‘Dealing’ with evolution
How to ‘deal’ with evolution’s biggest argument!30 June 2006
Natural Selection …
The process of natural selection is valid and accepted by virtually all scientists (creationists and evolutionists). It shows creatures change over time.
Question: ‘Is the change we see that which could turn a fish into a man, for example?’
Most people equate natural selection to ‘molecules to man’ evolution. It’s the biggest ‘proof’ for evolution offered in classrooms or media. Because natural selection can be scientifically demonstrated, many people believe ‘evolution’ has been proven.
When children are born it’s common to discuss whose features they have. ‘She’s got daddy’s nose’ or ‘mommy’s eyes’. Everyone knows that genetic information for the child was inherited from their parents. It’s the result of mixing together genetic information from mom and dad.
God’s Deck of Cards … A Simple Explanation …
Let’s use an example comparing a deck of cards to the genetic information in living things (dogs for example). This will help us understand how changes happen. It’s simple and accurate enough to teach the concept.
Shuffle the cards and deal hands of five cards each. Each hand is different. They change each time you deal them, but because of a limited amount of cards, they only change so much!
No matter how long you deal cards there are built-in limits to the system you are using. You may get hands with small or large, red or black cards or combinations of both. However, shuffling and dealing cards won’t create new cards with totally different symbols that never existed before. It will only produce new combinations of the symbols you already had.1
This is a good example of how God made all of the living things on Earth. He made them with an incredible amount of genetic information! Each time they deal out (produce offspring) some of the information that a living thing has, you get a different combination of information (a different hand of cards)!
Pick a Card …
Charles Darwin discovered that pigeons could breed various forms by artificial selection. Dog breeders do the same today. To select ‘smallness’ for example, breeders will mate only the smallest specimens together in hopes of isolating dogs with genes for ‘smallness’.
However, this leads to a loss of information! The dogs no longer have genetic information for ‘largeness’! (It is as if, by preferring some cards, we leave others behind.) This provides no help to the theory of evolution. Evolution by definition requires, at some point, new information to arise! (E.g: Lizard to bird evolution would require new information for wings.)
Even secular scientists agree that modern dogs have a common origin from the same gene pool. The journal Science said:
The origin of the domestic dog from wolves has been established … we examined the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequence variation among 654 domestic dogs representing all major dog populations worldwide … suggesting a common origin from a single gene pool for all dog populations.2
By deciding which ‘cards’ to play with, breeders can create unique combinations. However, no matter how different they appear they have all come from the same ‘deck’ …
Call Their Bluff!
Variation within a kind is a different concept than ‘goo to you’ evolution. It means that there is a vast amount of information in living things and that many combinations are possible. But there are limits. Selecting from existing information does not create new information.
In fact, by choosing some information in preference to others, it gets rid of the information not selected ‘for’. A dog population that adapts to a cold environment does so by losing genes for short hair, leaving only long-hair genes in the population.
Even evolutionary scientists admit that natural selection has never been seen to produce new words, sentences or chapters in the library of genetic information in living things. Natural selection is like choosing books out of a library. It cannot write new books into the libraries of information in living things.
A House of Cards …
Natural selection is the intellectual ‘fool’s gold’ of evolutionary theory. Its ability to show one kind of creature changing into another (e.g: lizard into bird) is worthless. It looks good but fails when tested.
For evolutionists, the only place new information could possibly come from is mutation (inherited mistakes when DNA is copied). But mutation is also an information losing process. In some cases a mutation may be beneficial, even though information has been lost (see Beetle bloopers ).
Knowing how to explain this quickly and simply is important. The question of origins isn’t just an intellectual exercise. It has eternal consequences. Many people reject the God of the Bible because of faith in ‘evolution’—they think they can dispense with their Creator and therefore not be accountable for their actions (their sin).
Notes & References
- The card dealing analogy, though useful, is not exact because with inheritance in organisms that reproduce by sexual means, the offspring get a full set of genes each, selected from four sets of genes carried by the parents. Because there can be four different versions of each gene (four alleles) in the two parents (two sets of genes x two parents), and the offspring gets two of these (one from each parent), and there are many tens of thousands of genes, there are many combinations possible in the offspring. But the card deck analogy is correct in that we are only looking at recombinations of existing genes/information.
- Genetic Evidence for an East Asian origin of Domestic Dogs, Science 298(5598):1610–1613, 22 Nov 2002.