This is perhaps one of the most dumbfounding, absurd proposed evidences against evolution that I have ever encountered. Supposedly creationists do not accept evolution but at the same time they do accept it, but they do not realize, or maybe they straight out deny, that it is indeed evolution. Micro-evolution (which is a misnomer because it is simply short term evolution) covers two changes that creationists accept: variation and speciation. However what they do not seem to understand is that these two occurrences are not evidence against evolution. People like Kent Hovind and Ken Ham have so misconstrued these concepts as to be either willingly ignorant are blatantly dishonest, putting their fingers in their ears and singing while the scientific education boards attempt in vain to explain to them what these processes are.
Before I progress in correcting this erroneous view of evolution, we need to learn what it is that creationist believe micro-evolution is. Essentially we start off with God creating a number of ‘kinds’ of animals. A kind of fish, a kind of snake, a kind of bird, a kind of horse, a kind of dog etc. Then we have a bit of actual science for once (albeit tainted by the pseudo-scientific ‘flood geology’). Variations begin to appear within these animals, causing visible changes of the few thousand years since they were created. This leads to the millions of species we see today. However all of these animals, though now not interbreeding and being considered different species, are still labeled as members of the same ‘kinds’. The so called creations ‘scientists’ will say “well yes they have been changing over time, but all these varieties of dogs are still dogs, bird species are all still birds. We have never observed one kind of animal evolve into another kind of animal. This is micro-evolution.” Now, what they are telling us would be true, if they were not blinded by their myth that the earth is less than ten thousand years old. They are dismissing the evidence that the world is billions of years old and saying that “within the past six to ten thousand years all the changes in these animals has never produced a new kind of animal.” Creationists are being blindly daft and perhaps purposefully limiting evolution to a period of six thousand years. It’s no wonder we are asked time and again why we don’t observe kind to kind evolution occurring. First they need to clear out the insanely dishonest idea of young earth creationism before we can begin to educate them on evolution. More on this later.
Now on to speciation. The reason I mention speciation is that over and over evolutionists are told that there is no evidence for species to species evolution. But this is simply a misunderstanding of what the term species means. In very simple terms a species is any individual group of animals that cannot interbreed with another group. Speciation occurs when this group of animals is internally separated and variations as mentioned above begin to occur within the two separate groups. Over time these variations accumulate to the point that the two groups now have distinct characteristics and the gene-pools are no longer able to mix and produce offspring. Creationists then take the same paint to speciation and say “but look, they are still the same kind of animal.” Well of course they are, you are limiting variation to a period of millennia, what do you expect to see?
The geological records gives us billions of years of speciation or so called micro-evolution to work with. If the creationist claim that variation and speciation do not lead to the development of new kinds were true, we should expect to find ‘kinds’ of dogs coexisting with ‘kinds’ of dinosaurs within the same geological strata. However we do not see the modern kinds, or even their ten thousand year old representatives existing in Jurassic or Pliocene stone. This tells us that the modern kinds MUST have developed through millions of years of speciation, and we have the fossil and genetic evidence to confirm that they did.
Now, I have dealt with this in a previous chapter, but again I must address the claim that there are no transitional fossils, because after watching a video debate featuring Kent Hovind I was astounded by the stupidity of what he was suggesting. Supposedly an acceptable piece of evidence for evolution would be a fossil showing one kind evolving into another kind. No, not evolving over millions of years of subtle changes into another kind. But literally a freeze-frame of an animal, Pokémon style, undergoing over the period of its life a metamorphoses into another species. Well for once creationists are right when they say that evolution doesn’t happen. We do not live in a Pokémon world in which animals change into different forms over the duration of one generation. This misunderstanding is ridiculous. In Thunderf00t’s words, “Why do people laugh at creationists? Only creationists don’t know why.”
Slightly less absurd is the idea that evolution occurs when one species gives birth to another species in one generation. Creationists reject every transitional fossil by claiming that it is a fully formed animal. Now of course it is. A transitional form is not a half metamorphosis between one kind and another. It is an animal exhibiting traits that belong to an extinct species and a living species, supported by further fossils showing traits slowly changing generation by generation away from the ancestor and towards what we see in the modern animal. This is also supported by genetic evidence showing that the modern animal is a descendant of the ancient animal, just as we can do with bone remains of humans when confirming ancestry.
To summarize this chapter, we start off with animals exhibiting changes in appearances over time. This is variation. Then these animals become more and more distinct to the point that they cannot interbreed, and are thus considered new species. This is speciation. It is also an example of evolution whether creationists like it or not. We are held up at this point because they jump on the train and say that regardless of all of this ‘microevolution’ these animals are still the same ‘kinds’ of animals. The problem here is that they stamp the earth with a production date of 4000 BC, thereby not allowing enough time to see major evolutionary change. But when shown fossil evidence of a kind of animal developing the traits and appearance of a different kind of animal over an immensely large time frame, they stamp it with the same production date and place it in the same 6000 year period as its descendants and ancestors. Of course we can see that the evolutionary change needed to go from fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal, and all other branches of development, cannot have occurred in the Biblically time frame, and there is born the claim that evolution is false.
So before we can begin to properly educate creationists on the evidence for evolution, we need to remove from their eyes the misconception that the world is less than ten thousand years old, and the pseudo-science of flood geology. Once they understand the evidence for the age of the earth, we can begin to show them how micro-evolution that we observe today has been happening for billions of years and that all of this micro-evolution has accumulated and has the power, given the immense time, to change a reptile into a bird, an apelike creature into a man and a fish into an amphibian.
No comments:
Post a Comment