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Creation 35(1):45, January 2012

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The Singapore Evolution Garden

Its exotic plants show evolution has not happened

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Wikipedia:Sengkang CC-BY-SAevolution-garden

Singapore is a modern city-state and island at a crossroads of trade, travel and communications. Located in southeast Asia, it’s a prosperous city renowned for its skyscrapers, metro system, restaurants and parks.

In 2005, the Singapore Botanic Gardens opened a 1.5-hectare (3.7-acre) display called the Evolution Garden.1

This tells the story that plants evolved and adapted on the earth over billions of years. The Garden is presented dramatically and visitors feel they are travelling through time. Along the way, they experience the evolutionary story with little brass plaques marking the path every few hundreds of millions of years.

Upon entering, visitors are confronted with a landscape of artificial rocks and a pool, suggesting bubbling mud and scalding volcanoes. It’s devoid of plants, so gives a hot, unpleasant feeling. This conveys what evolutionists say Earth was like at the beginning: intolerably hot; bathed in withering radiation; possessing a poisonous, unbreathable atmosphere; and devoid of life.

To create a sense of ‘otherworldliness’, giant boulders are strewn around, some real and some artificial. Also, the plants on display were selected to give a prehistoric mood with large old cycads and the horsetail (Equisetum)—an exotic to Singapore. Eerie models of extinct scale trees (Lepidodendron) stretch their spooky branches high above.

As the path winds through the Evolution Garden, visitors pass landscapes representing supposed evolutionary ‘events’ such as the beginning of life on Earth, the invasion of plants onto the land, the rise of ferns, and the age of cycads. Many have complimented the management on their outstanding execution of the story of plant evolution.

US seminary president Albert Mohler describes evolution as the “creation myth of the secular elites”.2 Myth may seem harsh but it’s probably apt, since a myth is an invented story, an unproved collective belief. The Evolution Garden of Singapore fits that well.

For example, the conditions on the early earth have never been observed. It’s just a story, invented collectively to explain how lifeless chemicals could have evolved into a living cell without any intelligent intervention. Miraculous as that claim originally sounded, it’s becoming even more implausible as our knowledge of the intricate design of living cells grows.3 Experts now admit they have no idea how life could possibly evolve by natural processes.4

Nor has any other evolutionary event been witnessed. Interestingly, Equisetum fossils are common in the coal measures of the Northern Hemisphere, the Carboniferous rocks. The modern plants are dubbed a ‘living fossil’.5 Virtually identical with their fossil counterparts, the cultivated Equisetum in the Evolution Garden actually demonstrate the opposite of the Garden’s message. They display no evolution over the supposed 300 million years of geological time,6 and also suggest this geological time does not exist.

Evolutionary teaching is now part and parcel of the global tourist scene. As governments around the world promote tourism they fund displays and literature that teach evolution as a fact. Why not tell the public about its insurmountable problems?

One day hopefully the Singapore Botanic Gardens will change its story and tell it as it is. This world was intelligently designed right from the beginning. Give the Creator His rightful due.

Remember your Creator in the days of your youth … Ecclesiastes 12:1
Posted on homepage: 31 March 2014

References and notes

  1. Wong, W.H., The case of the evolution garden, Roots: Botanic Gardens Conservation International Education Review 2(2):9–11, 2005; www.bgci.org/resources/article/0238, available via web.archive.org, also at bgci.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Roots-2.2-master-planning-for-education.pdf. Return to text.
  2. Mohler, A., Creation vs. Evolution—The New Shape of the Debate, albertmohler.com, 1 February 2011. Return to text.
  3. Smith, C., Fantastic voyage, Creation 30(1):20–23, 2007; creation.com/fantastic-voyage. Return to text.
  4. Davies, P., Was life on Earth born lucky? New Scientist 179(2403):32, 2003; Also see interviews on Ben Stein, Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed, DVD. Return to text.
  5. Catchpoole , D., Horsetails are living fossils ! Creation 33(3):23, 2011; creation. com/horsetail-living-fossil. Return to text.
  6. Bell, P., ‘Evolutionary stasis’: double-speak and propaganda, Creation 28(2):38–40, 2006; creation.com/stasis. Return to text.

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