The Case for a Creator by Lee Strobel Read Free Book Online Page B

pouches” or “gill slits.” 31
    This colorful tidbit stayed with me from the first time I heard it. “Aren’t gills strong evidence that our ancestors lived in the ocean?” I asked Wells.
    He sighed. Apparently, I was not the first person to raise this issue with him. “Yes, that’s the standard argument, but—here,” he said, gesturing toward me, “Look down toward your navel for a moment.” Feeling a little awkward, I bowed my head. “Now, feel your neck,” he said. “There are ridges in the skin, right?” I nodded.
    “Well, if you look at an embryo, it’s doubled over. It has ridges in the neck. I’m not saying they’re only skin folds; they’re more complicated than that. But it’s just an anatomical feature that grows out of the fact that this is how vertebrate embryos develop.
    “Let me be clear: they’re not gills!” he stressed. “Even fish don’t have gills at that stage. In humans, the ridges become one thing; in fish, they become gills. They’re not even gill slits. To call them gill-like structures is merely reading evolutionary theory back into the evidence. They’re never gill-like except in the superficial sense that they’re lines in the neck area. As British embryologist Lewis Wolpert said, the resemblance is only illusory. 32
    “It’s interesting how these misconceptions continue to thrive,” he went on. “Evolutionists used to teach that famous phrase ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,’ which is a fancy way of saying that embryos repeat their evolutionary history by passing through the adult forms of their ancestors as they develop.
    “But this theory has been widely dismissed for many decades, because it’s empirically false. Even so, there are aspects of it that still come up. And ‘gill slits’ would be a prime example of that.”
    WING, FLIPPER, LEG, HAND
    Earlier in our interview, Wells had brought up another category of evidence for universal ancestry: homology in vertebrate limbs. I remember as a student seeing the drawings depicting the similar bone structures in a bat’s wing, a porpoise’s flipper, a horse’s leg, and a human’s hand. I was told that even though these limbs have been adapted for different uses, their underlying similarity—or “homology”—is proof that they all share a common ancestor.
    Wells had briefly mentioned this phenomenon at the outset of our interview. “Isn’t homology good evidence for Darwinism?” I asked.
    “Actually, these homologies were described and named by Darwin’s predecessors—and they were not evolutionists,” he replied. “Richard Owen, who was the most famous anatomist of Darwin’s time, said they pointed toward a common archetype or design, not toward descent with modification.”
    “But,” I protested, “the similarities are there—you can’t deny that.”
    “Yes, but the explanation can go either way: design or descent with modification. How do we determine which is true? Listen—similarity alone doesn’t tell us. Look at Berra’s Blunder.”
    He threw out that comment assuming I would know what he was referring to. Although the term sounded vaguely familiar, I couldn’t pinpoint what it meant. “Berra’s Blunder?” I asked. “What’s that?”
    “Phillip Johnson coined that term based on a book that was written by a biologist named Tim Berra in 1990. Berra compared the fossil record to a series of automobile models, saying that if you compare a 1953 and 1954 Corvette side by side, and then a 1954 and 1955 Corvette and so on, then it becomes obvious that there has been descent with modification. He said this is what paleontologists do with fossils, ‘and the evidence is so solid and comprehensive that it cannot be denied by reasonable people.’ 33
    “Far from demonstrating his point, the illustration shows that a designer could have been involved,” Wells said. “These successive models of the Corvette are based on plans drawn up by engineers, so there’s intelligence at