Jeff's Lunchbreak: Creationists' Weird Concepts of Hyper-Evolution

Note: This entry adapted from Quora.

While some creationists may be of the sort convinced by the saying, "The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it," many more want to show that the their beliefs are rational and supported by evidence. In this search for rational explanations, many of the more intellectual creationists actually do accept evolution in certain forms, though they'll often refuse to say so. For example, here's an example from Answers in Genesis, Speciation, Yes; Evolution, No. The title says it all. The writer comes out and says that certain phenomena that are part of evolution actually occur, but then denies that this is 'evolution'.

It even included this figure:

Image Source: Answers in Genesis, Click to embiggen

It looks almost like the branching pattern you see in mainstream biology textbooks, with the big difference being that they've decided to stop going back any further than the 'kinds' that were created in the Garden of Eden.

In fact, for creationists who take the Noah's Ark story seriously, and have given any thought at all to what it would take to fit representatives of all the world's animals on the ark, it becomes very obvious that there's no possible way to fit every single species. So, they focus on the word 'kind', claiming that kind is more akin to families instead of species, and that Noah only had to take representatives of the different kinds. Then, once the flood waters dried up, the descendants of those rescued animals would go on to 'adapt' (not evolve, of course) into many new species.

Here's another example from Answers in Genesis, this one from the page, Reimagining Ark Animals.

Image Source: Answers in Genesis, Click to embiggen

Yes. Creationists are proposing that all living cats have a common ancestor.

And here are a few photos people took at The Creation Museum:

Image Source: RationalityNow.com, Click to embiggen

Image Source: RationalityNow.com - Creation Museum Part 5

Image Source: GasFoodNoLodging.com, Click to embiggen

These particular creationists are proposing some rather large 'adaptations' over the generations.

Granted, it does get a little hard to explain creationist rationale since it's not always fully coherent. For example, in that first article I linked to (Speciation, Yes; Evolution, No), the writer says that this type of adaptation is possible thanks to a large gene pools with already existing variation. In fact, I'll include one last figure to show the claim:

Image Source: Answers in Genesis

And creationists are very fond of saying that no new information can be created through genetic mutation. But look at the types of adaptation Answers in Genesis was proposing for all those animals after the flood. Even with clean animals that had 7 pairs instead of just 1 pair, there's no way their genomes would have had all the variation necessary to produce the varied offspring Answers in Genesis is claiming. And the time scales they're proposing (remember - the flood was only a few thousand years ago) are far more rapid than anything from actual science. It's almost funny that the creationists who deny 'evolution' so vehemently, go on to propose this type of hyper evolution.

But even with this hyper evolution, creationists claim that adaptation can only go so far, and that animals of a certain kind will only ever go on to have descendants of the same kind, as if there's some kind of magic stop sign in the genome.

Anyway, many creationists don't actually deny certain evolutionary principles. In fact, many creationists amp those principles up to 11 to deal with other inconvenient facets of creationism. But, they'll steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that it's 'evolution'. I mean, one breeding pair of cats evolving into lions, tigers, ocelots, bobcats, jaguars, and all the other cats in a mere 6000 years is perfectly reasonable. But a common ancestor between cats and dogs would just be silly.