|
Surprise! Surprise!
A rugged tree supposedly
extinct since before the Jurassic Period (165 million years before the
present by conventional dating) not only towers upwards of fifty feet
toward the sky but appears never to have gotten the news it was supposed
to evolve into something new and different according to Charles Darwin.
Evolutionism's guru
declared without equivocation, ...we may safely infer that not one
living species will transmit its
unaltered likeness to a distant futurity.1
It was ...September 10, 1994, an avid bushwalker named David Noble
discovered a bizarre tree with leaves shaped like a stegosauer's tail
and bark that looked as thought it was covered in bubbling chocolate
while tramping through "...unexplored canyons only a couple hours drive
from Sydney," Australia.2
Dubbed the "Wollemi Pine" (Wollemia nobilis), the discovery
created a sensation. Professor Carrick Chambers, Director of Sydney's
Royal Botanic Gardens, described the find as "...the equivalent of
finding a small dinosaur on Earth."3 So significant was the
sighting, the exact whereabouts of the 100 or so known "extinct" trees
continues as a carefully guarded scientific secret while carefully
nurtured Wollemi offspring are now available to the public through the
auspices of the National Geographic.
So what's the big deal? Think about it!
First, a stubborn tree species refused to die! Refusal to go extinct by
surviving fire and flood, whether for millions of even a few thousand
years stands as tall triumph for the tenacity of life.
At least equally impressive, is the Wollemi's living testimony of
stasis---the genetic resemblance to and reproduction of its fossil
ancestry. The Wollemi thumbs its nose at Darwinian conjecture, turning
an evolutionary prediction upside down.
The Wollemi is not alone in testimony of stasis of life kinds resembling
ancient ancestry in the fossil record. The known list of examples is
long and growing!
Alligators, oysters, sea urchins, horseshoe crabs, bowfins, Australian
lung fish, sturgeons, crinoids, bats, arrow worms, opossums, star-fish,
corals, platypus, roundworms, clams, ostracodes, brachiopods, and the
Western Pacific's nautilus.4
As for Darwin's dream of some transitional fossil chain of organic life,
evolutionist Henry Gee's comment says it all. "To take a line of
fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not scientific
hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same
validity as a bedtime story---amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not
scientific."5
WLJ
Note: The author is the proud owner of a Wollemi pine, a cultivated
offspring of Noble's 1994 discovery.
1. Charles Darwin,
Origin of Species,
647.
2. The Wollemi Pine Tree, a pamphlet, published by National
Geographic, 2006, 4.
3. Carrick Chambers, The Wollemi Pine Tree, 3.
4. Warren L. Johns, Beyond Forever: Evolutionism's End Game
(Smithville, Tennessee: Creation Digest, 2007) 97, 98.
5.
Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time (New York: The Free Press,
1999) 116, 117. |
