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Creation 19(2):24–25, March 1997

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Editor’s note: As Creation magazine has been continuously published since 1978, we are publishing some of the articles from the archives for historical interest, such as this. For teaching and sharing purposes, readers are advised to supplement these historic articles with more up-to-date ones suggested in the Related Articles and Further Reading below.

Red-blooded evidence

Refuting the evolutionary ‘sea-water’ argument

by

Photo iStockphotoRed blood cells

Sometimes evolutionists claim that our blood has very similar element composition (sodium, chlorine, etc.) to seawater and this they attribute to our ancestors evolving in the oceans eons ago. Various popularisers of evolution have made this claim. For example, Robert Lehrman, in The Long Road to Man (Fawcett Publications, 1961), said:

“One human characteristic, a chemical one, harks back to our ancestry in the ocean … the percentages of sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, iodine, chlorine, and other minerals in human blood salt coincide with those of sea water. Our ocean–living ancestors developed cells adapted to the chemical environment of sea water. When they left the ocean, they took a part of the environment with them in the form of a fluid that bathes the cells; later it was incorporated into the blood stream.”

The argument has not been used widely of late, but it still surfaces from time to time—see Presidents and evolution.

Studies of blood reveal how incredible it is!

There are major problems with the argument:

  • The mineral concentrations in human blood plasma and/or serum1,2 and seawater3 are quite different. They are not at all similar (see Table). The chlorine and sodium contents of blood are only about 20% to 30% of seawater whereas the iron content is 250 times greater. Compared to seawater, blood has little magnesium but 9,000 times as much selenium. The data in the Table contradict the evolution-from-seawater idea. Lehrman and others are quite wrong in saying that the percentages of minerals in human blood coincide with those in seawater. There is little similarity. Even the blood of sea creatures such as crabs is quite different from seawater.

  • Even within an evolutionary framework of thinking the claim does not make sense. According to evolutionary beliefs, amphibians came out of the sea more than 350 million years ago. Salt is being added to the sea all the time, by rivers carrying dissolved salts from the land to the sea, for example. It would have taken a maximum of 62 million years to accumulate all the sodium we now have in the oceans (using current rates of influx and the evolutionists’ own assumption that ‘the present is the key to the past’, and being as generous to the evolutionists as possible by assuming pure water to start with)—see Salty seas: evidence for a young earth. In other words, 350 million evolutionary years ago, when amphibians are supposed to have evolved, there should have been no salt in the oceans at all! So, if the salt in the blood of amphibians was similar to that in seawater now, which it is not, it cannot be due to the salt content of the sea when they supposedly evolved! Of course the oceans are not all those millions of years old, as the evidence from the lack of sufficient mineral accumulation indicates.

Our incredible blood!

ElementBloodSeawater
Sodium 3220 10800
Chlorine 3650 19400
Potassium 200 392
Calcium 50 411
Magnesium 27 1290
Phosphorus 36 0.09
Iron 1 0.004
Copper 1 0.001
Zinc 1.1 0.005
Chromium 1.1 0.002
Bromine 4 67
Fluorine 0.1 1.3
Boron 1 5
Selenium 0.9 0.0001
Table. The mineral contents of human blood plasma or serum1,2 and seawater3 (mg per litre). Return to text.

Studies of blood reveal how incredible it is! Blood carries oxygen from our lungs to every cell in our bodies and removes carbon dioxide back to the lungs where it is expelled as we breathe. However, blood does much more than that. It carries food to all the cells in the form of energy (glucose) and chemical building blocks such as minerals, vitamins, amino acids and fatty acids for the manufacturing of various cell components. Our blood carries waste products such as urea to our kidneys from where it is expelled. Blood carries special cells and proteins to combat disease–causing bacteria and viruses which might invade the body. Blood carries a very complex set of agents which will stop bleeding if we are cut and initiate repair of damage to injured areas. The systems which regulate our body temperature also rely on the blood to carry heat to the extremities where it is dissipated. And there is much that has yet to be learnt about blood and its marvellous abilities.

The levels of elements in the blood are controlled by the body to within strict limits so that the blood can perform all its various functions efficiently. Genetic defects (mutations) which render certain enzymes less effective and cause, for example, excess or inadequate iron in the blood, cause disease. Such genetic defects have accumulated since the Fall (Adam and Eve were created perfect) and are now being identified as the cause of many human ailments.

Blood was originally created to do what it does and what it does do it does marvellously well—just as it was designed to do! Such a complex system did not arise through a series of accidents following the enclosure of some seawater, as some evolutionists might want to believe. Nor can accidents improve it—they only destroy. Let us give our Creator, the Lord Jesus Christ, the honour that is rightfully His for creating our blood with all its wonderful functions.

First posted on homepage: 25 August 2010
Re-posted on homepage: 19 June 2013

References

  1. Burtis, C.A., Ashwood, E.R., Clinical Chemistry, W.B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia, 1994 edition. Return to text.
  2. Baselt, R.C., and Cravey, R.H., Disposition of toxic drugs and chemicals in Man, Year Book Medical Publishers, Inc, Chicago, 1989 edition. Return to text.
  3. The New Encyclopedia Britannica, 15:925, 15th Ed., 1992. Return to text.

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