Evidence for biblical creation: The stasis of kinds

People have asked me, “What is the evidence for biblical creation?” That's a difficult question because there is often a misunderstanding about what “evidence” is. Evidence is neutral – that is, it isn't truly for any theory. Rather, theories are invented in order to explain the evidence. A theory might seem to explain the evidence rather well but then later, the theory could still be rejected in favor of a new theory. As theories come and go, the evidence is always the same. The universe just keeps chugging along like it always has and nothing has changed except the theory.

After having said that evidence isn't really for any theory, I still feel there are some things better explained by biblical creation than by secular theories. I'm not saying secular theories have no explanation for any of things things (well, I guess in some cases they don't), but that biblical creation has the most reasonable explanation and, so, is more likely the correct explanation. I'm not going to make a series of posts with the best evidence, but will make this a recurring topic that I post from time to time, with similar headings. You can find all the posts related to this topic by clicking on “Evidence for creation” in the label cloud on the left.

The Stasis of Kinds

The Bible says God created the plants and animals “after their kind” (Genesis 1:24, et al). If I use these verses as a guide, a kind would be defined as a group of creatures originally created by God that would reproduce creatures similar to themselves and would include all of the various species that are descended from the original group. Think bears for a moment: a hypothetical ursa-kind might include polar bears, grizzly bears, black bears, panda bears, and sun bears. However, the bear-kind would never give rise to something like a cow because there are traits that cows possess that bears don't – like a divided stomach. Evolution, on the other hand, proposes that creatures have changed from one kind to another, as in dinosaurs becoming birds.

For evolution to be possible, populations would have to acquire novel traits. To turn a dinosaur into a bird, it would have to gain feathers. To turn a reptile into a mammal, it would have to acquire hair. For a molecule to turn into a man, it would require a billions of years long parade of novel features being added generation after generation. If evolution were true, new traits would have to appear in populations with a fair amount of frequency. They don't.

One of the lies spoken by evolutionists is that microevolution over time leads to macroevolution. The most famous example of microevolution, by far, is the peppered moth. Due to changes in the environment, the ratio of dark and light coloring in the moth population changed over time. The lie is that the tiny changes (microevolution) we observe can accumulate over “millions of years” to become drastic changes (macroevolution).

Let me ask you a simple question: If there are light moths and dark moths in a population, how long would birds have to eat one color of moth before new colors would begin to appear? You don't have to think about it too long because the answer is fairly obvious; you cannot add new colors by continuously removing colors no matter how long it continuous. In the end, you will only have fewer colors. In the 100+ years since the peppered moth experiment was first published, there has been no accumulation of small changes. There have only been back and forth changes in the ratio of light and dark moths amounting to a net change of zero! The peppered moth study is literally a textbook example of natural selection but in the century since it was first observed, there has not even been microevolution in the peppered moth species!

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Let me offer another example – dogs. Most people are familiar with dogs. We see dogs in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and colors. Pretend I owned a golden retriever but I wanted a green retriever. Could I selectively breed dogs to create a green one? What if I did it for 50 years? 100 years? 1,000,000 years? Dogs may come in a lot of colors but they don't come in new colors. Though there are a variety of dogs, they can never evolve past becoming dogs because nothing new is ever added to the dog-kind.

The limitation of natural selection is that can only select from traits already present in the population. If I should release a motley pack of dogs into a new environment, natural selection would immediately begin her work. The dogs that lacked the instinct or ability to hunt would quickly starve. The ones with coats that camouflage well would find it easier to sneak up on prey. Simply put, the dogs with traits best suited to environment will tend to live longer and have more pups; those with unsuitable traits will tend to die sooner and leave fewer pups. Over many generations, the most successful traits will be inherited more often, and the pups will begin to look alike. At that point, we might even call that population a new species. However, there will still be only those traits that were already present in the first generation. Nothing new has been added.

I've seen a hundred instances of critics calling natural selection, “evolution.” Natural selection is the opposite of evolution. Over time, natural selection can make animals well adapted to their environments but it is only accomplished by continuously removing traits not suited to that environment. The result is a species that is less diverse than the kind. There is a lot of variety among dogs. There is less diversity among golden retrievers. We can understand how a wolf could become a dog. That doesn't explain how a fish could become a frog!

Evolutionists suggest that mutations could add new traits to a population. I intend to write about that on another post but I'll say now that we don't have any examples of it actually happening. If evolution were true, trait adding mutations should occur frequently. Why don't we see any? What we do observe are bears staying bears, moths staying moths, and dogs staying dogs. We see changes happening, but we've never seen a change in the direction that could turn one kind of animal into another. What we observe is more consistent with the Bible than with evolution.