a . “Ever since William Smith [the founder of the index fossil technique] at the beginning of the 19th century, fossils have been and still are the best and most accurate method of dating and correlating the rocks in which they occur. ... Apart from very ‘modern’ examples, which are really archaeology, I can think of no cases of radioactive decay being used to date fossils.” Derek V. Ager, “Fossil Frustrations,” New Scientist, Vol. 100, 10 November 1983, p. 425.
b . “It cannot be denied that from a strictly philosophical standpoint geologists are here arguing in a circle. The succession of organisms has been determined by a study of their remains embedded in the rocks, and the relative ages of the rocks are determined by the remains of organisms that they contain.” R. H. Rastall, “Geology,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 10, 1954, p. 168.
u “Are the authorities maintaining, on the one hand, that evolution is documented by geology and, on the other hand, that geology is documented by evolution? Isn’t this a circular argument?” Larry Azar, “Biologists, Help!” BioScience, Vol. 28, November 1978, p. 714.
u “A circular argument arises: interpret the fossil record in the terms of a particular theory of evolution, inspect the interpretation, and note that it confirms the theory. Well, it would, wouldn’t it?
“... the fossils do not form the kind of pattern that would be predicted using a simple NeoDarwinian model.” Thomas S. Kemp, “A Fresh Look at the Fossil Record,” New Scientist, Vol. 108, 5 December 1985, p. 66.
u “The intelligent layman has long suspected circular reasoning in the use of rocks to date fossils and fossils to date rocks. The geologist has never bothered to think of a good reply, feeling that explanations are not worth the trouble as long as the work brings results. This is supposed to be hard-headed pragmatism.” J. E. O’Rourke, “Pragmatism Versus Materialism in Stratigraphy,” American Journal of Science, Vol. 276, January 1976, p. 47.
“The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning, if it insists on using only temporal concepts, because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales.” Ibid., p. 53.
Although O’Rourke attempts to justify the practices of stratigraphers, he recognizes the inherent problems associated with such circular reasoning.
u “But the danger of circularity is still present. For most biologists the strongest reason for accepting the evolutionary hypothesis is their acceptance of some theory that entails it. There is another difficulty. The temporal ordering of biological events beyond the local section may critically involve paleontological correlation, which necessarily presupposes the non-repeatability of organic events in geologic history. There are various justifications for this assumption but for almost all contemporary paleontologists it rests upon the acceptance of the evolutionary hypothesis.” Kitts, p. 466.
u “It is a problem not easily solved by the classic methods of stratigraphical paleontology, as obviously we will land ourselves immediately in an impossible circular argument if we say, firstly that a particular lithology is synchronous on the evidence of its fossils, and secondly that the fossils are synchronous on the evidence of the lithology.” Derek V. Ager, The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record, 3rd edition (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1993), p. 98.
u “The charge that the construction of the geologic scale involves circularity has a certain amount of validity.” David M. Raup, “Geology and Creationism,” Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, Vol. 54, March 1983, p. 21.
u In a taped, transcribed, and approved 1979 interview with Dr. Donald Fisher, the state paleontologist for New York, Luther Sunderland asked Fisher how he dated certain fossils. Answer: “By the Cambrian rocks in which they were found.” When Sunderland asked if this was not circular reasoning, Fisher replied, “Of course; how else are you going to do it?” “The Geologic Column: Its Basis and Who Constructed It,” Bible-Science News Letter, December 1986, p. 6.
u “The prime difficulty with the use of presumed ancestral-descendant sequences to express phylogeny is that biostratigraphic data are often used in conjunction with morphology in the initial evaluation of relationships, which leads to obvious circularity.” Bobb Schaeffer, Max K. Hecht, and Niles Eldredge, “Phylogeny and Paleontology,” Evolutionary Biology, Vol. 6 (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1972), p. 39.
c . Peter Forey, “A Home from Home for Coelacanths,” Nature, Vol. 395, 24 September 1998, pp. 319–320.
u Since the above discovery near Indonesia in 1998, most coelacanths are being caught off the coast of northern Tanzania, 500 miles north of what was thought to be their old habitats. [See Constance Holden, “Saving the Coelacanth,” Science, Vol. 316, 8 June 2007, p. 1401.]
d . “Zoologists originally thought that the paired fins of coelacanths and the fossil lobe-fins functioned as true limbs, as props to lever the fish against the solid substrate of the bottom sand or against rocks.” Keith S. Thomson, Living Fossil: The Story of the Coelacanth (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Ltd., 1991), p. 160.
u “... much attention has been focused on their fins in the hope that they will tell more about how fins became limbs.” Ommanney, p. 74.
u “For the coelacanth was a member of a very ancient class of fishes which was supposed to have disappeared some 70 million years ago. This great group of fishes, called crossopterygians, flourished during that decisive era in the history of the earth—when the fish, taking on legs and lungs, went forth to conquer the continents.” Jacques Millot, “The Coelacanth,” Scientific American, Vol. 193, December 1955, p. 34.
As late as 1955, Dr. Jacques Millot, who led many studies of freshly caught coelacanths, still believed coelacanths evolved legs.
Perhaps their stalked fins permit them to creep along the rocks like seals. Ibid., p. 38.
This myth was buried only after Dr. Hans Fricke’s team observed coelacanths in their natural habitat in 1987. Their bottom fins have nothing to do with legs or creeping. Why did Millot ignore facts he knew best? The coelacanth, he thought, solved a big problem. In 1955, Millot wrote:
One of the great problems of evolution has been to find anatomical links between the fishes and their land-invading descendants ... For a long time evolutionists were troubled by this major gap between fishes and the amphibians. But the gap has now been bridged by studies of ancient fishes, and this is where the coelacanth comes in. Ibid., pp. 35–36.
Later (1987), after studying live coelacanths, the scientific world learned that Millot was wrong. The coelacanth did not bridge this gap. Therefore, the fish-to-amphibian problem is back.
u “He [J. L. B. Smith] was able to report [in the journal Nature] that, like the lungfishes, the fish had an air bladder or lung (on the basis of the taxidermist’s report of the discarded viscera), which was a median rather than paired structure.” Thomson, Living Fossil, p. 39. [It is now recognized that the discarded “bag” was not a lung, but an oil-filled swimming bladder.]
e . “The brain of a 90-pound coelacanth weighs less than 50 grains [0.11 ounces]—that is, no more than one 15,000th of the body weight. No present-day vertebrate that we know of has so small a brain in relation to its size.” Millot, p. 39.
f . “I confess I’m sorry we never saw a coelacanth walk on its fins.” Hans Fricke, “Coelacanths: The Fish That Time Forgot,” National Geographic, Vol. 173, June 1988, p. 838.
“... we never saw any of them walk, and it appears the fish is unable to do so.” Ibid., p. 837.
g . “Few creatures have endured such an immense span of time with so little change as coelacanths. The cutaway drawing of a present-day specimen seems almost identical with the 140-million-year-old fossil found in a quarry in southern West Germany. ... Why have coelacanths remained virtually unchanged for eons ... 30 million generations?” Fricke, p. 833. [Answer: They were fossilized a few thousand years ago, during the flood.]
u “Throughout the hundreds of millions of years the coelacanths have kept the same form and structure. Here is one of the great mysteries of evolution—that of the unequal plasticity of living things.” Millot, p. 37.
u “The coelacanths have changed very little since their first known appearance in the Upper Devonian.” A. Smith Woodward, as quoted by Thomson, Living Fossil, p. 70.
u “What is even more remarkable is that in spite of drastic changes in the world environment, the coelacanths are still much the same organically as their ancestors. ... In the meantime, research is continuing ... and will try to penetrate the secret of the adaptability which has enabled them to live through many geological eras under widely differing conditions without modifying their constitution.” Millot, p. 39.
u “... the coelacanths have undergone little change in 300 million years ...” Ommanney, p. 74.