Reading Nathaniel Jeanson and Jason Lisle’s paper, On the Origin of Eukaryotic Species’ Genotypic and Phenotypic Diversity, was, to be kind, a chore. Nevertheless, after trudging through the entire 51-page, single-spaced, 26,000-word equivalent of a Marcel Duchamp painting, it was clear to me what the actual argument of the paper was. Here it is (if you want to spare yourself the read): [And no, it’s not an actual quote from the paper]
“God packed so much genetic diversity in the original ‘kinds’ that as soon as they came out of Noah’s Ark 4,365 years ago, beagles were giving birth to coyotes, who were giving birth to poodles, who were giving birth to hyenas…all within a span of about 200 years…and then after that, the genetic mutations rates settled down to what we know them to be today.”
That’s really the gist of the entire thing. And no, it is not convincing nor believable.
Now for the Parts I Did Understand
Now, in the midst of those 51 pages, there were other statements made that I found interesting, to say the least. Allow me to elaborate on them briefly:
- Jeanson and Lisle reject the original, standard YEC claim that God created all the diversity of species all at once as “fixed species.” Instead, their claim actually amounts to: (A) there was a miraculous creation of God of the “kinds,” each one packed with all the genetic material ready to explode throughout nature; and then (B) natural selection and genetic mutation were the main natural engines of diversification from that point on…but never did one “kind” morph into another “kind.” It was a matter of natural selection within kinds.
This is actually amazing, because they are admitting to the basic premise of evolution, with two exceptions: (A) they still hold that God essentially “poofed” everything into existence a mere 6,000 years ago, within the span of a week, and (B) they hold to what can only be considered “hyper-evolution” that literally exploded within the span of 200 years after Noah. That is incredible. And this leads to my next point.
- Jeanson and Lisle claims the following happened in this order: (A) Noah’s flood happened 4,365 years ago; (B) there was an explosion of massive speciation immediately after the flood; (C) then there was the ice age…all within the span of 200 years. Here’s specifically what they said: “Since most YE creationists put the date of the ice age in the centuries following the Flood, this period of extinction was as rapid as the proposed period of Tertiary speciation.”
When talking about the fossils that are in the Tertiary layers, they note that there is a tremendous diversity of species found in them, as opposed to the Quaternary layers. Now, in case you didn’t know it, scientists have dated the Tertiary period from 66-2.6 million years ago, and the Quaternary period from 2.6 million years ago to the present.
Amazingly, Jeanson and Lisle simply dismiss that out of hand—so much so, that they do not even to mention it—and simply state as fact their personal assumption that the Tertiary period happened only about 4,000 years ago (not 66 million) and lasted for a mere 200 years (not 63.4 million). And then with that, they simply conclude: “It’s as if an enormous amount of speciation took place between the end of the Flood and the Ice Age, and then tapered off dramatically for the next several millennia.”
I’m sorry…WHAT?
To casually change the accepted scientific consensus from 66 million years ago to 4,000 years ago, and to change the period of time for a certain era from 64 million years to 200 years—without any sort of scientific data to back up such an extraordinary claim—to just “throw it out there”—let’s just be kind, and say, that should raise a few red flags…possibly more than were on display for Hitler’s Nuremberg Rally.
- Jeanson and Lisle also give a specific, understandable analogy to argue for the possibility of the kind of rapid genetic changes they are claiming. The analogy, though, is
unbelievable…literally. Here it is: the common wood frog “develops from a single cell to a sexually mature adult in less than three years.” To change from a single cell to a full frog in three years requires a lot of rapid change. Therefore, if that kind of change can happen in three years, saying that an original “cat kind” could develop into tigers, leopards and lions over the course of 4,365 years doesn’t sound so hard, does it?
Yes it does.
Do I even need to point out the obvious absurdities here? That’s essentially saying, “Since my son at one point was just a fertilized egg, and then 9 months later was a 3 pound-six ounce baby—and that took only 9 months—then isn’t it possible for one pair of “cat kinds” to develop into all the varieties of cat species over 4,365 years?
But wait! That’s wrong too, for Jeanson and Lisle had just argued that the vast majority of this kind of development happened in the Tertiary period (which they argue, remember, happened only about 4,000 years ago AND LASTED FOR ONLY 200 YEARS). So in other words, their own claim as represented in the above picture is deceptive—it goes against their earlier claim that all the variation happened over a span of merely 200 years.
Therefore, when they say, “Since any two felid species have far fewer phenotypic differences between them than do an amphibian egg and an adult frog, producing a wide range of species morphologies in a few thousand years is comparatively simple,” we can respond with, “Wait, don’t you mean only 200 years? Aren’t you actually claiming that “original 1,000 kinds” of animals that came off Noah’s ark changed, via natural selection and gene mutation, into the current 500,000 land animals we have today…all within a span of 200 years, and then, all of a sudden, just stopped changing into different species, around the year 4,000 BC?”
Yes, that’s basically what they’re claiming, and that makes their already absurd claim even more absurd.
In Conclusion…
There is probably much more I could comment on, but quite frankly, I feel what I’ve covered is more than enough. So allow me to skip to their conclusion. In their conclusion to their “not-really-peer-reviewed” paper of 26,000 words, Jeanson and Lisle state that what has accounted for the variety of species we have today is:
(A) a miraculous creation of all the “kinds” a mere 6,000 years ago within the span of six days, with each kind so chock full of genetic variations waiting to explode, that
(B) almost immediately, due to natural selection, caused them to explode into a variety of species, but then
(C) the Flood wiped everything out, but still
(D) the “kinds” that came out of the ark 1,700 years after the original creation, came out and exploded again into the variety of species we have today…and it took a mere 200 years to get there.
(E) Since then, there simply has been much variation among species at all. The end…simple.
With that, they confidently stated, “Thus, speciation on the young-earth timescale is not only plausible; it is quickly becoming scientifically superior to any other explanation for the origin of the rich diversity of life on this planet.”
…but it isn’t. Despite 51 pages of what can be described as nothing less that scientific-sounding gobbly-gook, the fact is that none of their “claims” have any basis in reality.
What’s the Real Problem?
I happened to come across one other blog online by an atheist who had written a response to this paper as well. Without going into detail, his post basically said, “It is all B.S.” I realized that, once again, Answers in Genesis has succeeded in proving to the world that Christians are nothing more than lying, deceptive, pseudo-scientific charlatans—at least that’s the impression.
That is what is truly sad and infuriating about all this. In their dogged attempt to try to prove the earth is only 6,000 years old, Answers in Genesis literally resorts to deception. They literally write insanely long “papers,” lie about them being “peer-reviewed,” fill them with scientific-sounding jargon that is incomprehensible, casually just declare the Tertiary period lasted for 200 years a mere 4,000 years ago without citing any evidence whatsoever to back up that claim…and then they put it out there on their website, not with the intention of actually interacting with the scientific community and trying to make their case; but rather to pull the wool over the eyes of people who simply don’t know enough about science or the Bible to realize they’re being deceived.
And in the process, not only does Answers in Genesis actively deceive scores of Evangelical Christians who have been duped by this sort of thing, but they are, quite literally, “blaspheming the name of the LORD among the Gentiles.” There is no other way to say it.
Let’s Clear a Few Things Up About Evolution, Christians, and History
What makes it more insane is that AiG is doing this over the issue of evolution. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, regardless of your opinion of whether or not the theory of evolution is convincing, thinking evolution is a “threat” to the Gospel, and claiming it is the “anti-God religion of atheism,” makes about as much sense as saying, “Photosynthesis is a denial that Jesus is the light of the world! It is the anti-God religion of atheism!”
Yes, evolution has challenged many Christians to re-think certain assumptions about the early chapters of Genesis, but as a biblical scholar, I can tell you that a lot of those assumptions hearken back, not to the early Church, but to the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. Simply put, the assumption that the world had to be only 6,000 years old was a result of people so fascinated by the rise of modern science, they just naturally assumed that Genesis 1-11 was trying to make scientific/historical claims. They assumed that because just before the Enlightenment, the leaders of the Protestant Reformation had rejected the previous 1,500 years of Church teaching and tradition, and therefore people soon became completely ignorant of the way in which Christians for the previous 1,500 years had understood Genesis 1-11.
Ironically, evolution got many Christians to look back at those lost 1,500 years and to realize that the early Christians did read Genesis 1-11 in a different way. They didn’t, in fact, insist that it was straightforward history. And since that’s the case, we need to realize that evolution is not a threat to the authority of the Bible or to Church teaching. It’s a scientific explanation of certain processes in nature, nothing more.
If you have serious questions about evolution, or simply don’t believe it, that’s fine. I have some unresolved questions about it too. But please, don’t be fooled into thinking it is a threat to the Bible, because to claim it is a threat to the Bible or to the Gospel is just plain wrong.
To go so far as to make an organization willing to deceive and misrepresent virtually everything about both science and the Bible in order to claim that evolution is the enemy of the Gospel and the root of all of society’s evils…well, that’s positively diabolical.
Good grief. I thought YECs insisted that their recent and ‘rapid’ ice age kicked in almost immediately after the Genesis Flood – and indeed was ’caused’ by it and by the massive volcanism they insist accompanied it. But are Jeanson and Lisle REALLY now delaying their ice age – in order to fit in ‘millions of species in thousands of years’ first?
Apparently so – I googled “It’s as if an enormous amount of speciation took place between the end of the Flood and the Ice Age, and then tapered off dramatically for the next several millennia” and it took me straight back to this ‘peer-reviewed’ article. (I assume they don’t then argue against this notion.)
Is this science or pseudo-science? It looks like a desperate fight against science in order to convince (those willing to be so convinced) that the Bible is infallible and is uniquely able to account for observable biological reality in the here and now. (But it creates as many problems as it solves.)
By the way, other YECs have mentioned ‘maximum heterozygosity’ in the past eg Carl Wieland on 1 August 1997 – it’s on the Creation Ministries International website.
PS On 29 April Ken Ham blogged:
“The model laid out in their paper “significantly advances the young-creation explanation for the origin of species, and it makes testable predictions by which it can be further confirmed or rejected in the future”” and;
“We’ll be posting a series of lay-level summaries of this exciting research in the coming days, so be sure to watch for those articles.”
(The lengthy paper purported eg in various charts to compare ‘predicted’ with ‘actual’ – but Ham appears to be referring to an opportunity for test the paper’s ‘testable predictions’ in the future. I would look forward to that.)
I now see that the quote from the article in question (mentioning an ‘enormous amount of speciation’) is contained within the seventh paragraph under the heading ‘General Aspects of the Young-Earth Creation Speciation Model’. The paragraph suggests that tertiary layers (which “represent a short window of time between the end of the Flood and the ice age”) “contain a tremendous amount of species’ diversity, implying that a massive burst of speciation took place in just a few hundred years”. Even if the tertiary period was just a ‘few hundred’ years I do not understand how an ‘ice age’ caused by Noah’s Flood could take a few hundred years to get going. An ice age ‘explained’ as in articles such as this:
https://answersingenesis.org/environmental-science/ice-age/what-started-the-ice-age/
This is what you get when you try to match geological and fossil evidence with a 2,000 + year old sacred book.
I don’t want to have a ‘monologue’ but Ham stated in his blog of 29 April “one of the many questions we’ve received about the Ark is how so few kinds could turn into so many species in just a few thousand years after the Flood”.
https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2016/04/29/millions-of-species-in-thousands-of-years/
Yet seemingly the paper argues that most/all of this hyper speciation (not to mention re-colonising the whole planet) occurred in just 200 or so years post-flood. Which leads me to think that he either has not read and fully understood the actual paper and has been badly briefed on its contents, or has read it and is poorly presenting some of its actual contents.
I think the answer is clear:AiG isn’t really concerned about actual facts or logical coherence…those are ultimately irrelevant when there is an agenda and ideology to push at all costs.
My background is in biology (though I do more work in paleontology), and I had largely the same reaction as you –that Jeason is trying to wow lay readers with a lot of technical sounding (but largely incomprehensible) jargon. He and others at AIG can’t even seem to make up their minds on what if any role mutations and natural selection play in hyperspeciation (evidently Ham thinks they have to tread carefully, or it will look too much like normal “evolution”). In some recent AIG aritcles Ham and Jeason imply mutations and/or Natural Selection have no role in the speciation, even though Jeason’s long paper says both are possible factors, and he even spends pages showing lots of charts about “mutation rates” –as if implying they are very relevant. However, they can only be relevant if a high % of mutations are beneficial and selected/inherited, about which he presents no data. What he does not tell the reader is that (as YECs themselves have been claiming for years) only a tiny % are beneficial and selected, which does him no good in his YEC time frame, but which over millions of years, can produce not only speciation, but major evolutionary changes Moreover, Jeason’s claims largely contradict previous claims about hyperspeciation or “rapid post-Flood diversification” by supposed “baraminology” experts Todd Wood and Kurt Wise. Jeason also has no plausible mechanism to limit speciation beyond “baramin” boundaries –all he does is suggest his YEC interpretation of Genesis demands it, which of course will not fly with most scientists, even many theistic ones. More of my thoughts on the subject, with an emphasis on what I call the “allele problem” are at: http://paleo.cc/ce/ark-gene.htm
Thanks for the reply. I haven’t written anything on the blog yet this year, so I haven’t responded to recent comments.