No sooner had the 21st century dawned than another icon of mega-evolution came crashing down.

Splashed across the full-color pages of the November, 1999 issue of the prestigious National Geographic were fossil remnants trumpeted as "...a missing link between terrestrial dinosaurs and birds that could actually fly... a true missing link in the complex chain that connects dinosaurs to birds."

But despite the pretty pictures and the exuberant tone suggesting authenticity, the reputable sponsors had been victimized by a carefully concocted con job. In a game of "Pin the Tail," some enterprising huckster had hitched the tail of some ancient fossil dinosaur, unearthed from China's Liaoning Province, onto an unrelated fossil bird.

Some dogs won't hunt and that bird couldn't have flown with the weird appendage. The only thing the "dino/bird" fossil accomplished was spattering egg on embarrassed faces. Even a February 17, 2000 issue of the respected journal Nature, compounded the confusion by mixing its report of the hoax with a picture caption describing "the tail of a primitive bird" appended "to the body of a dinosaur" although the original National Geographic feature pictured the converse: "...arms of a primitive bird and the tail of a dinosaur..."

Oh, well! 

In the never-never land of mega-evolutionary make-believe, this was not the first, and unlikely to be the last example of science gone fishing.

Remember our reputed "ancestor," the so-called "Piltdown Man?" That deliberate fraud flummoxed hardcore evolutionists for nearly half the 20th century. Even Clarence Darrow, the astute trial lawyer who artfully defended evolution in the 1925 Scopes Trial, bit on that "scientific" trash by cluttering the trial's written record with quotes from a gullible scientist alleging Pildown Man to be "...distinctly human...an approach toward man in very ancient strata..."

By 1953, the most devout Darwinists recognized they had been hornswagled by a cunning hoax. The Piltdown fabricator stained a piece of a human skull and the jaw of an ape to look old and then planted the faked "evidence" in an English gravel pit in time for a 1912 "discovery." Darwin disciples embraced the hokum!!!

Darrow pitched a lofty argument for academic freedom, defending the right of professor John Scopes to teach evolution to Dayton, Tennessee high school students. The celebrated defense counsel buttressed his case by introducing into the Scopes Trial record, citations from the 1914 edition of George W. Hunter's Civic Biology, the textbook approved for use in Dayton's 1925 science classrooms. 

An often overlooked problem here: the evolution dogma in the text authored by Hunter and touted with passionate eloquence by Clarence Darrow, embraced a survival of the fittest mentality. Racist words glare ominously from pages 195-6 of the now out-of-print volume.

"...there is a greater difference between the lowest type of monkey and the highest type of ape than there is between the highest type of ape and the lowest savage..."

"Undoubtedly there once lived upon the earth races of men who were much lower in their mental organization than the present inhabitants... we find that at first he must have been little better than one of the lower animals..."

"...At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure...Ethiopian or Negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race...the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race...and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America."

One paradox to the hype of the trial: not only was Defendant John Scopes an admirer of William Jennings Bryan, but also, according to one teenage student who sat in Scopes' biology class, he never actually taught evolution to his students much less promoted the racism that leaps from the pages of Hunter's Civic Biology. 

Three years before Scopes, enterprising evolutionists dreamed-up images of a western world ape-man fashioned from a single molar unearthed in Nebraska heartland. Cooler heads prevailed by 1928, with the belated admission exposing the fictional depictions of the never-was "Nebraska Man." All the hype had been generated at sight of a pig's tooth.

Light and dark samples of peppered moths were glued to white and dark backgrounds and photographed to illustrate evolution. Apart from the dubious technique to prove a point, reality confirms that peppered moths never evolve into some new and different animal critter but remain peppered moths, albeit of contrasting colors. Photos of light and dark moths still litter school textbooks although they prove only the genetic adaptability inherent in every genome.

Ernst Haeckel, 19th century Darwin devotee, touted evolution with evangelistic fervor. Shamelessly thumbing his nose at scientific method, he modified and then flaunted comparative embryonic drawings of different animals, introducing the phony flim-flam as "evidence" ratifying Darwinism. Though exposed and disgraced in 1874, Haeckel's art survived as mega-evolutionary hype haunting pages of biology textbooks far into the twentieth century.

The fertile mind of this big-time hustler trotted out another make-believe, pet idea in a tree of life format showing supposed interrelationships of organic life forms reflective of Darwinian conjecture. What Haeckel lacked in evidence, he supplied glibly with innovative thought.

Clueless as to how inorganic matter at the trunk of his "tree" managed to spontaneously generate organic life, he invented "monera.." Without a scintilla of evidence that these alleged bits of protoplasm even existed (they did not), he published drawings of his imaginings to bridge the gap. 

Thomas H. Huxley, influential spokesman of Darwinism, swallowed the Haeckel make-believe, hook, line and sinker, confidently alleging that the aptly named Bathybius haeckelii "...probably forms one continuous scum of living matter...on the sea bed...girding the whole surface of the earth..." It all sounded downright authoritative and scientific until reality revealed the "scum" as nothing more than a mix of alcohol and seawater forming gypsum.*

Brilliant scientists act with integrity, managing to skirt the minefield of hype and hokum that can taint objectivity. Still, scholars cherishing competing worldviews may reach different conclusions looking at identical facts. Swedish embryologist Søren Løvtrup went so far as to suggest in 1987, "...that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science."

Hype and hokum aside, a growing chorus of scientists reject the obsolete primitivisms of Charles Darwin and embrace a worldview recognizing intelligent design fashioned by a Master Designer.

* See Ian T. Taylor's, In the Minds of Men ( Minneapolis: TFE Publishing, 1996).

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