Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization

1 Darwin’s Demise

On the Futile Search for Missing Links

Will Hart

Charles Darwin was a keen observer of nature and an original thinker. He revolutionized biology. Karl Marx was also an astute observer of human society and an original thinker. He revolutionized economic and political ideology. They were contemporary nineteenth-century giants who cast long shadows and subscribed to the theory of “dialectical materialism”—the viewpoint that matter is the sole subject of change and all change is the product of conflict arising from the internal contradictions inherent in all things. And yet, as much appeal as dialectical materialism had to the intellectuals and working classes of certain countries, by the close of the last century it had failed to pass the test in the real world.

Darwinism is beginning to show similar signs of strain and fatigue. It is not just creationists who are sounding the death knell. Darwin was well aware of the weaknesses of his theory. He called the origin of flowering plants “an abominable mystery.” That mystery remains unsolved to this day.

As scientists have searched the fossil record assiduously for more than one hundred years for the “missing link” between primitive nonflowering and flowering plants without luck, a host of other trouble spots have flared up. Darwin anticipated problems should there be an absence of transitional fossils (chemically formed duplications of living creatures). At the time, he wrote: “It is the most serious objection that can be urged against the theory.”

However, he could not have predicted where additional structural cracks would appear and threaten the very foundation of his theory. Why? Biochemistry was in an embryonic state in Darwin’s day. It is doubtful that he could have imagined that the structure of DNA would be discovered in less than one hundred years from the publication of Origin of Species.

In a twist of fate, one of the first torpedoes to rip holes in the theory of evolution was unleashed by a biochemist. In Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, Michael Behe, a biology professor, points to a strange brew bubbling in the test tube. He focuses on five phenomena: blood clotting, cilia, the human immune system, the transport of materials within cells, and the synthesis of nucleotides. He analyzes each phenomenon systemically and arrives at a single startling conclusion: These are systems that are so irreducibly complex that no gradual, step-by-step Darwinian route could have led to their creation.

The foundation of Darwin’s theory is simple, perhaps even simplistic. Life on Earth has evolved through a series of biological changes as a consequence of random genetic mutations working in conjunction with natural selection. One species gradually changes over time into another. And those species that adapt to changing environmental conditions are best suited to survive and propagate and the weaker die out, producing the most well-known principle of Darwinism—survival of the fittest.

The theory has been taught to children for generations. We have all learned that fish changed into amphibians, amphibians became reptiles, reptiles evolved into birds, and birds changed into animals. However, it is far easier to explain this to schoolchildren—with cute illustrations and pictures of a lineup of apes (beginning with those having slumped shoulders, transitioning to two that are finally standing upright)—than it is to prove.

Darwinism is the only scientific theory taught worldwide that has yet to be proved by the rigorous standards of science. Nevertheless, Darwinists claim that Darwinism is no longer a theory, but rather an established scientific fact. The problem is not a choice between biblical creation and evolution. The issue to resolve boils down to a single question: Has Darwin’s theory been proved by the rules of scientific evidence?

Darwin knew that the only way to verify the main tenets of the theory was to search the fossil record. That search has continued since his day. How many paleontologists, geologists, excavators, construction workers, oil- and water-well drillers, archeologists and anthropologists, students and amateur fossil hunters have been digging holes in the ground and discovering fossils from Darwin’s day until today? Untold millions.

What evidence has the fossil record revealed concerning Darwin’s transitional species? The late Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould, the antithesis of a Bible-thumping creationist, acknowledged: “All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically lacking.”

Notice he didn’t say that there is a dearth of fossils—just of the ones that are needed to substantiate Darwin’s theory. There are plenty of fossils of ancient forms and plenty of newer ones. For example, we find fossils of early and extinct primates, hominids, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, but no fossils of the transition linking ape and man. We find a similar situation with Darwin’s dreaded appearance of flowering plants, his Achilles’ heel.

Water deposits in the ancient past have left millions of fossils in a vast geologic library. Why do we find representative nonflowering plants from three hundred million years ago and flowering plants from one hundred million years ago still alive today but no plants showing the gradual process of mutations that represent the intermediate species that (should) link the two?

There are no such plants living today, nor are they found in the fossil record. That is Darwin’s cross.

This is a serious, even critical issue that needs deep and thorough analysis. In an interview about his penetrating critique, Facts of Life: Shattering the Myth of Darwinism, the science journalist Richard Milton describes what made him write the book: “It was the absence of transitional fossils that first made me question Darwin’s idea of gradual change. I realized, too, that the procedures used to date rocks were circular. Rocks are used to date fossils; fossils are used to date rocks. From here I began to think the unthinkable: Could Darwinism be scientifically flawed?”

Milton makes it clear that he does not support those who attack Darwin because they have a religious ax to grind: “As a science journalist and writer with a lifelong passion for geology and paleontology—and no religious beliefs to get in the way—I was in a unique position to investigate and report on the state of Darwin’s theory in the 1990s,” he said. “The result was unambiguous. Darwin doesn’t work here any more.”

According to Milton, who had been a firm Darwinist, when he began to rethink the theory, he became a regular visitor to Great Britain’s prestigious Natural History Museum. He put the best examples that Darwinists had gathered over the years under intense scrutiny. One by one they failed to pass the test. He realized that many scientists around the world had already arrived at the same conclusion. The emperor was as naked as an ape. Why had no one gone public with papers critiquing the theory?

What trained, credentialed scientist earning a living through a university or government position wants to jeopardize a career and earn the disdain of colleagues in the process? Apparently none. Rocking the boat is never popular. The HMS Beagle is still afloat and it appears to be buttressed by a Darwinist army that is every bit as dogmatic about its beliefs as are the creationists, who, Darwinists complain, have a religious, nonscientific agenda.

Scientists have dropped hints, however. During a college lecture in 1967, the world-renowned anthropologist Louis B. Leakey was asked about “the missing link.” He replied tersely, “There is no one link missing—there are hundreds of links missing.”

Gould eventually wrote a paper proposing a theory to try to explain the lack of transitional species and the sudden appearance of new ones. He called this theory “punctuated equilibrium.”

The public is not generally well informed about the scientific problems associated with Darwin’s theory of evolution. And while the average person is aware that there is a war going on between creationists and evolutionists, that is seen as a rear-guard action, an old battle between science and religion over matters that the Scopes trial settled more than a generation ago. And there is some consternation over “the missing link” between apes and man.

The true believers among Darwinists have long been puzzled by the lack of transitional fossils. The reasoning goes something like this: They must be out there hidden in the record somewhere. How do we know this? Darwin’s theory demands it! So the search goes on. But just how long a time and how many expeditions and how many years of research are needed before they finally admit that there must a good reason that the transitional fossils are not there?

Critics contend that the reason for the lack of transitional fossils is simple: Darwin’s theory fails to meet the rigorous scientific criteria for proof because it is fatally flawed. The main tenets did not predict what has proved to be the outcome of more than a hundred years of research: missing links instead of transitional species.

Darwin knew the flak would come should the fossil record not contain the necessary transitional species.

Geneticists have long known that the vast majority of mutations are either neutral or negative. In other words, mutations are usually mistakes, failures of the DNA to accurately copy information. It would appear that this is not a very reliable primary mechanism and it needs to be, because natural selection is obviously not a dynamic force that could drive the kinds of changes that evolutionists attribute to the theory.

Natural selection operates more like a control mechanism, a feedback system that weeds out poor adaptations and selects successful ones.

The problem with mutation being the driving force is several-fold. As Behe pointed out in his book, life within a cell is just too complex to be the outcome of random mutations. But Darwin didn’t have the kind of lab technology that molecular biologists today have at their disposal. Darwin was working with species, not the structure of cells, mitochondria, and DNA. But the mutation theory doesn’t work well on other levels, either.

Now we must return to the problem of the sudden appearance of flowering plants. There is a high degree of organization in flowers. Most flowers are specifically designed to accommodate bees and other pollinators. Which came first, the flower or the bee? We’ll get to that momentarily; the first question is: How did the alleged primitive nonflowering plant, which had for eons relied on asexual reproduction, suddenly grow the structures required for sexual reproduction?

According to Darwin’s theory, it happened when a gymnosperm mutated and then changed over time into a flowering plant. Is that possible? Let’s keep a few facts in mind: In flowering plants, the transfer of pollen from the male anther to the female stigma must occur before seed plants can reproduce sexually. The mutation had to start with one plant, somewhere, at some point. There were no insects or animals specifically adapted to pollinate flowers because there were no flowers prior to that time.

This is where the idea of combining mutation, natural selection, and gradualism breaks down. When faced with the dilemma of advanced organization and the leap from asexual reproduction to sexual reproduction, Darwinists will say that evolution simply operates too slowly for the links to be apparent. That is a non sequitur. If it acts slowly, then there should be a superabundance of fossils demonstrating the existence of the missing links.

Natural selection would not select a gymnosperm (let’s say a fern) that suddenly mutated a new structure that required an enormous amount of the plant’s energy but had no purpose. In other words, flowerless plants could not have gradually grown the flower parts in a piecemeal fashion over tens of millions of years until a fully functional flower head was formed. That would go against Darwin’s own law of natural selection, the survival of the fittest.

The more you isolate the logical steps that had to occur for Darwin’s theory to be correct, the more trouble you get into. How would a newly evolved flower propagate without other flowers nearby? Why do we find numerous examples of gymnosperms and angiosperms in the fossil record but no transitional species to demonstrate how mutation and natural selection operated to create flowers?

If Darwinism cannot explain the mechanisms responsible for speciation and how life on this planet evolves, what can? Sir Francis Crick, the codiscover of DNA’s double helix structure, proposed the concept of “panspermia,” the idea that life was brought to Earth by an advanced civilization from another planet. It is obvious that Crick was not sold on Darwinism. Behe ends his book with an argument for integrating a “theory of intelligent design” into mainstream biology.

Other biologists, like Lynn Margulis, think that Darwinism leans too heavily on the idea that competition is the main, driving force behind survival. She points out that cooperation is as readily observed and as important, perhaps more important. Nature contains many examples of symbiosis: Flowers need bees and vice versa. Another example is the relationship between mycorrhizal fungi and forest trees. There are bacteria that fix nitrogen for plants. The list goes on. What is a human body but a collection of different kinds of cells and viruses working together to create a complex organism?

The old paradigm is starting to give way to new thinking and new models such as intelligent design and extraterrestrial intervention. Marx and Freud were nineteenth-century pioneers who blazed trails, but so was Newton. Their new paradigms inspired new perspectives and they solved old problems. Still, they had their limits. Their theories were mechanistic and materialistic. Newton’s decline came with the introduction of Einstein’s theory of relativity. The new paradigm of the laws of physics fit the facts and answered more questions, and that meant it had greater utility. Is Darwin next?

Until a more comprehensive theory of how life originated, changed, and continues to evolve emerges, as Richard Milton put it, “Darwin doesn’t work here anymore.”