The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [28]
As a result, said Denton, the fossil record “provides a tremendous challenge to the notion of organic evolution.” 36 But what about the archaeopteryx? The fossils of this magnificent creature, its detailed image pressed into fine-grained limestone, still seemed to stand in stark contrast to this trend.
“Doesn’t archaeopteryx fill the gap between reptiles and modern birds?” I asked Wells.
“There are several problems with that,” came his reply. “Does it show Darwinian evolution? Well, no, for the same reason that the Corvettes don’t illustrate Darwinian evolution. We would need more than an intermediate form to show that; we would need to know how you get from one to the other.
“The question is, do you get from a reptile to a bird—which is an astonishingly huge step—by some totally natural process or does this require the intervention of a designer? An archaeopteryx, as beautiful as it is, doesn’t show us one way or the other. Besides, we see strange animals around today, like the duck-billed platypus, which nobody considers transitional but which has characteristics of different classes.”
“But the archaeopteryx is a half-bird, half-reptile, right?”
“No, not even close,” he insisted. “It’s a bird with modern feathers, and birds are very different from reptiles in many important ways—their breeding system, their bone structure, their lungs, their distribution of weight and muscles. It’s a bird, that’s clear—not part bird and part reptile.
“But there are more interesting parts to the archaeopteryx story,” he added. “The main one comes from a branch of evolutionary theory called cladistics. This takes Darwinian theory to the extreme. Cladists define homology, or physical similarities, as being due to common ancestry. Then they say, well, the main way we can group animals in the evolutionary tree is through homologies, which is already a bit of a circular argument. When they go back into the fossil record, they assume birds came from reptiles by descent, and they look for reptiles that are more bird-like in their skeletal structure.”
“Where do they find them?” I asked.
Wells smiled. “That’s the fascinating part,” he said. “It turns out they find them millions of years after archaeopteryx! So here we have archaeopteryx, which is undeniably a bird, and yet the fossils that look most like the reptilian ancestors of birds occur tens of millions of years later in the fossil record. The missing link is still missing! Now evolutionists are stuck looking for another theoretical ancestor to try to fill the gaps, but it hasn’t been found.”
“So the archaeopteryx is not an ancestor of modern birds?”
“Not at all. Paleontologists pretty much agree on that. There are too many structural differences. Larry Martin, a paleontologist from the University of Kansas, said clearly in 1985 that the archaeopteryx is not an ancestor of any modern birds; instead, it’s a member of a totally extinct group of birds.” 37
So much for the power of archaeopteryx to authenticate Darwin’s claims. Even ardent evolutionist Pierre Lecomte du Nouy agrees:
We are not even authorized to consider the exceptional case of the archaeopteryx as a true link. By link, we mean a necessary stage of transition between classes such as reptiles and birds, or between smaller groups. An animal displaying characters belonging to two different groups cannot be treated as a true link as long as the intermediary stages have not been found, and as long as the mechanisms of transition remain unknown. 38
Yet even if archaeopteryx had turned out to be a transitional creature, it would have been but a whisper of protest to the fossil record’s deafening roar against classical Darwinism.
“If we are testing Darwinism rather