Thursday, September 16, 1999
Book fights evolution with dull mush
BY KAREN SAMPLES
The Cincinnati Enquirer
It's too bad Refuting Evolution is such a convoluted book. After a couple of hours, my head was swimming like ambulocetus in a 50-million-year-old ocean.
Oops, sorry. The authors say this never happened.
Reconstructed from a few bones, ambulocetus was a weird-looking critter with tiny legs for walking and a strong tail for swimming. Some scientists think he evolved into the whale.
Refuting Evolution insists otherwise. God created everything 6,000 years ago, so there was no earlier ocean, and whales never came from walking mammals.
Last week, this 143-page book was passed out to students at Ryle High School by supporters of Answers in Genesis (AIG). It's the nonprofit organization trying to build a creationist museum in Boone County.
AIG thinks the theory of evolution is bad for teen-age
self-esteem. No wonder young people are depressed and prone to violence. Who wouldn't be? According to the evolutionists, we're all just “descendants of a vast lineage of replicators sprung from primordial pond scum.”
Refuting Evolution is full of quotes such as the preceding one, from the magazine Scientific American. In part, the book tries to defeat evolutionists by repeating their most incendiary remarks.
It's unfortunate, really. God and science are not incompatible. Some of our most eminent scientists have spoken eloquently on the possibility of intelligent design. Instead of exploring this provocative territory, the book resorts to making biologists look mean-spirited.
It also tries to “prove” biblical creation by reinterpreting the evidence of evolution. What results is a contorted, confusing mess.
Yes, says the author, mutation gives rise to different species, but only through the loss of genetic information. God made a certain number of basic animals with many genes. Naturally, these animals changed over time in response to their environments, but they didn't develop new genes on their own, the book says.
This is an interesting idea made to sound very scientific.
It's not.
True scientists are busy testing their own theories, not just talking about the inconsistencies in somebody else's. OK, so there are missing links in the fossil record. But do creationists have a test for God?
Nope. Just tortuous paragraphs such as this one:
“Many evolutionists point to allegedly imperfect structures as "proof' of evolution, although this is really an argument against perfect design rather than for evolution. But many allegedly imperfect structures can also be interpreted as a deterioration of once-perfect structures, for example, eyes of blind creatures in caves. However, this fails to explain how sight could have arisen in the first place.”
Huh?
If kids weren't depressed before reading this, they will be afterward. It's terribly dull.
Too bad. With the right presentation, science and religion are anything but. Refuting Evolution should have stuck to the topic of intelligent design, which it covers in the second-to-last chapter.
Here's the irony: The more some scientists learn, the more impressed they are by the possibility of a creator.
Even the simplest cell is extraordinarily complex. A perfect balance in the universe made life possible on Earth. Human beings have 3 billion base pairs of genes.
And all this was accidental?
Don't read Refuting Evolution to find out. Study science, consider the big picture, and then take a leap of faith.
Karen Samples is Kentucky columnist for the Enquirer. Her column appears Thursdays and Sundays. She can be reached at 578-5584, or by e-mail ksamples@enquirer.com
