In the News: World’s “First” Animals? by Eric Lyons, M.Min.

http://apologeticspress.org/APContent.aspx?category=9&article=1607

In the News: World’s “First” Animals?

by	Eric Lyons, M.Min.

In December 2011, Discovery News published an on-line article titled, “Earliest Animals Looked Like Baseballs.” In the article, Jennifer Viegas referred to a study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences that claimed “microscopic 570-million-year-old fossils from China may represent the earliest evidence for animal life on Earth.” (Notice the difference in this statement and the aforementioned article title. Whereas the announcement in the title is made with certainty, the statement within the article is toned down considerably.) Fast forward only two months. The same Web site (Discovery News) published a story titled “World’s First Animals Were Namibian Sponges” (2012). What’s more, these dust-speck-sized sponges were said to be found in Africa “in rocks between 760 and 550 million years old…. That means animals, previously thought to have emerged 600 million to 650 million years ago, actually appeared 100 million to 150 million years before that” (“World’s First Animals…,” 2012).
So, within only a two-month period, the popular evolutionary Web site Discovery News, has gone from suggesting that microscopic, baseball-like creatures in China may be the “earliest animals” on Earth, to reporting that the “world’s first animals” were sponges from southern Africa. What’s more, they went from alleging the first animal evolved 570 million years ago to saying the first animal evolved as early as 760 million years ago.
Is there any wonder why so many people around the world still reject the so-called “science” that evolutionists espouse? Time and again, what we are told today (often as “fact”) is debunked tomorrow (cf. Butt, 2006; Lyons, 2007), yet the theory is “never wrong”—it just “evolves.” Need a few more years? Need a million more years? How about 100,000,000 more years? No big deal, right? Just trust the assumption-based, often-contradictory, faulty dating methods in which evolutionists continually put so much confidence.
What made this latest story even more appalling was the certainty with which Tony Prave (geologist from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland) spoke concerning the Namibian sponges. These “hollow globs…were our ancestors,” he said (emp. added). “[T]his would be our great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother” (“World’s First Animals…”). Doesn’t that just make your day? Doesn’t that make you feel good? To “know” that we evolved from a hollow, dust-speck-sized glob of sponge?
Call me crazy, but I choose to believe exactly what Almighty God revealed in His inspired, never-changing, ever-enduring Word (1 Peter 1:24-25), and what has always been and always will be consistent with true, testable science: He created animals and humans separately—and not hundreds of millions of years ago (cf. Romans 1:20; Mark 10:6; Luke 11:49-51).
The search for the “first animal” is futile. But, of course, government (i.e., tax-payer) sponsored evolutionary scientists have to find some way to justify their continued support and search for fossils of, among other things, dust-sized, hollow, glob-like sponges.

REFERENCES

Butt, Kyle (2006), “One Little Beaver Demolishes 100 Million Years,” Apologetics Press, http://www.apologeticspress.org/apcontent.aspx?category=9&article=1787.
Lyons, Eric (2007), “Yesterday’s ‘New Reality of Evolution’ Debunked Again,” Apologetics Press, http://www.apologeticspress.org/APContent.aspx?category=9&article=2236.
Viegas, Jennifer (2011), “Earliest Animals Looked Like Baseballs,” December 6, DiscoveryNews, http://news.discovery.com/animals/fossils-early-life-111206.html.
“World’s First Animals were Namibian Sponges” (2012), February 7, DiscoveryNews, http://news.discovery.com/animals/namibia-sponge-fossils-worlds-first-animals-study-120207.html.