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Tale of Transition
from Water to Land
Evolutionists assume
that the sea invertebrates that appear in the
Cambrian stratum somehow evolved into fish in
tens of million years. However, just as Cambrian
invertebrates have no ancestors, there are no
transitional links indicating that an evolution
occurred between these invertebrates and fish.
It should be noted that invertebrates and fish
have enormous structural differences.
Invertebrates have their hard tissues outside
their bodies, whereas fish are vertebrates that
have theirs on the inside. Such an enormous
"evolution" would have taken billions of steps
to be completed and there should be billions of
transitional forms displaying them.
Evolutionists have been
digging fossil strata for about 140 years
looking for these hypothetical forms. They have
found millions of invertebrate fossils and
millions of fish fossils; yet nobody has ever
found even one that is midway between them.
An evolutionist
paleontologist, Gerald T. Todd, admits a similar
fact in an article titled "Evolution of the Lung
and the Origin of Bony Fishes":
All three subdivisions
of bony fishes first appear in the fossil record
at approximately the same time. They are already
widely divergent morphologically, and are
heavily armored. How did they originate? What
allowed them to diverge so widely? How did they
all come to have heavy armour? And why is there
no trace of earlier, intermediate forms?
38
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According to the
hypothetical scenario of "from sea to
land", some fish felt the need to pass
from sea to land because of feeding
problems. This claim is "supported" by
such speculative drawings. |
The evolutionary
scenario goes one step further and argues that
fish, who evolved from invertebrates then
transformed into amphibians. But this scenario
also lacks evidence. There is not even a single
fossil verifying that a half-fish/half-amphibian
creature has ever existed. Robert L. Carroll, an
evolutionary palaeontologist and authority on
vertebrate palaeontology, is obliged to accept
this. He has written in his classic work,
Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution, that "The
early reptiles were very different from
amphibians and their ancestors have not been
found yet." In his newer book, Patterns and
Processes of Vertebrate Evolution, puslished in
1997, he admits that "The origin of the modern
amphibian orders, (and) the transition between
early tetrapods" are "still poorly known" along
with the origins of many other major groups.39
Two evolutionist paleontologists, Colbert and
Morales, comment on the three basic classes of
amphibians-frogs, salamanders, and caecilians:
There is no evidence of
any Paleozoic amphibians combining the
characteristics that would be expected in a
single common ancestor. The oldest known frogs,
salamanders, and caecilians are very similar to
their living descendants.40
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410-million-year-old coelacanth fossil.
Evolutionists claimed that it was the
transitional form representing the
transition from water to land. Living
examples of this fish have been caught
many times since 1938, providing a good
example of the extent of the
speculations that evolutionists engage
in.
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Until about fifty years
ago, evolutionists thought that such a creature
indeed existed. This fish, called a coelacanth,
which was estimated to be 410 million years of
age, was put forward as a transitional form with
a primitive lung, a developed brain, a digestive
and a circulatory system ready to function on
land, and even a primitive walking mechanism.
These anatomical interpretations were accepted
as undisputed truth among scientific circles
until the end of the 1930's. The coelacanth was
presented as a genuine transitional form that
proved the evolutionary transition from water to
land.
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Why Transition From
Water to Land is Impossible
Evolutionists claim
that one day, a species dwelling in water
somehow stepped onto land and was
transformed into a land-dwelling species.
There are a number of
obvious facts that render such a
transition impossible:
1. Weight-bearing:
Sea-dwelling creatures have no problem in
bearing their own weight in the sea.
However, most
land-dwelling creatures consume 40% of
their energy just in carrying their bodies
around. Creatures making the transition
from water to land would at the same time
have had to develop new muscular and
skeletal systems (!) to meet this energy
need, and this could not have come about
by chance mutations.
2. Heat Retention: On
land, the temperature can change quickly,
and fluctuates over a wide range.
Land-dwelling creatures possess a physical
mechanism that can withstand such great
temperature changes. However, in the sea,
the temperature changes slowly and within
a narrower range. A living organism with a
body system regulated according to the
constant temperature of the sea would need
to acquire a protective system to ensure
minimum harm from the temperature changes
on land. It is preposterous to claim that
fish acquired such a system by random
mutations as soon as they stepped onto
land.
3. Water: Essential
to metabolism, water needs to be used
economically due to its relative scarcity
on land. For instance,, the skin has to be
able to permit a certain amount of water
loss, while also preventing excessive
evaporation. That is why land-dwelling
creatures experience thirst, something the
land-dwelling creatures do not do. For
this reason, the skin of sea-dwelling
animals is not suitable for a nonaquatic
habitat.
4. Kidneys:
Sea-dwelling organisms discharge waste
materials, especially ammonia, by means of
their aquatic environment. On land, water
has to be used economically. This is why
these living beings have a kidney system.
Thanks to the kidneys, ammonia is stored
by being converted into urea and the
minimum amount of water is used during its
excretion. In addition, new systems are
needed to provide the kidney's
functioning. In short, in order for the
passage from water to land to have
occurred, living things without a kidney
would have had to develop a kidney system
all at once.
5. Respiratory
system: Fish "breathe" by taking in oxygen
dissolved in water that they pass through
their gills. They canot live more than a
few minutes out of water. In order to
survive on land, they would have to
acquire a perfect lung system all of a
sudden.
It is most certainly
impossible that all these dramatic
physiological changes could have happened
in the same organism at the same time, and
all by chance.
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However on December 22,
1938, a very interesting discovery was made in
the Indian Ocean. A living member of the
coelacanth family, previously presented as a
transitional form that had become extinct
seventy million years ago, was caught! The
discovery of a "living" prototype of the
coelacanth undoubtedly gave evolutionists a
severe shock. The evolutionist paleontologist
J.L.B. Smith said that "If I'd met a dinosaur in
the street I wouldn't have been more
astonished".41 In the years to
come, 200 coelacanths were caught many times in
different parts of the world.
Turtle fossil
aged 100 million years: No different
from its modern counterpart. (The
Dawn of Life, Orbis Pub., London
1972)
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TURTLES WERE ALWAYS
TURTLES
Just as the
evolutionary theory cannot explain basic
classes of living things such as fish and
reptiles, neither can it explain the
origin of the orders within these classes.
For example, turtles, which is a reptilian
order, appear in the fossil record all of
a sudden with their unique shells. To
quote from an evolutionary source: "...by
the middle of the Triassic Period (about
175,000,000 years ago) its (turtle's)
members were already numerous and in
possession of the basic turtle
characteristics. The links between turtles
and cotylosaurs from which turtles
probably sprang are almost entirely
lacking" (Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 1971,
v.22, p.418)
There is no
difference between the fossils of ancient
turtles and the living members of this
species today. Simply put, turtles have
not "evolved"; they have always been
turtles since they were created that way. |
Living coelacanths
revealed how far the evolutionists could go in
making up their imaginary scenarios. Contrary to
what had been claimed, coelacanths had neither a
primitive lung nor a large brain. The organ that
evolutionist researchers had proposed as a
primitive lung turned out to be nothing but a
lipid pouch.42 Furthermore,
the coelacanth, which was introduced as "a
reptile candidate getting prepared to pass from
sea to land", was in reality a fish that lived
in the depths of the oceans and never approached
nearer than 180 metres from the surface.43
Next
Origin of Birds and Mammals
38 Gerald T. Todd, "Evolution
of the Lung and the Origin of Bony Fishes: A Casual
Relationship", American Zoologist, Vol 26, No. 4,
1980, p. 757.
39 R. L. Carroll, Vertebrate Paleontology and
Evolution, New York: W. H. Freeman and Co. 1988, p.
4.; Robert L. Carroll, Patterns and Processes of
Vertebrate Evolution, Cambridge University Press,
1997, p. 296-97
40 Edwin H. Colbert, M. Morales, Evolution of the
Vertebrates, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1991, p.
99.
41 Jean-Jacques Hublin, The Hamlyn Encyclopędia of
Prehistoric Animals, New York: The Hamlyn Publishing
Group Ltd., 1984, p. 120.
42 Jacques Millot, "The Coelacanth", Scientific
American, Vol 193, December 1955, p. 39.
43 Bilim ve Teknik Magazine, November 1998, No: 372,
p. 21. |
