Comments on: The Creation Museum Supports Evolution?

By: Laura

Laura — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:27:53 +0000

Oh, and according to him, it’s what happened to the dinosaurs, too. He said that they didn’t die, they just reduced in size to things like crocodiles. I was going to write about that in my “Ken Ham Believes in Evolution” post, too, but his website says something entirely different now so I didn’t have the sources to back it up.

By: Laura

Laura — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:26:06 +0000

Oh, I remember learning about that at a Ken Ham children’s conference back in 1994 or 95 or sometime around then. He put up a genetic diagram that showed how Adam and Eve had all of the genes necessary for all the races, and that different children were different races. He then went on to say the same was true for the animals in the ark. I am sure that my memory is a bit simplified and maybe a bit wrong as it has been so many years and I was just a kid who had never studied Mendelian genetics, but that is what I remember. I looked for this information so I could write a post about it, but couldn’t find it again and assumed I had remembered it completely wrong until I read this!

By: David D.G.

David D.G. — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:05:53 +0000

Richard Wade wrote:

From Epistaxis, about the word “microevolution”:

I wish you wouldn’t treat that as a real word. Creationists believe in it, but scientists don’t.

It’s similar to a word I’m coining right here, “microconcession.” One microconcession after another, creationists have for the last 500 years or so conceded in tiny steps, in a slow steady retreat in the face of advancing science. First, fossils were fakes, then well, okay they’re real. Then, those animals must still be alive somewhere because God would not allow complete extinction of one of his creations, then well, ok they are extinct. Then, on and on…

One has to wonder why, if their source of knowledge is literally perfect, divinely inspired and eternally unchanging, why they have to keep making these microconcessions until they finally add up to one big, fat macroconcession like “just plain wrong.”

I love it! I’m definitely going to try to remember and apply references to this business of “microconcessions.” :^D

Also, to Epistaxis: The term “microevolution” IS used by scientists and has been in use by them since before creationists started coopting the term. The main problem is that creationists, predictably, misuse and/or abuse the term (e.g., when someone points out a completely new species of bacteria, they claim that this is “only microevolution, because they’re still bacteria, not fish”).

~David D.G.

By: plum grenville

plum grenville — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:58:43 +0000

How do they know it was dog to fox not fox to dog?

By: CatBallou

CatBallou — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:38:32 +0000

Well they could have covered their asses—sorry, equus africanus asinus—by suggesting that there were wolves and foxes on the ark, and that dogs descended from wolves.
It still would have been a ridiculous notion, but genetically it would have been more accurate.
If the Creation Museum adopts that idea, I want credit for it!

By: Stephen P

Stephen P — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:00:59 +0000

Do any creationists define what “kind” means? Does it mean species, genus, what?

Based on how they use the term, it can be determined that they recognise the following ‘kinds’:

1. Humans
2, 3, 4, etc: to be defined.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:20:30 +0000

AronRa has a nice video depicting what the earth was like on the so-called "day of creation" on Sunday, October 23rd, 4004 B.C. I wonder if Mr. Ham has seen it?

By: Richard Wade

Richard Wade — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:18:39 +0000

So if that was the consequence of a bottleneck 10,000 years ago in cheetahs, what would be the consequence of cutting all “kinds” of land animals down to 2, or 7, individuals.

KarateMonkey, you bring up an important point: If all of us are descended from the handful of individuals who survived on the ark just a few thousand years ago, then our mitochondrial DNA would be extremely similar, and we could very easily trace our genomes back to them. However, our genes are more diverse than that. As it actually happened, humanity apparently did squeeze through a bottleneck about 74,000 years ago, when Toba, a super volcano in Sumatra exploded, and the resultant climactic upheaval reduced the fledgling species of homo sapiens down to between 1,000 and 10,000 individuals. We are the descendants of those survivors, and our mitochondrial DNA still carries the "scar."

By: b

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:06:33 +0000

Ahhh, but you see:

Dogs (and wolves) have a genome of 78 chromosomes. The red fox has 34 chromosomes.

This only proves their point that information can be lost but not gained! (So long as you accidentally forget to look at the actual genetic sequences.)

By: KarateMonkey

KarateMonkey — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:02:18 +0000

Speaking of cheetahs, one interesting thing about them is that they apparently went through a severe genetic bottleneck some 10,000 years ago. As a result the existing population is genetically similar skin grafts from one cheetah to another don’t provoke an immune response. Of course they’re also more vulnerable to disease, have a hard time breeding and high infant mortality rates.

So if that was the consequence of a bottleneck 10,000 years ago in cheetahs, what would be the consequence of cutting all “kinds” of land animals down to 2, or 7, individuals.