Creation Science Rebuttals
Genesis Veracity
Article #2: Sea Shells, Sea Shells, Everywhere
Review by Greg Neyman
© Old Earth Ministries
The second article starts off by discussing mutations. He claims mutations never enhance gene pools, and they almost always are harmful. Apparently, he hasn't looked too deeply into modern science. For example, in humans there are about 175 mutations per generation. Of those, most are harmful, but some are beneficial. The key here is that the harmful mutations do not survive long, whereas the beneficial ones, although fewer, have the better chance of surviving. Evolution favors the beneficial mutations, as they provide the organism with an added bonus it did not have before. Fortunately for scientists, mutations are commonly observed and can be studied.
The author goes on to talk about species in the second paragraph, but he gives on information that is important to the creation debate. He goes on to claim that most of the animals in the fossil record are alive today, but evolution would predict that most species should be extinct. What are the numbers?
Estimates of the number of species alive today is about 1.5 million. Of these, one million of them are insects, which do not preserve very well as fossils. That leaves about 500,000 named species. We currently have about 250,000 known fossil species, most of which are not insects. Thus, not counting insects, the number of living species is only two times greater than the number in the fossil record.
From a scientific standpoint, this is to be expected. Fossil preservation is a rare event, and finding fossils in many cases boils down to blind luck. If we had the capability to dig up all the fossils in the world, we very well could find millions upon millions of new species. The number of species is of no concern to the creation science debate.
The author next mentions that most fossils are of marine animals, and states "Mostly water creatures in the rocks on the continents? How can this be? The water must have been up on the continents, no way around it." This shows a complete disregard for geologic tectonic forces, and the role they play in uplifting rock layers. He goes on to say that there are even sea creatures in the rocks of the mountains. He mentions Greenland, but most young earth creationists point to Mount Everest, where there are marine fossils high up on the mountain. Plate tectonics explains it all, however, young earth creationists, using Morton's Demon, can ignore such evidence. Instead, they believe in something called catastrophic plate tectonics, which fails every scientific test! For example, make a layer of sediment with fossils during the supposed global flood, then have rapid plate tectonics to uplift it over 20,000 feet high (Mt Everest). The young earth model would not be lifting rock...it would be lifting soft mud, and there would be no Mount Everest. (This doesn't even take into account the fact that Everest's layers have been metamorphosed, which indicates the passage of much more time than 4,300 years).
Sources: Talk Origins Index, Georgia Perimeter College
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