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