The Forgiving Darwinist: Hope for Me!

In reading a recent article on the National Geographic Online website, I came across a startling admission. In previous posts, I've protested the sub-sub-categorization of fish species. Every time Evolutionary biologists come across a specimen who's fin is slightly smaller or dots are slightly lighter, they want to declare it to be a new species, give it a Latin surname and celebrate the onward march of evolution, right before our very eyes!

Now, my argument, and that of many others, has been that this is not an example of evolution, but is only a slight variation in what the Bible calls a 'kind'. God proclaimed that each should reproduce after it's kind. Evolutionists haven't been able to show that to be untrue, and never will. The variation between trout species does not make them each their own 'kind', just variations within a single 'kind'.

Now this article continues to push the evolutionary faith just like everything else on the National Geographic website. But it also contains a shocking admission that I've never seen before: that out of zeal for the evolutionary faith, past scientists tended to find many species in the fossil record where few or one actually existed. Here's the full text of the admission in question:

Mistakes Made

Andy Currant is a paleontologist at the British Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the study.

"Most large fossil herbivores tend to tune down to a smaller number of taxa [biological classifications] when you look at them closely," he said.

But, he added, the mistakes made by early investigators are easy to forgive. Researchers used to be hypersensitive to variation in specimens and did not really understand how much variation there can be between males and females within a population, he said.

Marcelo Sánchez, a paleontologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, said: "Solving such a specific taxonomic problem may not seem important. But individual-species research like this is ultimately what major claims about evolution depends[s] upon."

Now let's quickly break down what this man is saying.

First, he's pointing out that when paleontologists and taxonomists look "closely" at the evidence, what was once thought to be evidence of many species is found to be very few. There is a pressure on paleontologists to discover new species of dinosaurs to fill in the "gaps" in the evolutionary tree! Their theory is not benefited by fewer unique animals. They need more!

But, thankfully, Kaplan has struck a conciliatory tone with past scientists for skewing scientific evidence to support their evolutionary presuppositions. Magnanimity on this scale is rare to the scientific community. Perhaps it's part of a rising trend of a traditionally Christian valu...er...never mind.

I haven't found the website where you register to be forgiven by the scientific community, but perhaps there is now hope for me!