Creationism - National Center for Science Education

example), but these changes are all the result of mere variation and degeneration within
the original types caused by mutations.
Genetics itself does not teach Christianity nor any other form of religion but it allows plenty of room for
Christianity and does not clamor for change. It does not supply facts to indicate a natural upward evolution
of the race but indicates a horizontal tendency for the most part with loss when mutation occurs. This type
of change is the vain hope of those who would see man emerging as the culmination of natural change.
[1970:175]
John Klotz, who has a biology Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh, and was
also a founding member of CRS, presents a similar treatment in Genes, Genesis, and
Evolution (1970; originally 1955).
Mutations have occurred in the past and still occur at a fixed, measurable rate. But all of this change,
insofar as the organic world is concerned, has taken place within limits fixed by the Creator when He
fashioned the different “kinds” in the beginning. [1970:vi]
Many other creationists besides Winrod have explained the story of Jacob and
Laban’s goats in Genesis, which is often cited by opponents as an example of the
unscientific nature of the Bible, by means of a Bible-science approach. Tinkle
(1970:153-154) interprets the real cause of the appearance of spotted and striped
offspring as due to recessive genes (though Jacob obviously thought it was due to the
external visual influence of striped rods to which Jacob exposed the mother goats).
According to Frank Marsh (1944:81), John Van Haitsma (an organic science professor at
Calvin College and a founder of the evangelical American Scientific Affiliation) also
explained the story in terms of recessive genes in The Supplanter Undeceived (1941).
In The Genesis Record, Henry Morris of the Institute for Creation Research says
that Jacob “had apparently learned something of what we now call Mendelian genetics,”
and realized that the spotted and speckled traits were recessive. Morris rejects the
apparent meaning of the story: that Jacob, believing in prenatal influences, supposed that
the striped rods could cause the birth of similarly marked goats by a kind of sympathetic
magic.
It may be that Jacob had learned certain things about these animals which modern biologists have not yet
even approached.
There are, indeed, certain factors which can become prenatal influences, and which can determine to
some degree the physical characteristics of the progeny. Though it is surely very unlikely that an external
image can be transmitted through the visual apparatus to the brain and thence in some way as a signal to the
DNA structure to specify certain characteristics to be triggered in the embryo, it is nevertheless true that
certain chemicals can and do have a signficant prenatal influence if they can reach the embryo or, prior to
conception, the DNA in the germ cells. It is possible that certain chemicals in the wood of these trees—
peeled rods of which were actually in the water which the flocks came to drink—were capable of affecting
the animals. [1976:475-476]
In any case, continues Morris, the rods probably had an aphrodisiac effect (whether
chemical or visual), inducing the goats to produce more offspring, which benefitted both
Laban and Jacob, who got to keep the recessive phenotypes. Morris adds, however, that
God, to benefit Jacob, supernaturally increased the proportion of these recessive
phenotypes.