We Won’t Even Say We Told You So

Advances in the study of genetics continue to raise uncomfortable questions about the credibility of Darwinian evolutionary theory, requiring ever-more-elaborate pseudo-scientific fantasies about the origin of species and, as usual, reminding Christians that the wisdom of this world is folly with God and “He catches the wise in their craftiness.”

It appears Darwin’s religion requires more faith than ever.

The link for this gem of an article comes courtesy Christian Daily Reporter’s Adam Ford. Phys.org reports on the unexpected results of a joint study by Rockefeller University’s Mark Stoeckle and University of Basel’s David Thaler of five million gene “snapshots” of 100,000 animal species submitted by researchers around the world.

Surprising Conclusions

Several of the study’s conclusions fly in the face of textbook biology:

1. Contrary to expectations, species with large, far-flung populations do not become more genetically diverse over time.
2. Genetically speaking, ninety percent of animal life is roughly the same age, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 years old. In other words, animals emerged about the same time as humans.
3. Species have very clear genetic boundaries, and there’s nothing much in between.

Number two was the real fly in the ointment, as you might imagine. The money quote from David Thaler:

“This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could.”

Understandably, since it’s a spectacularly unlikely thing to have occurred by coincidence.

Mass Extinction Events and Species Boundaries

The current conventional wisdom holds that the last major mass extinction event was 65.5 million years ago, making the simultaneous emergence of so many species awfully difficult to explain from an evolutionary perspective. On the other hand, neither a vastly more recent mass extinction event than previously contemplated nor the study’s other conclusions pose problems for creationists, leaving only the timeline as a bone of contention — and even that is potentially only out now by a single order of magnitude.

And numbers one and three accord with scripture precisely:

“And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind.”

The language may be archaic and not particularly technical, but that sounds an awful lot like species boundaries to me.

I for one would be delighted to welcome a few of the many Christian accommodationists out there back into the creationist camp. I promise, we won’t even say we told you so.