Creationist Apologetics, part 4

I started a series of post on creationist apologetics in response to Scientific American’s 15 Answer’s to Creationist Nonsense. I have had other important issues to write about in recent weeks, but I continue the series here. SA responses to the orange statements are in blue, and my retorts to this are in black.

Evolution is unscientific, because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created.

This blanket dismissal of evolution ignores important distinctions that divide the field into at least two broad areas: microevolution and macroevolution. Microevolution looks at changes within species over time--changes that may be preludes to speciation, the origin of new species. Macroevolution studies how taxonomic groups above the level of species change. Its evidence draws frequently from the fossil record and DNA comparisons to reconstruct how various organisms may be related.
These days even most creationists acknowledge that microevolution has been upheld by tests in the laboratory (as in studies of cells, plants and fruit flies) and in the field (as in Grant's studies of evolving beak shapes among Galapagos finches). Natural selection and other mechanisms--such as chromosomal changes, symbiosis and hybridization--can drive profound changes in populations over time.

The historical nature of macroevolutionary study involves inference from fossils and DNA rather than direct observation. Yet in the historical sciences (which include astronomy, geology and archaeology, as well as evolutionary biology), hypotheses can still be tested by checking whether they accord with physical evidence and whether they lead to verifiable predictions about future discoveries. For instance, evolution implies that between the earliest-known ancestors of humans (roughly five million years old) and the appearance of anatomically modern humans (about 100,000 years ago), one should find a succession of hominid creatures with features progressively less apelike and more modern, which is indeed what the fossil record shows. But one should not--and does not--find modern human fossils embedded in strata from the Jurassic period (144 million years ago). Evolutionary biology routinely makes predictions far more refined and precise than this, and researchers test them constantly.
Evolution could be disproved in other ways, too. If we could document the spontaneous generation of just one complex life-form from inanimate matter, then at least a few creatures seen in the fossil record might have originated this way. If superintelligent aliens appeared and claimed credit for creating life on earth (or even particular species), the purely evolutionary explanation would be cast in doubt. But no one has yet produced such evidence.

It should be noted that the idea of falsifiability as the defining characteristic of science originated with philosopher Karl Popper in the 1930s. More recent elaborations on his thinking have expanded the narrowest interpretation of his principle precisely because it would eliminate too many branches of clearly scientific endeavor.

The evolutionists are the ones who fail to make the distinction between microevolution and macroevolution. Whenever a creationist asks for proof that evolution is happening today, they always point to things like the Galapagos finches or peppered moths. These examples do not contradict Scripture. Whenever they are asked why you can’t see macroevolution happening today, they say it is a slow process. But “punctuated equilibrium” is invoked as a counter-argument against the lack of fossil evidence. (In other words, macroevolution happens just fast enough that real fossil evidence is very hard to find, but just slow enough that you can’t quantify contemporary macroevolutionary progress. How convenient for the evolutionist!) I have already exposed the hoax of the alleged missing links between ape and man.

As far as not finding modern human fossils in certain layers goes, this is an even bigger hoax. There is no such thing as the Geologic Column. Nowhere can you find even half of its layers in one place! If a “modern” human fossil were found in the Jurassic layer, the evolutionists could simply reclassify it as a more recent layer (so much for the falsification principle). It is not unreasonable to assume that dinosaurs could have spread out faster in the beginning and lived for many years in places where there were no humans. Evolutionists ignore evidences that humans and dinosaurs were contemporary such as cave drawings, human artifacts found with dinosaur bones, and footprints of man and dinosaurs together. There are many other examples of where fossils are out of place and contradict the evolutionary model.

Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve.

Speciation is probably fairly rare and in many cases might take centuries. Furthermore, recognizing a new species during a formative stage can be difficult, because biologists sometimes disagree about how best to define a species. The most widely used definition, Mayr's Biological Species Concept, recognizes a species as a distinct community of reproductively isolated populations--sets of organisms that normally do not or cannot breed outside their community. In practice, this standard can be difficult to apply to organisms isolated by distance or terrain or to plants (and, of course, fossils do not breed). Biologists therefore usually use organisms' physical and behavioral traits as clues to their species membership.
Nevertheless, the scientific literature does contain reports of apparent speciation events in plants, insects and worms. In most of these experiments, researchers subjected organisms to various types of selection--for anatomical differences, mating behaviors, habitat preferences and other traits--and found that they had created populations of organisms that did not breed with outsiders. For example, William R. Rice of the University of New Mexico and George W. Salt of the University of California at Davis demonstrated that if they sorted a group of fruit flies by their preference for certain environments and bred those flies separately over 35 generations, the resulting flies would refuse to breed with those from a very different environment.

Yes, speciation does exist, but this does not contradict Scripture because a “Genesis kind” is not necessarily the same thing as a species (which, as they point out, even the establishment can’t agree on the exact definition). All of this is microevolution which does not prove that macroevolution (such as apes to man) takes place.

If macroevolution really took place and is continuing as it always has been, then you should be able see it happening. I claim that it can’t just be a gradual process. Evolutionists claim that a certain chromosome pair fused together somewhere along the line in the evolution of man from apes. A change in chromosome pair number can’t just be a gradual process—it has to happen in one generation. Did the first ape creature that had 23 chromosome pairs find another ape that also had a mutation which was similar enough that an offspring could be produced? Or did it have to happen several times before two with the same (chromosome pair-changing) mutation just happened to become mates? How many times did two with just the right (chromosome pair-changing) mutation mate and produce offspring which died out because the mutation was unfavorable, caused sterility, or just by chance?

There are mutations which can change chromosome number, such as a missing or additional sex chromosome, or other trisomies. But I have never heard of a natural mutation which actually changed the chromosome pair number. If evolutionary mutations occur completely randomly, then one would expect that the more organisms of a particular type exist, the greater the likelihood that such a mutation would be observed in that type of organism. There are 6.7 billion human beings on earth today. Perhaps evolutionary biologists should invest in a matchmaking service which can match people by chromosome pair number. Come on, put your money where your mouth is if you really think it’s true!