Many of you may dread the coming of spring. You dread it because of all the beautiful flowers that come into bloom right? Well, unless your middle name is Scrooge, more likely the reason has to do with what those flowers produce. When flowers open, many of them release windborne pollen into the air. This causes many people with allergies to be continually sneezing and blowing their noses as the pollen from those flowers reaches their nostrils. However, a largely ignored study from a few years ago might have evolutionary scientists doing a little more than sneezing over pollen. This article will examine reports of pollen being found places evolutionary theory demands it should not be.
The particular study of interest here comes from the University of Zurich Switzerland where researchers studied fossilized pollen that supposedly dates to the Triassic period of the Geologic Column. The study said it was approximately two hundred and forty-seven million years old. The pollen is from flowering plants, better known as angiosperms. This raised a problem for evolutionists as angiosperms were not supposed to evolve until the early Cretaceous period, which is around one hundred million years later.
Rather than have to reconstruct the already broken geologic column, the researchers deployed what is known in logic as a rescuing device. They recognized they had a problem. ” Six different pollen types (I–VI) are differentiated based on size, reticulation pattern, and exine structure. The described pollen grains show all the essential features of angiosperm pollen.” In other words, they had six separate types of pollen, all of which had every feature of angiosperm pollen. Under normal, unbiased circumstances, this would be enough to classify is as angiosperm pollen. However, these are not normal unbiased circumstances. These researchers recognize the enormous implications for both their beloved theory and potentially their future research if they call these pollen fossils angiosperms. Thus in the very next sentence, they contradict themselves. “However, considering the lack of a continuous record throughout the lower part of the Mesozoic and the comparison with the oldest Cretaceous finds we suggest an affinity to an angiosperm stem group.” So, they are not angiosperms, they are angiosperm like. Despite the fact, you literally just said they were identical to angiosperm pollen.
We will address the mental gymnastics involved later. First, let us look at the implications of this find. Evolutionists have a conundrum. They must do one of two things if they are honest. Either they must admit that they were wrong about when angiosperms evolved, or they have to reject whatever radiometric dating method was used to date the rock as being inaccurate. There is no way they will ever admit to the latter option, so that leaves the former as the more palatable choice. If they move the origin of angiosperms back one hundred million years, they have another problem. They must explain the lack of fossil angiosperm pollen or parts in the Jurassic period. Further, it would poke a sizeable hole in the asteroid dinosaur extinction theory. The theory claims that an asteroid impact drastically altered earth’s climate, causing the dinosaurs to go extinct, except for those that miraculously survived by morphing into birds. If angiosperms existed over one hundred and sixty million years before the asteroid, evolutionists must explain why angiosperms did not follow many of the gymnosperms into extinction and most of the rest into obscurity. These are serious problems hence the aforementioned rescuing device.
Rather than confront the issues caused by this discovery honestly, these researchers essentially pulled a cop-out. They were honest enough to state that the pollen was identical to angiosperm pollen. However, their worldview then caused them to say that it could not possibly be angiosperm pollen and thus must have been from an angiosperm-like plant, rather than a true angiosperm. This level of mental gymnastics is worthy of an Olympic gold medal. However, this study is not the only pollen problem evolutionists have.
Pollen fossils are found regularly in dig sites all over the world. There is even a field of science that studies them, called palynology. Many of them are troublesome for evolutionists but I’m going to point out one example. Evolutionary paleontologists were digging a site in the Hell’s Creek formation in North Dakota. They discovered numerous fossils from post-Cretaceous mammals and thus classed the rock as being post-Cretaceous. However, when the pollen samples found were analyzed, experts claimed the pollen was Cretaceous. This was slightly embarrassing as the asteroid should have wiped out any Cretaceous angiosperms. Enter more mental gymnastics. Researchers concluded that the asteroid did not wipe out life quite as quickly or catastrophically as they believed and that the rocks represented that. They reinterpreted their theory so that it would still work in light of new evidence. Bear that in mind.
Interestingly, one of the researchers, Dr. Antoine Bercovici, had this to say about the out of place pollen fossils. “Further studies on other sites in North Dakota showed that this anomaly was the rule, rather than exception.” In other words, pollen fossils are out of place all over fossil sites in North Dakota. His explanation was a phenomenon called reworking which basically involves water eroding the rocks down to the pollen fossils, then new rocks forming around and incorporating the old rock. This might work as an explanation if there were only one or two anomalies. However, asking me to believe this happened regularly is like asking me to believe you won the lottery one hundred tries in a row without cheating. This is mental gymnastics again, of gold medal caliber.
Pollen fossils are illustrative of a much broader problem with evolutionary dogma. Evolution lacks falsifiability. The scientific method requires that it is possible to disprove something for it to be considered scientific. Evolutionists would loudly proclaim that it is possible for evolution to be disproved. However, when the conditions they set down are met, they move the goalposts and demand that creationists try again. This illustrated by the number of times they change the expected timelines for things. At one point, mammals were believed not to have lived with dinosaurs. When mammal fossils were found with dinosaurs that theory changed. At some point, the goal posts have to stop moving. Even evolutionists recognize this. Writing as far back as 1969, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a well-known evolutionist in his time, had this to say about evolution. “The fact that a theory so vague, so insufficiently verifiable, and so far from the criteria otherwise applied in ‘hard’ science has become a dogma can only be explained on sociological grounds.” Von Bertalanffy recognized that evolution was unverifiable because it was incredibly vague. The only reason it was accepted dogmatically is that scientists wanted to believe it, not because of the evidence. These latest pollen discoveries just drive the point home a little further.
Links to the two pollen articles
http://nmnh.typepad.com/100years/2015/06/solving-a-fossil-pollen-mystery.html
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2013.00344/full
In His Image 