Avery Foley
If you follow the science news, you may have noticed that evolutionists are increasingly saying that evolution happens much faster than they originally thought. For example, a recent study wrote that urbanization is bringing about changes in organisms. Salmon are getting smaller, spiders bigger, and blackbirds are becoming more sedentary and fearless. The article says, “What’s new is that these evolutionary changes are happening much more quickly than previously thought, and have potential impacts on ecosystem function on a contemporary scale. Not in the distant future, that is — but now.” This is just one of many examples that have come up recently in the news.
Now, biological evolution is supposed to be a slow process over millions of years. New species are supposed to form slowly and gradually. So why is it that evolution seems to be happening quickly? Because it doesn’t take millions of years for new species to arise! Creationists have long said that most of the species we have today have arisen from the original kinds on the Ark at the time of the global Flood of Noah’s day around 4,350 years ago. You do not need millions of years to form all the species we have today. What you need is a changing environment for creatures to adapt to using their God-given genetic variety.
Many evolutionists call evolution and speciation the same thing. For example, one researcher studying jays on Santa Cruz Island observed that two new species of jays are forming on the same island. She refers to this speciation as “evolution in action.” She also writes, “evolution isn’t just a slow, steady process spread out over millennia; it can occur rapidly and alter the characteristics of a population from one year to the next.” Again, here is a researcher recognizing that evolution is supposedly a process that is much faster than previously thought.
But speciation is not the same thing as evolution! Speciation is what we call small, observable changes within a kind. Speciation is why we have polar bears, grizzly bears, and black bears. Or why we have lions, jaguars, and tigers. Or why we have finches with different sized beaks. Evolution, on the other hand, is an unobserved process that supposedly adds new information into the DNA of a creature so that one kind of animal turns into another. This has never been observed and everything that we see in nature contradicts this.
So how does “lightning fast evolution” fit into a biblical worldview? What researchers are observing around the world is that it doesn’t take millions of years to create new species. Indeed, it doesn’t even take centuries or decades—it can just take a few generations! This fits into a biblical timeline. Noah took two of every kind (seven of some) of land animal with him on the Ark. After the Flood was over, the animals disembarked to fill the new world. As time passes and species become extinct or new environmental challenges arise (such as the introduction of a competing species or a natural disaster), creatures must adapt or they die out. Those creatures that are more fit to survive the new challenges live to pass their genes along. Those who are not fit, die off. Eventually the kind becomes more specialized and different species develop. But this is not evolution because evolution requires an addition of brand-new genetic information so one kind can turn into another kind. Speciation is a loss of information as creatures become more specialized and one kind never turns into another kind. Speciation is actually the opposite of evolution!
So these on-going studies show that there has been more than enough time since the Flood for all the different species we see today to have arisen from the original kinds on the Ark. Scientists are showing that speciation is a rapid process. Not a slow, gradual one. The evidence confirms God’s Word, not evolutionary ideas about the past.
You can read another article I wrote about a study that show that speciation happens quickly here.
The author does not seem to have the academic background to make the claims she does. What she obviously either does not know or is not telling us is that the 9 species of “horse-kind” differ radically in the number of chromosome rearrangements each species has, far more than could be found in a single pair of animals. Generally only a small proportion of all chromosomal rearrangements are fixed in any given population. This means for the Ark scenario to be true there must have been a huge amount of chromosome mutation occurring in the descendants of that single ancestral pair. Fixing these mutations in their species is evolution. For it to occur in millions of years from a population of ancestral equids is far more parsimonious than for it to occur in less than 5,000 years from a single pair of equids.