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Fossil Forensics: Separating Fact from Fantasy in Paleontology
There is a difference between fact and speculation. Unfortunately, scientists and science media often fail to make the distinction everywhere they should. This is especially true within paleontology. Paleontologists often develop theories which, while interesting or even exciting, lack supporting evidence, or are even flat out contradicted by available evidence. Fossil Separating Fact from Fantasy in Paleontology brings you face to face with fossils of all kinds and from every layer of the fossil record. Photographs, diagrams, illustrations, and in-depth descriptions help you get acquainted with not only the fossils but also the organisms behind them and how they affect our understanding of natural history. In Fossil Forensics, biology professor Dr. Jerry Bergman examines many claims that have been made about fossil discoveries to determine what the rock record does and does not show about organisms, their ancestry, and their evolution. In this book, Dr. Bergman examines claims about general features of fossils such as teeth and feathers as well as claims about the origins and lineages of groups of all kinds, including whales, bats, birds, and insects.
439 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 17, 2017
43 people are currently reading
82 people want to read
About the author
Jerry Bergman
60 books19 followersPh.D. in Human Biology, Columbia Pacific University, San Rafael, California
Ph.D. in measurement and evaluation, minor in psychology, Wayne State University, Detroit
M.S. in Biomedical Science, Medical College of Ohio
Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology at Northwest State College in Archbold OH for over 17 years. Now completing his 9th degree, Dr. Bergman has over 600 publications in 12 languages and 20 books and monographs. He has also taught at the Medical College of Ohio where was a research associate in the department of experimental pathology, and he also taught 6 years at the University of Toledo, and 7 years at Bowling Green State University.
Dr. Bergman has presented over one hundred scientific papers at professional and community meetings in the United States, Canada, and Europe. To discuss his research, he has been a featured speaker on many college campuses throughout the United States and Europe, and is a frequent guest on radio and television programs. His research has made the front page in newspapers throughout the country, has been featured by the Paul Harvey Show several times, and has been discussed by David Brinkley, Chuck Colson, and other nationally known commentators on national television.
His other work experience includes over ten years experience at various Mental Health/Psychology clinics as a licensed professional clinical counselor and three years full time corrections research for a large county circuit court in Michigan and inside the walls of Jackson Prison (SPSM), the largest walled prison in the world. He has also served as a consultant for CBS News, ABC News, Reader’s Digest, Amnesty International, several government agencies and for two Nobel Prize winners, including the inventor of the transistor. In the past decade he has consulted or has testified as an expert witness or consultant in almost one-hundred court cases. A Fellow of the American Scientific Association, member of The National Association for the Advancement of Science, and many other professional associations, he is listed in Who’s Who in America.
Ph.D. in measurement and evaluation, minor in psychology, Wayne State University, Detroit
M.S. in Biomedical Science, Medical College of Ohio
Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology at Northwest State College in Archbold OH for over 17 years. Now completing his 9th degree, Dr. Bergman has over 600 publications in 12 languages and 20 books and monographs. He has also taught at the Medical College of Ohio where was a research associate in the department of experimental pathology, and he also taught 6 years at the University of Toledo, and 7 years at Bowling Green State University.
Dr. Bergman has presented over one hundred scientific papers at professional and community meetings in the United States, Canada, and Europe. To discuss his research, he has been a featured speaker on many college campuses throughout the United States and Europe, and is a frequent guest on radio and television programs. His research has made the front page in newspapers throughout the country, has been featured by the Paul Harvey Show several times, and has been discussed by David Brinkley, Chuck Colson, and other nationally known commentators on national television.
His other work experience includes over ten years experience at various Mental Health/Psychology clinics as a licensed professional clinical counselor and three years full time corrections research for a large county circuit court in Michigan and inside the walls of Jackson Prison (SPSM), the largest walled prison in the world. He has also served as a consultant for CBS News, ABC News, Reader’s Digest, Amnesty International, several government agencies and for two Nobel Prize winners, including the inventor of the transistor. In the past decade he has consulted or has testified as an expert witness or consultant in almost one-hundred court cases. A Fellow of the American Scientific Association, member of The National Association for the Advancement of Science, and many other professional associations, he is listed in Who’s Who in America.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 31, 2019
There is much interpretation in making fossils fit into the evolution “just so” story. Darwinists have to be willingly blind when they view the multitude of exquisitely detailed fossils. Some fossils, Darwinists claim to be the oldest, are quite complex.
Darwin believed the gaps in the fossil record would be filled in eventually. As Dr. Bergman documents, the Darwinists are still wishing and hoping to get those gaps filled. They have fantastic faith that they will find those fossils.
Dr. Bergman was an evolutionist in college, “However, science requires validation, not mere assertion, so I continued to read the literature, and soon realized that taking their word for the evidence shows naïve, to say the least.” (pg.2)
Dr. Bergman’s book documents “the fossils tell a very clear account of the history of life quite in contradiction to the story of Darwinism.” (pg. 3)
Each chapter is like a book and can be read in any order. There are three chapter groups: I “General Fossil Considerations,” II “The Invertebrates,” and III “The Vertebrates. Having a high degree of interest in insects (See http://www.insectman.us/), I went right to the third part (Chapter 7) of “The Invertebrates”—“Insects—Ancient and Modern.”
Insects “should be a major evidence for evolution. This is because fully 80 percent of all confirmed animal species—now estimated by many entomologists as close to 1.8 million—are insects…” But, “Insect evolution is rarely is discussed by Darwinists as evidence of macroevolution…” (pg. 135)
Darwinists simply do not know how insects came to be. “At least five major theories of the ancestry of insects exist…” (pg. 141)
Within those theories are individual mysteries such as insect flight. The most “ancient” fossil insects have fully developed wings.” (pg. 141)
Insect wings are well-designed and complex. Their origin is “one of the most controversial topics in paleoentomology” and “has resulted in enormous speculation about their origin.” (pg. 149)
“(E)volution does not rely on foresight…How could all the machinery of flight-wings, wing articulations, neural circuitry, powerful flight muscles—evolve incrementally?” (pg. 151) I think it was the late Dr. Duane Gish who asked, “What good is half a wing?” “Another problem is that insect wings do not function independently, but must articulate appropriately with the body, and also must function as a unit, which requires coordination by a nervous system of great complexity. The energy required for flight is enormous…” (pg. 156)
Insect wing folding is “the most morphologically complex joint in the animal kingdom” and “a variety of folding systems exists, including longitudinal and transverse, all requiring unique muscle and nerve designs.” (pg. 156)
“Another major mystery that must be explained is the evolution of the insect eye.” (Pg. 157) Insect compound eyes have individual lenses often numbering into the thousands! Again, Darwinists are forced to see fossils of so-called “early” insects had eyes as complex as living insects.
Insect metamorphosis is many times more compelling evidence against evolution. Butterflies, alone, are enough to say “bye-bye” to evolution.
Even a fossil that can be remotely imagined as a transition is speculative and has to be written in scientific literature that is similar to Kipling’s “Just So Stories.” An example is a children’s book (The Evolution Book, Sara Stein, 1986) that states insects (originally probably resembling “the marine worms of today”) gradually "developed joints in their legs and rigged them into every sort of appendage a mad inventor could dream up.” (pg. 159) “That’s an example of how ingenious evolution is.” (pg. 160)
Insects certainly bug evolutionism, but the reader will find many more examples of why evolution is not supported by the fossil record in “Fossil Forensics-Separating Fact from Fantasy in Paleontology”.
Darwin believed the gaps in the fossil record would be filled in eventually. As Dr. Bergman documents, the Darwinists are still wishing and hoping to get those gaps filled. They have fantastic faith that they will find those fossils.
Dr. Bergman was an evolutionist in college, “However, science requires validation, not mere assertion, so I continued to read the literature, and soon realized that taking their word for the evidence shows naïve, to say the least.” (pg.2)
Dr. Bergman’s book documents “the fossils tell a very clear account of the history of life quite in contradiction to the story of Darwinism.” (pg. 3)
Each chapter is like a book and can be read in any order. There are three chapter groups: I “General Fossil Considerations,” II “The Invertebrates,” and III “The Vertebrates. Having a high degree of interest in insects (See http://www.insectman.us/), I went right to the third part (Chapter 7) of “The Invertebrates”—“Insects—Ancient and Modern.”
Insects “should be a major evidence for evolution. This is because fully 80 percent of all confirmed animal species—now estimated by many entomologists as close to 1.8 million—are insects…” But, “Insect evolution is rarely is discussed by Darwinists as evidence of macroevolution…” (pg. 135)
Darwinists simply do not know how insects came to be. “At least five major theories of the ancestry of insects exist…” (pg. 141)
Within those theories are individual mysteries such as insect flight. The most “ancient” fossil insects have fully developed wings.” (pg. 141)
Insect wings are well-designed and complex. Their origin is “one of the most controversial topics in paleoentomology” and “has resulted in enormous speculation about their origin.” (pg. 149)
“(E)volution does not rely on foresight…How could all the machinery of flight-wings, wing articulations, neural circuitry, powerful flight muscles—evolve incrementally?” (pg. 151) I think it was the late Dr. Duane Gish who asked, “What good is half a wing?” “Another problem is that insect wings do not function independently, but must articulate appropriately with the body, and also must function as a unit, which requires coordination by a nervous system of great complexity. The energy required for flight is enormous…” (pg. 156)
Insect wing folding is “the most morphologically complex joint in the animal kingdom” and “a variety of folding systems exists, including longitudinal and transverse, all requiring unique muscle and nerve designs.” (pg. 156)
“Another major mystery that must be explained is the evolution of the insect eye.” (Pg. 157) Insect compound eyes have individual lenses often numbering into the thousands! Again, Darwinists are forced to see fossils of so-called “early” insects had eyes as complex as living insects.
Insect metamorphosis is many times more compelling evidence against evolution. Butterflies, alone, are enough to say “bye-bye” to evolution.
Even a fossil that can be remotely imagined as a transition is speculative and has to be written in scientific literature that is similar to Kipling’s “Just So Stories.” An example is a children’s book (The Evolution Book, Sara Stein, 1986) that states insects (originally probably resembling “the marine worms of today”) gradually "developed joints in their legs and rigged them into every sort of appendage a mad inventor could dream up.” (pg. 159) “That’s an example of how ingenious evolution is.” (pg. 160)
Insects certainly bug evolutionism, but the reader will find many more examples of why evolution is not supported by the fossil record in “Fossil Forensics-Separating Fact from Fantasy in Paleontology”.
November 30, 2017
Informative
This book is almost all you need to crack open the evolution story of fossil record. thumbs up & very, very informative.
This book is almost all you need to crack open the evolution story of fossil record. thumbs up & very, very informative.
July 5, 2020
Solid read about the lack of transitional fossils....the section on Whale evolution was in particular most revealing.
July 19, 2021
Interesting information on the fossil record and evolution
May 9, 2019
This book is written by a man named Jerry Bergman, who is an adjunct associate professor at the Medical University of Ohio, and an instructor in the Division of Arts and Sciences at Northwest State Community College in Archbold, Ohio. He has nine degrees, including an M. A. in social psychology and a Ph.D. in human biology. He is a well educated man who has written a dozen books, and therefore should be respected for his acumen. He is also a known defender of the Creationist point of view, and this book is an effort to couch his beliefs in scientific method.
The arguments that are put forward here are thought provoking. The entire jist of the whole monologue seems to be that, no matter what kind of animal one may look at, there is no indication in the fossil record of any type of evolution from simple forms to complex ones. This book does not go through the entire fossil record, but it does hit the high points. It also looks at the various methods that scientists have used to try to prove evolution, including comparative morphology (the physical attributes of fossils) and DNA testing of modern specimens, and comes to the conclusion that, even after over a century of attempts, there has been no breakthrough that definitively proves evolution has or is taking place. The writing in this is a little stilted and tends to drone in places, but that can be put down to a case of an academician who has been around his scientific contemporaries for so long that he has forgotten how to talk to the average layperson. There are also plenty of terms dropped in, with no explanation or definition, that only fellow scientists or persons educated in the subject matter may be familiar with (phylogeny, Ordovician, and Monoplacophorans, among many others). So, if the reader is not a student of paleontology, they may want to tackle this with a dictionary by their side.
I have read some previous reviews of this book (not on this site), and I find some of them to be a little preachy, the very thing that they are accusing this author of. Yes, he does bring up the subject of the giraffe, but that is an argument that creationists have been using for decades, and you would think that detractors would be used to that one by now. There is the mention of no references or documentation of the quotes used, however, in the version I read, there are notations at the end of each quote, and lists of references at the end of each chapter. As for his lack of a degree in the subject, the author freely admits in the introduction that he has depended on the evidence and conclusions put forward by other scholars for his information. All in all, the attempts to ridicule his efforts seem just a little panicky, so perhaps his words are not falling on deaf ears, just ears that do not want to hear the legitimate points he is making. Could the fact that he is espousing a view that some will not even tolerate be the problem? What we must remember is that, for all that it is being taught in schools and colleges around the country, the theory of evolution is still just that, a THEORY. This means that there is the very real possibility that it is not the whole truth, if not completely in error. This is not because the creationists are right. It is just always the risk with theories, that, given time and additional research, they may be proven wrong. And that is simply a fact of life.
The arguments that are put forward here are thought provoking. The entire jist of the whole monologue seems to be that, no matter what kind of animal one may look at, there is no indication in the fossil record of any type of evolution from simple forms to complex ones. This book does not go through the entire fossil record, but it does hit the high points. It also looks at the various methods that scientists have used to try to prove evolution, including comparative morphology (the physical attributes of fossils) and DNA testing of modern specimens, and comes to the conclusion that, even after over a century of attempts, there has been no breakthrough that definitively proves evolution has or is taking place. The writing in this is a little stilted and tends to drone in places, but that can be put down to a case of an academician who has been around his scientific contemporaries for so long that he has forgotten how to talk to the average layperson. There are also plenty of terms dropped in, with no explanation or definition, that only fellow scientists or persons educated in the subject matter may be familiar with (phylogeny, Ordovician, and Monoplacophorans, among many others). So, if the reader is not a student of paleontology, they may want to tackle this with a dictionary by their side.
I have read some previous reviews of this book (not on this site), and I find some of them to be a little preachy, the very thing that they are accusing this author of. Yes, he does bring up the subject of the giraffe, but that is an argument that creationists have been using for decades, and you would think that detractors would be used to that one by now. There is the mention of no references or documentation of the quotes used, however, in the version I read, there are notations at the end of each quote, and lists of references at the end of each chapter. As for his lack of a degree in the subject, the author freely admits in the introduction that he has depended on the evidence and conclusions put forward by other scholars for his information. All in all, the attempts to ridicule his efforts seem just a little panicky, so perhaps his words are not falling on deaf ears, just ears that do not want to hear the legitimate points he is making. Could the fact that he is espousing a view that some will not even tolerate be the problem? What we must remember is that, for all that it is being taught in schools and colleges around the country, the theory of evolution is still just that, a THEORY. This means that there is the very real possibility that it is not the whole truth, if not completely in error. This is not because the creationists are right. It is just always the risk with theories, that, given time and additional research, they may be proven wrong. And that is simply a fact of life.
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November 21, 2021كتاب بيدحض نظرية التطور من خلال مناقشتة فى عده فصول مابين الاسنان و الريش و الفقريات و المفصليات و انواع اخرى مثل الطيور و الديناصورات و الحيتان. بشكل عام بيشرح الانواع و الوظائف وبيوضح الحفريات المكتشفه والى بتظهر الشكل الكامل للحيوان من حيث الكفاءه والقدره على المعيشة من ملايين السنين فى ظل عدم توافر اى حفريات تبين شكل او مظهر للتطور مما يدعم مبدا الخلق
June 24, 2018
Not worth reading.
August 31, 2024
A fantastic book showing the absolute absurdities of evolution. Over and over again, Dr. Bergman shows that there are no transitional fossils
at all
, a fact that even evolutionists themselves admit. For example, chapter 6 covering trilobites has quotes from Evan Clarkson, Niles Eldredge, and H.B. Whittington which admit that trilobites have a "sudden, abrupt appearance" and there is "no evidence . . . [for] a transition series of fossils".
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews