Bad Logic in Marine Evolution Study

One of the staples of presenting molecules-to-man evolution is flawed logic. For example, how do they know the age of a fossil? Because of the layer it was found in. How do they know the age of the rock layers? Because of the fossils they contain. The viciously circular reasoning is a dizzying as just-paid cowboys dancing at a hootenanny.

Image credit: US Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management

Based on their presuppositions that Darwin was right and that the fossils in the geologic column are both ancient and in an orderly progression, a study of marine organisms presumes to portray evolution. In this case, evolution caused creatures to grow larger, therefore, evolution is true. However, the study was heavily biased and used selective citing, and there were no signs of change of something evolving into something else. Worse for them, the biblical creationist model of the Genesis Flood explains the fossils and the geologic column far better than uniformitarianism.

Do animals evolve to become bigger and bigger over time? The largest fossilized animal in the Cambrian explosion was the trilobite, dated at 542 million years and topping out at about a foot-and-a-half in length. Can the evolutionary advantages of being bigger explain how the world’s largest animal—the blue whale—evolved to be 100,000 times larger than the largest trilobite? Stanford University evolutionary scientists answer “yes” to both of these questions, at least for marine animals.

Stanford paleobiologist Jonathan Payne and colleagues base their conclusions on a statistical survey of the body sizes of over 17,000 kinds of animals. His team reports that the average size of marine animals increased more than 150-fold over the past 542 million years. Most of the size increase, statistically speaking, was due to an increase in the maximum size of fossils in each layer ascending from the Cambrian through the Pleistocene strata.1 In other words, among the marine animals surveyed, the largest animals in each fossil layer were larger than the largest in the layers below. If the fossil layers actually did represent an evolutionary timeline, then this might suggest that the record-breaking sizes marine animals could achieve got larger and larger over millions of years. (As we will point out below, the layers do not mark millions of years of elapsed time, and there is another explanation for the way these fossils stack up!)

To read the rest, click on "Bigger Marine Animals Favored by Evolution?"