Page 241 - The Origin of Birds and Flight

Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar) 239

major problem—or rather, to give the impression of doing so.
Proponents of this new method of fossil interpretation, frequently
employed in the world of paleontology in the last 20 to 30 years, main-
tain that the age of fossils should be completely ignored, that their char-
acteristic features should be compared and evolutionary family trees
produced on the basis of the emerging similarities. This summary shows
what a huge distortion the method actually creates, by assuming that a
70-million-year-old fossilized species actually lived 170 million years
ago, and to build an evolutionary chain of descent on that basis.
Despite being an evolutionist, the paleontologist Larry Martin
states just how dogmatic and prejudiced evolutionists’ attitude is:
…I am annoyed with dogmatic statements including hints like, “if you
make cladistic analysis you will attain the truth.” Experimentally you
know this is inaccurate, because if you look exactly, all of the expert
cladists [one who classifies organisms according to the principles of
cladistics] working on the same group will attain different cladograms
[a branching, treelike diagram in which the endpoints of the branches
represent specific species of organisms]. You know, at best, only one of
these cladograms is true. That is probably because it is related to how
attentively people examine and select the features included in their
cladograms. If you put trash in your cladogram, you will end up with
trash. 3
Peter Dodson, the Pennsylvania University professor of anatomy,
states that the presence of alleged dino-birds following the first birds
represents a major difficulty and that using the cladistic method is a
forced solution:
Personally, I continue to find it problematic that the most birdlike
maniraptoran theropods are found 25 to 75 million years after the origin
of birds . . . . Ghost lineages are frankly a contrived solution, a deus ex
machina required by the cladistic method. Of course, it is admitted that
late Cretaceous maniraptorans are not the actual ancestors of birds, only
“sister taxa.” Are we being asked to believe that a group of highly
derived, rapidly evolving maniraptorans in the Jurassic gave rise to