A galaxy is speculated to form in only 700 million years. By way of contrast, in a comparable stretch of time (450 million years) the Living Fossil horse shoe crab has remained unchanged. In fact the Earth supposedly took only 20 million years to form out of a nebula, and that horse shoe crab remained immutable for 450 million years (22 times longer)! In the same time frame that the horseshoe crab remained the same, fish evolve into birds. Isn’t evolution (or lack thereof in the horseshoe crab) amazing?
One test I suggest is whenever we have a living fossil plus a supposed real fossil of the same species (like a horseshoe crab), to the extent we can do a sequence divergence test (proteins or DNA), let’s do it. Will the molecular clock freeze or tick?
It is hard to tell how old the universe is, but even supposing the universe is old, it does not mean the fossil record is old, or even if the whole fossil record is old, that a given fossil is as old as the paleontologists say it is. Isn’t skepticism to be valued?
Some will say the DNA and proteins aren’t testable since the fossil is too old by now. Well, that’s the same line that said there wouldn’t be any carbon-14 in the 300 million-year-old carboniferous layers or in 70 million year old dino tissue. And we have supposedly found DNA in dinos and carbon-14 to boot. Perhaps we can extract only biotic material someday (DNA or specific proteins) and then do carbon-14 testing. That way we’ll erase the contamination complaint.
The journal Nature reported that we’ve been able to sequence 700,000-year-old horse DNA. If a fossil that is dated tens of million of years is actually younger (say tens of thousands of years), at least in principle, we should be able to get a DNA sequence if we find DNA. If that molecular clock is shown to break for living fossils, that’s bad news for evolutionism. But maybe, like the question of carbon-14 in fossils, these are questions that are taboo to ask.
Calling Mark Armitage and Kevin Anderson or anyone willing to do such research. 🙂
One does not need to be a YEC to question paleontological ages. Richard Milton is not a creationist and is an agnostic, and he too is suspicious of the establishment narrative. If the paleontological narrative if false, then Darwinism is false.
NOTES
“Cocktail” designates a speculative idea