THE TALE OF TRANSITION FROM WATER TO LAND

Evolutionists assume that the sea invertebrates that appear in the Cambrian stratum somehow evolved into fish in tens of million years. However, just as Cambrian invertebrates have no ancestors, there are no transitional links indicating that an evolution occurred between these invertebrates and fish. It should be noted that invertebrates and fish have enormous structural differences. Invertebrates have their hard tissues outside their bodies, whereas fish are vertebrates that have theirs on the inside. Such an enormous "evolution" would have taken billions of steps to be completed and there should be billions of transitional forms displaying them.

Evolutionists have been digging fossil strata for about 140 years looking for these hypothetical forms. They have found millions of invertebrate fossils and millions of fish fossils; yet nobody has ever found even one that is midway between them.


According to the hypothetical scenario of "from sea to land", some fish felt the need to pass from sea to land because of feeding problems. This claim is "supported" by such speculative drawings.

An evolutionist paleontologist, Gerald T. Todd, admits a similar fact in an article titled "Evolution of the Lung and the Origin of Bony Fishes":

All three subdivisions of bony fishes first appear in the fossil record at approximately the same time. They are already widely divergent morphologically, and are heavily armored. How did they originate? What allowed them to diverge so widely? How did they all come to have heavy armour? And why is there no trace of earlier, intermediate forms?38

The evolutionary scenario goes one step further and argues that fish, who evolved from invertebrates then transformed into amphibians. But this scenario also lacks evidence. There is not even a single fossil verifying that a half-fish/half-amphibian creature has ever existed. Robert L. Carroll, an evolutionary palaeontologist and authority on vertebrate palaeontology, is obliged to accept this. He has written in his classic work, Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution, that "The early reptiles were very different from amphibians and their ancestors have not been found yet." In his newer book, Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution, puslished in 1997, he admits that "The origin of the modern amphibian orders, (and) the transition between early tetrapods" are "still poorly known" along with the origins of many other major groups. 39

Two evolutionist paleontologists, Colbert and Morales, comment on the three basic classes of amphibians-frogs, salamanders, and caecilians:

There is no evidence of any Paleozoic amphibians combining the characteristics that would be expected in a single common ancestor. The oldest known frogs, salamanders, and caecilians are very similar to their living descendants.40


410-million-year-old coelacanth fossil.
Evolutionists claimed that it was the transitional form representing
the transition from water to land. Living examples of this fish have been caught many times since 1938, providing a good example of the extent of the speculations that evolutionists engage in.

Until about fifty years ago, evolutionists thought that such a creature indeed existed. This fish, called a coelacanth, which was estimated to be 410 million years of age, was put forward as a transitional form with a primitive lung, a developed brain, a digestive and a circulatory system ready to function on land, and even a primitive walking mechanism. These anatomical interpretations were accepted as undisputed truth among scientific circles until the end of the 1930's. The coelacanth was presented as a genuine transitional form that proved the evolutionary transition from water to land.

Why Transition From Water to Land
is Impossible

Evolutionists claim that one day, a species dwelling in water somehow stepped onto land and was transformed into a land-dwelling species.

There are a number of obvious facts that render such a transition impossible:

1. Weight-bearing: Sea-dwelling creatures have no problem in bearing their own weight in the sea.

However, most land-dwelling creatures consume 40% of their energy just in carrying their bodies around. Creatures making the transition from water to land would at the same time have had to develop new muscular and skeletal systems (!) to meet this energy need, and this could not have come about by chance mutations.

2. Heat Retention: On land, the temperature can change quickly, and fluctuates over a wide range. Land-dwelling creatures possess a physical mechanism that can withstand such great temperature changes. However, in the sea, the temperature changes slowly and within a narrower range. A living organism with a body system regulated according to the constant temperature of the sea would need to acquire a protective system to ensure minimum harm from the temperature changes on land. It is preposterous to claim that fish acquired such a system by random mutations as soon as they stepped onto land.

3. Water: Essential to metabolism, water needs to be used economically due to its relative scarcity on land. For instance,, the skin has to be able to permit a certain amount of water loss, while also preventing excessive evaporation. That is why land-dwelling creatures experience thirst, something the land-dwelling creatures do not do. For this reason, the skin of sea-dwelling animals is not suitable for a nonaquatic habitat.

4. Kidneys: Sea-dwelling organisms discharge waste materials, especially ammonia, by means of their aquatic environment. On land, water has to be used economically. This is why these living beings have a kidney system. Thanks to the kidneys, ammonia is stored by being converted into urea and the minimum amount of water is used during its excretion. In addition, new systems are needed to provide the kidney's functioning. In short, in order for the passage from water to land to have occurred, living things without a kidney would have had to develop a kidney system all at once.

5. Respiratory system: Fish "breathe" by taking in oxygen dissolved in water that they pass through their gills. They canot live more than a few minutes out of water. In order to survive on land, they would have to acquire a perfect lung system all of a sudden.

It is most certainly impossible that all these dramatic physiological changes could have happened in the same organism at the same time, and all by chance.

However on December 22, 1938, a very interesting discovery was made in the Indian Ocean. A living member of the coelacanth family, previously presented as a transitional form that had become extinct seventy million years ago, was caught! The discovery of a "living" prototype of the coelacanth undoubtedly gave evolutionists a severe shock. The evolutionist paleontologist J.L.B. Smith said that "If I'd met a dinosaur in the street I wouldn't have been more astonished".41 In the years to come, 200 coelacanths were caught many times in different parts of the world.

TURTLES WERE ALWAYS TURTLES


Turtle fossil aged 100 million years: No different from its modern counterpart. (The Dawn of Life, Orbis Pub., London 1972)

To the side can be seen a 45-million-year-old freshwater turtle fossil found in Germany. To the left are the remains of the oldest known sea turtle, found in Brazil: This 110-million-year-old fossil is identical to specimens living today.

Just as the evolutionary theory cannot explain basic classes of living things such as fish and reptiles, neither can it explain the origin of the orders within these classes. For example, turtles, which is a reptilian order, appear in the fossil record all of a sudden with their unique shells. To quote from an evolutionary source: "...by the middle of the Triassic Period (about 175,000,000 years ago) its (turtle's) members were already numerous and in possession of the basic turtle characteristics. The links between turtles and cotylosaurs from which turtles probably sprang are almost entirely lacking" (Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 1971, v.22, p.418)

There is no difference between the fossils of ancient turtles and the living members of this species today. Simply put, turtles have not "evolved"; they have always been turtles since they were created that way.

Living coelacanths revealed how far the evolutionists could go in making up their imaginary scenarios. Contrary to what had been claimed, coelacanths had neither a primitive lung nor a large brain. The organ that evolutionist researchers had proposed as a primitive lung turned out to be nothing but a lipid pouch.42 Furthermore, the coelacanth, which was introduced as "a reptile candidate getting prepared to pass from sea to land", was in reality a fish that lived in the depths of the oceans and never approached nearer than 180 metres from the surface.43

38 Gerald T. Todd, "Evolution of the Lung and the Origin of Bony Fishes: A Casual Relationship", American Zoologist, Vol 26, No. 4, 1980, p. 757.
39 R. L. Carroll, Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution, New York: W. H. Freeman and Co. 1988, p. 4.; Robert L. Carroll, Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 296-97
40 Edwin H. Colbert, M. Morales, Evolution of the Vertebrates, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1991, p. 99.
41 Jean-Jacques Hublin, The Hamlyn Encyclopędia of Prehistoric Animals, New York: The Hamlyn Publishing Group Ltd., 1984, p. 120.
42 Jacques Millot, "The Coelacanth", Scientific American, Vol 193, December 1955, p. 39.
43 Bilim ve Teknik Magazine, November 1998, No: 372, p. 21.