1) "We're going to take things away from you on behalf
of the common good."
A. Karl Marx
B. Adolph Hitler
C. Joseph Stalin
D. None of the above
2) "It's time for a new beginning, for an end to
government of the few, by the few, and for the few...... And to replace it with
shared responsibility for shared prosperity."
A. Lenin
B. Mussolini
C. Idi Amin
D. None of the Above
3) "(We) .....can't just let business as usual go on,
and that means something has to be taken away from some people."
A. Nikita Khrushev
B. Josef Goebbels
C. Boris Yeltsin
D. None of the above
4) "We have to build a political consensus and that
requires people to give up a little bit of their own ... in order to create
this common ground."
A. Mao Tse Dung
B. Hugo Chavez
C. Kim Jong Il
D. None of the above
5) "I certainly think the free-market has failed."
A. Karl Marx
B. Lenin
C. Molotov
D. None of the above
6) "I think it's time to send a clear message to what
has become the most profitable sector in the entire economy that they are
being watched." (referring to oil companies)
A. Pinochet
B. Milosevic
C. Saddam Hussein
D. None of the above
Give up?
Answer to every question: None of the above.
Hillary Clinton said all of the above!
Hillary said, “It takes a village” – translation = It takes
Socialism.
OH – By The Way – both
Snopes.com and PolitiFact.com researched this information. PolitiFact slammed
them as taken totally out of context and argued their meaning changed when in
context. Snopes.com made no such claim.
When you read the quotes in full
context – their meanings do not change.
Without gradualness... We are back to a miracle. - Richard Dawkins,
Evolutionary Biologist.
Phyla are abstract categories that bring together basic
features that unite large groups of animals. So you can think of a phylum as a
group of organisms that all share a basic architecture. Based on the body plans
of animals, we divide animals into these major groups. We have vertebrates,
arthropods, echinoderms (such as sea urchins), etc. So each group has its own
unique features that make them very different from the next group. The
stability and consistency of the forms that make up the unique groups of phyla,
contradict Darwin's vision of an interconnected tree of life. The phyla do not
blend imperceptibly, one into another. So the question is; how did these
differences arise? If one reads the origin of species, it is clear that Darwin
is caught in a bind.
“Natura non facit saltum.” This was Darwin's famous Latin phrase which
means, "nature takes no sudden leaps”. In fact, Darwin went on to say that
if we found evidence of saltation, of a sudden appearance in the fossil record,
that would be something equivalent to evidence of special creation.
One of the most striking examples of a sudden
leaping nature is evident in the number and stability of new body plans that
first appeared during the Cambrian explosion. The Cambrian explosion in its
evidence tells us that a vast majority of the body plans and animal life we see
now appeared rather suddenly in a very brief period of time. Scientist now
agree that it is a defensible statement to say that most of the major animal
body plans (essential animal structures) are present in the Cambrian explosion.
If you can imagine creating a graph that would visualize
Darwin's theory, you would see a gradually growing curve of emerging phyla body
types over a long period of time. Now visualize a graph of what we've learned
from the thousands of excavations throughout the globe particularly of the Cambrian
and Precambrian periods. What we see is a massive spike in the number of new
species during the Cambria and thereafter a few that trickle in here and there
across the timeline. Alternately these two graphs are so dramatically different
they visually emphasize the disparity between Darwin's theory and what the
fossil record actually shows us. What we see is all the major body plans at the
beginning, and the organisms and life forms we see today fit within those basic
body structures. They do not gradually increase over time as would be in line
with Darwin's theory.
The sudden appearance of the Cambrian body plans deepens the
mystery in another way. The Darwinian model predicts that as new biological
forms evolved, simple to complex, they developed gradually from the smallest
differences in classification to the largest or from the “bottom up.” Darwin's
idea was that, given enough time evolution would lead to new species, new
families, orders and eventually phyla. Only after millions and millions of
generations do you end up with the several dozen phyla that we see around us
today. That is the bottom-up pattern predicted by Darwin's theory. Now the
other picture is top-down. The top-down picture says the primary differences in
body types are original. They are present from the start. When you find
mollusks in the fossil record, there they are, and the arthropods... Boom,
there they are, with the major differences present right from the beginning. So
the upper level of architecture is top-down, present and right there.
The fossil record clearly shows all the known basic body plans we
have today – appearing in what seems a geological instant.
To understand the geological speed of the Cambrian
explosion, imagine the history of life compressed into a single day. If we
imagine the history of life taking place in one 24-hour period, the current and
scientific standard estimates for the origin of life placed the occurrence
about 3.8 million years ago. If we start the clock at the top of a 24-hour
period, six hours pass nothing but the single celled simple organisms appear,
the same sort we saw in the beginning. 12 hours, same thing; 18 hours, same
thing; three quarters of the day has passed and all we have are the simple
single celled organisms. Then about the 21st hour in the space of about 2
minutes; Boom! Most of the major animal forms appear in the form that they
currently have in the present. Many of these animal forms persist to the
present, and we have them with us today. Less than 2 minutes out of a 24-hour
period; that's just how sudden the Cambrian explosion was.
Darwin was caught in the grip of a deep dilemma. The fossil
record showed him one thing; his theory told him something else. Darwin comes
to an impasse at this point, and he says, "If this pattern holds, it is a
genuine argument against my view." I believe 150 years later, we have
added a great volume of detail to the explanation but I think the basic problem
is still unsolved.
Absence of Transitional
Fossils
Evolution works very slowly as Darwin saw it, with lots of
failed experiments along way, and one would expect that over millions of years,
as sediment is being deposited, that you would capture some of those
experiments; some of those linking groups leading to the trilobites that Darwin
knew all about. So the absence of such forms is profoundly mysterious. However,
from the standpoint of intelligent design this is not mysterious at all because
we know that intelligent agents can bring things into existence that did not
exist before because they had an idea. They had a blueprint in their mind that
they realized in their creative activity. There's no need to tinker through
millions of years of evolutionary history if you can pull together a plan at a
discrete moment in time. This is exactly what appears to have occurred in the
Cambrian explosion.
Darwin said, "If numerous species belonging to the same genera, or families,
have really started to life all at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory
of descent with slow modification through natural selection."
James W. Valentine is an American evolutionary biologist and Professor
Emeritus in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of
California, Berkeley. He has published widely and -- in addition to
peer-reviewed publications -- has written several books.
Darwin himself in his book the Origin of Species noted that
he does not have a plausible answer to the Cambrian explosion. Without a
plausible answer for many years he theorized or argued that not enough fossil
excavation had been conducted. He believed that over time the fossil record
would show a transitioning set of steps or evolving of one species type into
another; supporting his Evolutionary theory. Unfortunately for Darwin’s theory
and for many who still hold to it; the fossil record has clearly shown that his
theory cannot be accurate.
Since the passing of Darwin we have now completed
archaeological and paleontological explorations on every continent. Virtually
all of these excavations have revealed and solidified the Cambrian explosion.
In the latter-half of the 20th century, industry has conducted very deep
offshore oil drilling. These offshore oil drilling projects were conducted by
coring very deeply below the surface of the ocean bottoms. Paleontologists knew
that such drilling would provide a much deeper look at the fossil record well
into the Cambrian period and prior. What they found even more profoundly
solidified Darwin's dilemma.
What they found in sediments dating back to pre-Cambrian was
not a fossil record of transitions of species. On the contrary all they found
were evidence of single cell organisms and simple plant life. The shale and
rock samples beneath the ocean floor have revealed that the single cell
organisms and plant life disappeared from the Earth rather suddenly. Then
sometime after that we see all the basic animal life structures including those
with complex design; bones vertebra, etc., appeared nearly all at once – not an
evolutionary process at all. Everything changed in what seemed to be a
geological instant.
In the early 1990’s, reports of new Chinese fossils were
released to the rest of the world. Marine biologist Paul Chien at the
University of San Francisco was one scientist who followed the news closely.
What drew his attention were a couple of articles that were published in the
People's daily, the official newspaper from the Communist Party in China. The
article stated the Chinese fossils drew the attention of scientists worldwide
and this fossil find actually challenges the theory of Darwin's evolution. Then
on December 4, 1995, Time Magazine published a cover story entitled Evolution's
Big Bang. The story included great detail about the Chinese fossils. Since 1996
Paul Chien has made several trips to conduct his own investigation in China of
the fossil site. Paul Chien has found that when you get into the subject of the
Cambrian explosion and all the various fossil sites there is one of two
possible reactions; people either love to talk about it or they would prefer to
avoid the subject. He says the Cambrian explosion absolutely challenges the
idea of the traditional view of evolution. The problem is that all of the
various fossils and animal species found have clearly appeared in a very brief
period of time. This is very difficult to explain from the evolutionary point
of view.
Paleontologists have determined that the Chinese fossils
were older than those excavated in the Burgess Shale in previous years. Yet,
anatomically they were often even more complex. This discovery also confirmed
that the previous estimates of the Cambrian explosion of life lasting 20 to 40
million years were much too long. The time estimate has now been reduced to
between 5 and 10 million years. So this is truly an explosive event in
scientific terms. What we are seeing is a quantum jump; and this quantum jump
has no explanation. Most scientists agree that we do not know the exact rate of
the Cambrian explosion; they simply agree that it was very fast in evolutionary
terms. As the time period of the Cambrian explosion has shrank, the challenge
to evolutionary theory has grown. This is because the distinct differences and
animal forms would have to be constructed very rapidly are much more dramatic;
these pose a real and fundamental challenge to evolutionary mechanisms.
Scientists began speaking in terms of finding an explanation to the Cambrian
Explosion outside of the Darwinian thought.
The Cambrian Explosion fossils in China were not all that
was discovered. In the area of shale below the Cambrian period, they found
evidence of little tiny microscopic sponge embryos. These embryos were
soft-bodied animals some of which were fossilized 60 million years prior to the
Cambrian explosion. They are eggs and embryos which are preserved in thin
crusts of mineralized materials, on ancient sea floors. Now this suggests that
the chemistry of the seawater in those days was somewhat different than it is
today because this method of preserving fossils disappears during the Cambrian
and it is not around today. Now this is highly significant because one of the
most popular explanations for the missing Precambrian fossils is that the
pre-Cambrian animals were too soft and too small to have been preserved. Dr.
Chien was able to develop a unique process of examining and analyzing the
embryos and the sponge content that they were in. Eventually using an electron
microscope he was able to examine the internal cell structure of the preserved
embryos.
Chien's work on these fragile samples of Precambrian life
raised an important question. If these lower strata that are Precambrian can
preserve an embryo, and if they can preserve a soft microscopic embryo, then
why could they not have preserve the larger ancestral forms of animals that would
have supposedly evolved into the Cambrian animals; according to Darwin's
theory? In other words if you can preserve something as fragile as an embryo,
why couldn't you, in the same strata of rock, preserved the immediate ancestor
of a hard shelled trilobite? So this idea that many scientists had put forth,
that the fossil record is just too damaged to give us an accurate general
picture; well that idea just doesn't wash.
During the past 150 years, fossil hunters have searched the
earth for the many species of transitional links that Darwin's theory requires –
yet they have come up empty.
Paul Kwan Chien – Marine Biologist,
known for his research on the physiology and ecology of intertidal organisms
and his support for intelligent design and creationism.
Senior Fellow, Center for Science & Culture. Dr. Wells
is an expert on biology textbooks and biology science curriculum as it relates
to Darwinian evolution.
James W. Valentine is an American evolutionary biologist and
Professor Emeritus in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University
of California, Berkeley. He has published widely and -- in addition to
peer-reviewed publications -- has written several books.
