“The apparent first appearance of a crinoid occurs in the Lower Ordovician of England. … It was not an intermediate form. It was not a primitive link with older … ancestors. The lack of a sequence of transitional types leading back to the ancestral stock is, of course, the chief reason for the uncertainty about origin of the class.”

–Paul Tasch, geologist, Paleobiology of the Invertebrates, 1980 Edition: 759 & 761.

Question. According to the physical facts of the fossil record (not imaginary family trees, extrapolations from genetics, or other tricks of the Darwinism trade), what are the ancestors of the echinoderms—crinoids, starfish, and sea urchins?

Proposed answer. Crinoids, starfish and sea urchins.

Echinoderms (Figs. 1-7) appeared hundreds of millions of years ago and survive today. And like with all invertebrates, the fossil record and origin of these creatures is a frustration to scientists incongruously teaching evolution as fact. Tasch’s description implying that the ‘intermediate’ ancestors of other animals are less uncertain than those of crinoids is misleading (see Part 2, Fictions taught as fact in college textbooks, 1st half, PCN #23, May-June 2013; or in html) because not one has been established.

The authority of sciences that teach as fact the exact opposite of what the cumulative, abundant, and better than photographic physical evidence of the fossil record actually says needs to be questioned. It doesn’t matter how many adherents there are. Three sciences are now caught up in the concealment of evidence for the sake of promoting a mythological view of origins as science—biology, paleontology, and anthropology. These fields are grouped together because they each push the same ideas through the use of propaganda and suppression, which are not traits of science.

Note that traits like the above are not a part of chemistry, physics, astronomy, geology, psychology, or mathematics. But the course of science as a collective discipline made a big mistake when it absorbed Darwinism despite the fossil record.

Beginning with Darwin, scientists actually started belittling the fossil record as a “record poorly kept.” Then, when the evidence did not support evolution, instead of being honest with the public, they increased their commitment to the error—the largest in science—and started teaching it as “fact.” Recently, they have begun to deride the world’s multicultural religions and their beliefs as a form of intimidation—a standard propaganda technique.

One sign of a catch-22 in science is the range of contradictions in how experts describe the fossil record. If the reader recalls, in Part 7, Living Fossils: Mollusca, the late Dr. Ralph Buchsbaum,

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zoologist, invertebrate biologist, and author of one of the best textbooks on invertebrates was quoted as saying that the brachiopods and molluscs had an “excellent, unbroken fossil record,” with most classes living today “already present in the Cambrian.”

–Buchsbaum, R., et al. Animals Without Backbones, 1987, 3rd Ed., p. 520.

A virtually identical observation is made by another zoologist and invertebrate biologist, Dr. Rich Mooi, curator of Invertebrate Zoology and Geology at the California Academy of Sciences, regarding the fossil record of the echinoderms:

“The fossil record of the Echinodermata is relatively complete… represented by specimens retaining an abundance of features comparable to that found in extant forms.”

–Mooi, R. 2001. Not all written in stone: Interdisciplinary syntheses in echinoderm paleontology. Canadian Journal Of Zoology 79(7): 1209-31.

“Excellent.” “Unbroken.” “Relatively complete.” These descriptions do not at all match what the public has been told about the fossil record, that it is “a record poorly kept.” This is a very relevant contradiction which anyone with a scientific mind needs to ponder. If a record is “excellent” and “unbroken” one can surely conclude that any transitional forms—if they ever existed—would be as abundant as any other fossils. Instead, genera, families, orders, classes, and phyla are all very distinct.

One way I have proposed to bring biology, paleontology, and anthropology closer to the open-minded goals of science is the Objective International 3D Stratigraphic Column project. It involves trillions of chronological layers with fossils accessible in road cuts, railroad cuts, quarries, mountainsides, stream cuts, and geological cores across tens of thousands of miles (those interested can be involved in many different ways which I hope to describe later). The Column is an interactive spherical graph literally the size of the earth because it is the earth. Sequences of fossils can be followed in three or four dimensions in the field, in books, or on the Internet. The fossils in the invertebrate record are excellently laid out and preserved with no need to imagine invisible or unknown creatures, something which has implications that must be addressed. So far, the facts (not evolutionary theory) confirm that the oldest of every creature is ‘already’ that creature. To look at this picture objectively, that’s what science is all about.

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