Page 238 - Darwinism Refuted

DARWINISM REFUTED

Evolutionists claim that all living things descended from a common
ancestor, and they have long cited pentadactyl limb as evidence of this.
But they know that this claim actually possesses no scientific validity.
Even today, evolutionists accept the feature of pentadactylism in
living things among which they have been able to establish no
evolutionary link. For example, in two separate scientific papers
published in 1991 and 1996, evolutionary biologist M. Coates reveals that
pentadactylism emerged two separate times, each independently of the
other. According to Coates, the pentadactyl structure emerged
independently in anthracosaurs and amphibians. 282
This discovery is a sign that pentadactylism is no evidence for a
"common ancestor."
Another matter which creates difficulties for the evolutionist thesis in
this respect is that these creatures have five digits on both their fore- and
hindlimbs. It is not proposed in evolutionist literature that fore- and
hindlimb descended from a "common limb"; rather, it is assumed that they
developed separately. For this reason, it should be expected that the
structure of the fore- and hindlimbs should be different, the result of
different, chance mutations. Michael Denton has this to say on the subject:
[T]he forelimbs of all terrestrial vertebrates are constructed according to the
same pentadactyl design, and this is attributed by evolutionary biologists as
showing that all have been derived from a common ancestral source. But the
hindlimbs of all vertebrates also conform to the pentadactyl pattern and are
strikingly similar to the forelimbs in bone structure and in their detailed
embryological development. Yet no evolutionist claims that the hindlimb
evolved from the forelimb, or that hindlimbs and forelimbs evolved from a
common source… Invariably, as biological knowledge has grown, common
genealogy as an explanation for similarity has tended to grow ever more
tenuous… Like so much of the other circumstantial "evidence" for
evolution, that drawn from homology is not convincing because it entails
too many anomalies, too many counter-instances, far too many phenomena
which simply do not fit easily into the orthodox picture. 283
But the real blow dealt to the evolutionist claim of the homology of
pentadactylism came from molecular biology. The assumption of "the
homology of pentadactylism," which was long maintained in evolutionist
publications, was overturned when it was realized that the limb structures

236