Evolutionists are stumbling around in a daze, like men lost in a very complicated maze , desperately looking for a way out - turning this way then that, searching for any kind of theory that could begin to get ready to start to explain the complexity of even the supposedly most simple of organisms. As they do so, new theories are scrapped and old ones resurrected, given a new slant and polished up in the forlorn hope they could begin to cope with the latest DNA discoveries.

As we have already seen, even Lamarck’s old ideas are making a comeback as researchers confirm that organisms can creatively respond to the needs of a new environment, rather than helplessly “waiting” for the fortuitous accumulation of accidental DNA copying errors to come to their rescue, before Natural Selection gives them the thumbs down of death.

In similar fashion, the old catastrophe and mass-extinction theories of French naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) are also being called back into service.

The brilliant Cuvier, famed in his youth for his prodigious memory, was a student and later professor of comparative anatomy who developed techniques for fleshing out the original form of a fossilized organism by studying the curves and contours of their bones, looking for clues to the shapes and sizes of the muscles and sinews that had once been attached to them.

Kangaroo Man?
Image for a moment that all life on earth had been destroyed and a little green anthropologist from Mars digs up a complete human skeleton, twisted and distorted in the ground. He might at first understandably assume that a human being was a four legged animal, and that since the back legs were so large, that it might have resembled the kangaroos he had found earlier in Australia – having a squatting posture and moving about by leaps and bounds. He might also assume, because of the British climate, that it once had a furry coat to keep it warm.

Thanks to the pioneering work of men like Cuvier, such initial impressions would soon be corrected – although, as happens with man’s alleged ape-like ancestors, the fur coat might still be retained as an interesting adornment, despite the fact that there was no actual evidence for its existence. [Ed: It’s interesting how those “vestigal” hairy bits got left under ther arms, G-Man, right in the warmest parts of the body where they were least needed.]

Cuvier’s interest in the study of fossils and their origins, led him to publish several books, two of the most important being: “Research into the Fossilised Bones of Quadrupeds” and “Discourse on the Upheavals of the Earth’s Surface”. It was Cuvier, incidentally, who named the famous “pterodactyl” (flying reptile), or “pterosaur (winged lizard).

Cuvier, a Christian person and never an evolutionist, saw organisms as integrated wholes, holistically engineered by the hand of God, with each part’s form and function integral to the entire body – and no part able to be modified without a knock-on effect on the others.
Darwin’s own comments in his later book “The Descent of Man”, suggest that he was also aware of this unfathomable complexity, saying: “In man, as in the lower animals, many structures are so intimately related, that when one part varies so does another, without our being able, in most cases, to assign any reason. We cannot say whether the one part governs the other, or whether both are governed by some earlier developed part.”

Convinced that plants and animals had been created for their particular roles in the earth’s ecology, Cuvier saw no developmental scale of perfection or complexity in the fossil record of the kind depicted by evolutionists of the time in their “great chain of being” charts. Instead, he insisted that any similarities between organisms were due to common functions, not to common ancestry -- since function determines form, form does not determine function. [Ed: Didn’t Darwin believe just the opposite, G-Man – claiming similarity in structure as irrefutable proof of descent from a common ancestor, rather than a common designer, i.e. God?]

It is instructive to compare and contrast Cuvier’s wise insights into the complexities of organisms, such as the giraffe, with the naive speculations of Lamarck, Quote: “The component parts of each must be so arranged as to render possible the whole living being, not only with regard to itself, but to its surrounding relations, and the analysis of these conditions frequently leads to general laws, as demonstrable as those which are derived from calculation or experiment. “

Anatomical Reconstruction
It was because Cuvier regarded organisms as delicately balanced functional wholes that he refused to believe in evolution. Each part of an organism, he maintained, no matter how small, bore signs of the whole – as we now know it does even internally in its cells, each of which apparently contains the genetic blueprint of the whole body.

Able to identify fossil animals from their teeth and pelvic bones, Cuvier said. “If an animal’s teeth are such as they must be in order for it to nourish itself with flesh, we can be sure without further examination that the whole system of its digestive organs is appropriate for that kind of food.” It was guiding principles like these that made of his anatomical re-construction techniques so successful

Extinction
Based on extensive research on fossils from the Paris Basin and other parts of the world, and his expert knowledge of comparative anatomy, Cuvier came to the conclusion that most fossils were from organisms that no longer existed and which had no connection to present-day organisms. [Ed: “No connection”. Got it!]

The ancient organisms, he maintained, had been destroyed by repeated catastrophes, and made extinct. They had not evolved into other forms in the manner Darwin later believed. [Ed: Had not evolved. Got it!]
It is interesting that for a time, some people maintained that the exotic creatures of the fossil record probably still existed in the unexplored parts of the world. Thomas Jefferson, for example, the third president of the United States, speculated that mammoths might yet be found living in the American wilderness. . [Yes, well, and what about the Coelacanth, G-Man? Old Tom could have been right.]

Although a life-long Protestant Christian, Cuvier believed that the Earth was immensely old, and that periodic “revolutions”, or catastrophes, had rendered numbers of species extinct.

Although Cuvier’s theory of “revolutions” was later rejected by Lyell and Darwin in favour of infinitely slow change, it has been resurrected in recent years, as we shall see in Part Three, to help explain the several mass extinctions of species evidenced by the fossil record, such as the major K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) event that wiped out the world of the dinosaurs.

An Extract Worth Reading
The following extract from Cuvier’s “Discourse on the Upheavals of the Earth’s Surface” (Paris, 1825), is well worth reading, and shows his awareness of the wild evolutionary ideas that were already in the air -- in particular those of his contemporary, Lamarck, no doubt..

(1) “Someone will say to me, Why would the present species not be modifications of these ancient ones which we find among the fossils, produced by local circumstances and climatic changes, carried to this extreme difference by the long succession of years. This objection must appear especially strong to those who believe in the indefinite possibility of changes in the structure of forms in organic bodies and who think that through habit over centuries all species could change themselves from one species into another or result from a single one of their species. “

Comment: Notice Cuvier’s awareness of the delusion later adopted by Darwin that, given enough time, and a mechanism for “indefinite” modifications, modern species might have descended from those found in the fossil record.

(2) ”However, we can reply to them following their own logic that if the species have changed by degrees, we ought to have found traces of these gradual modifications, that we ought to have discovered certain intermediate structures between the palaeotherium and today’s species and that up to the present time this has not happened at all. “

Comment: Here we find Cuvier fingering the fatal flaw in evolutionary theory that Darwin himself was forced to admit half a century later – namely the fact that the fossil record simply does not show the gradual changes, the “intermediate forms” that evolution demands. Darwin must have read these very same comments during his researches.

(3) “The varieties keep within certain limits fixed by nature. In order to respond to them, we must examine just how far these limits extend, a curious study, extremely interesting in itself in all its ramifications, a subject which, however, people have concerned themselves with very little up to now. “

Comment: Once again, Cuvier queries the early evolutionist assumptions of the day that organisms can be infinitely varied, and raises the interesting and neglected question that modern biologists would do well to investigate—namely, what are the limits God has imposed on micro-evolution within a Genesis “kind”? [Ed: George was a genuine genius, right, G-Man?]

(4) The most marked effects of the influence of man are revealed in the animal of which he has made the most complete conquest, the dog.”

“Subjected to all causes capable of influencing their development, matched in their unions at the will of their masters, dogs vary by colour; by the abundance of their hair, which they even lose entirely sometimes; in their nature; in their height, which can differ by a factor of five in linear dimensions (equivalent to more than a factor of one hundred in weight); in the shape of the ears, nose, and tail; in height relative to the legs; in the progressive development of the skull in domestic varieties, from which the very form of their head develops, sometimes skinny with a tapering muzzle and a flat forehead, sometimes a short muzzle and a bulging forehead; to the point where these apparent differences between a mastiff and a water spaniel or a greyhound and a pug are stronger than those of any wild species of a similar natural genus. “

“Finally, and this is the greatest amount of variation known up to this point in the animal kingdom, there are types of dogs who have one digit more on the rear foot along with the corresponding tarsal bones, as there are in the human
species some families with six digits.”

”But in all these variations, the relationships of the bones remain the same, and the structure of the teeth never changes to an appreciable degree.”

Comment: Darwin made a big thing of natural selection mimicking the work of plant and animal breeders. How interesting that here once again, as if prescient or inspired by God, Cuvier points out that despite the incredible variety that exists among dogs, they all remain dogs, with the same basic bau-plan or body structure – precisely according to G-Theory.

(5) “Thus, in the known facts, there is nothing which can in the least support the public opinion that the new genera which I have discovered or established among the fossils, any more than those which other naturalists have established, the palaeotheriums, anoplotheriums, megalonyx, mastodons, pterodactyls, ichtyosaurus, and so on, could have been the ancestors of some animals today.”

Comment: Even today, evolutionists still look wistfully to extinct organisms in the fossil record, vainly imagining that their disappearance somehow proves that they must have evolved on into something else more “modern”.

[Ed: With information like that available, I think the tormented Darwin clearly knew he was talking nonsense, G-Man, which is why he was so tormented. I am reminded of the apostle Paul’s comment about those ancient philosophers: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools” – Romans 1:22 ]