Horsin’ Around

Another discredited chart used by evolutionists is that showing the development of the horse from Eohippus to modern horses. The following selection of quotes show how an idea becomes entrenched and continues to be promoted in even in some of today’s public school textbooks.
 
"The ancestral family tree of the horse is not what scientists have thought it to be. Prof. T.S. Westoll, Durham University geologist, told the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Edinburgh that the early classical evolutionary tree of the horse, beginning in the small dog-sized Eohippus and tracing directly to our present day Equinus, was all wrong." ("Science News Letter," August 25, 1951, p. 118).
 
"Dr. Eldredge [curator of the Department of Invertebrates of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City] called the textbook characterization of the horse series 'lamentable.'
 
"When scientists speak in their offices or behind closed doors, they frequently make candid statements that sharply conflict with statements they make for public consumption before the media. For example, after Dr. Eldredge made the statement [in 1979] about the horse series being the best example of a lamentable imaginary story being presented as though it were literal truth, he then contradicted himself.
 
". . . [On February 14, 1981] in California he was on a network television program. The host asked him to comment on the creationist claim that there were no examples of transitional forms to be found in the fossil record. Dr. Eldredge turned to the horse series display at the American Museum and stated that it was the best available example of a transitional sequence."- L.D. Sunderland, Darwin's Enigma (1988), p. 82.
 
"The supposed pedigree of the horse is a deceitful delusion, which . . in no way enlightens us as to the paleontological origins of the horse."-* (Charles Deperet, "Transformations of the Animal World," p. 105).
 
"Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time.
 
"By this I mean that some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information. What appeared to be a nice, simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic. So Darwin's problem [with the fossil record] has not been alleviated." (David M. Raup, in "Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin" 50, 1979, p. 29).
 
"It was widely assumed that [Eohippus] had slowly but persistently turned into a more fully equine animal . . [but] the fossil species of Eohippus show little evidence of evolutionary modification . . [The fossil record] fails to document the full history of the horse family." ("The New Evolutionary Timetable, pp. 4, 96).
 
"The uniform continuous transformation of Hyracotherium into Equus, so dear to the hearts of generations of textbook writers, never happened in nature."- * George G. Simpson, Life of the Past (1953), p. 119.