I've received a lot of feedback over the last few months, and several of you have found more factual problems with The Truth Project. If you have something to contribute, let me know:
Deceptive Quotation of Colin Patterson
You probably are aware of this but here is something I looked up because Del Tackett makes such a strong point with it and give the impression that Patterson does not think there are good transitional fossils.
The Truth Project quoted Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, on fossils but did not give the context. Hence it is a deceptive use of a quote. They use only the underlined portion. Here is the whole story:
"I will lay it on the line, there is not one such fossil for which one might make a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way to put them to the test."
So, what Patterson is saying is that perhaps modern birds descended from the species Archaeopteryx, or perhaps they descended from a cousin species. He just doesn't know how to prove which is the case. Therefore, he refuses to make a claim he can't fully back up. Dr. Patterson does believe that there are transitional fossils, as witness this quote from his book:
"In several animal and plant groups, enough fossils are known to bridge the wide gaps between existing types. In mammals, for example, the gap between horses, asses and zebras (genus Equus) and their closest living relatives, the rhinoceroses and tapirs, is filled by an extensive series of fossils extending back sixty-million years to a small animal, Hyracotherium, which can only be distinguished from the rhinoceros-tapir group by one or two horse-like details of the skull. There are many other examples of fossil 'missing links', such as Archaeopteryx, the Jurassic bird which links birds with dinosaurs, and Ichthyostega, the late Devonian amphibian which links land vertebrates and the extinct choanate (having internal nostrils) fishes ..."
Evolution 1978, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. pp. 131-133
