What They Don’t Tell You About Evolution

Gerald McKibben

(This article was originally published in the Commercial Dispatch, Columbus, MS, February 6, 2006)

I once was a tadpole long and thin,

Then I was a frog with tail tucked in;

                                      Next I was a monkey swinging from a tree;                                    

Now I’m a doctor with a PhD!

-- The Evolutionist’s Refrain

(Anonymous)

Well, I don’t buy that at all.  But from all the bombardment we receive on the subject from our government, museums, schoolbooks, Hollywood, and the secular media, you would think that they had proved evolutionary theory as fact.  The reason the polls show that more than 50% of people surveyed don’t believe in evolution, in spite of all the propagandizing, is a testament to the extremely shaky foundations on which the theory is built.

Brainwashing the public

There is a major push this year to try to further brainwash the public; the National Field Museum in Chicago, for example, according to the Chicago Tribune, has added a $17 million “Evolving Planet” exhibit scheduled to open in March. The New York Times reported that an evolution exhibit funded by the National Science Foundation will go on long-term display in six museums across the country. Makes you wonder, if there is creditable evidence for evolution, why they have to go to so much trouble to convince us of it? The whole effort has a ring of religious fervor to it.

Statements are frequently made that science and religion are separate spheres, and that religion has no place in the public school system. Many have been deceived into believing that religion has been removed for public schools; to the contrary, a Biblically-based religion has been replaced by atheistic humanism. If you tell school children that they are really nothing more than rearranged pond scum, they will tend to act accordingly.

The much talked-about “fossil record” obviously fits the Biblical account of the creation and subsequent flood much better than it does the millions-of-years theory of Darwinism. Anyone who believes, as I once did, that the fossil record points to evolution should read Duane Gish’s book The Fossils Say No. And Darwin himself wondered why, “if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is all nature not in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?”

The Bible states that God made all the animals as distinct kinds. He created them with a tremendous amount of genetic variability, as a survival mechanism. Species differentiated from the basic kinds, and it was a creationist named Edward Blythe who first introduced the concept of natural selection 25 years before Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species in 1859. Darwin failed to give Blythe credit for this key element in his theory.

Creationists have no problem with basic kinds of animals undergoing genetic changes as a reaction to selective pressure, a parallel to which is plant and animal breeding. But it is worth noting that in these small genetic shifts information is lost; nothing new is added to the genome of the organisms. As a Plant Breeder friend once remarked, “We just rearrange the genetic material that is already there”. But for “higher” forms to evolve from “lower” ones, an increase in the genetic information must take place. You can start with a majestic dog breed and eventually, after selecting for certain traits over many generations, end up with Chihuahuas. But you cannot breed Chihuahuas and get back to the original dog; too much genetic information has been lost. And never in a billion years will a population of dogs change into cats.

Fewer than in Darwin’s time

The situation with respect to transitional forms in the fossil record is not any better today than it was 150 years ago: David Raup, Geology Curator at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, wrote “The record of evolution is surprisingly jerky, and ironically, we have fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time.”

I collect Biology textbooks, and quite a few contain the infamous horse evolution series, which purports to show transitional forms demonstrating the evolution of the horse from small, horse-like animals. But Niles Eldredge, Curator of the American Museum of Natural History, admitted in an interview that the horse exhibit in the AMNH was largely fictional, and that it is “lamentable” that pictures of it have found their way into many school books as if it were fact.

An “Embryonic Liar”

Another fictional presentation in most of these books are the drawings of embryos by Ernst Haeckel (in 1868)  that propose to show that human and fish embryos are very similar, a fraud exposed in the journals Science, Nature, and Anatomy and Embryology. Apparently he was so determined to convince the public of evolution that he was willing to resort to deceit. The London Times of August 11, 1997 called Haeckel an “Embryonic Liar”. And yet some books, including the World Book Encyclopedia 2000, continue to present the discredited drawings as evidence for evolution. These examples are not isolated ones, but were chosen because of their prominence in Biology textbooks as proof of evolution.

But the real battlefield for the evolution/creationism debate is in conflicting world views. To believe that God created everything implies that He has the right to set the rules, a concept that many refuse to accept, preferring to believe that the universe somehow created itself. This is a position in which I don’t have enough faith to believe.