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Speciation is not evolution

Rapid speciation is part of the creation model

J. C has accused CMI of being ignorant of science, evolution, and speciation. Typical for such commentators, he demonstrates a lack of understanding about what biblical creationists actually believe. We reproduce his letters to us below. CMI’s Joel Tay responds¹:

Dear J. C.,

I have a degree in Evolutionary Biology and Genetics. I am certainly familiar with the topic of speciation, and I agree, for the most part, with the discussion of speciation on that webpage. We have, for example mentioned cases of co-speciation of wasp and bacteria population by nothing more than differing species of bacteria in their gut, as well as speciation resulting from hybridization. In this same article, we also mentioned allopatric speciation occurring due to physical/geographical barriers, the founder effect, genetic drift, and other mechanisms of speciation. Many of these speciation mechanisms would come into play after the Biblical flood, for example, as the animals disperse all over the Earth. We have even published articles on speciation resulting from gene duplication and allodiploid hybrids. What we have already published on our website on speciation is more comprehensive than the web articles you just forwarded to us. You have failed to do your homework.

The Biblical Creation model actually predicts and requires not just speciation, but rapid speciation! Creationists believe that after the Flood, each animal kind (baramin) rapidly diversified, over just a few thousand years, often forming new species in the process. But speciation is not evolution! In fact, we had written about how the rapid rate of speciation continues to astonish evolutionists in cases of new species of mosquitoes, weeds, and house mice. The idea that creationists do not believe in the formation of new species is a strawman argument often put forth by uninformed evolutionists, and you yourself have fallen for that fallacy. In reality, anyone familiar with creationist literature would know that creationists reject the fixity of species—we even mention fixity of species as an argument creationists should not use! Interestingly, the fixity of species was actually taught by Darwin’s anti-biblical mentor, Charles Lyell, and it has more to do with the teachings of Aristotle than the teaching of the Bible.

As you said, “[W]hen one writes, speaks or proselytizes about a subject as complex and serious as evolution, it behooves the speaker/writer to know his/her subject.” I have done this. In like manner, I would encourage you to familiarize yourself with creationist literature and what creationists actually believe about speciation. This chapter from our updated Refuting Evolution 2 book should give a brief overview of the subject.

J.C. wrote back a second time. I will split up his response below and intersperse my comments:

I would encourage you to continue to search through the 11,500+ articles we have on our website and familiarize yourself with some of our key resources, such as Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels.

Natural selection is not evolution as already explained in the links I sent in my previous email. ‘Selection’ selects from something pre-existing; it selects out of; it is not ‘natural invention’. Therefore affirming natural selection and speciation is not the same thing as affirming evolution. Natural selection is a necessary part of the creation model for rapid speciation. It is a process of culling, of choosing between several traits, all of which must be in existence before they can be selected. Evolution on the other hand, requires the generation of radically new functions—not simple changes, but incredibly complex ones, like how to convert sugars to energy, or how to take the energy in sunlight and store it in sugar molecules. To do this, evolutionists appeal to mutations. But as Dr. Robert Carter wrote in his article on the four dimensional human genome, the complexity of the human genome stores information on at least 4 different dimensions (The linear DNA molecule is the first dimension, the 2-D interaction network represents a second dimension, the physical shape of the DNA in the nucleus is the third dimension, and all of that changes in the fourth dimension, time.). The simultaneous encoding of multi-dimensional information makes it impossible for evolutionists to explain the origin of the genome by means of ‘slow and gradual’ steps, one mutation at a time. I recommend Dr. Robert Carter’s The High Tech Cell if you want more information on this. As stated in his article Can Mutations Create New Information, Dr. Carter writes, “Evolution has to explain how the four-dimensional genome, with multiple overlapping codes and chock full of meta-information, came about. Can a mutation create new information? Perhaps, but only in the most limited sense. Can it create the kind of information needed to produce a genome? Absolutely not!” Furthermore, time only degrades the genome due to genetic entropy. This is yet another subject we have discussed in depth.

You can read more about this in Dr. Jonathan Sarfati’s, The Genesis Account, where he not only deals with the timing of the flood, but also details how pre-Darwinian creation scientists deduced post-Flood speciation from the Flood account itself. Dr. Robert Carter has also done significant research on human population genetics. In The Non-Mythical Adam and Eve, Dr. Carter demonstrates that starting with Adam and Eve, genetic drift over time would have created an allele frequency spectrum similar to what we see today. So the prediction stemming from Biblical creation matches what we see in the human genome. In his paper published in the Journal of Creation (volume 30(2):102-111, 2016), Carter examines the genetic effects of the recent population bottleneck associated with the Genesis Flood, and demonstrates that a biblical population model fit very well with what we see in the modern human population. In the book Genetic Entropy, and in The Mystery of our Declining Genes, Dr. John Sanford makes predictions about human genetics based on the biblical creation, old-earth creation, and evolution. Then by modeling human-like populations on the computing software, Mendel’s accountant, Sanford demonstrates that the Biblical model of human population genetics model fits the evidence much better than the evolutionary alternative. More recently, Sanford, Carter, and additional colleagues recently published a groundbreaking new paper on the subject. They were able to show that the biblical model reflect the real world, fitting the results derived from such models to the 1000 Genomes Project data. In fact, the biblical model was a better fit than the evolutionary model. In another publication, they showed that historical changes in human Y chromosome and mitochondria DNA reflect biblical history. 

On a side note, if natural selection and speciation are predicted by both creationists and evolutionists, how then can speciation be evidence against creation? This is a classic error, as explained in How to think (not what to think). Instead, the evidence makes a lot more sense when interpreted through the biblical account of creation. In contrast, evolutionists have a difficult time accounting for the evidence given, with what we now know about genetics today. Evolutionists have a “time” problem, where on the one hand they have insufficient time to account for ape-human evolution (see also the subject of Haldane’s dilemma), while on the other hand they have too much time for genetic entropy. They do not have a mechanism in natural selection and speciation that can account for evolution (since natural selection is a process of culling, and not a creative process), and neither do they have an adequate mechanism in mutations (especially when accompanied by experimental evidence) for the generation of complex meta-information in the context of a four dimensional DNA. So, replying to your question of whether speciation is an essential part of that mechanism that powers evolution, the answer is a clear ‘no’.

Joel Tay