HISTORICAL - NOT EMPIRICAL, John H. Horner "...paleontology is a historical science, a science based on circumstantial evidence, after the fact. We can never reach hard and fast conclusions in our study of ancient plants and animals... These days it's easy to go through school for a good many years, sometimes even through college, without ever hearing that some sciences are historical or by nature inconclusive." Dinosaur Lives, 1997, p.19

Stephen J. Gould, Harvard, "The Cambrian Explosion occurred in a geological moment, and we have reason to think that all major anatomical designs may have made their evolutionary appearance at that time. ...not only the phylum Chordata itself, but also all its major divisions, arose within the Cambrian Explosion. So much for chordate uniqueness... Contrary to Darwin's expectation that new data would reveal gradualistic continuity with slow and steady expansion, all major discoveries of the past century have only heightened the massiveness and geological abruptness of this formative event..." Nature, Vol.377, 26 10/95, p.682. "Since the so called Cambrian Explosion... no new Phyla of animals have entered the fossil record." Lecture at SMU, 10/2/1990

Richard Monastersky, Earth Science Ed., Science News, "The remarkably complex forms of animals we see today suddenly appeared. ...This moment, right at the start of the Earth's Cambrian Period...marks the evolutionary explosion that filled the seas with the earth's first complex creatures....'This is Genesis material,' gushed one researcher. ...demonstrates that the large animal phyla of today were present already in the early Cambrian and that they were as distinct from each other as they are today...a menagerie of clam cousins, sponges, segmented worms, and other invertevrates that would seem vaguely familiar to any scuba diver." Discover, p.40, 4/93.

Richard Dawkins, Cambridge, "And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. ...the only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation...", The Blind Watchmaker, 1986, p229-230.

IN THE CAMBRIAN, John Repetski, U.S.Geol. Survey, "The oldest land plants now known are from the Early Cambrian... Approximately 60 Cambrian spore-genera are now on record...represent 6 different groups of vascular plants..." Evolution, V.13, 6/'59, p.264.. Daniel I. Axelrod, UCLA, "This report of fish material from Upper Cambrian rocks further extends the record of the vertebrates by approximately 40 million years." [WY, OK, WA, NV, ID, AR] Science, Vol.200, 5/1978, p.529.

TRILOBITE EYES "...trilobites may have been superior to current living animals. They had, in principle, perfect vision: They possessed the most sophisticated eye lenses ever produced by nature. ...look like they were designed by a physicist." Science News, Vol.105, 2/2, 1974

DISTINCT LIVING KINDS" Stephen J. Gould, Harvard, "Our modern phyla represent designs of great distinctness, yet our diverse world contains nothing in between sponges, corals, insects, snails, sea urchins, and fishes (to choose standard representatives of the most prominent phyla)." Natural History, p.15, Oct. 1990.

DISTINCT FOSSIL KINDS, ...demonstrates that the large animal phyla of today were present already in the early Cambrian and that they were as distinct from each other as they are today...a menagerie of clam cousins, sponges, segmented worms, and other invertevrates that would seem vaguely familiar to any scuba diver." Discover, p.40, 4/93.

BLIND FAITH, Douglas Futuyma, "It is considered likely that all the animal phyla became distinct before or during the Cambrian, for they all appear fully formed, without intermediates connecting one form to another." Evolutionary Biology, 1985, p.325

"TREES" NOT FROM FOSSILS, Steven J. Gould, Harvard, "The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of the fossils.", Nat.His., V.86, p.13.

ARRANGED, R.H.Dott, U.of Wis. & R.L.Batten, Columbia, AMNH, "We have arranged the groups in a traditional way with the 'simplest' forms first, and progressively more complex groups following. This particular arrangement is arbitrary and depends on what definition of 'complexity' you wish to choose. ...things are alike because they are related, and the less they look alike, the further removed they are from their common ancestor." Evolution Of The Earth, p.602.

STORY TIME, Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist, British Museum of Nat. History, "I will lay it on the line--there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument." "It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another.... But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test. .... I don't think we shall ever have any access to any form of tree which we can call factual." Harper's, Feb.1984, p.56.

similarity IS NoT genetic, Sir Gavin Debeer, Prof. Embry., U.London, Director BMNH, "It is now clear that the pride with which it was assumed that the inheritance of homologous structures from a common ancestor explained homology was misplaced; for such inheritance cannot be ascribed to identity of genes. The attempt to find homologous genes has been given up as hopeless." Oxford Biology Reader, p.16, Homology an Unsolved Problem

R. H. Dott, Univ. of WI, R. L Batten, Columbia Univ., A.M.N.H., "Much research has been done in embryology since Haeckel's day, and we now know that there are all too many exceptions to this analogy, and that ontogeny does not reflect accurately the course of evolution." Evolution Of The Earth, p.86.

Simpson & Beck, "Haeckel misstated the evolutionary principle involved. It is now firmly established that ontogeny does not repeat phylogeny."Intro.To Biology, 1965,p.273.

Keith S. Thompson, Academy of Natural Sciences, "Surely the biogenetic law is as dead as a doornail. It was finally exorcised from biology textbooks in the fifties. As a topic of serious theoretical inquiry, it was extinct in the twenties." American Scientist, 5/6, 1988, p.273 "Ontogeny and Phylogeny Recapitulated"

Dr. Michael Richardson, St. George's Hospital Medical School, "What he did was to take a human embryo and copy it, pretending that the salamander and the pig and all the others looked the same at the same stage of development. They don't. ....There's only one word for this, and Dr. Richardson doesn't flinch from using it. 'These are fakes. In the paper we call them misleading and inaccurate, but that is just polite scientific language." The Times (London), p.14, 8/11/97

"Fraud Rediscovered", "In reality, Richardson and his colleagues note, even closely related embryos such as those of fish vary quite a bit in their appearance and developmental pathways. 'It looks like it's turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology.' ....But Haeckel's confession got lost after his drawings were subsequently used in a 1901 book called Darwin and After Darwin and reproduced widely in English-language biology texts." Science, p.1435, V.277, 9/5/97

"Embryonic Fraud Lives On," "Although Hacckel confessed...and was convicted of fraud at the University of Jena, the drawings persist. 'That's the real mystery,' says Richardson." New Scientist, p.23, 9/6/97

New York Times, 4/8,/2001, "Several years ago, though, biologists discovered that many of the drawings were fraudulent... One of the texts that includes the faulty drawings is the third edition of "Molecular Biology of the Cell," the bedrock text of the field. Its authors include Dr. Bruce Alberts, a biochemist who is president of the National Academy of Sciences, and Dr. James D. Watson, the geneticist who shared a Nobel Prize for unraveling the structure of DNA."

UNRELATED SIMILARITIES, J.Z.Young, Professor of Anatomy, Oxford, "...similar features repeatedly appear in distinct lines. ...so common that it is almost a rule that detailed study of any group produces a confused taxonomy. Investigators are unable to distinguish populations that are parallel...from those truly descended from each other." Life Of The Vertebrates, p.779 "From very different stocks, the marsupial carnivores and placental carnivores produced animals almost identical in physical form, the true wolf and the thylacine [marsupial wolf]. ...their proportions are uncannily similar; and their skulls are so similar that they are used as a classic 'spot the difference' examination question for zoology students." Prehistoric Life, p.187

"NOT SO HUMAN" "83% of the 231 genes compared had differences that affected the amino acid sequence of the protein they encoded. And 20% showed 'significant structural changes.' ... we have seen a much higher percentage of change than people speculated."

SHEEPISH ANCESTORS? "Sue Galloway, of the University of Otago, who led the team that included scientists at Helsinki University in Finland, was quoted as saying, "Sheep are human, basically. Ninety-eight per cent of our genes are the same." Electronic Telegraph, 7/ 4/2000.

MICE & MEN "Overall, mice and humans share virtually the same set of genes. ...On average, the protein-coding regions of the mouse and human genomes are 85 percent identical; some genes are 99 percent identical" National Genome Research Inst., (9/2006)

BOTHERSOM distresS, Stephen J. Gould, Harvard , "Every paleontologist knows that most species don't change. That's bothersome....brings terrible distress. ....They may get a little bigger or bumpier but they remain the same species and that's not due to imperfection and gaps but stasis. And yet this remarkable stasis has generally been ignored as no data. If they don't change, its not evolution so you don't talk about it." Lecture at Hobart & William Smith College, 14/2/1980.

"We can tell tales of improvement for some groups, but in honest moments we must admit that the history of complex life is more a story of multifarious variation about a set of basic designs than a saga of accumulating excellence. ...I regard the failure to find a clear 'vector of progress' in life's history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record. ...we have sought to impose a pattern that we hoped to find on a world that does not really display it." Natural History, 2/82, p.2

DARWIN'S BIGGEST PROBLEM, "...innumerable transitional forms must have existed but why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth? ...why is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain, and this perhaps is the greatest objection which can be urged against my theory". Origin Of The Species, Facsimile of First Edition, 1964, p.172

BIGGER NOW, David M. Raup, U. Chicago; C., "The evidence we find in the geologic record is not nearly as compatible with darwinian natural selection as we would like it to be. Darwin was completely aware of this. He was embarrassed by the fossil record because it didn't look the way he predicted it would... Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much. ...ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time. By this I mean some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as the result of more detailed information." F.M.O.N.H.B., V.50, p.35.

PREDICTION FAILED, Niles Eldridge, American Museum Of Natural History "He prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search. ...it has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin's predictions. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction was wrong." The Myths of Human Evolution, p.45-46

TEXT BOOK DECEIT, George G. Simpson, "The uniform, continuous transformation of Hyracotherium into Equus, so dear to the hearts of generations of textbook writers never happened in nature." Life Of The Past, p.119.

Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist British Museum of Natural History, "There have been an awful lot of stories, some more imaginative than others, about what the nature of that history [of life] really is. The most famous example, still on exhibit downstairs, is the exhibit on horse evolution prepared perhaps fifty years ago. That has been presented as the literal truth in textbook after textbook. Now I think that that is lamentable, particularly when the people who propose those kinds of stories may themselves be aware of the speculative nature of some of that stuff." Harper's, p. 60, 1984.

Derek Ager, U.at Swansea, Wales, "It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student....have now been 'debunked.' Similarly, my own experience of more than twenty years looking for evolutionary lineages among the Mesozoic Brachiopoda has proved them equally elusive." Proceedings of Geological Association., Vol.87, p.132

BIRD TEETH, Martin, Stewart, Whetstone Museum Of Natural History, U. Of Kansas, "Therapod dinosaurs, by comparison, have serrated teeth with straight roots and no constriction. ...Archaeopteryx has unserrated teeth with constricted bases and expanded roots like those of other Mesozoic birds."" The Auk, V.97, p86, 1980.

"BIRD-BRAINED" "Researchers at the U. of Texas, Austin have used a computerized x-ray technique to build a three dimensional picture of the inside of the skull and inner ear of a fossil archaeopteryx. From this they deduced Archaeopteryx had a brain and inner ear very similar to living birds...well suited for flight." Science Now, 8/4/2004

FOSSIL BIRD EARLIER, "Fossil remains claimed to be of two crow-sized birds 75 million years older than Archaeopteryx have been found....a paleontologist at Texas Tech University, who found the fossils, says they have advanced avian features. ...tends to confirm what many paleontologists have long suspected, that Archaeopteryx is not on the direct line to modern birds." Nature, Vol.322, 1986 p.677.

BIRDS FROM DINOSAURS? Douglas Futuyama, University Of NC "Yale University released...a landmark publication... 'the impetus for the book was the fact that this dinosaurian origin of birds had become, overnight, the dogma in the field, and many of us from the ornithological side felt that was simply wrong ...that birds descended from dinosaurs is utter nonsense." Chronicle Of Higher Education, 10/25/96.

REPTILE TO BIRD, W.E. Swinton, "The origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved." Biology & Comparative Physiology Of Birds, Vol.1, p.1.

D.B. Kitts, U.of OK, "Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of "seeing" evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them... The 'fact that discontinuities are almost always and systematically present at the origin of really big categories' is an item of genuinely historical knowledge." Evolution, Vol.28, p.467.

D.S. Woodroff, U.of CA, San Diego, "But fossil species remain unchanged throughout most of their history and the record fails to contain a single example of a significant transition." Science, Vol.208, 1980, p.716.

Stephen M. Stanley, Johns Hopkins U., "In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another." The New Evolutionary Timetable, 1981, p.95. David W. Swift, University Of Hawaii, "...no phylum can be traced from a preceding one in the fossil record, in fact we cannot account for the origin of a single phylum: they all appear abruptly. This is also true of lower taxonomic groups such as classes and orders, and possibly lower still." Evolution Under The Microscope, 2002, p.295

A MATTER OF FAITH, A.C. Seward, Cambridge, "The theoretically primitive type eludes our grasp; our faith postulates its existence but the type fails to materialize." Plant Life Through The Ages, p.561.

BLIND FAITH, Niles Eldredge, Columbia U., American Museum Of Natural History, "And it has been the paleontologist- my own breed-who have been most responsible for letting ideas dominate reality: ...We paleontologist have said that the history of life supports that interpretation [gradual adaptive change], all the while knowing that it does not." Time Frames, 1986, p.144

Gould & Eldredge, "In fact, most published commentary on punctuated equilibria has been favorable. We are especially pleased that several paleontologists now state with pride and biological confidence a conclusion that had previously been simply embarrassing; 'all these years of work and I haven't found any evolution'. (R.A. Reyment) Paleobiology, Vol.3, p.136.

S. M. Stanley, Johns Hopkins "The record now reveals that species typically survive for a hundred thousand generations, or even a million or more, without evolving very much. We seem forced to conclude that most evolution takes place rapidly...a punctuational model of evolution... operated by a natural mechanism whose major effects are wrought exactly where we are least able to study them - in small, localized, transitory populations...The point here is that if the transition was typically rapid and the population small and localized, fossil evidence of the event would never be found." p.77, 110, New Evolutionary Timetable, 1981.

Colin Patterson, B.M.N.H. "Well, it seems to me that they have accepted that the fossil record doesn't give them the support they would value so they searched around to find another model and found one. ...When you haven't got the evidence, you make up a story that will fit the lack of evidence." Darwin's Enigma, p.100

PALEONTOLOGY DOES NOT PROVE, D.B. Kitts, U.of OK, "The claim is made that paleontology provides a direct way to get at the major events of organic history and that, furthermore, it provides a means of testing evolutionary theories. ...the paleontologist can provide knowledge that cannot be provided by biological principles alone. But he cannot provide us with evolution." Evolution, Vol.28, p.466

DON'T USE THE FOSSILS, Mark Ridley, Oxford, "...a lot of people just do not know what evidence the theory of evolution stands upon. They think that the main evidence is the gradual descent of one species from another in the fossil record. ...In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favour of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation." New Scientist, June, 1981, p.831.

FOSSILS INDICATE CREATION! E.J.H. Cornor, Cambridge "Much evidence can be adduced in favor of the Theory of Evolution from Biology, Biogeography, and Paleontology, but I still think that to the unprejudiced the fossil record of plants is in favor of special creation." Contemporary Botanical Thought, p.61.