The Real Story of Creation
This is an article for anyone, especially young-earth creationists, interested in the creationism vs evolution debate. Having gotten into “creation science apologetics” at a young age, I had learned an enormous amount of such material. I was convinced that creationism was true, would engage in debates against evolutionists and made this a major part of what I considered my ministry. Examining the claims of “creation science” in the process of honing my skills to be able to reason people into faith in the spirit of 1 Peter 3:15 and Acts 17:1–3, however, revealed those creationists to often misrepresent findings, misquote scientists, make intellectually dishonest arguments and to sometimes outright lie. In this process, I had begun to study the theory of evolution with the sole intention of debunking it, expecting to find poor-quality evidence to base fanciful conclusions. Although I am not a scientist, I am a lawyer, and weighing evidence and comparing explanatory theories is par for the course. I expected to be able to piece together fresh arguments in favour of creationism in light of the faulty reasoning and evidence I would find. However, this was not the result. I have found it to be a theory that has been proven, as one would say in a court of law, beyond reasonable doubt.
By a literal interpretation of the Bible, the world would have to be understood as being spread out like a map over a flat disc — the word used is not the one for sphere (dur), but a circle (chug) (Isaiah 40:22). This disc-world stood on pillars (1 Samuel 2:8) like a table so that it would not move (Psalms 93:1, 1 Chronicles 16:30, Psalm 96:10). All of this was submerged in a watery abyss and covered by a giant transparent crystal dome, (Genesis 1:7). The sun, moon, and stars were contained within the expanse (Genesis 1:14) of this massive dome (Ezekiel 1:22). Fountains would allow water in from below the firmament, and windows in the expanse of it would allow rain in also (Genesis 7:11). It was in fact understood that way, as evident from rabbinical accounts. Much of the remaining ancient world too had the same cosmological view, including the Egyptians, Sumerians, the Greeks (Iliad, Odyssey, Anaximenes, Empedocles) and the Babylonians. There was no reason to not interpret these verses literally — there was no competing view. Later, when the spherical nature of the Earth was discovered and when this knowledge became well known, these verses were understood as being allegorical/metaphorical and poetic. Similarly, Joshua 10:12–13, 1 Chronicles 16:30, Psalm 19:6, Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, Psalm 104:5 and Ecclesiastes 1:5 were understood as supporting a Geocentric view of the cosmos, with the Sun revolving around the Earth, including by Martin Luther and John Calvin, who denounced Copernicus as a heretic.
Some quotes from Martin Luther:
“Indeed, it is more likely that the bodies of the stars, like that of the sun, are round, and that they are fastened to the firmament like globes of fire, to shed light at night, each according to its endowment and its creation.”
“We Christians must be different from the philosophers [i.e. scientists] in the way we think about the causes of these things. And if some are beyond our comprehension (like those before us concerning the waters above the heavens), we must believe them and admit our lack of knowledge rather than either wickedly deny them or presumptuously interpret them in conformity with our understanding.”
Just as Christendom has outgrown such ideas, it is now time to acknowledge the scientific evidence for evolution and to reinterpret the creation passages as allegorical. In this article, I will present this compelling evidence. Evolution was a theory when Darwin introduced it, but it has been continually corroborated for over 200 years now by many fields as we shall see, for it to be recognized as a fact. After I have explained the mechanisms of evolution and the evidence in its support, I will comment on how the creation science apologists are wrong in their approach.
Evolution is a process by which populations diversify and change due to variations in the frequency of particular genes found among them. These variations in gene frequency are caused by random mutations. Some mutations are beneficial, most are neutral, and some are harmful. The beneficial mutations give individuals who have the gene an advantage, due to which they are likely to have comparatively more offspring. These offspring will have more children on average as well due to the advantage, and eventually the gene will be found in a large part of the population. The opposite effect is found when the mutation is harmful. When a population stays together, as genes keep getting circulated freely, the whole population changes slowly together, according to whatever mutations are beneficial in the environment at that point of time.
Which mutations are beneficial can change over time, as the environment is subject to change. When a part of the population is split and put somewhere else, the two populations thus created will start accumulating different mutations on a population level. After many generations, these two populations will be different from each other to the extent that they cannot reproduce with each other, or will have problems if they tried (e.g. a horse and a donkey, which had a common ancestral population, will produce a sterile mule). If their genes have not diverged too much, they can create fertile offspring, and this can sometimes result in the creation of a new species that can only mate with other crossbreeds of the same type (many plant species have naturally arisen in this manner). When a population arises that cannot reproduce with its sibling population, a new species is said to have arisen.
When a portion of a population is split and is put in a considerably different environment, the selective pressures would be different. As only those individuals that are better suited to surviving the new environment would survive, and only those individuals would have offspring that survive, large population-level changes would occur at a considerably faster pace. The population that changes in this way will usually end up looking different, when compared to its parent population. Sometimes, the environment is not too tough for a species to survive in. When this is the case, the population changes in a random direction, and develops features that don’t add to the survival value but may have other uses, such as having features that are attractive to mates. This is called genetic drift. For example, guppy fish, over generations, will grow more colourful if they are in a safe environment as more colourful fish are more sexually attractive (this has been observed in an experiment). If the environment suddenly becomes tough to inhabit, the population will either not survive (if it does not change fast enough, on a population level), or change in a manner that makes the population more suitable for the tough environment as the individuals that are comparatively less suited to it die out. To use the same example of the guppy fish population, if a predator is introduced to the population, over time, the population will on average not have bright colours but will instead have pale colours that help the fish camouflage with pebbles (this too has been experimentally shown).
Every single one of these phenomena, which constitute evolution by natural selection and genetic drift, has been directly observed. Even before these phenomena were identified as operating in nature, selection pressures were used by humans to mould species to their liking. Dogs, for example, were bred into many variants with desired traits by applying artificial selection (as opposed to natural selection), causing the creation of populations with traits desirable to humans. In an experiment by Dmirty Belyayev, foxes were artificially selected for friendliness to humans. In just 30 generations, most of the population had become dog-like in tameness and also in some physiological features.
To further understand speciation (the creation of new species), let us look at what are called “ring species.” They occur when a single species becomes geographically distributed in a circular pattern over a large area. Immediately adjacent or neighbouring populations of the species vary slightly but can interbreed. But at the extremes of the distribution — the opposite ends of the pattern that link to form a circle — natural variation has produced so much difference between the populations that they function as though they were two separate, non-interbreeding species. A well-studied example of a ring species is the salamander Ensatina escholtzii of the Pacific Coast region of the United States. In Southern California, naturalists have found what look like two distinct species scrabbling across the ground. One is marked with strong, dark blotches in a cryptic pattern that camouflages it well. The other is more uniform and brighter, with bright yellow eyes, apparently in mimicry of the deadly poisonous western newt. These two populations coexist in some areas but do not interbreed — and evidently cannot do so. Moving up the state, the two populations are divided geographically, with the dark, cryptic form occupying the inland mountains and the conspicuous mimic living along the coast. Still farther to the north, in northern California and Oregon, the two populations merge, and only one form is found. In this area, it is clear that what looked like two separate species in the south are in fact a single species with several interbreeding subspecies, joined together in one continuous ring. The evolutionary story that scientists have deciphered begins in the north, where the single form is found. This is probably the ancestral population. As it expanded south, the population became split by the San Joaquin Valley in central California, forming two different groups. In the Sierra Nevada the salamanders evolved their cryptic coloration. Along the coast they gradually became brighter and brighter. The division was not absolute: some members of the sub-populations still find each other and interbreed to produce hybrids. The hybrids look healthy and vigorous, but they are neither well-camouflaged nor good mimics, so they are vulnerable to predators. They also seem to have difficulty finding mates, so the hybrids do not reproduce successfully. These two factors keep the two forms from merging, even though they can interbreed. By the time the salamanders reached the southernmost part of California, the separation had caused the two groups to evolve enough differences that they had become reproductively isolated. In some areas the two populations coexist, closing the “ring,” but do not interbreed. They are as distinct as though they were two separate species.
Most creationists admit that at least some of this process does in fact happen. While they admit that micro-evolution happens, however, they do not admit that macro-evolution happens. Micro-evolution refers to population-level changes within the species, whereas macro-evolution refers to new species arising. However, new species arising has, without a shade of doubt, been observed. It is possible to give rise to speciation even in the lab with creatures that have a short lifespan, as many generations of that creature can be observed as a consequence. When confronted with this evidence, creationists usually deviate from the scientific definition of macro-evolution and say that one “kind” (the word is found in Genesis 6 and 8) of animal cannot evolve into another kind even though speciation can occur. The creationist idea, therefore, is that all animals belong in one kind or another, that God created each kind of animal independently, that two of each kind made it to Noah’s ark, and that all surviving animals are variants of these ancestor kinds. However, this claim does not withstand scrutiny as there is evidence for all animals being interrelated.
Even creationists admit that all horses have a common ancestor, all dogs have a common ancestor, all mice have a common ancestor and so on. Evolutionists agree with this. The following is a phylogenetic tree that shows all the various dog breeds coming from a common ancestor — a wolf. A creationist presumably agrees with the evolutionist on this.
We know which breed is closely related to which breed, and how distant one breed is to another (which translates to how far the most recent common ancestor is), by two methods. One is by comparing their physical features, and the other is by looking at their genetic similarity (this is a simplification for the purpose of explanation, as phylogeny is done on the basis of observed heritable traits, such as DNA sequences, protein amino acid sequences, and morphology). Both methods would lead to the same conclusion, although a genetic comparison leads more accurate results as sometimes physical features can be sometimes misleading (although not commonly). The more similar two breeds look, the more related they are and vice versa. The more similar their genes, the more closely related they are and vice versa. Since dog breeds are monitored by humans, both of these methods can be checked and found to work against records. Now, we must agree that all dogs have descended from a wolf. Perhaps you disagree, and believe that all dogs have descended from a dog, but wolves are a separate kind. Why, then, can dogs and wolves create hybrids? Besides, the same two methods that help us identify the relatedness of dog breeds indicate that dogs and wolves have a common ancestor that was a wolf. The ancestral wolf sibling whose descendants would eventually be dogs would not have looked any different from its sibling whose descendants would continue to be wolves. This dog-ancestor wolf, most likely, would have been a little friendlier than its sibling towards humans, giving it an advantage in being able to get food from humans. This would have given it some success, and it would have passed on this trait to its descendant, and eventually a whole separate population of tamer wolves was created, which eventually evolved into dogs. Both doglike wolves and wolf-like dogs are found in the fossil record, and this ancestry is also indicated by DNA evidence. Hence, we must agree that dogs and wolves have a common ancestor.
However, the problem does not stop at wolves. Consider the following phylogenetic tree. (See below.)
Just as there are morphological (physical features) and genetic similarities between the grey wolf and the dog, indicating a common ancestry, there are genetic and morphological similarities between the grey wolf, the red wolf and the coyote. The ancestral dog would have looked closer to the grey wolf than the grey wolf does to coyotes and red wolves. Why then does the dog look fairly different now? To answer this, we must go back to the explanation of how when a population is split and has a new environment to adapt to, it changes quickly at a population level in order to survive and thrive. While the ancestral dog had this change in environment, coyotes and grey wolves and red wolves do not. They continue to look quite similar to each other while there is a full continuum of dog breeds that range from wolflike huskies to tiny chihuahuas.
The grey wolf, the coyote, the red wolf and the dog thus have a common ancestor, as indicated by the very same methods of morphology and genetics. By this principle, we cannot stop even here. Wolves, dogs and coyotes have morphological and genetic similarities to foxes and the African wild dog. It is also true that wolves, dogs and coyotes are more closely related to each other than they are to foxes and African wild dogs. Yet, similarities exist between these wolves and foxes (to simplify). Even from a common sense perspective, you can see the similarities between a dog and a fox. It should not be too hard to imagine: when you can concede that a chihuahua and a german shepherd have a common ancestor when they look very different from each other, it should not be hard to see the similarities between dogs/wolves and foxes, which are albeit much further relatives.
Before proceeding, it must be noted how precise genetic tests are. They are invaluable to criminal law, and for many other purposes. They can tell, with great precision, how related two individuals are. This, as it stands to reason, is something we can test against family records. Thus, we know genetic testing to be accurate. Your DNA also reveals what your ancestral populations are, and in what proportion. If you commit a crime and your DNA is found, your DNA doesn’t need to be in a registry for you to be caught. It is possible to narrow down the possible suspects merely by looking at how much similarity there is to known DNA sequences, as you inevitably have similarities to other humans based on the distance of relatedness to them. Thus, it is possible to know who the criminal is more related to than who, making it possible to quickly narrow down the list of suspects. As we have seen, DNA is also useful for charting the evolutionary history of dogs. Sometimes, even when morphology is deceptive, DNA tells the story. When can morphology be deceptive? As we have already seen, when a population splits off and has to adapt to new surroundings, it can lead to quick and dramatic changes. When such change happens for a prolonged period, there are larger differences when compared to related species than otherwise. Yet, while morphology may deceive us sometimes when this is the case, DNA does not fail to reveal degrees of relatedness.
Going back to wolves, foxes, dogs, coyotes and African wild dogs, by the standards established so far, it must be conceded that they too have a common ancestor. Perhaps, you might think, the ancestor of all these animals — a dog/fox/wolf like creature with some features of each, would have been the animal that was present on Noah’s ark. Like previously, we cannot draw the line there. This creature has yet more relatives.
Now here is an even wider phylogenetic tree:
This one just adds a few more species of foxes that are a little more distantly related to the animals already explored, and fills in a few more animals that are fairly closely related. The dhole and the jackal, for example, are a little more related to wolves and dogs than foxes.
As you may predict by now, the nested hierarchy of similarities do not end here. Here is another phylogenetic-tree/cladogram that represents all the animals explored so far as “Canidae”:
As expected, the similarities and differences vary according to the degree of relatedness. Given that this is a very zoomed out phylogenetic tree, the relatedness may be a little harder to imagine with mere common sense. Bears, as it can be seen, are related to dog-like carnivores (Canidae). This becomes a little easier to picture when the extinct Hemicyonidae (present in the diagram), a group of carnivorans that are often called dog-bears, is considered. If we were to zoom into the phylogenetic tree from here, we would see that the common ancestor of bears, dog-bears, dogs and the other creatures covered in the diagram, the first Caniformian can be seen to diverge into each of these types of creatures in a slow process at various stages.
Just to explore the connection between cats and dogs, let us look deeper into the clade ‘Feliformia,’ which includes a number of animals that have similarities to cats:
In the above chart, Felidae represents all cats. Let us zoom into this clade and look at the various types of cats we are familiar with, including the house cat:
Thus, it is now possible to imagine a large phylogenetic tree with many branches which branch off into even more twigs, one twig of which is a dog, and another of which is the house cat.
Let us now go back to the chart depicting the descendants of the clade Carnivora. While it may be possible to visualize otters, weasels, red pandas and badgers as being related to each other (they all belong to the clade musteloidea), it may be hard to reconcile with pinnipeds (seals, walruses, etc) being related to bears and otters. Some record of the evolutionary process of this dramatic divergence has in fact been found, such as fossils of the following:
Although you may concede that it is possible that an animal may gain an advantage by developing some bodily changes, such as being able to live in water or being able to fly, you may object that it would not be possible to have such dramatic changes with a slow, evolutionary process. What use is half a wing, you may ask, or half a flipper. In the slow process of turning a leg into a flipper, it needed to be the case that every step of the way needed to be advantageous for the animal. In the intermediate stage, you may argue, the animal would be well-adapted to neither water nor land. However, it is not hard to imagine why this is not true and we have the fossil record for it. We can also see how animals with webbed feet, like otters, effectively have something in between feet and flippers. Similarly, many different kinds of animals have appendages used to glide — half a wing? It is also not hard to imagine that these features may have initially served another purpose, just like the wings of an ostrich are used for maintaining balance whereas at some point in its ancestry it would have been able to fly.
To take another example, let us look at the evolution of whales from land-dwelling mammals. Here are diagrams of a few intermediary fossils that have been found:
Indohyus was not the ancestor of whales, but was almost certainly its cousin. But if we go back 4 million more years, to 52 million years ago, we see what might well be that ancestor. It is a fossil skull from a wolf-sized creature called Pakicetus, which is a bit more whalelike than Indohyus, having simpler teeth and whalelike ears. Pakicetus still looked nothing like a modern whale, so if you had been around to see it, you wouldn’t have guessed that it or its close relatives would give rise to a dramatic evolutionary radiation. Then follows, in rapid order, a series of fossils that become more and more aquatic with time. At 50 million years ago there is the remarkable Ambulocetus (literally, “walking whale”), with an elongated skull and reduced but still robust limbs, limbs that still ended in hooves that reveal its ancestry. It probably spent most of its time in shallow water, and would have waddled awkwardly on land, much like a seal. Rodhocetus (47 million years ago) is even more aquatic. Its nostrils have moved somewhat backward, and it has a more elongated skull. With stout extensions on the backbone to anchor its tail muscles, Rodhocetus must have been a good swimmer, but was handicapped on land by its small pelvis and hindlimbs. The creature certainly spent most if not all of its time at sea. Finally, at 40 million years ago, we find the fossils Basilosaurus and Dorudon — clearly fully aquatic mammals, with short necks and blowholes atop the skull. They could not have spent any time on land, for their pelvis and hindlimbs were reduced (the fifty-foot Dorudon had legs only two feet long) and were unconnected to the rest of the skeleton. This is a process that took 10 million years, which is relatively fast on an evolutionary timescale. Again, note that when any two adjacent relative specimens that are closely related are considered, you may concede that they may be from the same “kind.” However, there is a continuum between each of them, making it impossible to distinguish kinds. This is the case with the entire animal kingdom and the plant kingdom, each creature being related to every other.
When scientists examine the similarities and differences between creatures, they do not use only their common sense. It is an extremely systematic and detailed process, and it reveals the common ancestry and relatedness of all animals based on the degrees of similarity. For example, humans are classified the way that they are because they fall into the following cladistic characteristics (explained later); each of the terms used has a detailed definition that I have not included: Eumetazoa — all animals more advanced than sponges, Bilateria (triploblast animals) — animals that are at some stage of development bilaterally symmetrical, Coelomata — bilaterally symmetrical animals with a tubular internal digestive cavity, Deuterostomia — coelomates in which early development of the digestive tract begins with a blastopore where the anal orifice opens before the oral one, Chordata — deuterostomes with a spinal cord, Craniata — chordates with a brain enclosed inside a skull, Vertebrata — craniates with a spinal vertebrae descending from the skull, Gnathostomata — vertebrates with a jawbone, Osteichthyes — bony vertebrates, Sarcopterygii — bony vertebrates that have both lungs and legs, Stegocephalians — limbed vertebrates with digits on the ends of their appendages, Tetrapoda — gill-less stegocephalians that are skeletally adapted for four limbs, Anthracosauria — pendadactyl and postaquatic (or “terrestrial”), Amniota — dry-skinned tetrapods that develop in amniotic fluid and that have keratinized digits (claws, fingernails, hooves), Synapsidae — amniotes with a single temporal fenestra, Cynodonta — therapsids with canine teeth, Theria (mammals) — endothermic (warm-blooded) therapsids with lactal glands, Euarchontoglires — placental mammals with modern but still-generalized skeletal features, Archonta — placental mammals with fully enclosed optical orbits and binocular vision, Primata (primates) — hind-leg dominant archontids with opposable thumbs, Haplorhini — “dry-nosed” primates, Anthropoidea — also known as Simiiformes, also known as monkeys, Catarrhini — Old World monkeys, Hominoidea (apes) — Old World monkeys capable of brachiation, Hominidae — great apes, Hominini — exclusively bipedal humanish apes and Homo (man) — bipedal human-apes with enormous brains. The further one goes down this list, the less humans would have in common with other animals and vice versa — the higher one goes in this list, the higher the number of animals that have all those features in common.
Unlike this systematic classification, the created kinds that are claimed by creationists to be unrelated to each other are not defined with any clarity and have no basis in fact whatsoever, despite my attempts to find them. Rather, they seem to be based on childlike logic: “a dog is a dog,” “a cat is a cat.” Carl Linnaeus was an 18th century Christian scientist who created a powerful system of classifying animals and plants. Linnaeus lived a century before Darwin and had no concept of evolution. He believed that all life had been created by God, but his classification scheme failed to indicate any created “kinds.” Instead, every species he classified also belonged to a series of parent categories, all of which included sister sets and each with their own descendant groups full of other things apart from the ones he was trying to classify. He initially organized organisms by genus and species, but found that he had to create a collection of higher ranks too (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, etc.), because everything was in some way connected to everything else. It’s as if he was trying to fit everything into separate boxes of unique creations, but each of his boxes looked more like a set of Russian matryoshka dolls because they all indicated a nested hierarchy for reasons he couldn’t explain. This didn’t make sense from a creationist’s perspective. When he classified plants, he found the same kind of nested hierarchy.
When genes could be sequenced, it was found that the same nested hierarchy was found in genes as well. This is of extreme significance. Genes are not merely descriptions of a creature, but a set of instructions for the body to create itself from a single cell, and a whole lot of other information that does nothing. Only 5% of the human genome is functional DNA, 10% is structural DNA, and 45% is known to be useless parasitic DNA. The remaining 40% is not yet fully understood by molecular biologists. Not only in the functional DNA but also in the remaining DNA, the expected level of similarity and difference is found in accordance with the nested hierarchy. They are similar in the sense that old mutations — both beneficial and harmful, are found to be present in identical form the more closely related two animals are. There are many examples of mutations that a creature underwent being passed on to its descendants, in which it remains in an inactivated or modified form as that change would presently play no purpose or would serve a different purpose. Humans, for example, have disabled genes (but they are present) for tail growth. Rarely, this gene is expressed in infants and the tail has to be surgically removed.
Humans have multiple defective monkey genes (or ape genes, doesn’t matter how you word it, all monkeys including apes have them). We humans posses the exact same gene that codes for an enzyme that synthesizes vitamin c (enzymes are proteins). All monkeys and apes have this gene and in the exact same spot, humans included. The difference is that our gene is disabled. We have a gene for Vitamin C synthesis, but it does not work. Thus we must directly consume vitC-rich foods in order to get it. Other apes can synthesize vitC the way humans and other primates and many other animals can synthesize vitD from the sun. Another defective monkey gene is MYH16. It’s a gene that is present in all other primates that codes for a protein called myosin which is responsible for creating powerful cranial and jaw muscles. These muscles are what gives primates their strong bite force. We, humans, have among the weakest bite force per body mass of all primates. Why? Because this gene, although it is present in the human genome at the same spot as in other primates, is too disabled in our genome. Our broken monkey gene means we don’t have a powerful bite force. Genes for fur-like body hair are found disabled, as are genes for processing uric acid. In birds, there is a disabled gene for growing teeth. This gene, when enabled artificially, results in the bird growing teeth at the embryonic stage. If each kind of animal was created separately, why do they have inactivated genes in the exact places where we would expect to find them if they were descended from ancestors common to other species? There is no possible explanation other than evolution, because the alternative is deliberately deceptive creation.
If each kind of animal was created separately, it was not necessary for the nested hierarchy in Linnaean classification to be reflected exactly in the nested hierarchy found in the DNA of all animals. Each living creature would not have had a record of mutations that happened in faraway ancestors which are held in common by every descendant creature from that point on but absent in creatures that do not have common ancestry subsequent to the mutation.
This is a video of what is called the phylogenetic challenge with pictures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Agmt_xHuG7Q (Bite Sized: Phylogeny Challenge — YouTube).
Take the challenge yourself, and see if you can distinguish created kinds from the nested hierarchy that would have to be contended with.
To stress this point about created kinds being impossible to make out one last time: try this. Take any two animals and look up what the last common ancestor is claimed to be. Then make a sequential link of all available fossils leading up to that common ancestor from both animals. Now, ask yourself if every set of two adjacent fossils in that chain is the same kind. If A and B are the same kind, B and C are the same kind, C and D are the same kind, then A and D will also have to be the same kind. What you end up with is the conclusion that every animal is the same kind. No theory other than common descent is consistent with this, unless animals were created in such a way that we cannot differentiate them into separate categories if all of them, including extinct animals, were viewed at once. The continuum of similarity and gradual change, again, is not superficial and limited to similar appearance. Each fossil in this continuum will also have been found to have the expected age such that it is consistent with evolution, as we shall see. There are other pieces of evidence too that this document will cover that make evolution the only possible evolution — if it is false, then it would mean that many things about the world were created in a compellingly and deliberately deceptive way.
The following is an expansive phylogenetic tree:
OneZoom: All life (https://www.onezoom.org/life.html/@biota=93302?vis=polytomy&img=best_any&anim=flight#x454,y1315,w2.7696)
Creationists argue that mutations are almost always harmful for the animal, and that information is only “lost” as copies are made of copies of genes. This is not true, and like every other claim in this document, this can be verified. Firstly, at the genetic level, this is untrue — mutations that are beneficial, harmful or neutral can all happen by deletions, disablements, additions and changes in the genetic code — how exactly does one define “new information” then? Secondly, there have been many observations and experiments showing “new information” arising. In an experiment by Lenski, 12 populations of e.coli bacteria were bred. After 31,500 generations, one of the populations generated the ability to metabolize citrate, which was a nutrient in the culture medium used that normally cannot be used by e.coli bacteria. This was because of two successive mutations, one of which had happened at around the 20,000th generation but had no effect on citrate metabolism. Is this not new information, and does this not show how random mutations spread across tens of thousands of generations can, by chance, provide a survival advantage? Another example if a strain of bacteria that developed the ability to hydrolize nylon, a polymer substance invented in 1935. Nothing which has ever existed before it was similar. The enzymes developed for this purpose would not work on any other substance whatsoever. After this was observed, the same development of the ability to eat nylon was replicated in a lab, removing any doubt that the mutation was not already present before there was a benefit to be had by digesting nylon. It was a different mutation this time, however, which enabled the same outcome. In yet another example, it was theorized that evolution from single celled life to multicellular life was caused by selective pressure from predation. To test this, an experiment was conducted. A single celled algae called Chlamydomonas reinhardtii was observed to develop into multicellular life when subjected to a predator called Paramecium tetraurelia in just 50 weeks. Is this not new information? Is this not macro-evolution, even at the undefined “kinds” level?
Beneficial mutations can be observed in humans too. 10% of Europeans have one that gives them a resistance to AIDS. A family in Connecticut has a mutation with hyperdense, virtually unbreakable bones, and there were no side effects or downsides observed for these individuals. Tibetans living in high altitudes since many generations have genes that provide for greater blood oxygen saturation, allowing them to deal with the altitude better.
The evolution of life is analogous to the evolution of language. For example, there are several languages based on the Roman alphabet, which in English has only twenty-six letters. Yet by arranging these in different orders, we’ve added several hundred thousand words to English since the fifth century, and many of them were completely new. It is estimated that there were originally 50,000 to 60,000 words in Olde English and nearly a million words now! The principle is the same in genetics. There are millions of named and classified species of life, all of them based on a variable arrangement of only four chemical components. These are adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. For ease of documentation, these are abbreviated to their first initial, so that when geneticists “read” DNA, it appears as codons of three letters: AGC TTC GAG CTA, and so on. We know that Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese all evolved from Latin, a vernacular that is now extinct. Each of these newer tongues emerged via a slow accumulation of their own unique lingo, occasionally acquiring new slang, abbreviations, or terms adopted from other sources. These are analogous to mutations. Thus, the original Latin diverged into new dialects and eventually distinct forms of language such that the new Romans could no longer effectively communicate with either Parisians or Spaniards. In sexually reproductive species, speciation is determined when two members of the same genus no longer interbreed or can no longer produce viable young. The longer two groups are isolated, the more mutations build up between them and the less chance they have of producing fertile offspring. There will come a time when they can only produce infertile hybrids, and then when they can’t produce anything at all. This would be analogous to two cultures having increasingly distinct dialects until they reach a point that they can’t understand each other anymore. Similarly, if we took an original Latin-speaking population and divided them, with one group sequestered in complete isolation over several centuries, they might still be able to understand each other, though their independently derived local jargon will most likely be unintelligible to all foreigners, including other Latin-language speakers. They each may develop a new Latin-based language, but they won’t start speaking Italian or Romanian because identical vocabularies aren’t going to independently come up twice.
Most evolution is defined by cladogenesis, where one ancestral type branches into multiple others. In this case, Latin would not have to be extinct before French, Spanish, and Romanian could have developed around it. This happens when groups of people are isolated long enough that unique differences filter into one or both cultures over time and are not still sharing the same cultural influences/genetic material. However, some evolution is defined by anagenesis, where an ancestor is completely replaced by a descendant. In this analogy, that would be Latin slowly becoming Italian. In this case, of course, Latin does go extinct, and the next generations weren’t even aware of it.
Importantly, notice that there was never a first person to speak Italian. There was never a time when there were Latin speakers and one guy speaking Italian, nor were there ever old Latin people living among young Italians. The old fogies may not understand the kids today, but they can still communicate when they have to. Using the analogy of language is the best way I know to get people to understand how evolution is a gradual change — and one that happens on the population level, not on the level of individuals. The individuals wouldn’t even notice what is going on. The same situation is true in biological evolution. There is never the “first” member of any species. Understanding the analogy and what it teaches about very gradual change and about cladogenesis and anagenesis would help answer uninformed questions like, “if apes evolved into humans, why are chimpanzees still around?” (they only have a common ancestor, and they are both still evolving like any other creature) and “if one animal evolves into another, why do we not find a croco-duck?” (the evolutionary ancestral linkages are not random; crocodiles or ducks did not turn into each other but they have a faraway common reptilian ancestor, and it is possible to look at the fossil record for the slow divergence into many species that include these two). When an animal evolves, it can only build on top of what is already there — every clade group will have certain features in common, and the more recent the clade, the more the species within that clade will have in common. A clade is a group of organisms believed to comprise all the evolutionary descendants of a common ancestor. A few paragraphs ago, I listed the clades that humans fall into. From each of those levels, no descendant species could escape the changes it had accumulated thus far. No matter how much an animal changed, it would remain a member of all its preceding clades. Genesis 1:24, which says “And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so” is accurate. A cow will always give birth to a cow. No matter how much it changes over a long period, it will still have cow features. Similarly, cows are descended from a creature in the bovine clade called aurochs. These were descended from a creature in the clade Bovidae, which are descended from the clade Pecora, which are descended from the clade Ruminantia, which are descended from Cetruminantia, which are descended from Artiofacula, which are descended from Artiodactyla, etc. Cows are still Artiodactyla, Artiofacula, Certuminantia, Ruminantia, Bovidae and Bovines. Each of these clades only brought forth “after their own kind.” There were only minor modifications with each generation, never enough to put the next generation into another “kind.” In the following picture, at what point did blue become green, or green become yellow? It is the same way.
Due to animals having undergone morphological changes, many animals have remnants of parts that would have played a greater role in the past but now plays little or no role. For example, one whale in five hundred is actually born with a rear leg that protrudes outside the body wall. These limbs show all degrees of refinement, with many of them clearly containing the major leg bones of terrestrial mammals-the femur, tibia, and fibula. Some even have feet and toes! This comes from the reexpression of genes that were functional in ancestors but were silenced by natural selection when they were no longer needed. Yet these dormant genes can sometimes be reawakened when something goes awry in development (similar to how humans are rarely born with tails). Whales still contain some genetic information for making legs, and that information is there because whales descended from fourlegged ancestors. Cetaceans (whales, dolphins, etc) are the only group to lose their fingernails entirely, which the fossil record shows were once hooved. However, they still have all five fingers concealed in their flippers. Sea cows and manatees even have fingernails still visibly present on their flippers. Fossils of snakes reveal they once had complete legs with five toes, each with claws on them, where only a few pythons still have any vestigial claws now, and they’re only present on males. The “thumb” toe on dogs has been reduced to a useless dewclaw. Horses lost all but the middle finger, where the fossil record shows they had more once upon a time. Emus do not have wings but have extremely tiny useless arms. An emu’s arm is a spindly scrawny stem of a thing, with only one finger that ends in a claw. The claw is a perfectly bladed crescent-shaped talon just like it should be, but it is attached to an arm that has no musculature at all; the only way an emu’s arms move is by gently expanding and retracting with its ribs as it breathes because the arms are completely atrophied, so that claw is inarguably without any possible function.
Evolution is, in fact, the only working theory of biodiversity. Many more things in biology are explained best by it. The length of the laryngeal nerve — the nerve that connects the brain to the larynx, is one example. The nerve’s route would have been direct in the fish-like ancestors of modern tetrapods, traveling from the brain, past the heart, to the gills (as it does in modern fish). Over the course of evolution, as the neck extended and the heart became lower in the body, the laryngeal nerve was caught on the wrong side of the heart. Natural selection gradually lengthened the nerve by tiny increments to accommodate, resulting in the circuitous route now observed. The extreme detour of the recurrent laryngeal nerves, about 4.6 metres (15 ft) in the case of giraffes, is further evidence of evolution. The huge detour is best explained by evolution because it is a gradual, incremental process. For the route taken by the nerve to be corrected to a more efficient one, a big change would have been necessary and the mutation for the same would have been improbable. This creates an overall disadvantage — in giraffes the entire nerve is vulnerable due to its long neck and in humans, impacts to the chest can damage this nerve which serves the purpose of connecting the brain and the larynx which is in the throat! A designer making independent kinds would not have been constrained by such a step-by-step process which could only be deviated from very gradually, and could have corrected it immediately. Other facts, too, find their best explanation in evolution. Camouflage arises when random mutations creating new patterns and colours provide a survival advantage. Over time, the entire population is likely to have that mutation. This has been shown in experiments as well as observed in the wild.
Another phenomenon best explained by evolution is the competition between species in each biome. Predator and prey populations are constantly evolving in ways to increase their chance of survival, effectively creating an arms race. One small newt called Taricha granulosa, for example, is poisonous enough to kill an elephant. Why? Because its natural enemy, the garter snake, has kept building resistance to its TTX poison. When there is competition between species, there is an economic calculation that is reflected in how each of the species develop with respect to the challenges faced by them in order to maximize energy and survival. This selective pressure is balanced against sexual selection, i.e., features that would give individuals within a species a sexual advantage but not necessarily a survival advantage. This economic calculation which will have an evolutionary reflection is dependent on which biome the process occurred in. This is illustrated by the following example: Asian giant hornets are extremely efficient killers. Japanese honeybees, which are from the same habitat, have a method of resisting them. Newly introduced European honeybees, however, did not — each individual hornet could kill 40 of them per minute by slicing them to pieces. Many, many such adaptations exist. Given that environments change and creatures are introduced to new environments from time to time, it is necessary that the creatures in each biome keep changing to maintain the ecological balance.
When a species makes it, by sea, wind, tsunami, etc, to some island biome where it suddenly faces no competition, it ends up diverging into a great number of species, each specializing in exploiting one aspect of the biome. Darwin’s finches found on the Galapogos islands — each adapted for a different type of food and habitat, are an example of this. It is when this happened that in Juan Fernández archipelago and St. Helena, that sunflowers radiated into various types, some of which have become small woody trees. Only on oceanic islands can small flowering plants, freed from competition with larger shrubs and trees, evolve into trees themselves. How do we know that this is what happened? In these islands, plants, birds and insects are present but mammals, reptiles, amphibians and freshwater fish are absent. So we know this is what happened, because only the types of creatures that are present there can arrive at such an island from long distances!
Now, I will briefly move on to show that life is not 6,000 years old before coming back to more pieces of evidence for evolution. Creationists object when a fossil is described as being millions of years old. In truth, the twin nested hierarchy described so far already indicates a much more ancient time frame (the molecular clock is a technique that uses the mutation rate of biomolecules to deduce the time in prehistory when two or more life forms diverged). Let us persist, however, and see how a large number of dating methods all confirm each other.
Dendrochronology: you can calculate the age of a newly felled tree by counting rings in its trunk, assuming that the outermost ring represents the present. Rings represent differential growth in different seasons of the year — winter or summer, dry season or wet season — and they are especially pronounced at high latitudes, where there is a strong difference between seasons. Just as the existence of rings signifies seasonal cycles of rich and poor growth, so some years are better than others, because the weather varies from year to year: there are droughts that retard growth, and bumper years that accelerate it; there are cold years and hot years, even years of freak El Niños or Krakatoa-type catastrophes. Good years, from the tree’s point of view, produce wider rings than bad years. And the pattern of wide and narrow rings in any one region, caused by a particular trademark sequence of good years and bad years, is sufficiently characteristic — a fingerprint that labels the exact years in which the rings were laid down — to be recognizable from tree to tree.
Dendrochronologists measure rings on recent trees, where the exact date of every ring is known by counting backwards from the year in which the tree is known to have been felled. From these measurements, they construct a reference collection of ring patterns, to which you can compare the ring patterns of an archaeological sample of wood whose date you want to know. All very well, but not many of today’s trees were alive hundreds of years ago, let alone in the stone age or beyond. There are some trees — bristlecone pines, some giant redwoods — that live for millennia, but most trees used for timber are felled when they are younger than a century or so. How, then, do we build up the reference collection of rings for more ancient times? For times so distant that not even the oldest surviving bristlecone pine goes back that far? I think you’ve already guessed the answer. Overlaps. A strong rope may be 100 yards long, yet no single fibre within it reaches more than a fraction of that total. To use the overlap principle in dendrochronology, you take the reference fingerprint patterns whose date is known from modern trees. Then you identify a fingerprint from the old rings of modern trees and seek the same fingerprint from the younger rings of long-dead trees. Then you look at the fingerprints from the older rings of those same long-dead trees, and look for the same pattern in the younger rings of even older trees. And so on. You can chain your way back, theoretically for millions of years using petrified forests, although in practice dendrochronology is only used on archaeological timescales over about 11,500 years into the past. This is because we don’t have an unbroken chain in the reference collection of rings.
Radioactive Clocks: Some isotopes are stable, others unstable. ‘Unstable’ means that the atoms spontaneously decay into something else, at a predictable rate, though not at predictable moments. The predictability of the rate of decay is the key to all radiometric clocks. Another word for ‘unstable’ is ‘radioactive’. There are several kinds of radioactive decay, which offer possibilities for useful clocks. Every unstable or radioactive isotope decays at its own characteristic rate which is precisely known. Moreover, some of these rates are vastly slower than others. In all cases the decay is exponential. Exponential means that if you start with, say, 100 grams of a radioactive isotope, it is not the case that a fixed amount, say 10 grams, turns into another element in a given time. Rather, a fixed proportion of whatever is left turns into the second element. The favoured measure of decay rate is the ‘half-life’. The half-life of a radioactive isotope is the time taken for half of its atoms to decay.
The half-life of rubidium-87 is 49 billion years. Carbon-14’s half-life of 5,730 years is just right for dating on the archaeological timescale. An isotope much used on the evolutionary timescale is potassium-40, with its half-life of 1.26 billion years. Potassium-40, over time turns into Argon. By studying the ratio of the two elements in an igneous rock, one can deduce its age.
Only igneous rocks provide radioactive clocks, but fossils are almost never found in igneous rock. Fossils are formed in sedimentary rocks like limestone and sandstone, which are not solidified lava and cannot be dated by radioactivity. Corpses that are trapped in the mud have a chance of fossilizing when the mud turns into sedimentary rock. Even though only a small proportion of corpses actually do fossilize, sedimentary rocks are the only rocks that contain any fossils worth speaking of. Fossils found in sedimentary rock, therefore, are dated using igneous rocks found in that layer of sedimentary rock. Recognizably similar layers of sedimentary rock occur all over the world. Long before radioactive dating was discovered, these layers had been identified and given names: names like Cambrian, Ordovician, Devonian, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene. They are recognizably similar to each other, and they contain similar lists of fossils. Geologists have long known the order in which these named sediments were laid down. It’s just that, before the advent of radioactive clocks, we didn’t know when they were laid down. We could arrange them in order because — obviously — older sediments tend to lie beneath younger sediments.
We can then look at the fossils in successively younger strata, to see whether they constitute a sensible evolutionary sequence when compared with each other in sequence. Do they progress in a sensible direction? Do certain kinds of fossils, for example mammals, appear only after a given date, never before? The answer to all such questions is yes. Always yes. No exceptions. That is powerful evidence for evolution.
It is a fact that literally nothing that you could remotely call a mammal has ever been found in Devonian rock or in any older stratum. They are not just statistically rarer in Devonian than in later rocks. They literally never occur in rocks older than a certain date. But this didn’t have to be so. It could have been the case that, as we dug down lower and lower from the Devonian, through the Silurian and then even older, through the Ordovician, we suddenly found that the Cambrian era — older than any of them — teemed with mammals. At any moment somebody might dig up a mammal in Cambrian rocks, and the theory of evolution would be instantly blown apart if they did. However, this has not happened. Creationists must answer why the sequence of fossils found in the geological record match with what is predicted in evolutionary theory, filling up gaps in the phylogenetic tree and the fossils themselves being of creatures with features that are often predicted to be found by evolutionary theory.
Creationists claim that the sedimentary layers of the earth were created in a single year during Noah’s flood. However, this contradicts the scientific consensus in geology, stratigraphy, geophysics, physics, paleontology, biology, anthropology, and archaeology. The global flood cannot explain geological formations such as angular unconformities, where sedimentary rocks have been tilted and eroded then more sedimentary layers deposited on top, needing long periods of time for these processes. There is also the time needed for the erosion of valleys in sedimentary rock mountains. In another example, the flood, had it occurred, should also have produced large-scale effects spread throughout the entire world. Erosion should be evenly distributed, yet the levels of erosion in, for example, the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountains differ significantly. If there was a 9 km high flood, it would have been identified in the geological record without a doubt. Geological evidence of five separate mass extinction events have been identified, in addition to minor extinction events and various catastrophic events of which there is a historical record. In fact, geological records of many separate large floods can be identified, but there is no indication of a global flood. Creationists unfortunately do not understand how far advanced the study of geology and plate tectonics is, and how much these fields are corroborated by findings in other fields. One common error is to attribute to Noah’s flood anything that has been caused by any flood at any pre-historical period.
Multiple dating methods all point to the Earth as a whole being about 4.54 billion years old, and that the strata that, according to flood geology, were laid down during the Flood some 6,000 years ago, were actually deposited gradually over many millions of years. Further, the entire geologic column is found in several places, and shows multiple features, including evidence of erosion and burrowing through older layers, which are inexplicable on a short timescale. Carbonate hardgrounds and the fossils associated with them show that the so-called flood sediments include evidence of long hiatuses in deposition that are not consistent with flood dynamics or timing. One could go on and on about evidence of there not having been a global flood (there is, however, historical evidence of a local flood). Contrary to creationist claims, the geological column and the sequence found in the fossil record have been independently verified many times, and may be observed by those who wish to investigate the matter themselves.
Here are a few of the isotopes that are used as radioactive clocks:
At present, the applicable isotopes all agree with each other in placing the origin of the Earth at between four and five billion years ago, and support the theory that sedimentary layers were formed over millions of years, in which are deposited the fossil record. And they do so on the assumption that their half-lives have always been the same as we can measure today — as the known laws of physics, indeed, strongly suggest they should. Creationists would have to fiddle the half-lives of all the isotopes in their separate proportions, so that they all end up agreeing that the Earth began 6,000 years ago. If the earth is no older that 6,000 years, why do each of these dating methods agree with each other? All this, without even mentioning other dating methods like fission track dating, varve dating and ice core dating.
Creationists suggest that we cannot be sure that the decay rates may not actually have been constant. However, since the different radioisotopes in a rock decay in different ways, they wouldn’t give consistent dates if decay rates changed. Moreover, the half-lives of isotopes don’t change when scientists subject them to extreme temperatures and pressures in the laboratory. And when radiometric dates can be checked against dates from the historical record, as with the carbon-14 method, they invariably agree.
There are yet other ways to check the accuracy of radiometric dating. One of them uses biology, and involved an ingenious study of fossil corals by John Wells of Cornell University. Radioisotope dating showed that these corals lived during the Devonian period, about 380 million years ago. But Wells could also find out when these corals lived simply by looking closely at them. He made use of the fact that the friction produced by tides gradually slows the earth’s rotation over time. Each day — one revolution of the earth-is a tiny bit longer than the last one. Not that you would notice: to be precise, the length of a day increases by about two seconds every 100,000 years. Since the duration of a year — the time it takes the earth to circle the sun — doesn’t change over time, this means that the number of days per year must be decreasing over time. From the known rate of slowing, Wells calculated that when his corals were alive — 380 million years ago if the radiometric dating was correct — each year would have contained about 396 days, each 22 hours long. If there was some way that the fossils themselves could tell how long each day was when they were alive, we could check whether that length matched up with the 22 hours predicted from radiometric dating. But corals can do this, for as they grow they record in their bodies how many days they experience each year. Living corals produce both daily and annual growth rings. In fossil specimens, we can see how many daily rings separate each annual one: that is, how many days were included in each year when that coral was alive. Knowing the rate of tidal slowing, we can cross check the “tidal” age against the “radiometric” age. Counting rings in his Devonian corals, Wells found that they experienced about 400 days per year, which means that each day was 21.9 hours long. That’s only a tiny deviation from the predicted 22 hours. This clever biological calibration gives us additional confidence in the accuracy of radiometric dating.
Let us now look at one prediction based on a combination of dating methods, what is known about evolutionary history and what is known about plate tectonics. The earliest marsupial fossils, around 80 million years old, are found not in Australia but in North America. As marsupials evolved, they spread southward, reaching what is now the tip of South America about 40 million years ago. Marsupials made it to Australia roughly 10 million years later, where they began diversifying into the two-hundred-odd species that live there today. But how could they cross the South Atlantic? The answer is that it didn’t yet exist. At the time of the marsupial invasion, South America and Australia were joined as part of the southern supercontinent of Gondwana. This landmass had already begun to break apart, unzipping to form the Atlantic Ocean, but the tip of South America was still connected to what is now Antarctica, which in turn was connected to what is now Australia. Since marsupials had to go overland from South America to Australia, they must have passed through Antarctica. So we can predict this: there should be fossil marsupials on Antarctica dating somewhere between 30 and 40 million years ago.
This hypothesis was strong enough to drive scientists to Antarctica, looking for marsupial fossils. And, sure enough, they found them: more than a dozen species of marsupials (recognized by their distinctive teeth and jaws) unearthed on Seymour Island, off the Antarctic Peninsula. This area is right on the ancient ice-free pathway between South America and Antarctica. And the fossils were just the expected age: 35 to 40 million years old. After a find in 1982, the polar paleontologist William Zinsmeister was exultant: “For years and years people thought marsupials had to be there. This ties together all the suppositions made about Antarctica. The things we found are what you’d expect we would have.”
Let us look at another prediction that came true. One of the greatest fulfilled predictions of evolutionary biology is the discovery, in 2004, of a transitional form between fish and amphibians. This is the fossil species Tiktaalik roseae, which tells us a lot about how vertebrates came to live on the land. Its discovery is a stunning vindication of the theory of evolution. Until about 390 million years ago, the only vertebrates were fish. But, 30 million years later, we find creatures that are clearly tetrapods: four-footed vertebrates that walked on land. These early tetrapods were like modern amphibians in several ways: they had flat heads and bodies, a distinct neck, and well-developed legs and limb girdles. Yet they also show strong links with earlier fishes, particularly the group known as “lobe-finned fishes,” so called because of their large bony fins that enabled them to prop themselves up on the bottom of shallow lakes or streams. The fishlike structures of early tetrapods include scales, limb bones, and head bones. How did early fish evolve to survive on land? This was the question that interestedthe scientist Neil Shubin. Neil had spent years studying the evolution of limbs from fins, and was driven to understand the earliest stages of that evolution. This is where the prediction comes in. If there were lobe-finned fishes but no terrestrial vertebrates 390 million years ago, and clearly terrestrial vertebrates 360 million years ago, where would you expect to find the transitional forms? Somewhere in between. Following this logic, Shubin predicted that if transitional forms existed, their fossils would be found in strata around 375 million years old. Moreover, the rocks would have to be from freshwater rather than marine sediments, because late lobe-finned fish and early amphibians both lived in fresh water. Searching his college geology textbook for a map of exposed freshwater sediments of the right age, Shubin and his colleagues zeroed in on a paleontologically unexplored region of the Canadian Arctic: Ellesmere Island, which sits in the Arctic Ocean north of Canada. And after five long years of fruitless and expensive searching, they finally found a group of fossil skeletons stacked one atop another in sedimentary rock from an ancient stream. The fossil was named Tiktaalik roseae. Tiktaalik has features that make it a direct link between the earlier lobe- finned fish and the later amphibians, and it is of the expected age. With gills, scales, and fins, it was clearly a fish that lived its life in water. But it also has amphibianlike features. For one thing, its head is flattened like that of a salamander, with the eyes and nostrils on top rather than on the sides of the skull. This suggests that it lived in shallow water and could peer, and probably breathe, above the surface. The fins had become more robust, allowing the animal to flex itself upward to help survey its surroundings. And, like the early amphibians, Tiktaalik has a neck. Fish don’t have necks — their skull joins directly to their shoulders. Most important, Tiktaalik has two novel traits that were to prove useful in helping its descendants invade the land. The first is a set of sturdy ribs that helped the animal pump air into its lungs and move oxygen from its gills (Tiktaalik could breathe both ways). And instead of the many tiny bones in the fins of lobe-finned fish, Tiktaalik had fewer and sturdier bones in the limbs — bones similar in number and position to those of every land creature that came later, including ourselves. In fact, its limbs are best described as part fin, part leg. Clearly Tiktaalik was well adapted to live and crawl about in shallow waters, peek above the surface, and breathe air. Given its structure, we can envision the next, critical evolutionary step, which probably involved a novel behavior. A few of Tiktaalik’s descendants were bold enough to venture out of the water on their sturdy fin-limbs, perhaps to make their way to another stream (as the bizarre mudskipper fish of the tropics does today), to avoid predators, or perhaps to find food among the many giant insects that had already evolved. If there were advantages to venturing onto land, natural selection could mold those explorers from fish into amphibians. That first small step ashore proved a great leap for vertebrate-kind, ultimately leading to the evolution of every land-dwelling creature with a backbone.
The picture shows an early lobe-finned fish (Eusthenopteron foordi) from about 385 million years ago; a land-dwelling tetrapod (Acanthostega gunnari) from Greenland, about 365 million years ago; and the transitional form, Tiktaalik roseae, from Ellesmere Island, about 375 million years ago. The intermediacy of Tiktaalik’s body form is mirrored by the intermediacy of its limbs, which have a bone structure in between that of the sturdy fins of the lobe-finned fish and the even sturdier walking limbs of the tetrapod. Shaded bones are those that evolved into the arm bones of modern mammals: the bone with darkest shading will become our humerus, and the medium- and light-shaded bones will become the radius and ulna, respectively.
Let us look at yet another prediction — one of the oldest evolutionary predictions, by Charles Darwin himself. He predicted that if his theory was true, there should be a bird found in the fossil record with unfused wing fingers. His prediction was vindicated just a couple years later when they found the first Archaeopteryx. This creature had some features that were dinosaurian and some which were avian.
Subsequently, other fossils were found filling the gap between dinosaur and bird evolution.
The theropods that gave rise to birds, as you can see, belong to a much larger set of theropod dinosaurs:
Now, let us look at human evolution. Creationists often claim that there are “missing links” in the evolution from an ape-like creature to human beings. This term, however, had a basis in reality only for a short period of time, as many, many fossils were found afterwards which show the transition. Here is a summary of the fossil record, which may already be slightly outdated:
Darwin, in fact, predicted that apes that were ancestral to humans would be found in Africa. This was based on the logic that “in each great region of the world the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region. It is, therefore, probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; and as these two species are now man’s nearest allies, it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere.” This prediction turned out to be true, and confirmed by the fossil record as well as the study of mitochondrial DNA by 1980.
All apes including humans have many features in common. Among modern apes, however, non-human apes all resemble one another far more than they resemble humans. Gorillas are our distant cousins, and yet they share with chimps features like relatively small brains, hairiness, knuckle-walking, and large, pointed canine teeth. Gorillas and chimps also have a “rectangular dental arcade”: when viewed from above, the bottom row of their teeth looks like three sides of a rectangle. Humans have diverged in several regards with respect to the general design of apes: we have uniquely flexible thumbs, very little hair, smaller and blunter canine teeth, and we walk erect. Our tooth row is not rectangular, but parabolic. Most striking, we have a much larger brain than any ape: the adult chimp’s brain has a volume of about 450 cubic centimetres, that of a modern human about 1,450 cubic centimetres. When we compare the similarities of chimps, gorillas, and orangutans to the divergent features of humans, we can conclude that, relative to our common ancestor, we have changed more than have modern apes.
Around five to seven million years ago, then, we expect to find fossil ancestors having traits shared by chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas (these traits are shared because they were present in the common ancestor), but with some human features too. As the fossils become more and more recent, we should see brains getting relatively larger, canine teeth becoming smaller, the tooth row becoming less rectangular and more curved, and the posture becoming more erect. And this is exactly what we see. But first a few caveats. We don’t (and can’t expect to) have a continuous fossil record of human ancestry. Instead, we see a tangled bush of many different species. Most of them went extinct without leaving descendants, and only one genetic lineage threaded its way through time to become modern humans. We’re not yet sure which fossil species lie along that particular thread, and which were evolutionary dead ends. The most surprising thing we’ve learned about our history is that we’ve had many close evolutionary cousins who died out without leaving descendants. It’s even possible that as many as four humanlike species lived in Africa at the same time, and maybe in the same place.
Now, let us turn to a famous objection to the theory of evolution — that structures like the eye are so intricate that it could not have come up through a gradual process — “what use is half an eye?” The fact is, however, that the process of the eye’s evolution is well-understood. Simpler forms of the eye can be seen in species which branched off at various times in the past. This shows us the sequence in which the eye evolved, as we can observe a gradation of eyes going from the simplest to ones as complex as ours. We can also observe the different directions in which other species’ eyes have evolved, and at what point they diverged from the process that created our own eyes. Eyes only keep getting better as long as each incremental step provides a survival advantage. Hawks have far better eyes than us as they depend on their eyes to a great extent. On the other hand, some animals which went underground lost their eyesight as they did not need it anymore.
A possible sequence of such changes begins with simple eyespots made of light-sensitive pigment, as seen in flatworms. The skin then folds in, forming a cup that protects the eyespot and allows it to better localize the light source. Limpets have eyes like this. In the chambered nautilus, we see a further narrowing of the cup’s opening to produce an improved image, and in ragworms the cup is capped by a transparent cover to protect the opening. In abalones, part of the fluid in the eye has coagulated to form a lens, which helps focus light, and in many species, such as mammals, nearby muscles have been co-opted to move the lens and vary its focus. The evolution of a retina, an optic nerve, and so on follows by natural selection. Each step of this hypothetical transitional “series” confers increased adaptation on its possessor, because it enables the eye to gather more light or form better images, both of which aid survival and reproduction. And each step of this process is feasible because it is seen in the eyes of a different living species. At the end of the sequence we have the camera eye, whose adaptive evolution seems impossibly complex. But the complexity of the final eye can be broken down into a series of small, adaptive steps. Yet we can do even better than just stringing together eyes of existing species in an adaptive sequence. We can, starting with a simple precursor, actually model the evolution of the eye and see whether selection can turn that precursor into a more complex eye in a reasonable amount of time. Dan-Eric Nilsson and Susanne Pelger of Lund University in Sweden made such a mathematical model, starting with a patch of light-sensitive cells backed by a pigment layer (a retina). They then allowed the tissues around this structure to deform themselves randomly, limiting the amount of change to only 1 percent of size or thickness at each step. To mimic natural selection, the model accepted only “mutations” that improved the visual acuity, and rejected those that degraded it. Within an amazingly short time, the model yielded a complex eye, going through stages similar to the real-animal series described above. The eye folded inward to form a cup, the cup became capped with a transparent surface, and the interior of the cup gelled to form not only a lens, but a lens with dimensions that produced the best possible image. Beginning with a flatwormlike eyespot, then, the model produced something like the complex eye of vertebrates, all through a series of tiny adaptive steps — 1,829 of them, to be exact.
Finally, let us look at how natural selection operates on a molecular level. A cell is a versatile chemical factory, capable of spewing out massive quantities of a wide variety of different substances, the choice being made by which enzyme is present. And how is that choice made? By which gene is turned on. Just as the cell is a vat filled with lots of chemicals, only a minority of which react with each other, so every cell nucleus contains the entire genome, but with only a minority of genes turned on. When a gene is turned on in, say, a cell of the pancreas, its sequence of code letters directly determines the sequence of amino acids in a protein; and the sequence of amino acids determines the shape into which the protein folds itself; and the shape into which the protein folds itself determines the precisely shaped sockets that marry up substances drifting around in the cell. Every cell, with very few exceptions such as red blood corpuscles, which lack a nucleus, contains the genes for making all the enzymes. But in any one cell, only a few genes will be turned on at any one time. In, say, thyroid cells, the genes that make the right enzymes for catalysing the manufacture of thyroid hormone are turned on. And correspondingly, the same thing happens for all the different kinds of cells. Finally, the chemical reactions that go on in a cell determine the way that cell is shaped and the way it behaves, and the way it participates in, interactions with other cells, which lead to various types of cellular reorganization like layering, invagination and hardening. So the whole course of embryonic development is controlled, via an intricate sequence of events, by genes. It is genes which determine sequences of amino acids, which determine tertiary structures of proteins, which determine the socket-like shapes of active sites, which determine cell chemistry, which determine ‘starling-like’ cell behaviour in embryonic development. “Starling-like” refers to how flocks of starling birds fly in complex patterns that look extremely coordinated as if they were planned, but is rather the result of each bird operating according to particular rules with respect to surrounding birds. Cells, similarly, operate in a bottom-up fashion wherein many cells following local rules create complex emergent phenomena. So, differences in genes can, at the originating end of the complex chain of events, cause differences in the way embryos develop, and hence differences in the form and behaviour of adults. The survival and reproductive success of those adults then feeds back on the survival in the gene pool of the genes that made the difference between success and failure. Thus, through an unconscious biological process operating at many levels, new species arise. And that is natural selection.
This concludes the explanation and presentation of evidence for evolution. I do not believe it to be possible to view all the pieces of evidence presented so far simultaneously and to say that they can also be interpreted to support the 6-day creation sequence. In fact, there is not one fact that could have been consistent with only creationism, whereas there are many facts that are consistent only with evolution, and all that evidence put together makes it undeniable, even undebatable. The fact that all of life on earth uses DNA as a method to encode genes, and the fact that we do not perfectly know how life first arose may be evidence for a creator, and the fact that we do not know how the laws of the universe came about also may be evidence for a creator. One may say that the laws of the universe were determined to result in life on earth, and for the marvelous evolutionary process to take place. Let us now move on finally and briefly, to how the matter ought to be considered.
Here is a Martin Luther quote:
“There is on earth among all dangers no more dangerous thing than a richly endowed and adroit reason, especially if she enters into spiritual matters which concern the soul and God. For it is more possible to teach an ass to read than to blind such a reason and lead it right; for reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Whosoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason. Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees it must put out of sight, and wish to know nothing but the word of God. Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but — more frequently than not — struggles against the divine word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.”
And another:
“Everyone who by faith slays reason, the world’s biggest monster, renders God a real service, a better service than the religions of all races and all the drudgery of meritorious monks can render. Do not consult that Quackdoctor, Reason.”
I hope the reader finds this, as I do, a contemptible way to view the matter. If we adhered to this view strictly, we would still believe in a flat earth and heliocentrism. Unfortunately, as I discovered too late, creation science apologists had the same view, although they are not honest about it. As a creationist, I had believed that the literalist interpretation of the creation passages advanced by the young-earth creationists was also backed up by a body of intellectually honest science. Intellectual honesty is honesty in the acquisition, analysis, and transmission of ideas. I have found creation science apologists to be intellectually dishonest.
Ken Ham says, “We need to be looking at the world through our biblical glasses. We have a revelation from one who says, “I know everything; I’ve always been there. Here’s what happened in the past.” So when we take that revelation, put on our set of glasses, and we look at the evidence, we can say, “Aah now I understand! Fossils couldn’t have formed before sin. There was no death before sin. There was a global flood. That connects to geology. God made distinct kinds of animals and plants. That connects to biology.” And so on.” Even here, he has decided the conclusion based on his interpretation before even beginning to engage in any science. That is lawyering, not science — rationalization, not reasoning.
In science — and there are many Christian scientists, there is a willingness to change one’s mind — perhaps not always at the individual level, but at the institutional level. There is fame and honour to be had by proving the existing orthodoxy wrong, which ensures that every claim is independently verified, every logical proposition questioned. This system is admirable because it pursues the truth and encodes a type of epistemic humility. Not so with creation science institutions, which, having already determined that they have interpreted the Bible correctly, announce beforehand that they refuse to be reasoned with:
“By definition, no apparent, perceived, or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record.”
— Answersingenesis.org, which requires those joining the organization to submit a signed statement of faith committing themselves to particular doctrinal beliefs
“[V]erbal inspiration guarantees that these writings, as originally and miraculously given, are infallible and completely authoritative on all matters with which they deal, free from error of any sort, scientific [sic] and historical as well as moral and theological.”
— Institute for Creation Research
“The final guide to the interpretation of the Bible is the Bible itself. God’s world must always agree with God’s Word, because the Creator of the one is the Author of the other. Thus, where physical evidences from the creation may be used to confirm the Bible, these evidences must never be used to correct or interpret the Bible. The written Word must take priority in the event of any apparent conflict.”
— Mark Ramsey’s Greater Houston Creation Association
These statements are quite revealing. They are admissions that the interpretations that they place their faith on do not hold true in the real world, or at least admissions that they may not hold true. If there is any apparent untruth in their beliefs that is clearly visible to any intelligent person, I suppose they must believe it to be some type of “maya.” It is the sort of blind faith that any Christian would ridicule if he saw it in a Muslim or a Hindu.
The intellectual dishonestly of these creation science apologists does not stop with their methodology. Countless hoaxes have been perpetrated in service of creation science, some of them being fake archaeological finds like depictions of dinosaurs or human footprints alongside dinosaurs (they are all demonstrably fake). They lie often and selectively admit scientific evidence, and anybody who researches their claims honestly will come to the same conclusion. They do not do science in any sense of the term, they only advance a single hypothesis after presupposing its veracity.
Kent Hovind, owner of a fake doctorate, a convicted felon for tax fraud (I do not mind tax evasion, but one has to be honest about it) and husband to three wives, is a great example of extreme intellectual dishonesty. His seminars, in fact, are so riddled with lies that every single sentence would have to be examined under a microscope. I have seen him being corrected again and again on specific points, but yet refuse to correct himself like any decent person would. By employing the gish gallop, he dances around questions to fool uninformed listeners (here is one example in which it doesn’t work due to his opponent being familiar with his tactics, completely exposing Kent’s poor argumentation — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEKltaQ5HlA ). Creation science apologists have gained a reputation for dishonesty around the world, and it should not come as a surprise that the term “gish gallop” used earlier is named after a creationist debater named Duane Gish, meaning “a rhetorical technique in which a debater attempts to overwhelm an opponent by excessive number of arguments, without regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments.”
The worst contribution of creation science apologists, by far, even worse than dishonest arguments and hoaxes, is their material aimed at children. Countless children are inundated against a proper understanding of many scientific fields because they are taught to disbelieve anything that conflicts with a particular version of young earth creationism. In one Answersingenesis CD called “Dinosaurs, Genesis and the Gospel,” Ken Ham goes so far as to deceive children using a fake magic trick (while pretending it is real) showing a “fire-breathing lizard” that he allegedly discovered spitting out a huge flame, in support of his argument that dinosaurs were fire-breathing dragons that lived alongside humans.
Finally, let us look at a quote from a Christian scientist named Theodosius Dobzhansky who authored an essay titled “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution” (1973):
“Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology. Only if symbols are construed to mean what they are not intended to mean can there arise imaginary, insoluble conflicts…. the blunder leads to blasphemy: the Creator is accused of systematic deceitfulness.”
Credits
This article is meant to be used for reference purposes. I have borrowed heavily from authors like Jerry A. Coyne, Richard Dawkins and Aron Ra, a PBS article, Wikipedia and a number of other sources for the presentation of the evidence. I have, however, fact-checked every claim made to my satisfaction.