffice to recount one of the comments made in “extra time”, found at the end of the podcast I have. After all the discussion, and all the claimed evidence offered, when Melvyn asks the panel what they would love to learn next about the alleged fish to tetrapod transition, one answers the following way:
“How did these animals actually really adapt to those terrestrial environments?”
Despite the brash and aggressive confidence at the opening of the podcast, what we’ve been told for the previous fifty minutes or so is severely lacking, even for the experts. They came out with guns blazing, but when all was said and done, the bullets were blanks.
Below I have added a section on the supposed transitional form “Tiktaalik”, and I have listed some more articles and videos on related subjects.
THE PANEL:
Emily Rayfield
Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Bristol
Michael Coates
Chair and Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago.
Steve Brusatte
Professor of Palaeontology and Evolution at the University of Edinburgh
NOTES
1 Article “THE FOSSILS STILL SAY NO: THE FINS TO FEET TRANSITION“
by Jeffrey P Thomkins PhD. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2021
https://www.icr.org/article/the-fossils-still-say-no-fins-to-feet-transition/
Tiktaalik
AIG Canada video hosted by Calvin Smith. “Atheists Love To Boast This So-Called “Proof” of Evolution.
Tictallic was first touted publically in 2006 as the missing link between fish and tetrapod. It was considered a monumental evolutionary link between fish and land-walking animals or tetrapods. The New York Times happily defined it as “a powerful rebuttal to religious creationists”. It was dubbed the “fishapod”, and was featured in school textbooks. Calvin notes how incredible it is to consider many thousands of people around the world celebrating, as they did, the thought that they were descendants of fish, in a world where there is no ultimate meaning or purpose to life. “It was like watching Romans 1 play itself out before your eyes”, says Calvin.
Richard Dawkins happily joined in the celebration, stating that “Tiktaalik is the perfect missing link… “perfect because it is missing no longer” (From The Greatest Show On Earth”.
However, fossil footprints of a tetrapod, found in rocks dated at 18 my older than Tictallic, were found in Poland. Smith quotes some of the back-tracking comments made by evolutionists. Here’s one:
“These results force us to reconsider our whole picture of the transition from fish to land animals” (Per Ahlberg quoted in, “Fossil Footprints Give Land Vertebrates A Much Longer History”, Science News, Science Daily, January 8th 2010).
See also Sherwin article from Jan 2010 https://www.icr.org/article/banner-fossil-for-evolution-demoted
And this one from June 2020 https://www.icr.org/article/was-a-fossil-fish-hand-discovered
And this one covers Tiktaalik as well https://www.icr.org/article/did-fish-learn-walk
AND this by Tomkins March 2021 https://www.icr.org/article/the-fossils-still-say-no-evolution-land-vertebrate
Oddly, evolutionists claim that whales evolved from tetrapods. Here’s a video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su-gcrynllU&ab_channel=AnswersinGenesisCanada
DO FISH SKULLS SHOW EVIDENCE FOR EVOLUTION? by Frank Sherwin, October 2022 https://www.icr.org/article/fish-skulls-evolution
Article: “Will The True Tetrapod Transition please step forward?” by Brian Thomas, PhD, October: icr.org
Article: “DID SCIENTISTS MAKE FISH GROW HANDS?” by Jeff Thomkins, PhD, January 2013 icr.org
Fuel for Faith 