Genesis 1:11, Now With Neodarwinian Stylings!

“You see, kids, the Calla lily, or Zantedeschia aethopica, isn’t really a lily at all! In fact, Brianna, the white part you are touching — which you so innocently call the “flower” — is actually just a leaf, or bract, that has been modified by natural selection to attract insect pollinators to the inflorescence inside of it. Thousands of tiny orange male flowers sit atop hundreds of tiny female flowers on a long column called a spadix, in an arrangement similar to that utilized by the genus Arum. The genus Zantedeschia is native to Africa, which is where we humans probably started evolving away from the common ancestor we share with apes and chimpanzees. Modern humans have only been around for a few hundred thousand years, and ever since then we have looked to the heavens and our favorite bedtime stories to explain the things we don’t understand or refuse to learn about.”

I gave a tour to some homeschool kids this morning and felt a bit like the Pied Piper leading them through the forest. The little ones wanted to hold my hands, and eventually I had one on each arm. That was the good part. The awesome part was when I started talking about “fossils” and “millions of years” and I saw one of the parents have a mini freak out … I can only assume she thought I was going to drop the E-bomb. I didn’t, because a discussion on evolution vs. creationism would have been an unnecessary flourish while talking about limestone. Maybe next time I’ll try to work it in somehow. Is there some homeschool supply company that specializes in tearing out pages of science books before you buy them, or are the churches printing their own science books these days?

While creationism explains everything, it offers no understanding beyond, “that’s the way it was created.” No testable predictions can be derived from the creationist explanation. Creationism has not made a single contribution to agriculture, medicine, conservation, forestry, pathology, or any other applied area of biology. Creationism has yielded no classifications, no biogeographies, no underlying mechanisms, no unifying concepts with which to study organisms or life. In those few instances where predictions can be inferred from Biblical passages (e.g., groups of related organisms, migration of all animals from the resting place of the ark on Mt. Ararat to their present locations, genetic diversity derived from small founder populations, dispersal ability of organisms in direct proportion to their distance from eastern Turkey), creationism has been scientifically falsified.

Quote from the Botanical Society of America’s Statement on Evolution.

I won’t get all Richard Dawkins here, but a story of Creation is only one of the things religions have traditionally had to offer to their subjects. Ignorance of hundreds of years of scientific inquiry just because you’re really jazzed about the first line of the Bible is about as relevant as a society full of Herman Melville fans naming all of the children Ishmael.

And that takes us right on in to Baraminology, because if there’s one branch of science the creationists like, its psuedoscience. So much creativity, so misdirected.