INTRODUCTION

The idea of evolution, which materialists ever since Ancient Greece have employed to account for the origin of life, entered the world of science in the 19^th century with Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species. Those who supported the materialist philosophy, which underwent an enormous rise during the 19th century, adopted the theory of evolution as an answer to the question of how life came into being, but did not question the theory's scientific foundations.

Apart from making inferences from a number of biological observations, Darwin's book did not offer any scientific proofs for his theory, leaving the question of evidence for later. In particular, he suggested that the fossils that he expected would support his theory would be discovered eventually.

The theory of evolution, fervently embraced despite its scientific weakness by those who denied the fact of Creation, shortly came to dominate the scientific world. From scientific magazines to school textbooks, the theory of evolution was portrayed as scientifically proven and the only valid explanation of the origin of life. Scientists who pointed out the errors and illogicalities of the theory were either silenced by threats to their academic careers or else accused of being dogmatic or anti-scientific. The proponents of materialist ideologies imposed the theory of evolution on entire systems of education and popular culture for 150 years, despite possessing no evidence for it, and employing only methods of propaganda.

From the second half of the 20^th century onward, however, the privileged position that the theory of evolution had enjoyed among the scientific community became increasingly problematic. Observations and experiments in a wide range of scientific disciplines, from paleontology to biology and from anatomy to genetics, began to produce findings that argued against the theory. In the face of these new scientific findings, evolutionists suddenly found themselves and their theory on the defensive. By the beginning of the 21^st century, the theory of evolution had become the subject of wide debates the world over. To a large extent, it had lost its former prestige and in many quarters was expected to collapse at any time soon. Between the lines, world-renowned scientific magazines such as Nature, New Scientist, Science and Scientific American began publishing frequent doubts about the theory of evolution.

Scientific discoveries from the second half of the 20th century began preparing the collapse of the theory of evolution.

1. Increasingly, biologists have discovered that living organisms consist of exceedingly complex structures. It has been shown that proteins, DNA and the cell, all possess irreducible complexity and cannot have come into being by chance, as the theory of evolution originally maintained. That impossibility has also been calculated mathematically.

2. It has now been accepted that natural selection and mutation, long proposed as the mechanisms of evolution, have no power to cause living species to evolve. Natural selection may weed out weak or sickly individuals, but brings no new genetic information to living organisms, and mutations merely damage existing genetic information.

3. The transitional forms that evolutionists expected to find in the fossil record- and which might be regarded as proof that species evolved from one another-have not been found. Fossils emerge suddenly and with all their particular features fully present, and the fossil record demonstrates that no species experienced any process of gradual change leading to its eventual disappearance.

This book deals with the third of these scientific developments which have undermined the theory of evolution-the fossil record.

Before moving forward, we need to stress that the absence of transitional forms from the fossil record is by itself sufficient to undermine the whole theory of evolution. Charles Darwin, the founder of the theory, actually admitted the truth of this! After inquiring into the absence of such forms, he wrote that "this, perhaps is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory." 1

And today, one of the main objections to Darwin's theory of evolution indeed, concerns the fossil record. Even among evolutionists, there is a serious dispute over how to interpret the fossil record. Fossils, one important source of scientific evidence regarding natural history, clearly refute the theory of evolution and show that life on Earth appeared suddenly, with no evolutionary process behind it-in other words that life forms were created.