Shropshire Star

Evolution is science’s way of explaining the diversity of life

Inventors, on occasion, use the natural world for inspiration when designing objects but this does not mean that the wing of a bird, bat or fly was designed.

Published
Fossils

The designers of the submarine didn’t start with a horseless carriage, they were able to start afresh. But in the natural world, the “designer” of mammals started with a reptile. Which is why mammal middle ear bones, anvil and hammer, are modified reptile jaw bones.

It’s interesting creationists accept natural selection, Darwin’s mechanism for evolution, happens – but without proof reject it as evidence for Darwin’s famous theory. Evolution is science’s way of explaining the wide diversity of life on earth and is the consensus view of the science community.

Natural selection is the process by which information about the environment is transferred to an organism. Natural selection chooses beneficial mutations and removes harmful ones. Later-in-time organisms, such as humans and whales, are much more complex than earlier ones.

Therefore, it is clear some kind of ‘information increase’ in the DNA must have occurred. All organisms are united by descent from a common ancestor and the theory predicts we should find intermediate fossils between birds and reptiles, but not between birds and mammals.

As expected, we have found reptile-like fossils with feathers, pterosaurs; bird-like fossils with teeth, Ichthyornis. But no mammalian fossils with feathers or birds with mammalian-style middle ears and no winged horse. Any finding of a striking half-mammal, half-bird intermediate would be inconsistent with common descent and a falsification of evolution.

Organisms all created at the same time would have produced a uniform fossil record so the theory of kinds, championed by David Burton, does not explain the fossil record. We have fossils in strata spanning many hundreds of millions of years. Only the last couple of million years contain fossil plants and animals, which closely, yet imperfectly, resembles what we presently find on the earth.

Darwin’s theory is the only one that explains what we observe.

A C Mitchell, Madeley

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