SIX: Natural Selection and Speciation

In the last article, changes to the entire surface of the earth and its climate were presented as a direct result of the Genesis Flood. The post-Flood world developed a wide range of climates from arctic to temperate, subtropical and tropical. Also, many variations of climate developed due to combinations of latitude, elevation, proximity to or distance from oceans, and the presence of intervening mountains blocking passage of moisture-laden air to desert regions.

This is in great contrast to what is thought to be the stable pre-Flood worldwide subtropical climate, which would not have provided a stimulus for the expression of different genes contained in the genomes of each biblical kind. However, with the multitude of climates produced in the post-Flood world due to the


 factors presented in the last article (hyperlink?) great environmental challenges faced animals (and plants) as they multiplied, spread out and filled the earth after leaving the Ark in obedience to God’s command.

Remembering that God, not Noah, selected the animals and sent them to the Ark, He selected the animals that possessed the widest range of genes for many different characteristics. This endowed the animals with the capability to express different characteristics derived from combinations of genes that would allow them to adapt to various living conditions.

For example, let’s take the dog kind. The original pair of the dog kind, upon leaving the Ark, multiplied, spread out and filled the earth. (By the way, genetic studies by secular scientists now show that dogs originated from the gray wolf in the Middle East.) As they encountered different conditions, different characteristics would favor some individuals over others.

Lets focus on fur length and color. A pair of dogs encountering arctic conditions each possesses genes for long and short fur. Their offspring receive the combinations shown in the diagram so that one fourth will have long fur, one fourth short fur, and half medium-length fur. Those with long fur will have a better chance of survival in arctic conditions, will out reproduce the others and will become the dominant or only type that survives in those conditions. The same holds for those with white fur, for they will have better camouflage in snow than dogs with black or gray fur. This is a greatly simplified picture of what occurs, but the principles still hold true.

This process is called natural selection, and creationists believe this is what happened in rapid fashion after the flood, and still occurs today at a slower pace. However, creationists differ greatly from evolutionists on the following points:

1. Natural selection occurs with the loss of information. As you can see from the diagram, the dogs with long fur no longer have the genes for short fur, because they were selected out by the cold conditions in the arctic. For many years, evolutionists have maintained that mutations plus natural selection are the mechanism for evolution to occur. We shall discuss in a future article that mutations are either neutral or lead to disease or death. They do not add information to the genome.

2. These changes in fur length or color are changes within a kind, not from one kind (dog) to another kind (cat or bear). This is speciation – the formation of species within the same original kind that came off the Ark by migration, causing isolated gene pools and loss of information through shuffling of genes as shown in the diagram. This is how the dog family formed 35 species since the Flood. The domestic dog with some 400 breeds worldwide is just one of those 35 species.

3. On the one hand, the evolutionary scenario starts with a miniscule gene pool in one initial life form branching out into a tree, which shows all life descending from that original life form, through the addition of information by mutation and natural selection. This is based on man’s changing thoughts. On the other hand, Biblical history tells us that at the beginning there was a huge gene pool made up of many different kinds forming a great creation orchard, with each tree a different Biblical kind, such as bear, cow, horse, cat, dog, etc. There was great loss of information through extinction by the Genesis Flood and additional loss of information in individuals by speciation after the Flood. This is based on God’s unchanging Word.

This leads us to the question: What about people? What happened to them after the Flood? We will look at this in the next article.