Another error of the evolutionists claims that every kind of creature which exists today, man included, has derived from a long series of substantial changes - one species into another - through the "natural selection" powers of those species which prove to have been the hardiest, allegedly demonstrating the "survival of the fittest." This is fraudulent on several counts; for example, many animals - even those which are enemies by nature - are known to go out of their way, even to the point of risking their lives according to biologists, to care for the less fit of other species. But more contradictory to evolutionary theory is simply the fact that Natural Selection has itself become a loose and laughing matter among serious biologists.

Take, for example, the Frigate Bird. The Frigate is a tropical sea-bird that never gets its feet or feathers wet. Why? Because their feathers are not waterproof and their feet insufficiently webbed to suit an aquatic environment. They can neither swim nor dive into water without becoming waterlogged and, without properly webbed feet, cannot paddle even if they did manage to land on the water without sinking. Although their wingspan is an incredible eight feet, they cannot even fly without a powerful undercurrent of air because their wings are so thin. Their primary diet is the vomit of other birds. This is Natural Selection at work?

Another sad chapter in the process of trying to instill order into the madness of Evolution occurred in 1909 when the Austrian biologist, Paul Kammerer, claimed to have bred several generations of a dry-land toad with special pads on its hands that normally occur only in those which mate in water. When it was discovered that the "pads" were, in fact, the result of an artificial injection of black ink, Kammerer committed suicide at the age of 46, leaving behind a note adamantly refusing burial in the Roman Catholic Church, the religion of his youth.

Such manipulations are fairly common to evolutionary theory. For example, a century earlier (in 1809), the French naturalist John Baptist Lamarck, of whom Kammerer was protege, argued that the physical acquirements animals achieve in response to their environment are then passed down to their offspring, yet no modern geneticist has managed to discover any conceivable mechanism which might transmit such adaptations.

Example: does a giraffe have a long neck because

(a) it was able to eat off trees when its shorter-necked cousins had run out of food, and thus managed to live longer, consequently producing more long-necked giraffes?

(b) short-necked giraffes reached increasingly higher in search of food, thus passing down to their offspring longer necks?

(c) with their legs so long, they had to develop matching necks in order to bend over far enough to drink without collapsing? Or is it perhaps

In any event, there is no rational way in which man himself can be considered a result of any such "Selection," Natural or otherwise. If mankind were a "random accident" swimming out of some "primordial ocean," then our ability to think would likewise be a random accident; hence, Evolution renders ridiculous even the idea of itself; for the capability to conjecture, and thus to theorize such nonsense, would be a mere accident of alphabet soup. Moreover, Creation extends throughout the universe; hence, to be consistently logical and to support their fallacy that all models of biological application have been uniformly contingent over the eons, Evolution must claim the possibility of survival of the fittest life everywhere, even on other planets, indeed, even in other as-yet-undiscovered solar systems.

Now, outside the glaringly salient fact that modern science, despite all its technological wonders, has yet to locate life of any kind elsewhere, there is also the inescapable fact that the most accomplished astronomers, utilizing the most powerful means of cosmic detection known to man, have failed to demonstrate conclusively that anything even vaguely resembling life could be sustained on any other planet orbiting any other sun in the universe - as proven by various probes. And, at this writing, only a negligible handful have even putatively been pin-pointed.

NBC News on Halloween Eve of 1995 gratuitously asserted that scientists had estimated the existence of four hundred billion planets in our Milky Way Galaxy alone. They can "estimate" all they want, but they certainly have had a difficult time positively substantiating their location or definitively finding any sort of life on any of them.

In August of 1996, NASA eagerly announced "life on Mars" based on the discovery of a potato-shaped meteorite found in Antarctica. Stanford University researchers claimed that it contained evidence of conditions supposedly required for ancient life on the red planet; however, scientists have been unable to answer the challenge manifested by the fact that the exact conditions are just as explainable by familiar, well-known, every-day, inorganic earth-bound processes, and could just as easily have occurred while the rock was lying around on our own planet. Famed chemist, Edward Anders, dean of American meteorite sciences, admitted that planetary geologists are all but unanimous in remaining extremely skeptical about the igneous chunk of ore. The Viking I and II missions to Mars discovered only inert tundra and desolate sterility in the landscape. But, hey. If it looks like life, it must be life, right? - even if it flew to earth on a magic carpet.

Fortunately, for those who continue to profess the true Faith (and even if another planet were one day discovered), we have the assurance of the Voice of God declaring infallibly through His Catholic Church against the possibility of human life on any other than our own small, fragile orb. In Cum Sicut of November 14, 1459, Pope Pius II condemned as heresy this fallacy:

That God created another world besides this one, and that in its time many other men and women existed, and that consequently Adam was not the first man.

Evolutionists also contend that, as certain species evolve, their predecessors die off and become. The original species is supposedly annihilated, and brand-new species assume their place in the scale of living things. This is a blasphemous impossibility, since the inspired Word of God declares:

All the works which God hath made continue forever; we cannot add anything or take away from those things which God hath made. Ecclesiastes 3:14

This solitary verse, all by itself, is enough to condemn the vast body of evolutionary heresy to oblivion - at least for those who still believe in God instead of "foolish old wives' tales" (I Timothy 4:7). Furthermore, St. Thomas Aquinas takes pains to assure us in his Summa Theologica (I, Q.104, art.4):

The nature of creatures shows that none of them is annihilated ... Wherefore, we must conclude by denying absolutely that anything at all will be annihilated. Moreover, the power of God is conspicuously demonstrated in His preserving all things in existence, "upholding all things by the word of His power" as is said in Hebrews 1:3.

For this reason, St. Francis de Sales, another Doctor of the Church, stipulates in his famous Catholic Controversies that "As soon as Providence had created man, the heavens, the earth, and the things in heaven and on earth, it preserved them and perpetually preserves them, so that the species of each tiniest bird is not yet extinct." Here, someone will postulate the objection that the famous "Tyrranosaurus Rex" and the flying "Pterodactyl" have become extinct. These are straw men - utter ideological bugaboos. Evolutionists concoct their own mythical monstrosities, and then conveniently kill them all off so that they won't have to give any reason why they are no longer available for close-up examination. They have thus created, for example, Archeopteryxes, Velociraptors, Deinonychi, Carnosaurs, Sauropodomorphs, Ceratosaurs, Lesothosauri, Ornithominids, Marginocephalians, Thyreophorans, Mononyki, Euornithodpods, and various other oddities, only to declare them no longer "extant."

Take the notorious Acanthostega, a famous "360-million-year-old fish with four legs and thirty-two toes" reported in TIME magazine in August, 1995. Sure. Put those creatures back in time far enough, and you can make up any story you like about them. And even though the most ingenious of scientists is unable to offer any genuine proof as to how they "became >extinct," they still expect us to believe that they are in fact extinct because, well, they are no longer around, are they? This is rather like saying St. Patrick never drove all the snakes out of Ireland because, as everyone knows, there are no snakes in Ireland.

Personally, I have always suspected that the majority of what biologists call "dinosaurs" were more fiction than fact, more in the fairy-tale mentality of the evolutionist than in the mind of God, more of a paleontological artist's rendering than that of nature. Especially when the skeleton of a bat has been found in West Texas measuring over 100 feet in wingspread. The point is: if you had seen this creature flying around last Tuesday night searching for its supper, wouldn't you have exclaimed: "Oh, look at the pretty pterodactyl"? Besides, even modern science is forced to admit that the biggest giant that ever lived is still right here with us, namely: the blue whale which weighs over twenty times that of an African elephant, and is commonly known to exceed one hundred feet in length. This is larger than any dinosauric concoction, real or imagined.

Genesis says that "giants" roamed the earth in those days (6: 4). Saint John Chrysostom took this to mean great sinners of gross bestiality, and St. Augustine suggested it might indicate actual human beings four or five times our size. But even over-sized sinners are still men. The ancient Enacians were "giant monsters" (Numbers 13:34); Goliath was just under ten feet tall but still called a "giant" when dispatched by little St. David (Ecclesiasticus 47:4); and David's nephew Jonathan also killed an enormous Araphan possessed of six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot (II Kings 21:20).

But if the notion of "giants" includes inhabitants of the animal kingdom as it must, this verse, to anyone who still speaks the language, can only mean giants of the species which God had created, not giants of some new species which modern archaeology has gone on to invent but never managed to discover alive or all in one piece, and all of which are now conveniently extinct. Consider the fossils found of giant bugs: one ancient millipede grew to be six-and-one-half-feet long, but remained nonetheless a bug - and still no larger than the earthworm of the Galapogos Islands which often exceeds ten feet in length even today. After all, a two-pound Pomeranian is just as much a dog as is the Mastiff which weighs over two-hundred-and-fifty pounds. Picture to yourself the contemporary iguanas often kept as pets, or the Komodo dragon of Asia. What would they look like as eighty-foot giants?

Australia in our own 20th Century boasts 35-foot crocodiles which weigh six tons and go out to sea. In Texas, we would call that "one humdinger of a horny toad." As a matter of fact, Australia is the only other country on our planet which hosts the famed horned toad which was once so plentiful in the Lone Star State. They look in miniature exactly like what modern evolutionists would depict as tiny dinosaurs. Since "dinosaur" literally means "terrible lizard" in Greek, I can assure you that if I ever saw a giant of this species, I would run the other way as expeditiously as possible. Especially if it had a hundred-foot spread and dressed out some six tons!

Another point is God's use in Genesis of the word "kinds" - He made everything "according to its kind" and they all had seed "according to their kind," and so forth. This kind must equate to the most fundamental species which have been variously classified since the ancient Greeks and beyond. Even then, naturalists from the Thracian philosopher Aristotle to the Swedish biologist Linnus have made their share of mistakes in categorizing these "species." After all, it does become confusing at times, even for the most eminent of zoologists and botanists.

For example, we have canines that laugh (hyenas) and dogs that can't even bark (basenjis); mammals that fly (bats), but birds that can't (ostriches), fish that cannot swim (oysters) and fish that both swim and fly (the marbled hatchetfish of South America achieves true flight), as well as birds that swim but cannot fly no matter how hard they try (penguins). There are snakes that lay eggs, snakes that give birth to live offspring, and a few (certain rattlesnakes) that can go either way in the same year depending on their current disposition.

Other non-evolving oddities in nature include the cuddly Koala Bear that is not a bear at all, but an arboreal marsupial; the "DogWeed" of the English Channel, which was only recently determined to be, not a seaweed at all, but a living animal (it smells just like Fido when he's wet); the Tasmanian Wolf, which was classified as a jackal for years but is in reality a marsupial (it is called a "Marsupial Tiger" in Australia); the large-mouth bass which is a perch, the perch which is a sunfish, and the rainbrow trout which is, in fact, a salmon. The hairless mole-rat is neither a mole nor a rat, and has teeth so elongated it can scarcely close its mouth. Do you suppose God made a mistake? Or was it not perhaps the evolutionists, who would cover the animal with fur and file down its teeth?

At any rate, the word "kind" is used ten times in Genesis to declare that denizens of the animal kingdom reproduce only according to it; consequently, "species" must mean an identifiable group that can bear fertile offspring only from within the group, as any qualified geneticist can manifestly prove even on his day off. As Dr. Leibe Cavalieri of the Sloan-Kettering Institute surmised: "You can cross cats with cats, and dogs with dogs, but you cannot cross cats with dogs" - something rather obvious even to cats and dogs.

It is the Book of Ecclesiasticus which assures us that:

He Who lives forever created all things together [what? No evolutionary changes?] - All these things live and remain forever [what? no extinct dinosaurs?]. (18:1; 42:24)

It is simply not believable that any sole surviving representative of a "thing" or a "kind" which the Lord created could ever become totally extinct. Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches explicitly that nothing tends towards annihilation once brought into being by Almighty God. Therefore, I can only add that any of the giant beasts we think of today as a "dinosaur" must still be around somewhere, if they ever existed at all. Like, say, in Loch Ness. The feet of both man and dinosaur crisscross all over each other at Dinosaur State Park in Glen Rose, Texas, proving that we both lived at the same time, not sixty-five million years apart as paleontologists insist. So, if the real dinosaurs became extinct, why haven't we?

I find it equally unbelievable that any kind of creature God created and "found good" in the beginning (Genesis 1:25) can conceivably have been killed off, even by a Great Flood or a Greater Comet, and thus become utterly lost to the world. Certainly, various varieties and strains and breeds and sub-species have been lost to us, but can we positively state that a specific kind of creature no longer exists on the face of the earth, at least in some of its representatives? After all, a hybrid between sub-species is still representative of the species itself.

Scientific texts and world-famous journals continue to argue that several creatures have become extinct, only to discover them unremittingly and embarrassingly tinct. Alligators, for instance, were on the Endangered List of threatened wildlife, yet Louisiana is running over with them, shipping them to Arkansas, and warning golfers in the New Orleans area not to go around reaching into any lagoons for stray balls - and this, from a newspaper account dated clear back in September of 1974, the very month alligators first made it onto the "Endangered" Species List.

The flying opossum was written off as hopelessly extinct in conventional biology texts until rediscovered in the forests of Queensland, Australia in 1991. The Clacanth, a pretty blue fish with a funny-looking tail, was highlighted in every single textbook until 1938 as "extinct for over ninety million years." That very year, one was caught in the Indian Ocean, where they thrive north of Madagascar. It might be wondered with all legitimacy just how many other allegedly extinct creatures are still with us, since so many zoologists and marine-biologists not only discover these stray denizens of the wild now and then, but also persist in changing the rules of the game every other week in order to account for their oversights.

The aurochs, a wild cow of Europe, became extinct in the early 1600's as well as the tarpan, a horse of last century; but there are other cows and other horses, many of them right here in Texas. Evolution claims all horses descended (or ascended?) from the Eohippus, a stallion with toes on its feet, into the Equus, our modern hooved steed. Of course, the evolutionists never mention the Gotland pony, on an island of the same name off the coast of Sweden, which persists in having toes instead of hooves. Careful breeding has long been known even yet to produce such ancient throwbacks. The gene-pool of a fundamental species simply refuses to go away or get lost.

A couple decades ago, the rhinoceros (called a "unicorn" in Psalm 91) was threatened with extinction according to the current African Wild-Life Census - that is, until an intrepid Englishman actually went to Africa and lived for over a year among the beasts, tagging them and counting them scientifically, only to discover that our universe was far from under-supplied with unicorns.

Then, of course, there's the famous duck-billed platypus, the kiwi bird, and the hapless passenger pigeon, all of which were reported in the press of this century as gone by the wayside. Well, you will be glad to know that the platypus is alive and well in Australia, the kiwi (three varieties of them, including the famous "extinct" Apteryx popularized in the B.C. cartoon strip) is thriving in New Zealand and, at last count, flocks of passenger pigeons are brooding and breeding on game preserves and bird sanctuaries in South Carolina and elsewhere - despite the fact that they became "completely extinct" no later than 1914.

Frankly, even though the World Conservation Union has listed one out of nine of all known species of birds and mammals on its famous Endangered Species List, I do not seriously fret that God will permit our passenger pigeons to dwindle below the same family of fourteen He ordered Noah to conduct onto the Ark (Genesis 7:13). But even if He should, the passenger pigeon is only one of a dozen varieties of pigeons in the parks and plazas of the world. Even the famous extinct Dodo bird of Mauritius was, after all, a member of the pigeon family.

Perhaps the most amazing discovery of all "extinct" animals was the dinosaur netted by Japanese fishermen off the coast of New Zealand in 1977. Although nibbled by fish, its fresh body was astonishingly entire, all four flippers and thirty-five feet of him. Color photographs were published of this sea monster, along with its picture on a postage stamp sold over the counter in Tokyo for months thereafter. The creature has been positively identified by scientists as a Plesiosaur; however, its existence was generally smothered in this country by Evolutionists who likely feared that broadcasting the discovery would expose all their textbooks declaring "Plesiosaurs extinct for over sixty-six million years" as the idiotic lie it is, and consequently doom their foolishness to the oblivion it so richly deserves.

The National Broadcasting System, in its Evening News segment of August 16, 1995, relayed a documentary from San Diego in which it was flatly stated that: "Every twenty seconds an animal species becomes extinct." This claim is not only bad science, poor research, and irresponsible broadcasting, it is absolute propaganda on the level of hogwash. According to NBC then, fifteen million, seven-hundred-and-sixty-eight thousand animal species disappear from the face of the earth every ten years. Mercy! Is there no God in charge here?

A reasoning man will be compelled to conclude that, although the variety of a particular species may indeed pass out of existence (and several have), the entire "kind" will be with us till the End of Time one way or another. For, Genesis declares:

And God said: Let the earth bring forth the green herb and such as may seed, and the tree yielding fruit after its kind, which may have seed in itself upon the earth ... And the earth brought forth each one according to its kind. And God brought forth every living and moving creature according to its kind. So the heavens and the earth were finished and all furniture of them. And on the seventh day, God ended His work ... and He rested from all His work which He had done.

Turtles live between plated decks,

Which practically conceal their sex;

I think it clever of the turtle,

In such a fix, to be so fertile.

Finally, it must be pointed out that our First Vatican Council in 1869 squelched for once and all time the heresy that species evolve, and that we therefore have substantially new creatures coming into existence as time wears on. The Council defined infallibly that, "if anyone does not confess that the world and all things which it contains, both spiritual and material, are brought forth by God from nothing according to their whole substance: let him be anathema." (De Fide I, Canon 5). This lets us know conclusively and without doubt that every thing which now exists has been around ever since God called it out of nothingness in the beginning of time, and that a thing cannot be any more nor less than God first made it.

C) by the concurrence of some of the greatest minds in science who, with intellectual honesty, persist in rejecting this irrational death-wish known as Evolution. But for anyone with the true Catholic Faith, the Holy Scriptures alone are sufficient to reduce this heresy to oblivion for, as Jesus Himself assures us, "Scripture cannot be broken" (John 10:35). It was under Pope St. Pius X that the Pontifical Biblical Commission published the following in the Acts of the Apostolic See back in 1909:

Question: May we teach that the first three chapters of Genesis do not contain the narrative of things which actually happened, a narrative which corresponds to objective reality and historical truth?
Answer: In the negative!

Question: May we call in question the literal and historical meaning where there is question of facts which touch the fundamental teachings of the Christian religion, for example: the creation of all things by God in the beginning of time, the special creation of man, the formation of the first woman from Adam, and the unity of the human race?

Answer: In the negative!

Evolution postulates that we came from lower vertebrates, not from Adam, that the first human species was not one single original man, and that therefore there was no single Original Sin. This error is condemned by so many Popes and Prelates in so many Creeds and Councils they cannot all hope to be catalogued in this brief essay. However, if man evolved from monkeys, would someone please tell me why the monkeys stopped evolving and ended up in zoos instead?

In fact, if the evolution of species is such an on-going process, why is it that the bodies of common household ants and mosquitos have been found in amber "dated" by entomologists to be sixty-five million years old? How is it a little shellfish called the Lingula maintains a fossil record allegedly reaching back in time (according to ichthyologists) half-a-billion-years and yet is identical to the one still swimming around in our oceans? Why did it never think to evolve into a crab or a parrot or a baby zebra?

Would to God our modern era atheists believed the Voice of God heard in His one true Church instead of their own echoes!

Another theory of the fairy-tellers involves the fantastically great age the universe must have survived for all their inventions to have come true. Given enough time, they claim, and bacteria will change into puppies, plants, and people (not necessarily in that order). Ironically, the famed Hubble Space Telescope discovered, in June of 1996, a distant galaxy older than the universe itself! Of course, such a disparity is rationally impossible, and the evolutionary cosmologists are red-faced over the entire episode. Moreover, it is scientifically demonstrable that the moon is slowly spiraling away from us and, at the 4.6 billion years the earth and moon are calculated by Evolutionists to have existed, our satellite should have been millions and millions of miles further afield than it actually is today.

But, logically, it would seem that the age of the world must fall between one of two extremes: either it commenced at the comparatively recent time allowed by the Roman Breviary and the Roman Martyrology recited by priests and religious for centuries, or else it must be lost in the mists of infinity. And our Holy Father, John XXII, condemned the proposition that "the world existed from all eternity" back in March 27, 1329. After all, the very first verse in the Bible assures us that "in the beginning, God made heaven and earth," and Psalm 89 speaks of a moment for Him that existed "before the mountains were made or the earth and world were formed." Hence, material creation cannot extend into the past indefinitely.

The Martyrology entry for December 25th states that the birth of our Savior took place 5,199 years after Creation, making these closing moments of the 20th Century still less than the 7,200 years since the Almighty said "Let there be light." In this regard, since God created all the heavenly bodies after He had fashioned light itself, why would it be extravagant to hold that a "light-year" pertains only to that which occurs in Time? After all, Creation and Time were brought into being simultaneously.

Therefore, it need not have taken seven years for the light from Alpha Centauri to reach us (as astronomers claim), inasmuch as God could have created our sun and our nearest neighboring suns, and the extension of light between them, all in the same work-week. As a matter of fact, Genesis declares that, on the fourth day of Creation, God said: "Let there be lights made in the firmament of Heaven" (1:14), not mentioning suns nor limiting this illumination merely to stars or other heavenly bodies and thus - as is literally stated - including their lights as well.

Speaking of our own sun, ever since the year 1836 over a hundred scientific witnesses at the Royal Greenwich Observatory in England as well as at the U.S. Naval Observatory in this country have made direct visual measurements indicating that its diameter is shrinking some 830 miles per century. If the commonly-held presumptions of Evolution are true - that the sun is 4.6 billion years old and that the rate of decay is always the same throughout time for everything in the universe - then the diameter of the sun must once have been well over thirty-eight trillion miles wider than today! Is this even conceivable?

Concerning time itself, the Hebrew word for "day" in Genesis ordinarily indicates a period of twenty-four hours. Consequently, even the first "day" of Genesis had a "morning and evening" (1:5). Besides, God can neither deceive nor be deceived. If He used the word "day" in a certain context in one book of the Bible, that word must mean the same throughout all the other books when written in the same context; otherwise, God will have succeeded in deceiving His children to whom He wrote all these books in the first place.

Therefore, if the word "day" is used in any biblical book to denote within a particular context more than the normal period of time, Our Lord would be required either to tell us so - or else tell us a lie. Hence, in point of fact, we have the inspired and inerrant word of Holy Scripture that the days of Creation were indeed of the same precise interval of time as the 24-hour ones with which we are all so familiar, Daylight Savings included. Remember the story of when Joshua made the sun stand still (Joshua 10:13-14); it "stood still in the midst of heaven, and did not hasten to go down for the space of one day. And there was never before nor afterwards so long a day" - not even the 32-hour one granted king Ezechias at the prayers of the prophet Isaias (IV Kings 20:11). For, in Joshua's case, Scripture clearly states: "Was not the sun stopped, and one day made as two?" (Ecclesiasticus 46:5), thus rendering this miraculous day at least thirty-six hours in duration. Remember, it was to determine identical periods of time that God created the sun, the moon, and the stars in the first place:

And God said: Let there be lights in the firmament to divide the day and the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years. And God made lights to rule the day and night. (Genesis 1:14-18)

This "day and night rule" - our standard of time - must necessarily be the same today as it was then, or else all other "seasons" and "years" in-between will invariably mean something other than the seasons and years which are familiar to all of us. In short, all the words of God might mean something other than what they clearly declare that they mean. Therefore, unless God is deceiving us, the six "days" it took Him to construct the universe must have been our customary, run-of-the-mill, morning-and-evening periods of twenty-four hours. But God cannot deceive his children. Unfortunately, the same does not hold true for Evolutionists.

Bear in mind that science can measure only what it can see. If a botanist had stepped into the Garden of Paradise five minutes after the Almighty had brought it into being with all its trees bearing fruit ready to eat (Genesis 2:16), he might have felled one, counted its rings, and exclaimed: "Look here! A mature, five-year-old apple tree!"

God did not create bits of dust that built themselves into mountains over the ages, nor bring forth animal and vegetable life as immature seedlings, but in the fullness of their being. A mountain may grow, belch, and move over the years, but the chicken came first, not the egg. Likewise, Our Lord did not create the first man as a mere infant, but rather as an adult male, already capable of bearing children (Genesis 1:28) and of cultivating a garden (Genesis 2:15). If the local anthropologist had chanced upon Adam in that dim and pristine setting, he would have observed: "Aha! Here is a mature Homo Sapiens already some thirty years old! Sir, would you happen to have a cup of tea?"

The new techniques of determining the age of primitive fossils and the like have literally become an international disgrace, especially after the recent sophomoric attempts to destroy the authenticity of the Holy Shroud of Turin turned out to have been based on fraud (the latest studies prove the Shroud to be over 1,900 years old).

Although calculations based on Electron Spin Resonance are the current rage among Evolutionists, they are as speculative as ever. A report from a current science manual quoted by The Dallas Morning News in 1994 ironically states that the age-old strategy of counting tree rings is still the most accurate manner of dating any fossils found in the same strata. The authors discussed modern dating methods such as Carbon-14, potassium-argon dating, argon-argon dating, and other exotic geochemical dating technologies, and conclude that, should there ever be any scientific disagreement on the readings, one could al-ways verify the accuracy of origin by going back and counting ... tree rings!

Dating the age of the earth or anything in it by way of the strata game is itself an exercise in misguided indirection, shoddy science, and faulty thinking. Supposedly, the build-up of sedimentation over the centuries created a geological "column" by which creatures caught in the mire generated their own level of burial, rather like a running calendar of dated deposits in a vertical position. But geologist Guy Berthault, by means of a painstaking series of experiments at the Engineering Research Center of Colorado State University, positively demonstrated that water, carrying varying densities of sand, silt, dirt, and debris, would lay down laminated layers of strata not vertically, as in a stacked column, but horizontally in the direction of the flow, and then only according to the density and coarseness of the materials being carried, as well as the fluctuating velocity of the water itself.

The cataclysmic eruption of Mt. St. Helens in May of 1980 deposited multiple layers of pumice-like strata in only a scant few minutes, which puzzled geologists and evolutionists alike since they were virtually identical to those found in the Grand Canyon - which, they claim, required millions of years to lay down. Consequently, evolutionists are like witnesses at a cosmic car wreck who arrive on the scene much too late to have seen the actual fender-bender. They envision stacks of relics in stratified layers built "up" over sequential "eons" of time when, in actuality, the strata was pushed out almost as a whole, and settled into horizontal layers in a matter of moments.

Did human life "evolve," then, until such time God felt our animal existence could safely house a human soul? Hardly. It is an indisputable fact of Faith that Eve never came from a lower life form, but directly from one of Adam's ribs (Genesis 2:21). Of course, feminists may argue that Adam was certainly a lower life form; but, in fact, modern mitochondrial DNA research has proven that every man alive today comes, not from lemurs nor lungfish, but from one single, solitary female - Eve, "the mother of all the living" (Genesis 3:20). And just as Eve gave birth to all men, she herself derived directly from her husband.

A century ago Evolutionists might have scoffed at the idea of a complete human being coming from another's rib, but today, with genetic research into the actual cloning of animal life from mere cells, an entire rib would constitute a big head start. Allegedly, a sheep was successfully cloned in Scotland in July of 1997, at least from its male parent's seed, >and was incubated by an adult ewe as surrogate mother. Other such biological perversions have recently been reported, whether genuine or facetious. Technology, it seems, has now reached this occult stage, even if the events so far cannot be deemed a true cloning in the conventional sense of the word.

Newspapers a few years back reported a woman named Patricia White in South Africa who, by way of in vitrio fertilization by her son-in-law, gave birth to her own daughter's triplet girls. This made her both mother and grandmother of the girls, her daughter both stepmother and half-sister to them, and the husband a father of his own half-step-sisters-in-law-once-removed. Don't ask me what it made the poor triplets. Ah, scientific progress. Thanks to the marvelous petri dish, we have now ushered in the era of a genuine Glass Menagerie, even if it is admittedly neither evolutionary nor novel as far as the fundamental species produced is involved. In any event, those who believe that God can neither deceive nor be deceived must hold that Eve never evolved from Adam, but was brought forth from a single bone nearest his heart.