I’ve featured paleoentomologist Gunter Bechly a number of times on this blog because he’s well-researched and does a thorough job, and I particularly like his Fossil Friday articles. In this week’s article, he discusses the origin of feathers, which is often used to promote evolution.

Scientists claim that “tweaking just a few genes transforms scales into feathers” and these “results indicate that an evolutionary leap — from scales to feathers — does not require large changes in genome composition or expression.” If this claim is true, then doesn’t that prove evolution?

Not so fast, says Bechly. He refers to this claim as “complete hogwash” and points to numerous flaws in their research and logic and refutes their grand evolutionary claims.

One thing I’ve heard from evolutionists, time and again, is that there’s not much difference between a scale and a feather, and feathers can easily evolve from scales. I’ve always found this claim to be ridiculous, but many evolutionists believe it. If this were true, then it shouldn’t be uncommon to find turtles, snakes, alligators, fish- and all sorts of organisms with scales- evolving feathers, right? After all, wouldn’t feathers provide some kind of beneficial advantage? Yes, of course they would. However, that’s not what we find in the real world.

In the real world, what do we find? We find that only feathered animals produce animals with feathers, and animals that don’t have the genetic code for feathers do not produce offspring with feathers. Simple. We never observe any kind of evolution to feathers, even though evolutionists claim it can happen with just a few “tweaks” in the genome.

Bechly provides one refutation I wasn’t even aware of: the idea that bird feathers evolved from elongated reptile scales is no longer accepted by mainstream science, and hasn’t been for years. Scientists have finally realized how different scales are from feathers (always seemed obvious to me) at the molecular level. The way scales form in reptiles is very different from how feathers form in birds.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “Feathers are complex and novel evolutionary structures. They did not evolve directly from reptilian scales, as once was thought.” And according to Eastern Kentucky University, “Feathers, then, are not derived from scales, but, rather, are evolutionary novelties with numerous unique features.”

Bechly even points to a peer reviewed study: “Furthermore, it is inadequate to say that feathers evolved from reptilian scales, as both morphogenesis and CBPs of feathers are basal to those of avian scales, and that the molecular profiles of avian scales are similar to feathers, but different from reptilian scales.”

After addressing all the grossly exaggerated evolutionary claims, Bechly reminds us just how complicated feathers truly are. He refers to them as “the most complex integumental structures known in the animal kingdom,” and elaborates on the molecular processes involved and how it would be a “biological novelty” for an organism without the genetic code for feathers to evolve them.

He closes by acknowledging how impressive the evolutionary hype sounds to the uninformed and rightly calls this research misleading, overhyped, and mostly “smoke and mirrors.” Interestingly, Bechly is a scientist who still believes in common descent, yet says research like this has caused him to lose faith in evolutionary biology.

Good. I really hope his research leads him to the truth- God created organisms to reproduce after their kind, and this act of creation happened not that long ago.