Hi Russ

Have you ever heard of the Steve’s list? It’s true that there are some scientists who reject evolution, Dr Gower is apparently one of them but they number only about one in a thousand. Gower makes some interesting statements here and I must agree with him on his first point, it is not possible to reconcile genesis with ToE. The vast majority of christians have come to the conclusion that Genesis is a fable with an important message not a scientific work. That’s tenable I would suggest.

Gower is simply wrong when he says that there is no support for evolution in the fossil record. Maybe this was believed in 1975 though even then I think most of the evidence showing that this is false was already known. Most cite the Cambrian explosion as an example of sudden appearance without precursors yet today we know of many soft bodied precursors for the Cambrian fauna. That these creatures were soft bodied and so not easily or often fossilized accounts for their late discovery and the belief among some many years ago that it was an instant appearance event rather than an evolutionary event. But lets put this into perspective and in a modern light. Today we know that the Cambrian explosion took upwards of thirty million years and the fossil record shows a great deal of detail in the changes that took place from the earliest part of that period to the latest part. Today we also have fossils of many precursor species from before the Cambrian so it was neither without precursors nor instantaneous.

So when Dr Gower says that there is an absence of intermediate fossils he is simply wrong, when he says that species developed suddenly he is simply wrong. Maybe that was the best information available to him at the time but that was over thirty years ago. We’ve learned a lot since then.

Dr Gower is also wrong when you examine the order of creation compared to the appearance in the fossil record. Genesis has the creation order totally wrong when you examine the details and that fact was well known even in 1975.

How did Dr Gower get it so wrong? I have no idea, I’ve never heard of the man until today and I can only find him cited on YEC websites. He is a young earth creationist and an emeritus professor of biochemistry. He is not credentialed in any field of evolutionary study and so he is commenting outside his field of expertiese in the piece you cite.

In Reason

Russell