A documentary called "Dinosaurs in the Deeps" was broadcast on the Discovery Channel on April 14, 2003. The program considered the fish Coelacanth and dealt with the reaction its rediscovery had awoken in the scientific world and the subsequent efforts to observe it in its natural environment. Yet the Discovery Channel used these fish, which have remained completely unchanged for the last 400 million years, as a tool of evolutionist propaganda and referred to the Coelacanth as "our ancestor."
The truth is that the Discovery Channel concealed a great deal of information about the Coelacanth from its viewers. It should have emphasized how the common feature of all this information was the deadly blow it dealt to evolution. In brief:
1. Based on fossils before the discovery of the fish, evolutionists used to claim that the Coelacanth was an intermediate form in the transition from the sea to the land. It was believed that the fish walked on the seabed with its bony fins and that these organs represented an evolutionary function. Studies of living Coelacanth specimens, however, revealed that these claims were nothing but a fantasy. The organs were only used for swimming.
2. The living Coelacanth put forward as a basis for evolution was identical to 400-year-old fossils.
3. The fact that the fish had undergone no changes despite the great number of alterations, which had taken place in its natural environment over the course of 400 million years, revealed that the claim that changes in nature caused living things to evolve was groundless.
4. The realization that the fish carried shark’s blood dealt yet another blow to evolution, since the two fish belonged to different classes.
5. In terms of the theory of evolution a huge gap was left in the fossil record when the Coelacanth was abandoned as an ancestor.
6. When it was established that the organs possessed by the fish (for example, its electromagnetic identification organ and a structure resembling a placenta) were also present in the 400 million-year-old specimens fundamentally undermined the claim that life evolved from simple forms to complex ones.
As the Discovery Channel concealed all this information from its readers for the sake of defending Darwinism, it also misdirected those viewers with tales about the Coelacanth being "our ancestor." Yet defending the theory of evolution should never take priority over revealing the objective facts. Focus magazine actually set out all these details, one by one, in its April edition, and accepted the damage they did to the theory of evolution. We should like to draw the Discovery Channel"s attention to our article dealing with the Focus report here (http://www.darwinism-watch.com/focus_0304.html), and suggest the channel take it as an example.