Three years ago Ken Ham very publicly promoted what he believes is a biblical model of biological evolution to explain the diversity of life on Earth. However, I have a book before me that provides compelling evidence that his model of evolution is wrong. That book is the Bible.
For those that follow young earth creation literature nothing that Ken Ham said in his debate with Bill Nye was new or surprising but I suspect that most of the national audience was surprised to hear how Ken Ham talked about the origin of species. He talked about a Biblical creation model of the earth’s origins but when it came to the origins of species he might as well have called his view biblical evolution because he believes that every species, except man, is derived from common ancestors.
To illustrate his view of biblical evolution he showed a slide (see below) and explained that on Noah’s ark there were only one pair of the felines, canines and elephants that represented their “kind.” After departing the ark those pairs of animals “diversified” (ie. evolved) into all the feline, canine and elephant species we see today including all of the fossil species that have ever been described.* He showed what biologist would call an evolutionary tree even if all the branches were not connected at the root.
I have written many times about how young earth creationists have increasingly been embracing massive species formation after the Flood. See my YEC Hyper-evolution Archive for links to my articles exploring this topic in more depth. I want to just focus on one point that Bill Nye made but he did not explain particularly well.
Nye pointed out that if there was massive species formation – Ken Ham can call it diversification, genetic sorting or whatever he wants, it is still the creation of new species from an ancestral species – there is a rather obvious prediction of this super-speed Biblical evolution model: Species would have to have been created on a generation by generation basis. To get all the species we see today species would have to have forming at rates that would make any Darwinian evolutionist blush.
Take the finches of which Darwin’s finches are just 10 of 1200+ species! For a single pair of finches to give rise to 1200 distinct species of finches in 4500 years would require near constant species formation. We should expect to witness the evolution of new species of finches right before our eyes. Or at least we should have reports of people who have witnessed brand new species being born. Such reports are lacking but we do have evidence of many finch species that thousands of years ago looked just as they do today.
Animals mentioned in the Bible are the same species we see today!
I have a book before me that provides compelling evidence that Ken Ham’s speculative idea of Biblical evolution is wrong. That book is the Bible. Massive fast-paced evolution has not happened in the recent past. I know this because the Bible refers to, or describes, over 100 animals. In most cases we can be quite certain from the descriptions that these animals represent species that are still around today and look the same today as they did when the biblical authors laid eyes upon them.
The young-earth creation (YEC) model suggests that a pair of canines got off the ark and then changed into many species of foxes, wolves, coyotes, and domestic dogs. If this is the case we should find many intermediates of these living in historical times. We could ask: where are the intermediate animals? Are they mentioned in the Bible? We could even go as far as to say that the YEC has no evidence of this speciation because they haven’t produced any intermediate fossils that represent the missing links between the species we have today.
But what do we find in the scriptures? We find that even in the earliest records, people easily distinguished between foxes, wolves and domestic dogs and probably jackals. We can also go to extra-biblical sources like Egyptian writings and see images of domestic dogs which look like breeds of dogs – which aren’t even full-fledged species – that live in Egypt today. We even have mummies of dogs and other animals that confirm that they are indistinguishable from those we see today. It seems that there is no evidence of speciation here at all but rather fully formed species that have maintained the distinguishing characteristics of their kind since their very first mention in scripture.
What about other animals groups? There are donkeys, mules, and horses in the Old Testament but YECs say none of these were on the ark. Rather, they claim only a pair of something like a generic equine was present. There are bison, buffalo, and other cattle in the OT. There are gazelles, addax, antelope, and deer (see my recent post: Are Ruminants Derived from a Common Ancestor? Ruminating on the Meaning of Noahic Kind). There are domestic cats, lions and probably a cougar. Egyptian writings clearly identify both female and male lions and they had multiple forms of domestic cats. The earliest paleolithic drawings depict lions and other types of cats. So it appears that modern cat species were well established during the earliest biblical times.
The book of Job, which YECs often claim is a very early book recording events right after the Flood, records many animals that are just as we know them today such as the Ostrich (Consider the Ostrich: Job 39 and God’s Commentary on Creation; Consider the Ostrich: Adapted for the Present World Part III). What about camels? Yep, they seem to be just like camels today. Ancient drawings of camels show all the familiar characteristics that are familiar to all of us.
I could go on and on but I think the point is made that the there is no evidence in the Bible that animals have been rapidly morphing from one species into another. In fact the eyewitness evidence derived from the Bible strongly supports the conventional biological understanding that very little change in species have occurred in the past 5000 years. Lions are still lions, leopards are still leopards, tigers are still tigers and so forth.
So why are YECs claiming something for which there is NO biblical support? Because they have a more pressing problem: how to fit all living and recently extinct animals on the ark. By only requiring a pair of each “kind” on the ark they think they have solved that problem. Ken Ham actually mentioned this in his debate. But by making this claim he has created myriad of other problems for his creation model of evolution.
Massive genetic change required to support the biblical evolution model
Ken Ham’s slide that shows the elephant kind is probably the most instructive here. He includes mastodons and mammoths with the living elephants as members of the same kind. So there were only two elephants on the ark that evolved into these elephants but he also needs to include some as many as 150 extinct species of elephants that included many strangely tusked and trunked ones (see my article: A Trunk and Tusk-Challenged Fossil Elephant).
Let’s think about the genetic challenges. Mastodons and modern elephants are thought to have diverged from one another 25 to 30 million years ago. Those dates are based on dating of the fossil record but also on the total amount of genetic divergence seen in the mastodon and modern elephant genomes. To give you some perspective, these species are more than twice as different as humans and gorillas are with respect to their genomes. And yet Ham and his para-church organization are saying that these vast differences in genomes could have been created in just a few hundred years! Wow!
But how? I have seen no plausible genetic models from YEC scientists for how this could have happened. Certainly nothing we know about genetics right now could explain such dramatic changes in such a short period of time. Can modern genetic theories explain that much genetic change in 25 million years. I think it can but that doesn’t help the young-earth hypothesis.
A good critique of the debate on Age of Rocks pointed out (Ham and Nye agree: Ken Ham’s creation model is not scientifically viable) that elephants are especially problematic for the biblical evolution model. This is because elephants have a long generation time. It takes a decade for an elephant to become sexually mature and then they only have a few offspring during their long lives. How could 100+ species of elephants each of which doubtless had millions of individual members have been derived from just two animals only 4500 years ago?
Consider that over 2000 tons of tusks of just one species, the mastodon, have been sold on world markets in the past 50 years. It is estimated that this represents on a tiny fraction of the estimated 140 MILLION tusks still trapped in the Siberian tundra. There are likely millions of mastodon fossils as well and we are not even considering that fact that a majority of mastodons that died would never have been fossilized. Mammoths and mastodons are recorded in very old rock art and so we know they were present long ago and as long as people have seen them they never experienced any significant changes – other than their extinction. So how can Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis claim that the Bible’s prediction of change within a kind is borne out by evidence?
A biblical evolution model that compresses massive amounts of new species formation into a small amount of time is neither supported by the observation evidence gather from the world or the eyewitness testimony presented in the Bible. YECs have proposed biblical evolution solely as an ad hoc theory to help them escape other perceived problems with their flood geology model of Earth’s history.
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*Regarding fossil species: there are many fossils of extinct cats, canines and elephants. Some might wonder if young earth creationists think that these are part of the fossils formed in a global flood. The answer is: not usually. This is because the fossils of theses mammal groups are all found in the upper portion of the fossil record which they consider to be post-flood deposits. That raises a natural question: were there no cats, dogs, elephants, whales, cows, etc.. before the flood? If there were why are there NO fossils of any of them but so many of dinosaurs?
** This article has been updated from one written soon after the Ken Ham/Bill Nye debate in February 2014.
Naturalis Historia 
Great article. Well-explained in easy-to-understand sentences. You have a gift. In the early 1980s I called Univ of Arizona about tree-ring dating. They told me that by matching tree rings from different samples of preserved wood, they could count back 10,000 years. If this is still true, it is a data block on creation earlier than 10,000 years ago (unless God created a young earth that looked like an old earth, which seems deceptive). Have you looked into this, and how do YEC folks rationalize it?
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That tree ring data has been expanded and confirmed quite a few times now. I’ve written about varves which are similar to tree rings and with a similar message here: https://thenaturalhistorian.com/2016/08/16/a-60000-year-varve-record-from-japan-refutes-the-young-earth-interpretation-of-earths-history/
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The tree ring record goes back to 12,500 + years. They raise doubt indicating some trees produce 2 rings per year.
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Tree rings are specifically addressed in this article http://biologos.org/blogs/archive/biblical-and-scientific-shortcomings-of-flood-geology-part-4
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Currently posting this and some other truly great articles on AiG’s Facebook page. All the while getting barraged by YECs. I am hoping ot get the word out in a constructive way.
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So the question is not so much about what is in the Old Testament but is really about whether Answers in Genesis had in 2014 – or have developed since then – a viable model of origins and ongoing biological change. The answer appears to be a resounding ‘no’. Yet at the debate with Nye within his main presentation Ham claimed: “Based on the biblical account, there in Genesis 1, creationists have drawn up what they believe is a creation Orchard [rather than a tree]. In other words, they’re saying, “look– there is a great variation in genetics of dogs, and in finches, and so on, and so over time particularly after Noah’s flood, you would expect that if there were two dogs for instance, you could end up with different species of dogs, possessing an incredible amount of variability In the genes of any creature. And so you would expect these different species up here. But there are limits: dogs will always be dogs and finches will always be finches. Now, as a creationist, I maintain that observational science actually confirms this model. Based on the Bible.” But this ‘model’ arguably contradicts the opening chapters of Genesis – so the implied claim that it must be correct because it is ‘based on the Bible’ is highly unreliable. And when Ham later said “But observational science confirms the creation Orchard, so public school textbooks are rejecting observational science and imposing a naturalistic religion on students” he had just stated that “then they put it all together in this evolutionary tree, but that’s what you don’t observe” so he was really suggesting that because we don’t observe – in real time – the evolutionary tree of life, therefore what we have observed must be his model (‘based on the Bible’) instead.
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Creationists like to talk about what they call “observational science” vs “historical science. ” To them, the only real science is something you observed through your senses and you were present to witness. Hence, Ken Ham’s favorite argument stopper, “We’re you there?” Creationists have a profound skepticism about reason – it is seen as either nonexistent or too corrupt to ever be used for anything. This skepticism is rather a lot like post-modernist skepticism (the only difference I can see is that the post-modernist does not trust anything, including the authority of a certain reading of the Bible).
Some Christians have a worldview that welcomes reason, seeing it as part of what it means to be made in the image of God, seeing using reason as an important God-given vocation (while knowing that we can be mistaken on facts). Others see reason as either meaningless or as a deception to make one doubt Bible literalism. I have noticed that those who are skeptical about reason, be they religious or not, always have a low view of humanity.
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The February 2017 “National Geographic” has a great article on the small cats of the world — all supposedly from a “cat kind” on the Ark, in Ken Ham’s story. Please also see Don Prothero’s new 2017 encyclopedic book on MAMMALS from Mesozoic “time” on — and ask your YEC friends how so many now-extinct forms had to be wasting space and food on the Ark – or how dozens of elephant forms (for instance) had to “diversify” from a “kind” leaving the Ark (to get themselves buried in fossil strata now dated 10 to 20 million years old). See Kipling on
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Sorry – I lost contact going back to ask you to Search: road-song of the bandar-log. Read it (and Kipling’s story as well) for a needful “lift” in dealing with the “noise” of ever-hopeful pseudoscience. Or you can share my “haiku” from years ago: Two blind beggars, walking together, say, “Thank God for this nice, safe ditch!” Ask your YEC friends if, maybe, they’d want TWO “elephant kinds” on the Ark – the teeth of mammoths and mastodons being so very different. Odds are, any public library will have to put Prothero’s book – with many pictures – on its shelves; you could recommend it. GLL
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yes, so many extinct species and so little-public awareness of that diversity. In my biology course I talk about past elephant diversity and students are just shocked that so many other forms of elephants have existed. The typical YEC/AiG follower knows about dinosaurs, wooly mammoths and some animals from the Ice Age movies but if they had any concept of the vast numbers of extinct organisms it would have to make them pause to think about how they all fit into the biblical timeline.
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Not sure if you deal primarily with “mainstream” creationist organizations, but I found this treasure trove a while back and thought you might be interested.
http://www.evidentcreation.com/TRM-Converg.html
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if a robot that is identical to human is evidence for design then why not human if they are identical?
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What, specifically, is the evidence that the robot is designed?
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are we need evidence that a robot is a product of design? we know that nature cant produce robots. so we can conclude that a robot need a designer.
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How are you defining “robot”? I don’t understand the question. Something that was identical to a human would also be a human.
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so what is the different between a human (from materialistic prespective) and a robot with a self replicating system?
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You tell us. You’re the one who brought up robots.
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but you are saying that it will be a human and not robot. so what is the difference that make you decide to call it human and not a robot?
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I still don’t follow. Are you trying to argue that if a person can make an artificial replica of a natural object, then the natural object must also be artificially created? That’s logically false.
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not. i am try to say that a robot need a designer. that is all.
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Which is a tautology, of course. The definition of a robot is that it is an artificial machine.
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so an artificial human is a robot by definition then?
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To: C. E. Trobaugh — Thank you VERY much for link to Brett Miller’s Evident Creation. It’s the most comprehensive, reasoned and informative writing that I’ve ever seen – balanced in covering all bases.
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That said, two minutes later I’m having to ask Miller now why his site would “link” to creationist sites such as ICR AiG CMI where Deulgian pseudoscience is the rot in their apologetic. Who gets it?! Not to mention the mention of John Mackay in Australia doing the same after I sent him and his supporters (2014) in SE Missouri 60 good reasons to oppose Delugian catastrophism. New thought: How can any argue for the Hawaiian Islands being late- or POST-Flood creations of God (thus also Iceland and Yellowstone having to be post-Flood) when Genesis says the “fountains of the deep” (volcanics?) were closed after the first 5 months of the Flood? Sorry if I’m off topic. GLL
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If there was a catastrophic event like a worldwide flood that drastically changed everything about the Earth from topography, to ocean levels, to atmosphere, to the temperature of the earth; to the amount of living organisms alive on the earth…. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that the highest rates of adaptation, diversification, and change among living creatures would have happened within the first thousand years after the flood, and then mellowed out drastically as time went on?
Think about it… Think about how much that first generation of feline would change from those a hundred generations later within that first 1000 years, as they populated different parts of the earth from 1 single starting point… adapting to a wildly different environment then before the flood…. and to wildly changing environtments as the earth replenished itself directly after the flood. That first 1000 years after the flood would have been absolute chaos with the temperature dropping in many parts of the world low enough for an ice age to happen; each animal having offspring from as close a relative as you could possibly imagine; animals roaming large distances in desperate search of food, with generations often living in drastically different environments from the previous generation from migrations from a single starting point.
If there ever was a time for drastic change for all living things on the planet, it was after the flood.
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Sure, there would be higher selection pressure on organsims during times of environmental change. This is observed in the fossil record at times of extinctions. Following extinction, organisms adapted and speciated at much higher rates. Still, even those rates involved hundreds of thousands of years to form species. The biggest problem with the idea of rapid diversification is that it requires a lot of genetic material to work with and the Flood would have represented a severe genetic bottleneck. The result of this bottleneck would have been to limit the ability of the descendants to speciate until they had accumulated more genetic variation through mutations. Even if there were some variation, speciation (isolation of gene pools) would not take place in a few hundred years. Population genetic modeling would show this but just think about how long it has taken to create dog and cat breeds. We have used extreme selection to do that meaning applied a selection coeficient that is far higher than that observed in nature. Even in a changing environment the selection coefficient for most alleles is going to be far to low to result in such quick genetic segregation. Lastly, what usually happens in very fast climate change is that species go extinct, not speciate and adapt. The other thing they do is migrate to suitable habitat not adapt to a new habitat. Generally only long sustained but slow changes in the environment result in adaptations to knew enviroments.
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Want to refute Ken Ham — do a quick Bing search for The Tully Monster of Mazon River, Illinois, and that refutes him really quick. I had laid into Ken Ham on a number of occasions as I refuted Eric Hovind, “Dr.” Kent Hovind and Institute for Creation Research as they’re toilet fishing as I am trying to keep this comment clean as their King James Bible has the words “piss” and “bastard” in there. I had referenced Megalodon in a dark way when I would use young earth allegorical illustrations to create a really grim picture as I would put Megalodon in the water with Noah’s Ark (I got Atheists cracking up at this.)
Sharks predate dinosaurs with their evolution as my readings about shark evolution go back to when I was a kid. Proverbs 18:15 was put into practice when I went to study philosophy in college as I realized evolution stemmed from natural philosophy so when I wrote my first science fiction story I invoked a young earth creationist teacher pitted against an smartass agnostic student. When I laid into Eric Hovind I had invoked a lot of controversy as I went in hard when I laid into him when the heavy metal community (both secular and Christian metal communities were dropping their jaws.)
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