"LIVING FOSSILS"
As we step farther back into the eons of evolution, we come to insects preserved in amber. The evolutionary age of such specimens is around forty million years. Ants, earwigs, and other insects have all been found well preserved, but if evolution is truly happening, why have these creatures not changed into something else by now? Why do these insects still exist?
We now move on to a more drastic example showing the stability of living things over time. The coelacanth is a fish living in the Indian Ocean near Madagascar, yet fossil coelacanths are supposedly forty million years old. This creature should not have remained unchanged for so long if evolution were happening. Creatures like the coelacanth are sometimes called "living fossils." They are organisms found in fossil-bearing rocks which are still alive in today's world.
If evolution were real, we would expect there to be a virtually complete replacement of so-called primitive fossil life with supposedly more advanced modern life. The National Geographic for June, 1988, published an article entitled "The Coelacanth: The Fish that Time Forgot." This article included, side by side, photographs of tail fins from both a fossil coelacanth and a living coelacanth, with the comment that these two tail fins -- one supposedly forty million years old and the other still living -- were "like carbon copies." If evolution is really occurring, why is this so? There does not seem to be genuine evidence of evolutionary change.
Other examples abound of the lack of evolutionary change over what is alleged to be time periods of millions of years. For example, sharks are supposedly primitive organisms that are said to have existed unchanged for 180 million years or so. Other animals are even more drastic in their apparent stability and lack of evolutionary change. The tuatara lizard native to New Zealand is identical to fossil specimens preserved in Jurassic rocks in Germany. Supposedly these rocks are about 200 million years old, yet there has been no evolution!
A classic example of stability is the cockroaches and many other insects. Roaches, ticks, centipedes, and spiders are supposedly primitive survivors from hundreds of millions of years ago. Yet they exist in fossil form exactly as they appear today. Rather than being "evolutionary survivors," creatures like these are powerful evidence of the complete absence of any evolutionary change over eons of time.
We have failed to find any evolutionary change in the past several hundred million years. So let's consider the trilobites, with an evolutionary age of around 600 million years. Trilobites are extinct as far as anyone knows, but they are similar to some varieties of present-day crabs, and evolution claims that crabs in general have not changed over hundreds of millions of years (see Note 6). With this lack of evolutionary change, it would not be impossible that trilobites may yet survive today in deep ocean sites.
One more case indicating the stability of life forms is one-cell organisms. If evolution is occurring from simple to complex forms, then surely one-cell life should not exist today. The very oldest fossil deposits found in Australia -- dated on the evolutionary time scale at about two billion years -- contain an organism dubbed eoastrion. One-cell organisms allegedly existed two billion years ago, and they certainly exist today. Where is the evidence for evolutionary change? On the cellular level, no organism is more primitive than any other because all cells are complex (see Note 7). There is simply no genuine evidence for the evolution of living things with time.
We have now considered three scientific fallacies of evolution. These claims -- that living things vary without limit, that life can come from dead material, and that living things evolve with time -- are beliefs that have no supporting scientific evidence.