Claim CH521:
The specialized dietary needs of many animals might have come about only
after the Flood via microevolution. Microevolution could also account for
climate preferences, lack of dormancy, wild temperament, and other traits,
meaning that Noah never would have had to face many of the challenges that
would be posed by animals in their present form.
Source:
Woodmorappe, John, 1996. Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study, Santee,
CA: ICR, pp. 61, 116-117, 125, 134.
Response:
- It is ironic that someone opposed to evolution would invoke evolution
as a magic wand to solve so many problems. The rates of evolution
proposed by Woodmorappe are far greater than the evolution rates that
biologists propose to account for common descent of all plants and
animals from a common ancestor.
Woodmorappe (1996, 5-7) further proposed that all species evolved after
the Flood from representative genera or families aboard the ark. Since
the evolution Woodmorappe proposed involves speciation and has no
barriers to change, it is unquestionably macroevolution, not
microevolution.
- Rapid evolution requires populations that include lots of variation
already; the evolution then proceeds via selection of existing
variation. If there is little or no variation in the population
already, nonharmful mutations must first occur to provide some
variation, and evolution is much slower. According to the Flood story,
almost all populations would have begun from just two individuals,
making variation virtually nil. (Few populations would have had the
capacity even to survive normal environmental fluctuations; Simberloff
1988). The populations would not have had the genetic variation to
allow microevolution of specialized traits to be common.
References:
- Simberloff, Daniel, 1988. The contribution of population and community
biology to conservation science. Annual Review of Ecology and
Systematics 19: 473-511.
created 2003-8-27
