Debunking Evolution - Common Ancestors (Lesson 5a)

Is it just me or does the evolutionary tree seem more like an orchard? All right, let's see if we can do this. Nope, that doesn't stay up. No, you've got to stay.

Stay.

Hey, Jane.

Organizing by Kind Instead of a Tree of Life

So, gotta be honest, I haven't really had a chance to study too much.

But...

Jane!

Sorry, I was just taking a break. I got this new makeup case and I'm having a hard time figuring out where to put everything. Now, I could put this lipstick here.

Or no. No, no, no.

No.

I'll handle this. So, we could organize it as simplest to most complex.

Or by color.

See, organization just is not my thing. Once my little sister asked me to organize all her little tiny plastic animals. Took me two days.

Organizing animals. It's like Carl Linnaeus.

Who's that?

Yeah, he was the first guy to classify animals.

Oh, oh, oh, yeah. I remember him now. His motto was, God created, Linnaeus ordered.

Yeah, his work is the basis for the classification system we still use today. Yeah, later Charles Darwin sketched a diagram to show how life started simple and then branched out to every creature on earth.

He said the different branches represent the different levels of classification. A tree of life, if you will.

Oh, yeah.

I keep seeing this over and over again in our textbooks.

Really?

Yeah.

Here we go. Check out this one.

Are researchers still trying to figure out how it happened?

There are a lot more of these diagrams. I think they change as different researchers group them based on different features.

These charts show groups of organisms they believe share a common ancestor.

Yeah, a group like that is called a clade. And these diagrams are called cladograms. Man, and I thought organizing my makeup was hard.

So do they. Well, not your makeup, classifying animals.

Okay, so remember that modern evolutionary classification is a rapidly changing science with a difficult goal, to present all life on a single evolutionary tree. As evolutionary biologists study relationships among taxa, they regularly change not only the way organisms are grouped, but also sometimes the name of groups.

Remember that cladograms are visual presentations of hypotheses about relationships and not hard and fast facts.

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

You're saying our textbooks say that cladograms are based off hypotheses, not facts.

Yeah, I'll show you why. Flip forward a page. Okay, that's because they only have living animals or fossils for certain places on the branches. These are real animals or fossils we've actually discovered.

But these branching points are just imaginary lines that represent the hypotheses about which animals evolved from a common ancestor. No facts support them that can't also support different links or no links.

The transitional fossils they represent have never been found. If they were, well, we'd see their pictures here, right? Though evolutionists point to a few examples, there should be thousands.

Creation According to Kind in Genesis 1

Genesis 121 says, So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that moves, with which the waters abounded according to their kind, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

From the beginning, God created fully formed kinds of animals. So it isn't a tree like Darwin thought. Instead, it's an orchard. God created the different kinds of animals, and then they expressed all types of amazing variety as they bred within their kind.

And recombining genetic possibilities that God packed into the original kinds produced that variety?

Exactly.

We see variation happening all the time. But we've never seen the evolutionary process of mutations and selection creating new kinds.

So dogs, apes, and people can show variety, but can never morph into a new kind.

Yep, just like the orchard. One basic tree kind can never become another. Scientists seem to name something a new species, even if there's only a minor change. And in the fossils, the smallest variation is classified as a different species, even though we see lots of variety with some species today.

Like what?

Like in dogs.

Just think about all the variety in the breeds of dog kinds, Canis familiaris, in the last 200 years. If future paleontologists dug up the bones of a bulldog, a chihuahua, and a Great Dane, they would surely classify them as three different species.

But they are all the same kind. Whether beaks of a finch change shape, or a color of a moth, the changes are limited.

When it's just expressing variety within the created kind.

Yep, so evolutionists consider adjustments to existing traits evidence that evolution made those traits in the first place. So, what if God made each basic kind with potential to change some of its traits, but no potential to morph into a different kind?

Dogs can breed with coyotes, and coyotes can breed with wolves. They're called a kaiwolf, so they must all be part of the same created kind. So they have a common ancestor, but it was the original dog kind that God created, not the transition between a reptile and a mammal like they show in these textbooks.

So fossils, the classification of animals, and the Bible are all in harmony.

That's what it looks like.

Practical Illustration of the Orchard Analogy

Well, all of that gives me an idea. What if we organize your makeup by kind? All the nail polish in one spot, all the eye stuff in another, and all the lip things elsewhere.

That's brilliant!

We do an orchard, not a tree.

Kind of makes you think, doesn't it?