Reconstruction by Mark Klingler

Evolution is based on authentic evidence of how life on the Earth works, say Jay Apt, Mary Dawson, and John Wible of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. They point to recent discoveries that support Darwin's theories, and note that visitors were entranced with the recent museum display of feathered dinosaurs, which clearly bridged the gap between modern birds and dinosaurs of long ago.

Adapted from an article published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Sunday, September 26, 1999. 

In the 141 years since the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species, scientists have used new data to become even more convinced of Darwin’s observations. The last scientific objection to the rules Darwin deduced was overcome a hundred years ago when Marie Curie discovered radioactivity. The radioactive elements in Earth’s interior kept the planet from cooling off in a few million years, and allowed us to estimate its age as over 4 billion years, time enough for life to evolve. 

New information appears constantly: last year paleontologists revealed the latest example of a fossil animal intermediate in the progression from dinosaurs to birds in Nature (September 16, 1999), and also in National Geographic (October 1999). But revivals of hundred-year-old debates also appear constantly, generally without consideration of the scientific discoveries of Darwin’s time or of ours. In 1999, the Kansas Board of Education decided to delete the teaching of evolution from the state's science curriculum. Locally, journalist Jack Kelly of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (September 19, 1999) wrote that the fossil record does not support evolution. Nothing could be further removed from the facts.

Millions of fossils, found in well-dated sequences of rocks, show evolution of forms through time and show many transitions among species. Charles Darwin began in 1831 to assemble a huge body of evidence that he analyzed and evaluated for more than 25 years before he carefully deduced a new rule of descent of organisms with modification. The rules of evolution and natural selection have been observed to apply to viruses within a few hours, to reptiles on islands changed by a hurricane over a few months, to fish in isolated ponds over a few years, and to horses over millions of years.

The fossil record is unequivocal on the progression of life from simple beginnings to complex organisms. Animals without backbones predate vertebrates. Amphibians appear after fish, mammals appear after reptiles, and no complex life occurs in rocks nearly as old as those containing the oldest fossil bacteria. There is a vast body of fossil confirmation of evolution and of natural selection preserved in the world’s great collections, including those of Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

To discard this vast body of authentic evidence as not worthy of being taught in Kansas public schools is to deny those youngsters access to a comprehensive understanding of the past. It is also to deny them future job opportunities in the fast-growing medical and biotechnology fields, which cope daily with evolution of viruses, natural selection of bacteria which make them resistant to drugs, and the re-emergence of evolved, drug-resistant tuberculosis. 

In the past few years, Carnegie Museum of Natural History paleontologists have published new information on the gradual, transitional changes of marine organisms called brachiopods, which can be found in the rocks underlying Pittsburgh; transitional stages in the skulls and skeletons of early mammals, which 120 million years ago had the first beginnings of characteristics now shared by placental mammals, including humans; evolution of whales from early land dwellers to advanced marine animals that navigate by echolocation; and the first evidence from China of the lineage leading from lemur-like primates to the anthropoids, early ancestors of humans. What an adventure!

In 1999, Carnegie’s paleontologists worked in Wyoming, Montana, Germany, and China, adding newly discovered animals to a vast body of paleontological data. This same year paleontological investigation in China unearthed a new species of the feathered dinosaur Sinornithosaurus millenii, eliminating the distinctions between two major groups of vertebrates--reptiles and birds. Children already know that the closest things to dinosaurs that exist today come to our bird feeders in the winter.

Understanding the fossil record produces awe at the magnificent unfolding of life through the immense sweep of the Earth’s past, an appreciation for the present, and certainty of continuing change in the future. This is indeed a wonderful universe for our children to marvel at and understand!