"In the beginning G-d created the heaven and theearth." - Genesis 1:1

Why should one care about evolution? After all, one can be a "theistic evolutionist", a creationist who believes that G-d used evolution as His means of creation. However, while such a theory is internally consistent, it poses grave difficulties. The first and most serious is that, even taking the days of Genesis 1 as geological ages, sudden creation as opposed to gradual evolution seems to be the most straightforward interpretation. The second is that, in the case of man, we are specifically told that G-d made man from the dust of the earth, not from the lineage of lower primates. The third is that G-d told the species He created to reproduce "after their kind". While the word translated "kind" may be broad enough to mean "genus", it certainly precludes evolution from one-celled organisms up through primates.

What, then, are we to make of the theory of evolution? The most serious flaw with the theory is its failure to account for organs that are "irreducibly complex", that is, so intricate and composed of so many interworking parts that they would be utterly useless were any part missing. One such organ is the eye. As a unit, it makes the world's most sophisticated camera seem like a Tinkertoy. But remove the optic nerve, or the cornea, or the retina, or any other of its dozens of component parts, and what remains is worthless. Such a structure could not have come about naturally, over millions of years, because natural selection works vigorously against the creation of useless appendages. (Natural selection is the process by which well-adapted individuals thrive at the expense of poorly-adapted individuals.) Said Charles Darwin, the founder of modern evolutionary thought, "To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration,could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree." ("The Origin of Species",Penguin edition, page 217) Other irreducibly complex structures include the ear, the digestive system, and the respiratory system.

More seriously, in the case of the sexual reproductive system, the organism doesn't even have unlimited generations to get it right. Either the organ systems are all in place from day one, or the organism leaves no offspring at all and cannot adapt. Not surprisingly, there are no known fossils of animals with partially-formed sexual reproductive systems.

The problem of irreducibly complex systems creates a corollary difficulty regarding the evolution of amphibians from fish. Fish use gills to breathe. Amphibians have gills as well, which they use while in water, but breathing on land requires an entirely different organ, the lung. The lung is so radically different from the gill as to preclude its having arisen from the gill, and it is too intricate to have arisen spontaneously. Consequently amphibians cannot have evolved from fish. Yet if life began in the ocean,as is claimed, there cannot have been any other evolutionary path for amphibians to follow. Amphibians must have been created.

Similarly, plants cannot have come about naturally. The leaf, by means of which plants make their own food, is another example of an irreducibly complex structure. The substructures that produce chlorophyll,those that absorb carbon dioxide from the air, those that receive water from the stem, etc. function perfectly when the leaf is intact; but remove any of those substructures and the leaf is useless. The leaf must therefore have arisen intact instantaneously.

Another difficulty is the fossil record. If an organism were to come about through evolution, we would expect to see in the fossil record a more or less continuous transition from the ancestor organism to the modern form; while rates of change might theoretically have varied from one era to the next, the overall process of evolution should be a continuous one(since an organism's young are always genetically similar to their parents).But the museums of natural history are totally devoid of any transition forms between invertebrates and vertebrates, between fish and amphibians,between amphibians and reptiles, between reptiles and mammals, or even between Australopithecus and modern man (Australopithecus is the supposed common ancestor of humans and apes). Attempts to explain the gaps in the fossil record in terms of the unlikelihood of any one fossil being preserved to the present day overlook the fact that, with the many fossils that have in fact been preserved, we should expect to see at least some intermediates. In the case of human evolution, some fossils have turned up which have been touted as intermediates. However, they can all be explained; I list a few below. (I am aware that creationist sources are taken with a large grain of salt by evolutionists, and not completely without justification, so I will quote from the book "Blueprints: Solving the Mystery of Evolution" [Penguin edition] by die-hard evolutionists Maitland Edey and Donald Johanson.)

Neanderthal man. The first Neanderthal fossil was a skull found in the Neander Valley in Germany in 1856. The beetling brow and heavy bones of the earlier fossil finds seemed to suggest that Neanderthalman was a primitive human ancestor, an intermediate between man and apes. But as Neanderthal fossils began to be discovered in the East, where the beetling brow and heavy bones were less pronounced, it began to seem likely that Neanderthal man was simply a slightly peculiar local type living in southwestern Europe. "Finally - and this is the late news flash onNeanderthal - he, too, is Homo sapiens. He gets the subspecies name H. sapiens Neanderthalensis. We are H. sapiens sapiens." (Page 328) In other words, Neanderthal man is nothing more than an extinct race of fully modern man, no more different from us than the modern races are from one another.

Cro-Magnon man. First discovered in a cave in 1868, he is believed to have been responsible for many of the cave paintings in the Dordogne Valley in France. "Today Cro-Magnon Man is labeled a Homo sapiens, just as you are. He wasn't so-labeled right off the bat, because there were very small skeletal differences between him and you. But so are there between many races of men around the world right now."(Page 328) So Cro-Magnon man is also fully modern.

Java Ape Man. In 1893 Eugene Dubois, a young Dutch doctor, found part of a skull and some teeth in Java, then a Dutch colony. The skull and teeth were so primitive and apelike that they could not have come from a human. He called his find Pithecanthropus erectus, or upright-walking ape-man; the species name "erectus" was justified by a leg bonefound near the skull. This fossil quickly earned the popular name "Java Ape Man". The leg bone was actually found some yards away and is now believed to have come from some other creature (Pages 329-330), so it seems likely that Java Ape Man was actually an ape and not a "missing link" at all.

Homo habilis. A husband and wife team, Louis and Mary Leakey, were exploring in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, where Australopithecus fossils had previously been found. In the course of their exploration, they came across skull and jaw fragments of four individuals which appeared to be more manlike than Australopithecus, having larger brains. Louis Leakey named the find Homo habilis, or handy man, believing that it was the maker of certain stone tools found in Olduvai Gorge (as opposed to the then-prevailing idea that the tools had been made by an australopithecus). However, "the bits and pieces of the habilis skulls were too fragmentary for its brain size to be calculated accurately. Fit them one way, and you get a fairly large brain. Fit them another, and you get a brain in the australopithecine range." (Page 335) So there is no real motivation for believing that Homo habilis isn't actually another race of Australopithecus.

Other supposed missing links have been put forward over the years, but all can be similarly explained. Some examples are Peking man (now knownto be fully human), Nebraska man (evidenced solely by a tooth now known to have come from an extinct race of pig), and Piltdown man (now known to have been a hoax). The fossil record is clear: man did not evolve from apes, Australopithecus, or anything else. Man, and all other species as well, were created spontaneously by G-d, and attempts to show otherwise will always fail. Archaeological evidence has always supported chapters 12 through 49 of Genesis, where the lives of the Patriarchs are discussed. Jews have also long been adept at keeping detailed genealogical records, lending credence to the "begats" portion of Genesis. Why should we have trouble accepting the rest of Genesis, where the creation of the world by a personal Creator who loves us is discussed?

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