Creation Facts of Life (7 page)

If evolution were true, we ought to be able to trace how hemoglobin evolved. But we can't. Could it be
repeated
evolution, the spontaneous appearance of hemoglobin in all these different groups independently, asks Dickerson? He answers that repeated evolution seemed plausible only as long as hemoglobin was considered just red stuff that held oxygen. It does
not
seem possible, he says, that the entire eight-helix folded pattern appeared repeatedly by time and chance. As far as creationists are concerned, hemoglobin occurs, complete and fully functional, wherever it is appropriate in the Creator's plan, somewhat like a blue-colored tile in an artist's mosaic.

Mosaic refers here to a picture or mural formed of many little bits of colored stone. According to the mosaic concept of kind, God used several different genes or gene sets over and over again in different combinations and proportions to make a variety of life forms, somewhat like an artist might use several different kinds of colored stones over and over in different proportions and arrangements to make a variety of artistic designs. The different bits of stone in the artist's mosaic would correspond to the many different genes or gene sets in God's "mosaics," which are the various forms of living things.

According to this
mosaic
concept, also called
modular
or
matrix
, God used a basic plan in making living creatures, somewhat similar to the plan He used in making different non-living substances. All the countless chemical substances in the universe are made from different combinations and proportions of only about a hundred different elements, usually displayed in a "chemistry mosaic" called the periodic table. Each kind of chemical compound can be represented by a formula expressing the number, kind, and arrangement of elements within it.

Perhaps God used genes as "elements"
in making the various kinds of life, so that conceivably each different kind of life could be represented by a
"formula"
representing the number, kind, and arrangement of different genes in its chromosomes. Such formulas would, of course, be much larger and much more complex than those for the most complicated chemical substances. Nevertheless, the mosaic concept does suggest that all the incredible variety and diversity of life forms we see about us may be constructed using only the information in a few thousand DNA segments, compared to about 100 chemical elements. Even more exciting, creationists might be able to use a mosaic pattern (or mathematical matrix) to predict the existence of unknown organisms and their features, like Mendeleev used his periodic table to predict the existence and properties of elements before their discovery.

The mosaic, non-branching (non-evolutionary) pattern of trait distribution produces practical problems for the biologist. Algae are usually classified into major groups on the basis of their pigment (greens, reds, browns, goldens, etc.), for example. But then both their structural complexity (unicellular, colonial, multicellular) and type of sexuality (iso-, hetero-, or oo-gamy) must be re-evolved independently ("convergently") on different branches of the evolutionary tree based on color. If they are classified by level of structural complexity, then neither the color pattern nor type of sexuality can be traced back to one common ancestor. Similarly, the evolutionary tree based on type of sexuality contradicts the branching trees predicted by pigment and structural complexity.

While he was yet the internationally respected senior paleontologist at the British Museum, Colin Patterson
²³
stunned the scientific world by calling evolution an "anti-theory" that generates "anti-knowledge" — a concept full of explanatory vocabulary that actually explains nothing and that even generates a false impression of what the facts are.

Patterson said that he finally awoke, after having been duped into taking evolutionism as revealed truth all his life, to find that evolutionary theory makes bad systematics (the science of classification). He then proceeded to examine the data as a creationist would, in simple recognition that creationists produce testable hypotheses, and that he could understand and explain what inferences creationists would draw from the data, without either agreeing or disagreeing with them. What a superb example of healthy scientific skepticism! Patterson was able to see the data regarding homology in their wholeness, and experience the unbridled freedom to wonder not only
how
but
whether
evolution occurred!

Some are hoping that DNA comparisons and gene sequencing ("molecular homology") can somehow salvage evolutionary classification.
²⁴
Is there anyone who hasn't heard that DNA comparison suggests something like 98 percent similarity between man and chimpanzee? The evidence so convinced one evolutionist debater that he told the audience if a chimp asked to take his daughter out on a date, he was not sure he could say "No." (I hope the daughter would be allowed to say "No.") There are even some groups pushing for the extension of U.N. human rights protection to chimps and orangutans!

It only takes a trip to the zoo, of course, to convince us that man and ape share many features, and there are unseen similarities in bone, muscle, nerve and sense organs, circulatory and digestive systems, hair, milk, etc. It should be equally obvious, however, that creatures designed by the same Creator to move, eat, breathe, etc. in similar ways would have many molecular similarities in common.

An article on "The 2% Difference" (
Discover
, April 2006) praises evolution and puts down intelligent design, but the author (Sapolsky) actually admits and describes key evidences noted by creation scientists over the past two decades.
²⁵
"Regulation is everything," he says. A sidewalk, fence, patio, and house may be made of bricks that are 100 percent identical, for example, but they are arranged in different ways to serve dramatically different purposes. Sapolsky points out that the brains of man and chimp operate using "the same basic building blocks" while they achieve "vastly different outcomes," so that in his opinion "there's not the tiniest bit of scientific evidence that chimps have aesthetics, spirituality, or a capacity for irony or poignancy." These awesome gaps or "qualitative distinctions" between the brains of chimps and people Sapolsky credits to a "relatively few" genes that regulate the number of brain cells (neurons) produced. Sapolsky seems to forget, of course, that a dysfunctional or diseased brain has just as many neurons as the ones we call normal, and stuffing more chips into a computer does not automatically improve it. It's not just the number of parts that produce the great gulf between human and chimp; it's how the parts are connected. As creation scientists have long noted, and the Bible implies, living things (and their functioning parts) are not a product of substance, but of organization. At the atomic level ("dust of the ground"), all organisms are essentially 100 percent identical; if the 2 percent difference in DNA presumed for man and chimp told the other 98 percent how to organize, the differences would be at least as vast and unbridgeable as we observe.

And there's more. The April 2006
Discover
article finally admitted what creation scientists have stressed for over 20 years: "a tiny 2% difference translates into tens of millions of AGCT differences." Indeed, a 2 percent difference among three billion base pairs would mean about
60 million
code letter differences between man and chimp. So, as creationists pointed out long ago and Sapolsky admits, "There are likely to be nucleotide differences in every single gene." In fact, reported in 2004 studies comparing chimp chromosome 22 with its presumed counterpart on human chromosome 21 showed a DNA difference of about 1.5 percent resulted in differences of more than 80 percent among the proteins produced by those genes.
²⁶
That did not surprise creation scientists, but shocked evolutionists.

Actually, studies of molecular homology have produced major controversies within the evolutionists' camp, since DNA trees frequently disagree with evolutionary trees based on fossils and/or on comparative anatomy. The evolutionist split is greatest when it comes to conflicting attempts (based on dubious, compounded assumptions) to use molecular homology as some sort of "evolutionary clock." After documenting the misfit of molecular data with both of two competing evolutionary views, Michael Denton
²⁷
writes this summary (p. 306):

The difficulties associated with attempting to explain how a family of homologous proteins could have evolved at constant rates has created chaos in evolutionary thought.
The evolutionary community has divided into two camps — those
still adhering to the
selectionist
position, and those rejecting it in favor of the
neutralist.
The devastating aspect of this controversy is that neither side can adequately account for the constancy of the rate of molecular evolution; yet
each side fatally weakens the other.
The selectionists wound the neutralists' position by pointing to the disparity in the rates of mutation per unit time, while the neutralists destroy the selectionists' position by showing how ludicrous it is to believe that selection would have caused equal rates of divergence in ''junk'' proteins or along phylogenetic lines so dissimilar as those of man and carp. Both sides win valid points, but in the process the credibility of the molecular clock hypothesis is severely strained and with it the
whole paradigm of evolution itself is endangered
(emphasis added).

Denton doesn't stop with these devastating anti-evolutionary comments (and a comparison of belief in molecular clocks with belief in medieval astrology!). He also describes data from molecular homology as a "biochemical echo of typology," where typology is the pre-evolutionary view of classification developed by scientists on the basis of creationist thinking.

Although partial data fit too easily into conflicting branching patterns, comparative similarities and homologies don't fit well at all onto evolutionary trees. They fit instead into hierarchical (groups within groups) categories, perhaps suggesting a multidimensional matrix (a "cube of cubes" in more than three dimensions). When Mendeleev discovered the pattern God used in creating the chemical elements, he was able to predict the existence and properties of elements not then known to science. Creationists may one day discover predictive patterns of trait distribution among living things, and prediction is the real measure of merit among scientific theories.

Embryonic Development

Some see the birth of a child as the most personal expression of God's creativity, but evolutionists say, "Look, if you're talking about creation, then surely the Creator must not be very good at it, or else there wouldn't be all those mistakes in human embryonic development."

Figure 7. The marvelous development of the human embryo should make everyone a creationist, it seems to me, but evolutionists say that the so-called "gill slits, yolk sac, and tail" are useless evolutionary leftovers (vestiges) that virtually "prove" we evolved from fish, reptiles, and apes. How does a creationist respond?

Figure 7 shows an early stage in human development. Consider it your first "baby picture." You start off as a little round ball of unformed substance. Then gradually arms, legs, eyes, and all your other parts appear. At one month, you're not quite as charming as you're going to be, and here's where the evolutionist says, "There's no evidence of creation in the human embryo. Otherwise, why would a human being have a yolk sac like a chicken, a tail like a monkey, and gill slits like a fish? An intelligent Creator should have known that human beings don't need those things."

Well, there they are, "gill slits, yolk sac, and a tail." Why are they there? What's a creationist going to say? The evolutionist believes these structures are there only as useless leftovers or "vestiges" of our evolutionary ancestry, reminders of the times when our ancestors were only fish, reptiles, and apes.

The concept of vestigial organs even resulted in cases of "evolutionary medical malpractice." Young children once had their healthy (and helpful, disease-fighting) tonsils removed because of the widespread belief that they were only useless vestiges. That idea actually slowed down scientific research for many years. If you believe something is a useless, non-functional leftover of evolution, then you don't bother to find out what it
does.
Fortunately, other scientists didn't take that view. Sure enough, studies have shown that essentially all 180 organs once listed as evolutionary vestiges have significant functions in human beings.

Take the yolk sac, for instance. In chickens, the yolk contains much of the food that the chick depends on for growth. But we, on the other hand, grow attached to our mothers, and they nourish us. Does that mean the yolk sac can be cut off from the human embryo because it isn't needed? Not at all. The so-called "yolk sac" is the source of the human embryo's first blood cells, and death would result without it!