COELACANTHS AND OTHER LIVING FOSSILS: NO CHANGE OVER TIME

COELACANTHS AND OTHER LIVING FOSSILS: NO CHANGE OVER TIME

(Text is equivalent to six double-spaced pages)

Introduction

A definition of evolution used by some biologists today is "biological change over time." There are some problems with this. When I was young, my parents measured my brother's and my heights from time to time by making marks on the edge of a door. Now I don't think of my growth as evolution, but according to the biologists' definition, it is evolution. I might add, measuring it requires no real expertise. And, change is factual, but so what? Science is about precision, but this is not. Obviously this is one objection I have with the definition. Basically, it is rather trivial. It is imprecise, not definitive, and therefore unimportant. Still, even with the current definition involving change, we will see that in certain cases, it has real faults and is not factual.

The big and important debate over evolution has to do with origins: The origin of life, of living things, and especially of humans. A better definition is Darwin's: "Descent from a common ancestor." (The Cobb County Board of Education put a different definition for evolution on their book stickers: "the origin of living things.") However, both Darwin's and modern biologists' definition of evolution run into extreme difficulty when one examines the fossil record, especially concerning what are called "living fossils."

Living Fossils

The 1998 find of "a living fossil" off Sulawesi, Indonesia (the Coelacanth pictured at the right) reminded me that this fish was once described as a "missing link." That is, evolutionists thought these lobed-fin fish were our ancestors. One reason for this interpretation is that the fossils of these fish look "primitive" (a favorite, but theory-laden word, among evolutionists). Another reason is these fish have fins at the end of what looks like short legs, hence their theory-laden nickname "Old Four-legs." The Indonesian locals, uninfluenced by the evolutionary idea, call the coelacanth Rajah Laut, "King of the Sea."

A criticism of the evolutionary idea was, and is, the lack of the hypothesized intermediates between one species and another. If land animals truly came from sea creatures, one would expect to find plenty of evidence of this, such as fossils of fish with their fins turning into legs. Darwin wrote in his Origin of Species that "innumerable transitional forms must have existed."⁽¹⁾ The predicted large numbers of fossil intermediate forms were never found, but the small number of coelacanth fossils showing the lobed fins appeared to fit the bill. This bubble burst in 1938 when a living one was caught southeast of South Africa. The second one was taken northwest of Madagascar in 1952. And now they have been found off the coast of Indonesia, 7,000 miles away!

The news of the discovery of Indonesian coelacanths was posted on the web 23 September.⁽²⁾ The find jogged my memory that coelacanths are not the only "living fossils." There is a huge amount of "living fossils," including the oldest fossils we know, stromatolites. Niles Eldredge edited a book on living fossils and defines them as "numbers of recent biota whose external form, at least, has changed but little since the line's inception."⁽³⁾ In other words, species that didn't evolve. Why don't living fossils such as coelacanths change as evolutionary "theory" predicts? Could the reason they don't evolve (and why we have no evidence of evolutionary change for any animal), is that the "theory" is wrong? If so, then the "theory" is more of an idea and there is nothing scientific about it. Let's look at the evidence.

Coelacanths

Because coelacanths have lobed fins (as seen in the sketch above and picture at the right) evolutionists thought them to be ancestors of the first amphibians, Ichthyostega, and hence, us. The earliest coelacanth appears in the fossil record about 375 million years ago, as calculated by uniformitarian means (U.M.), which would place it in the Devonian period. The last fossil was dated at about 80 million years ago (U.M.), which would be the Cretaceous period. In 1836, the great zoologist and paleontologist, Louis Agassiz described and named the first fossil coelacanth in his classic Poissons Fossiles.⁽⁴⁾ Incidentally, it was Agassiz's study of fossil fish that served as evidence in his fight against evolutionary theory.⁽⁵⁾"Living fossils" are also evidence against evolutionary theory and it is interesting that Charles Darwin coined this term. In the Origin of Species he called lungfish and other species whose form has remained unchanged since its inception "anomalous forms" that "may almost be called living fossils."

The discovery of living coelacanths in this century electrified the scientific world. A fish that had lived from Devonian times and then had thought to have died out with the dinosaurs was found alive. The first was taken in 1938 about three miles from the mouth of the Chalumna River, southwest of East London, South Africa. The second was caught in 1952 off Anjouan Island in the Comores Islands, northwest of Madagascar.⁽⁶⁾

In 1987, a German naturalist, Hans Fricke, observed and photographed coelacanths in their habitat off Grand Comoro Island. (Fricke is on the right in the photo of his submarine.) He found that they swam forward, backward, and even tilted head down, but never once walked, crawled, or otherwise moved on the bottom with their lobed fins, as some thought. So the coelacanth would never have moved up on land as hypothesized in the evolutionary scheme. It wasn't a missing link after all; it was a fish and it always had been a fish - for 400 million years (U.M.).

Other Living Fossils

Recall that Darwin had called the lungfish a living fossil in his Origin of Species. He was referring to the South American lungfish, Lepidosiren paradoxa, but the Australian and African lungfish are also living fossils. They all look "primitive" and have lobed fins. Obviously lungfish can't be our ancestors because they have remain unchanged, again for 400 million years (U.M.). Another animal, the horseshoe crab, would be a great candidate for our ancestor. It looks "primitive" and leaves the ocean to spawn on dry land. However, it, too, is a living fossil, appearing about 425 million years ago (U.M.) in the Silurian period, and remaining unchanged.

The oldest living fossils, stromatolites, are also among the oldest living things, some are more than 3 billion years old (U.M.). They are recurring agal mats that form alternating laminated layers with deposits of sediment.⁽⁷⁾ The one from my fossil collection is pictured at the right. It dates to the Precambrian period, is only 1.6 billion years old (U.M.), and is from Iron County, Missouri. Not many living forms of this algae are around today. The best known concentration is at Shark Bay, Australia, where a high saline environment deters predators. How is it that this algae remained unchanged over billions of years? Why didn't it evolve into something that would enhance its survival, so it wouldn't have to exist today only in protected environments?

Living fossils are found in the plant kingdom also. A classic living fossil is the dawn redwood tree. This conifer was fairly common in North America during the Pliocene. Pollen spores turn up regularly in fossil samples. It was thought to be extinct until living trees were found in 1945 in central China. The species was reintroduced into North America and, like the horse, which was also once extinct in America, is doing quite well.

"Primitive" Species

I mentioned that the term "primitive" is often used by evolutionists. It implies change: some specie was more primitive, but now it is not. Yet looks can be deceiving. The primitive-looking coelacanth has a massive organ in its head that we know nothing about. Some scientists speculate it might be an electroreceptor. If it is, it is unlike any that we know about today. Also, it seems that this fish generates an electric field around its body, as an electric eel does.⁽⁸⁾ We don't understand its uncanny sense of timing and can't explain its coastal navigation skills.⁽⁹⁾ It turns out that coelacanths are not so primitive after all.

Similarly, gars, sturgeons, bowfins, and paddlefish all look "primitive" but are living fossils. Yet they are doing nicely in today's environment. "Primitive" is so misused by evolutionists that we have to conclude that either it is more of a propaganda word than anything else, or else it is used ignorantly. When we study living creatures at the biochemical level we find tremendous sophistication. Michael Behe gives examples and explains just how complex biochemicals are in Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution.⁽¹⁰⁾ There is nothing simple or primitive about the biochemical make-up of any living thing, past or present. The DNA molecule, besides being very complex, also contains sophisticated information (click here for my article on the chemical evolution of life). The very cells we are made out of are complex.

Intermediates

The coelacanth story is an example of how evolutionists misinterpret the fossil record to promote their idea. There is a huge number of extinct species due to past global catastrophes (click here for my article on catastrophism). Evolutionists have seized onto certain extinct animals, claiming them to be intermediates in their hypothetical evolutionary development scheme. (The lack of transitional forms forces them into this.) That certainly was the situation for the coelacanths until they were found alive. These fish have been around for 400 million years (U.M.) and they didn't evolve into amphibians, or anything else. Instead of being examples for evolution, they are now examples against it.

An uninformed person might argue that intermediate forms appear in the evolution of the modern horse. Though long since thrown out as a simplistic construction, it still appears enough times in modern textbooks to create confusion. Consider the following quotes:

French paleontologist and evolutionist Dr. C. Deperet: "The supposed pedigree of the Equidae (horses, asses, zebras) is a deceitful delusion which...in no way enlightens us on the paleontological origin of the Horse."⁽¹¹⁾

Swedish evolutionist Professor N. Heribert Nilsson agrees: "The construction of the whole Cenozoic family tree of the horse is a very artificial one, since it is put together from non- equivalent parts, and cannot therefore be a continuous transformation series."⁽¹²⁾

Evolutionist Dr. George Gaylord Simpson debunks the simplistic constructions that appeared in our science textbooks: "The uniform, continuous transformation of Hyracotherium into Equus, so dear to the heart of generations of textbook writers, never happened in nature."⁽¹³⁾

So the most touted example of evolution, one with claimed fossil evidence of intermediate forms, comes up empty.

Conclusions

The books on coelacanths and other living fossils usually also describe a large number of living fossils, from brachiopods to the chambered nautilus, or from elephant-shrews to the Virginia opossum. If you think about it, just everything we see are "living fossils." The oldest bat fossil, 50 million years old (U.M.), is like today's bats. From tree squirrels to tapirs, they all look like their fossil ancestors. I have a termite encased in amber; it looks just like termites today. All insects today look like their fossil ancestors. The list goes on; example after example of no change from one type of animal to another in the fossil record. Darwin tried to cover over this embarrassment by saying the fossil record is incomplete, but it wasn't then and it's not now. What we know about living fossils, then and now, is a representative sample of the fossil record. For instance, Darwin knew a lot about fossils in his day. (He had Oxford professor William Buckland's great fossil studies, which include the trilobite and its very modern compound eye. Trilobites appear abruptly in the fossil record, with no pre-trilobite fossils. They continue for a long time in the fossil record with the same tri-lobed body plan until their abrupt disappearence. No evolution here!) And we know even more about fossils today. The fossil record, with its lack of intermediate forms and its unchanging biota such as the coelacanth, falsifies evolution. This conclusion is reinforced by my article on the Cambrian explosion (click here for it.)

References

1. C. Darwin, On the Origin of Species (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964) p. 172.

2. D. Knapp, "New sighting of 'living fossil' intrigues scientists," CNN Interactive 23 Sept 98. @ http://www.cnn.com/TECH/science/9809/23/living.fossil/

3. From Living Fossils (New York: Springer Verlag, 1984) p. 272.

4. K.S. Thomson, Living Fossil: The Story of the Coelacanth (New York: Norton & Co., 1991) p. 77.

5. E. Lurie, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) p. 99.

6. British Museum Leaflet, "The Living Coelacanth" (Dorchester, U.K: The Dorset Press, 1975) p. 1.

7. B.L. Stinchcomb, "Precambrian Agal Stromatolites and Stromatolitic Limestones in the St. Francois Mountains of Southeast Missouri," Study in Precambrian Geology, ed. by E.B. Kisvarsanyi (Rolla, MO: Missouri Dept. of Natural Resources, 1976) p. 122-131.

8. P.D. Ward, On Methuselah's Trail: Living Fossils and the Great Extinctions (New York: W.H. Freeman and Co., 1992) p. 200.

9. This is from a web site titled The Fish Out of Time located at http://www.dinofish.com/behav.htm.

10. Published in New York by The Free Press in 1996.

11. Transformation of the Animal World (New York: Arno Press, 1980) p. 105.

12. Synthetische Artbuilding (Lund, Sweden: Verlag CWE Gleerup)

13. Life of the Past (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953) pp. 125, 127.

Some Scientific Articles on the Coelacanth

Erdmann, M.V., Caldwell, R.L., Moosa, M.K. (1998) Indonesian "King of the Sea^"discovered. Nature 335

Fricke, H.W., Reinicke 0., Hofer H., and W. Nachtigall (1987) Locomotion of the coelacanth Latimeria chalumnae in its natural environment. Nature 329, 331--333

Fricke_,H.W. and K, Plante (1988) Habitat requirements of the living coelacanth Latimeria chalumnae at Grande Comore, Indian Ocean. Naturwissensehaften 75, 149-151

Balon E., Bruton M. and H.W. Fricke (1988) A fiftieth anniversary reflection of the living coelacanth Latimeria chalumnae: some interpretations of the natural history and conservation status. Env. Biol. Fish 23, 241-280

Forey P. (1989) Le coelacanthe. La recherche 215, 1319-1326

Fricke, H.W. and }C~ Hissman (1990) Natural habitat of the coelacanth. Nature 346, 323-324.

Piton B., Kasang L., Marsac F. and R. Plante (1990) L'habitat du coelacanthe aux Comores: quelques donnees d'environnernent physique. Documents Scientifiques ORSTOM-Brest 58, 1-19

Gorr T., Kleinschmidt T. and H.W. Fricke (1991) Close tetrapod relationships of the coelacanth Latimeria initiated by haemoglobin sequences. Nature 351, 394-397

Fricke H.W., Schauer J., Hissman K., Kasang L. and K Plante (1991) Coelacanths aggregate in caves: first observations on their resting habitat and social behavior. Env. Biol. Fish. 30, 281-285

Fricke H.W., Hissman K., Schauer 1, Reinicke 0. and K Plante (1991) Habitat and population size of the Coelacarnh Latimeria chalumnae at Grande Comore. Env. Biol Fish. 32,287-300

Fricke H.W. and K. Hissman (1991) Coelacanths,- the fate of a famous fish.

Fricke H.W. and K. Hissman (1991) Die Entdeckung des Quastenflossers. Begleitkarte zum Film 32105, FWU-Institut fur Film und Bild, Gleiselgasteig I Munchen, Sektion Biologie.

Fricke H.W. and K. Hissman (1992) Locomotion, fin coordination and body of the living coelacanth Latimeria chalumnae. Env. Biol Fish. 34, 329-356

Fricke H.W. (1992) Coelacanth tissue bank. Nature 357, 105

Heemstra, P.C. & P.H. Greenwood. 1992. New observations on the visceral anatomy of the late-term fetuses of the living coelacanth fish and the oophagy controversy. Proceedings of the Royal Society London B (249): 49-55.

Fricke, H.W. & J. Frahm. 1992. Evidence for lecithotrophic viviparity in the living coelacanth. Naturwissenschaften 79: 476-479.

Bruton, M.N. , Cabral, A.J.P. & H.W. Fricke. 1992 First capture of a coelacanth, Latimeria chalumnae (Pisces, Latimeriidae), off Mozambique. South African Journal of Science, 88: 225-227.

Fricke H.W. (1 992) Die Biologie des Quastenflossers. Beigleitkarte nun Film 3210146, FWU-Institut hr Film und Bild, Gleiselgasteig I Munchen, Sektion Biologie.

Scliewen U., Fricke H.W., Schartl M, Epplen, J.T. and S. Paabo. Which home for coelacanths? Nature 363, 405

Fricke H.W. (1993) Der Quastenflosser-- Biologie eines legendaren Fisches. Biologie in unserer Zeit 23(4), 229-237

Fricke H.W. and K. Hissman (1994) Home range and migrations of the living coelacanth Latimeria chalumnae. Mar. Biol 120, 171-180

Fricke H.W., Hissman K., Schauer I and R~ Plante (1995) Yet more danger for coelacanths. Nature 374414

Plante R. (1995) Les coelacanthes- les geants bleus des Comores. Oceanorama 25, 22-25

Hissman K. and H.W. Fricke (1996) Movements of the epicaudal fin in coelacanths. Copeia 1 996(3),605-61 5

Heemstra, P.C., A.L.J. Freeman, H.Y. Wong , D.A. Hensley & H.D. Rabesandratana. 1996. First authentic capture of a coelacanth, Latimeria chalumnae Pisces: Latimeriidae), off Madagascar. South African Journal of Science, 92: 150-151.

Schauer I, Hissman W and H.W. Fricke (1997) A method for deployment of externally attached sonic fish tags from a manned submersible and their effects on coelacanths. Mar. Biol

Plante R. (1997) Un fossile vivant en sursis?. Oceanorama 27, 16-18

Hissman, K, Fricke, H.W. and I Schauer Population monitoring of a living fossil: the coelacanth Latimeria chalumnae in decline? Conservation Biol.128, 359-362

Plante R. and H.W. Fricke. Coelacanth population, conservation and fishery activity at Grande Comore. Submitted to Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. (1997)

Fricke H.W. Living coelacanths: values, eco-ethics and human responsibility. Submitted to Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser (1997)

Acknowledgments

Listings above courtesy of Phil Heernstra, J.L.B. Smith Institute of Ichthyology, Grahamstown, South Africa and Raphael Plante, Centre Oceanologique de Marseille, Masseille, France. The first two pictures are from the CNN article in reference #2. The third picture is fromA History of Fishes, Norman and Greenwood, 1975. The picture of Fricke is from www.dinofish.com. Sharon Ann McMullen did the word processing.

Page updated

Report abuse