Years ago I was fighting the good fight of creation on the Internet. I argued that evolution was impossible, for it required that the genetic code had to be changed to make new kinds of animals. It did not seem feasible to me that evolution could do this. I argued in the CompuServe debate forum, basing my arguments on Michael Denton’s
Evolution: A Theory in Crises.
My favorite illustration was the difference between mammals and reptiles. The differences between living mammals and reptiles are substantial. Mammals all have hair, mammary glands, a four-chambered heart, and the distinct mammalian ear, with three little bones inside. These features are found in no living reptiles. I argued that this is because there is no viable intermediate between the two, that an animal could have either the reptile genetic code or the mammal code but could not be in the middle.
An evolutionist disagreed with me. He told me that in the past there had been many intermediates. He said that there were animals that, for instance, had jaw and ear bones that were intermediate between reptiles and mammals. How did he know this? He gave a reference to an essay in Stephen Gould’s
Ten Little Piggies. I wrote back that since the local library had a large collection of children’s book, I should be able to find that book. (I thought that was quite a zinger.)
I borrowed the book, and found an interesting account of how bones in the reptile jaw evolved and changed through millions of years to become the mammals’ ear. That sounded like such a clever tale. How could Gould believe it? Perhaps he made it up. But there was one little footnote, a footnote that would change my life. It said simply, “Allin, E. F. 1975. Evolution of the Mammalian Middle Ear.
Journal of Morphology 147:403-38.” That’s it. That’s all it said. But it was about to make a huge impact on me.
You see, I had developed this habit of looking things up, and had been making regular trips to a university library. I was getting involved in some serious discussions on the Internet, and was finding the scientific journals to be a reliable source of information. Well, I couldn’t believe that a real scientific journal would take such a tale seriously. But wait. Before I would declare victory, I needed to check it out.
On my next trip to the library, I found my way to the biomedical journal archive. I retrieved the specified journal, and started to read. I could not believe my eyes. There were detailed descriptions of many intermediate fossils. The article described in detail how the bones evolved from reptiles to mammals through a long series of mammal-like reptiles.
I paged through the volume in my hand. There were hundreds of pages, all loaded with information. I looked at other journals. I found page after page describing transitional fossils. More significantly, there were all of those troublesome dates. If one arranged the fossils according to date, one could see how the bones changed with time. Each fossil species was dated at a specific time range. It all fit together.
I didn’t know what to think. Could all of these fossil drawings be fakes? Could all of these dates be pulled out of a hat? Did these articles consist of thousands of lies? All seemed to indicate that life evolved over many millions of years. Were all of these thousands of “facts” actually guesses?
I looked around me. The room was filled with many bookshelves; each was filled with hundreds of bound journals. Were all of these journals drenched with lies?
Several medical students were doing research there. Perhaps some day they would need to operate on my heart or fight some disease. Was I to believe that these medical students were in this room filled with misinformation, and that they were diligently sorting out the evolutionist lies while learning medical knowledge? How could so much error have entered this room? It made no sense.
How can you explain those mysterious mammal-like reptiles? Reptiles and mammals today are quite distinct from each other. Mammalian features include differentiated teeth (incisors, canines, premolars, molars), double rooted teeth, a distinct jaw joint, three bones in the ear (stapes, incus, malleus), the diaphragm, limbs under the body, a different arrangement of toe bones, and a braincase that is firmly attached to the skull. No reptile has these features. But when we look at ancient fossils, we find a strange series of animals with features in the middle.
They begin 300 Ma (million years ago) in the Pennsylvanian. It was a different world. There were no mammals, flowering plants, or even dinosaurs. According to the fossil record, these would all come later. The world belonged to amphibians and reptiles. Early Synapsids such as Haptodus appeared. Their dentary jaw bones rose in the place where later animals would have a new jaw joint–the mammalian joint.
Then advanced pelycosaurs (270 Ma) like the Dimetrodon had signs of a bony prong for the eardrum. Later, cynodonts like the Procynosuchus (236 Ma) had jawbones more similar to mammals, but they still had the reptile’s jaw hinge.
The Probainognathus (238 Ma) and the Thrinaxodons (227 Ma) have signs of two distinct jaw joints, the reptilian and the mammalian. This allowed some of the bones that had been part of the reptile’s jaw to transmit vibrations to the ear. This was the beginning of the special mammalian ear bones.
By the time the Sinoconodon appears (208 Ma) the mammalian jaw joint predominates, and the reptilian jaw joint is small.
The Morganucodon (205 Ma) has teeth like a mammal, a distinct mammalian jaw joint, and only a tiny remnant of the reptile’s jaw. It’s malleus and incus ear bones remain attached to the jaw.
By the late Cretaceous period (80 Ma) early placental mammals like the Asioryctes had jaws and ears that were transformed to the mammalian type. Two of the reptile’s jaw bones, the quadrate and the articular were no longer part of the jaw. Instead they had become parts of the middle ear, the malleus and incus.
This is only a brief overview of these strange creatures. In reality, there are thousands of species that span many millions of years, with many intermediate stages of many different features.
Now what on earth was God doing? Why was he slowly introducing mammalian features into the fossil record? Why did he progressively change the design of the jaw, ear, teeth, and limbs until the animals look more and more like mammals? Should I just shrug my shoulders? “God moves in mysterious ways.” Problem resolved? No, I shall ask why.
Did God learn from past experience and introduce new creatures with improvement every several thousand years or so? Creationists would cringe at that suggestion. Then why do we find this progression? It is difficult to escape the all-too-obvious conclusion: God must have allowed the first mammal to evolve from reptiles through a process involving many millions of years.
As a Creationist, I finally came to the point where I considered that possibility. It instantly become apparent that this would be a huge change in worldview. For if the first mammal evolved from reptiles, then where did the second mammal come from? If God used thousands of transitions to evolve the first mammal, did he then just copy that design to create the second and third mammals? That makes no sense. These mammals must have evolved also.
In fact, we would need to conclude that all mammals have evolved from these mammal-like reptiles. Think for a minute of all of the varieties of mammals that you know–elephants, tigers, mice, dogs, and whales, to name a few. Did all of these descend from a sequence of mammal-like reptiles? Is there any other way to explain all of these intermediates?
The impact of that day in the library was truly stunning. I didn’t know what to say. I could not argue against the overwhelming evidence for mammal evolution. That was hopeless. But neither could I imagine believing it. Something had happened to me. My mind had begun to think. It was becoming free. And it was not about to be stopped. Oh no. There is no stopping the mind set free.
I went to the library and borrowed a few books on evolution and creation–diligently studying both sides of the argument. I started to read the evolutionist books with amazement. I had thought that evolutionists taught that floating cows had somehow turned into whales; that hopeful monsters had suddenly evolved without transitions; that one must have blind faith since transitional fossils did not exist; that one must simply guess at the dates for the fossils; and that one must ignore all of the evidence for young-earth creation. I was surprised to learn what these scientist actually knew about the Creationist teachings of flood geology, of the proposed young-earth proofs, and of the reported problems of evolution.
And I was surprised at the convincing answers that they had for these Creationist arguments. I was surprised to see all the arguments they had for evolution. I read with enthusiasm. I learned about isochrons, intermediate fossils, the geologic column, and much, much more.
I would never see the world in the same light. Several weeks later I found myself staring at the fossil of a large dinosaur in a museum. I stared with amazement. I looked at the details of every bone in the back. I wondered if a design so marvelous could really have evolved. But I knew that someone could show me other animals that had lived earlier that had transitional features to this dinosaur. And I knew that one could trace bones back through the fossil record to illustrate the broad path through which this creature had evolved. I stared and I pondered. And then I pondered some more.
Within days, I had lost interest in fighting evolution. I began to read more and write less. When I did debate, I confined my arguments to the issue of the origin of life. But I could no longer ignore what I had learned. Several months later I first sent out an email with probing questions to a creationist who had arrived on the scene. He never responded. I have not stopped questioning.
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This is from my website:
Did We Evolve?
