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E D I T O R I A L

ONE LONG ARGUMENT

Over the course of recorded history, the idea of a Creator God hasbeen constantly called into question. A millennium before the birth of Christ,David declared that: “The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God.”Four centuries later, the Chavarka philosophers of India were boldly denyingthe existence of the supernatural; “There is no heaven, no final liberation,nor any soul in another world”1 according to Brihaspati, the founder ofCharvarka philosophy. Shortly thereafter in the west, Epicureanism emergedfrom earlier atomistic philosophy and blossomed into a complete denial ofdivine action. Cicero put these words into the mouth of an exponent ofEpicurean philosophy:

For he [Epicurus] who taught us all the rest has also taught usthat the world was made by nature, without needing an artificerto construct it, and that the act of creation, which accordingto you cannot be performed without divine skill, is so easy,that nature will create, is creating, and has created worldswithout number. You on the contrary cannot see how naturecan achieve all this without the aid of some intelligence.…2

At around the same time, during the century before Christ’s birth, theRoman poet and popularizer of Epicurean philosophy Titus Lucretius Carussketched an outline remarkably similar to the modern Darwinian view ofhistory:

The atoms did not intend to intelligently place themselves inorderly arrangement, nor did they negotiate the motions theywould have, but many atoms struck each other in numerousways, carried along by their own momentum from infinitelylong ago to the present. Moving and meeting in numerous ways,all combinations were tried which could be tried, and it wasfrom this process over huge space and vast time that these com-bining and recombining atoms eventually produced greatthings, including the earth, sea, and sky, and the generation ofliving creatures.3

The formula for denial of the Creator God is simple and evolved little:First deny the possibility of design in nature, then substitute blind lawsinteracting under unguided conditions over an incredible period of time ina really big universe. In more recent times, the Darwinist apologist RichardDawkins put it this way:

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Given infinite time, or infinite opportunities, anything is possi-ble. The large numbers proverbially furnished by astronomy,and the large time spans characteristic of geology, combine toturn topsy-turvy our everyday estimates of what is expected andwhat is miraculous.4

From the beginning, Christians have consistently affirmed the realityof design in the creation. For example, the Apostle Peter says:

[T]here shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after theirown lusts, And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? forsince the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were fromthe beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorantof, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earthstanding out of the water and in the water.5

Scientists working at the interface of science and the Christian faithneed to be aware of the long history of disagreement over origins. Theapostles were probably personally aware of the kind of mockery and thegeneral outline of the opposition faced today by those who believe theBiblical creation account. In fact, the New Testament tells us that theApostle Paul debated with the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers in Athens.6

It is hard to imagine that the other apostles avoided interaction with theprevailing philosophies of their day.

It may appear ironic that when Christians make the Bible their standard,their view of reality achieves a previously unresolved clarity. Understandingnature through empirical observation becomes more rational when Biblicalrevelation provides the premises of our logic than when human logic,reasoning from false premises, is relied on alone. All the answers are notyet in, perhaps they never will be; that is why scientists still have jobs. Wemay have to wait to ask the Creator himself why He allowed so much evilin nature, why tigers are such beautifully perfect instruments of death toother equally beautiful creatures, or why certain snakes have fangs thatfold away when their mouths are closed and then swing out and forwardwhen they open to strike. In the mean time, current debate over IntelligentDesign is simply the latest installment of one long argument.7

Timothy G. Standish

ENDNOTES

1. Brihaspati is quoted in: Mádhava Áchárya. c1360. The Sarva Darsana Sangraha orReview of the Different Systems of Hindu Philosophy. Cowell EB, Gough AE,translators. 3rd Ed. 1908. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., p 10.

2. Marcus Tullius Cicero — De Natura Deorum http://www.epicurus.net/en/deorum.html.

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3. This is my own translation of the original Latin as printed in Titus Lucretius Carus,circa 55 B.C., De Rerum Natura, Book 5, lines 419-31. Lucretius: On the Nature ofThings. 1992. Rouse WHD, translator, Smith MF, rev. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press. The Latin text is reproduced below:

419 nam certe neque consilio primordia rerum

420 ordine se suo quaeque sagaci mente locarunt

421 nec quos quaeque darent motus pepigere profecto,

422 sed quia multa modis multis primordial rerum

423 ex infinito iam tempore percita plagis

424 ponderibusque suis consuerunt concita ferri

425 omnimodique coire atque omnia pertemptare,

426 quacumque inter se possent congressa creare,

427 propterea fit uti magnum volgata per aevom,

428 omne genus coetus et mortus experiundo,

429 tandeum convenient ea quae convecta repente

430 magnarum rerum fiut exordia saepe,

431 terrain maris et caeli generisque animantum.

4. Dawkins R. 1989. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the evidence of evolution reveals auniverse without design. NY: W. W. Norton and Co., p 139.

5. 2 Peter 3:3-5 KJV.

6. See Acts 17:18.

7. Darwin stated that he viewed The Origin of Species as, “one long argument.” See:Darwin CR. 1872. Recapitulation and Conclusion. Chapter 6 in The Origin of Speciesby means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Strugglefor Life. Sixth Edition. Markham, Ontario, Canada: Penguin Books, p 426.

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A R T I C L E S

SPECIES VARIABILITY AND CREATIONISM

Todd Charles WoodCenter for Origins Research

Bryan CollegeDayton, Tennessee

ABSTRACTBefore and after the publication of Origin of Species, creationists have

held a diversity of opinion regarding the origin of species. Studies of speciesin the sixteenth century began with numerous suggestions of wide variability,but after Francesco Redi helped to falsify spontaneous generation, scholarsbegan to view species as essentially fixed. This was reinforced by prominentnatural theologians, who endorsed a static creation. Despite the popularity offixity, even Linnaeus himself doubted it. After Darwin, many Christiansinstinctively defended the fixist definition of creationist that Darwin himselfpopularized in Origin. Only in the early twentieth century did creationistsreturn actively to developing models of limited speciation or polyphyleticevolution. The independent recurrence of these ideas suggests that they havesome intrinsic appeal to those seeking an alternative to monophyletic evolution.

INTRODUCTION

Before any history of creationist biology can begin, it seems importantto define the term “creationist.” The definition of creationism has gainedsome attention recently, as a sort of pejorative term. For example, IntelligentDesign (ID) advocates try to challenge the evolutionary theory in theo-logically neutral terms, while their critics persistently describe them as“creationists” (e.g., Pennock 1999, Piggliucci 2003). Others define“creationist” in extreme terms. For example, Douglas Futuyma defines“special creation” as “the doctrine that each species, living and extinct,was created independently by God, essentially in its present form” (2005,p 524). Similar definitions can be found in other textbooks (e.g., Stearns& Hoekstra 2005, p 17-18; Ridley 2004, p 688), even though Numbers’s(2004) research on creationism shows that fixity of species is a minorityamong modern creationist positions. If we accept Futuyma’s definition of“special creation,” then there are very few adherents of special creationamong young-age creationists. So what is a creationist?

Numbers (1999) traced the usage of creationism and found that todayit almost universally applies to young-age creationists, those advocates ofa short chronology for the earth and a universal deluge. This minimalist

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approach to the biblical issues surrounding the definition of creationistallows for a wide variety of scientific views held by creationists, only oneof which might be species fixity. I will follow this biblical definition ofcreationist, even though I acknowledge that applying creationist to manyof the individuals discussed herein is anachronistic. Nevertheless, if theyhold to the same doctrinal positions regarding Genesis that I do as a cre-ationist, then there exists a kind of theological and intellectual kinship,which transcends specific differences regarding scientific or other theo-logical ideas.

What then constitutes creationist biology? More specifically, what isthe creationist perspective on the origin of species? Despite Darwin’sdiscussion of creationists in Origin, creationist opinions on species fixityand variability have always been quite diverse. Since most attention isgiven (for better or worse) to creationists who endorse species fixity,I wish to focus more on the diversity of opinion among creationists whoreject species fixity. We shall see that there is no single creationistperspective on the species issue.

THE EMERGENCE OF SPECIES FIXITY

At the foundations of modern science, the enumeration of speciesarose as a specific aspect of defending the account of Noah’s Ark inGenesis 6-9. These listings gradually became more sophisticated overtime until they became interesting pursuits in their own right, regardlessof their application to Ark apologetics. Johannes Buteo’s (1559, see alsoGriffith & Monnette 2007) list of Ark animals exemplifies early efforts. Inaddition to sheep, goats, cows, and wolves, Buteo’s list of Ark animalsalso included unicorns, the pegasus, and the manticore. Royal Societyfounder John Wilkins (1668, see also Wood 2007) took a more conserva-tive approach and omitted some of the more fanciful creatures of Buteo’slist. Wilkins also suggested the possibility that some oxen on his list mighthave originated from a common ancestor by “various changes ... frequentlyoccasioned in the same species by several countries, diets, and otheraccidents” (Wilkins 1668, p 165). Thus it would not be necessary tocarry every minor variation of cow onto the Ark. Finally, John Ray, whoassisted Wilkins in composing his tables of animals, later created his ownlists of species using a more “natural” scheme (see Shapiro 1969, p 218).

Other biological considerations about Noah’s Ark can be found in thework of Jose de Acosta, Jesuit missionary and explorer who publishedNatural and Moral History of the Indies in 1590 (López-Morillas 2002).Acosta considered three explanations for how animals could have reachedthe Americas from the Ark’s landing site in the Middle East. The distance

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precluded swimming or flying, and Acosta thought it unlikely that peoplewould willingly transport “wolves and foxes and other such vile andworthless animals” (López-Morillas 2002, p 62). Acosta concluded thatthe third method of transport was the most likely: Animals came to thenew world by walking on an as yet undiscovered land bridge. Anticipatingthe discovery of the Bering land bridge is Acosta’s chief claim to fame inbiogeography today (e.g., Klein & Schiffner 2003).

Acosta also entertained the possibility that the animals of the Americaswere not different species from those found in Eurasia and Africa. “Wemust also consider whether these animals differ specifically and essentiallyfrom all others or whether their difference is accidental; this could becaused by various accidents, as in the lineage of men some are white andothers black, some giants and others dwarfs” (López-Morillas 2002, p 236).He admitted that this type of variation was unlikely to account for allAmerican animals, but his discussion of the possibility of wide variation isintriguing. Acosta was not the first or last to suggest that such speciesvariation was possible. This opinion was repeated in the English-speakingworld by Sir Walter Ralegh in 1614 (Ralegh 1829, p 214) and MatthewHale in 1677. So developed was Hale’s view that Zirkle (1946) called hima “pre-Darwinian evolutionist,” even though he evidently held the samedoctrinal views as creationists.

These musings do not negate the more common view of speciesfixity, even prior to Linnaeus. For example, in 1695, John Woodwardasserted that “the Animal and Vegetable Productions of the AntediluvianEarth did not in any wise differ from those of the present Earth” (p 247).Even Acosta rejected his own suggestion, “For if we are to judge thespecies of animals by their characteristics those of the Indies are so diversethat to try to reduce them to species known in Europe would be likecalling an egg a chestnut” (López-Morillas 2002, p 236).

The common understanding of “species” at the time was Aristotelianand Platonic (Landgren 1993). In Greek philosophy, the species was anidealistic form, an eidos. As an eternal object, the eidos could not changein its essence. This Greek conception of species became linked to theGenesis “kind” via the Vulgate, which translates min as species in Gen. 1:21,24, and 25. In the Hebrew Old Testament, min is used very infrequently,but usually refers to a category of living thing. From its usage, we inferthat it was an imprecise term, much like the English word “kind” (Woodet al. 2003). The philosophical concept of an immutable essence wasimposed on the text by linking min to species. Thus, while these earlymodern scholars suggested that the species might be defined broadly,

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they still held to the concept that species were defined by an immutableessence.

The demise of speculations about wide species variability is closelytied to the downfall of spontaneous generation, although as we shall see,species variability did not entirely disappear. Throughout the seventeenthcentury, a series of studies and experiments built the case against spon-taneous generation. The decisive work in the minds of many contemporarieswas that of Francesco Redi (1668), who showed that rotting meat, if keptcarefully separate from insects, did not generate maggots. Subsequently,scholars such as John Ray explicitly linked the rejection of spontaneousgeneration to species fixity. Ray (1691, p 298-299) wrote, “My Observationand Affirmation is, that there is no such thing in Nature, as Æquivocal orSpontaneous Generation, but that all Animals, as well small as great, notexcluding the vilest and most contemptible Insect, are generated by AnimalParents of the same Species with themselves.” Similarly, Carolus Linnaeuswrote in Systema Natura,“If we behold the works of God, it is more thansufficiently obvious to all, that every animate being comes into existenceout of a parent’s egg, and that all eggs produce offspring like its parents,wherefore no new species can arise” (quoted in Landgren 1993).

By the 1740s, however, Linnaeus became concerned with the occur-rence of hybridization (Landgren 1993). If species were marked by theirability to reproduce only after their own species, as scholars had assumedsince Redi’s experiments, what do we do with a hybrid, which resemblestwo apparently different species? Linnaeus began to suggest that in thebeginning, God had created only a single species in each genus, and thathybridization between those species produced the wide variety of specieswe see today. In Linnaeus’ more mature view, modern species did notrepresent the originally-created forms, but instead arose during history asGod’s created forms intermingled. Unfortunately, Linnaeus is so linked tospecies fixity that his later view on species variability is forgotten.

Speculations on the variable nature of species and God’s creationcontinued well into the nineteenth century. English clergyman and plantbreeder William Herbert developed a view of species in which God originallycreated a single member of each genus and variation occurred naturallywithout hybridization. Although Herbert accepted a global Flood, he rejectedthe young-age chronology (see Guimond 1966, p 200-202), and thus heis not strictly a creationist according to my doctrinal definition. Never-theless, his view on species variability is fascinating. According to Herbert,modern species were descendants of the created types that had variedand changed in response to climate changes after the Flood.

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If the Almighty created the original types capable of perma-nent variations under different circumstances, perhaps ofsoil or climate, those variations were worked at a veryearly period, on the first diffusion of seeds into every differ-ent portion of the world, especially by the operation of theflood, and may have in part resulted from the changes ofclimate which accompanied it and shortened the life ofman (Herbert 1837, p 338).

As might be expected, Herbert is presently considered to be a kind ofevolutionary forerunner to Darwin (e.g., Darlington 1937; Guimond 1966,1985), despite his clear advocacy of doctrinal issues that mark him as anold-earth creationist.

NATURAL THEOLOGY AND SPECIES FIXITY

British natural theology, as popularized by Wilkins (1675), Boyle (1688),and Ray (1691), is also partly responsible for perpetuating the belief inspecies fixity. The object of natural theology was to derive religiousprinciples from observation or reason, without explicit reference to specialrevelation. The functionalist approach to natural theology viewed con-trivance as evidence of a divine designer, and attempted to derive thecharacteristics of that designer from the admirable traits of his designs.By rejecting the use of special revelation, natural theologians were forcedinto rather contorted and unlikely explanations for the more unpleasantaspects of creation. John Ray (1691, p 309) exhibits this in his discussionof lice:

Here, by the by, I cannot but look upon the strange Instinctof this noisome and troublesome Creature the Louse, ofsearching out foul and nasty Cloaths to harbour and breedin, as an Effect of Divine Providence, designed to deterrMen and Women from Sluttishness and Sordidness, and toprovoke them to Cleanliness and Neatness.

However, we would oversimplify the issue by attributing this strangeexplanation of lice and many others like it merely to the inability to usespecial revelation (especially the account of the Fall of man and the subse-quent curse on creation). Besides just avoiding special revelation, therewas also a more subtle requirement on natural theology. As Ray (1691,Preface) expressed it, “by the Works of the Creation, in the Title, I meanthe Works created by God at first, and by Him conserv’d to this Day inthe same State and Condition in which they were at first made.” Naturaltheology required a strong measure of stasis to work. If any change increation was allowed, it would alter God’s revelation, just as surely as

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altering the text of the Bible would change special revelation. If we seeGod’s attributes in creation (which according to the natural theologianswe definitely do), then creation must be the same as when God made it.

When faced with natural evil, English clergyman and author of NaturalTheology William Paley (1830) took a peculiarly dualistic approach. Heincluded the viper’s fang and bee’s sting in admirable contrivances thatdemonstrated wise designs, without commenting on the purposes to whichthose contrivances were put. At the conclusion of Natural Theology, how-ever, Paley gave an extended account of the problem of natural evil inwhich he explicitly endorsed death as part of God’s design. “Immortalityupon this earth is out of the question. Without death there could be nogeneration, no sexes, no parental relation, i.e. as things are constituted, noanimal happiness” (Paley 1830, p 329). If death is a part of the design,then death is not an enemy to be vanquished or an interloper in God’screation, as most modern creationists would hold. Instead, death musthave been there from the beginning, and nature is necessarily static.

Thus we see that as scholars better understood reproduction, speciesfixity became fashionable, and from natural theology we find anotherstrong tradition of the stasis of creation. These traditions resulted in aview of the universe as an unchanging and unchanged entity. Seen in thislight then, Charles Lyell’s doctrine of uniformitarianism in geology cameas no novel proposal, but as a logical outworking of the prevailing viewsof his day.

THE RESPONSE TO ORIGIN

Despite individuals advocating species variability, scientists of the firsthalf of the nineteenth century commonly assumed that species were fixedand unchangeable. That does not diminish the reality of pre-Darwinianscholars who advocated species variability, but it is important to note thatthese ideas did not gain widespread acceptance. Consequently, Darwinreferred to the common view of species fixity throughout Origin, and heexplicitly linked species fixity to the doctrine of special creation (e.g.,Darwin 1859, p 44, 469). Given that Darwin should have known aboutcreationist alternatives to species fixity, why did he equate special creationwith species fixity? It is almost as if he was creating a straw man creationistin Origin with which to contrast his evolutionary views. This is probablynot correct either, since Darwin heard about Herbert’s view on speciesfrom Herbert himself, but Darwin considered him a kind of evolutionist(F Darwin 1897, p 312). Landgren (1993) suggested that Darwin’s “cre-ationist” was Darwin himself, an expression of Darwin’s own personalembarrassment at the naïve views of nature that he held in his youth.

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Whatever the source of Darwin’s ideas about creationism, after thepublication of Origin, a variety of responses to the proposed theory ofevolution can be observed (see Numbers 2006). Most of what we wouldcall biologists accepted the occurrence of evolution with few objections.Many followed Asa Gray in the U.S.A., by interpreting evolution as God’smethod of creating species (e.g., Gray 1860). Regarding the mechanismof evolution, Darwin made it clear in Origin that natural selection was notthe only means by which evolution might have taken place, but he believedthat it was the primary mechanism. Many others disagreed. Substantivecritiques of natural selection came from St. George Mivart (1871) andFleeming Jenkin (1867). Within his lifetime, Darwin saw nearly the entirescientific community agree to his argument for evolution but reject histheory of natural selection. This is ironic, since Darwin himself claimedthat an argument for evolution would be unconvincing without a crediblemechanism (Darwin 1859, p 3). Proposed alternative mechanisms includeda variety of neo-Lamarckian versions of the inheritance of acquired charac-teristics, a kind of internal drive to evolve called orthogenesis, DeVries’smutation theory, and divine inspiration of variations on which selectioncould work. So complete were the doubts about natural selection thatBowler (1983) named this period the “eclipse of Darwinism.” During theeclipse, arguments against natural selection were readily available in scien-tific books and papers.

To understand the re-emergence of creationist biology in the twentiethcentury, we need to look at one other response to Darwin: the outright,passionate rejection. These individuals simply rejected everything thatDarwin argued and vigorously defended the creationist caricature fromOrigin of Species, species fixity and all, as though they were themselvessuffering a personal assault. The zeal of their defense suggests that Darwinwas not so wrong in his characterization of at least a minority of creationists.Since most of them only argued for species fixity (contra Darwin) andlittle else, I will call them antievolutionists.

Typically poorly trained in science, antievolutionists filled their bookswith rhetoric and zeal but little logic or evidence. Even their book titleswere sensationalistic, aimed at a semi-educated public. Examples includeCharles Robert Bree’s 1860 Species not Transmutable, J. Wesley Milam’s1926 Specie Permanata, and Alfred Watterson McCann’s 1922 God - OrGorilla. Bree concluded his book with this assessment of Origin, “Frombeginning to end the book is a cheerless, gloomy narrative. It destroysevery vestige of the beautiful from the mind, without replacing it witheven a plausible or intelligent theory” (Bree 1860, p 254). Milam’s book isa classic of assumption without knowledge. Commenting on the nature ofspecies (which he consistently misspells as specie), he wrote,

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Naturalists have been in the habit of classing many varietiesas so many species, and classing so many specie under genera.Genera or genus has no business here. John Ray, the origi-nator of the term specie as applied to animals and vegeta-bles, etc., applied it to animals that were distinct and fixed,or supposed to be fixed, in nature. Linneus [sic] and Couvier[sic] accepted this nomenclature as indivisible. Now theygive genus or genera the place held by specie and makespecie divisible as varieties, yet in the theory of evolutionthey hold up species as divisible and say nothing aboutgenera. It is a plain case of deceit practiced by evolutionists(Milam 1926, p 103).

There is very little in that passage that is factually correct (Ray didnot originate the term species, Linnaeus did not accept immutable species).This is an extreme example of shoddy scholarship, but it is not atypical ofthe standard antievolutionist text.

LIMITED EVOLUTION

Thus the battle lines between evolutionists and “creationists” (actuallyantievolutionists) were drawn, and in the midst of this battle the ScopesTrial was born. Against this backdrop of conflict, where the combatantsshould have been easy to define, exists a surprising diversity of opinionregarding species fixity among creationists and religious opponents ofevolution. A kind of limited evolution within basic created types wasemerging (or perhaps re-emerging) independently in Europe and the UnitedStates. This new tradition was following closely and unwittingly the ideasof William Herbert.

One such religious objector to evolution was Erich Wasmann, a GermanJesuit and entomologist. Wasmann identified himself as a theistic evolutionist(see Wasmann 1909, p 21-48) and believed that the Bible did not have anyrelevant input on the question of the origin of species. “We must first ofall state clearly that the Bible is not intended to instruct us in modernscience, and we scientists of the twentieth century ought not to seekzoological information in it” (Wasmann 1909, p 17).

Wasmann was convinced that a type of evolution had occurred, atleast among the major groups of organisms, but he rejected the idea thatmammals, reptiles, and birds might have evolved from a common ancestor(Wasmann 1910, p 291-292). “This alone is certain; there is no evidenceat all in support of a monophyletic phylogeny” (Wasmann 1910, p 291).He also rejected the animal ancestry of human beings (Wasmann 1910,ch 11). His major objection to Haeckel’s version of evolution was Haeckel’s

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use of evolution as an argument for “monism,” or what we would callphilosophical naturalism (Wasmann 1909, pp 21-48). This brought Was-mann into direct conflict with Haeckel and led to a 1907 debate in Berlinwith eleven prominent German biologists (see Lustig 2002).

Wasmann published his views in two English-language books, TheBerlin Discussion of The Problem of Evolution (1909) and Modern Biologyand the Theory of Evolution (1910), which came to the attention of twoBritish authors. Tom Bond Bishop, founder of the Scripture Union, includeda favorable citation of Wasmann’s limited evolution in his 1918 compendiumEvolution Criticised. Far more elaborate was Harold C. Morton’s develop-ment on limited evolution in his 1925 The Bankruptcy of Evolution. Mortonspent an entire chapter explaining his theory of parvolution (from theLatin parva, small). “The real proven sphere of Evolution is simply withinthe type,” (p 168) to which he added ironically, “nor is the most convincedCreationist concerned to deny it” (p 170).

Across the Atlantic, similar thinking was coalescing around GeorgeMcCready Price, Seventh-day Adventist teacher and self-styled geologist.Price himself never cared much about biology, thinking instead that the“problem” of evolution was largely geological. In 1924, he published hisonly major work on evolution, The Phantom of Organic Evolution, inwhich he wrote, “We seem to have in nature certain great groups of livingcreatures, call them what we will, genera, families, or tribes, but usuallylarger than ‘species,’ all the members of each of which have probablydescended from common ancestors” (Price 1924, p 39). He elaboratedvery little on that point, but he did admit that “the Family seems to begenerally the original unit” (Price 1924, p 39). Coming out just before theScopes Trial, Phantom found something of a following and actually yieldedsignificant royalties for Price (the only one of his books to do so) (Numbers2006, p 105).

Price’s Phantom was followed in 1927 by Lutheran pastor Byron C.Nelson’s “After Its Kind.” Unlike most previous critiques of evolution,Nelson made a sophisticated argument informed by Mendelian geneticsand critiques of natural selection typical of the “eclipse of Darwin.” LikePrice, Nelson allowed for variation, but he was more conservative thanPrice. Nelson relied heavily on the mechanism of “variation” (evolution)and did not make broader inferences based on what kinds of variationsmight occur.

Nelson explicitly used the term species for the originally created unit,but he distinguished between natural species and systematic species.

The Bible does not mean to say that every distinct form ofplant or animal men see about them came from the hand of

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the Creator in just the form in which it is beheld. It is not theseveral types of dogs: fox-terrier, dachshund, collie, that werecreated to remain the same forever, but the one natural species,dog. The ‘kinds’ of Genesis refer not to the ‘systematic’ speciesidentified by men, but to those natural species of which theworld is full, which have power to vary within themselvesin such a way that the members of the species are not allexactly alike, but which, nevertheless, cannot go out of thebounds that the Creator set (Nelson 1927, p 19-20).

A major test of common ancestry to Nelson was the potential forproducing fertile offspring. In an article in The Bible Champion, Nelson(1929a) wrote, “When we apply this test to the animal world we find thatthere are groups which belong together. All the ‘dogs’ belong together,which also includes the wolves, coyotes, jackals. But the foxes are notincluded, for foxes and dogs do not cross, even under human compulsion.”The key to Nelson’s thought is empirical demonstration. Nelson was willingto admit to wide variation if that variation could be demonstrated empiricallyor if interbreeding was possible.

California farmer Dudley Joseph Whitney took a different approach.Whitney began a correspondence with Price in the summer of 1927, afterreading Price’s 1917 Q.E.D. or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation. Inone of his first letters to Price, he wrote, “I am disgusted with the waythat the antis [antievolutionists] fight for practical fixity of species. Itshows a complete ignorance of zoology and botany and Genesis does notdemand it either” (Whitney 1927). Whereas Nelson used Mendelian geneticsto construct an argument for a broad species fixity, Whitney objected toevolution on the grounds of the impossibility of radical alterations toorganisms, such as originating a new organ or converting a leg to a wing.

In the summer of 1928, Whitney began an extended and sometimesheated correspondence with Nelson over the limits of biological change.Nelson insisted on empirical evidence of change and emphasized a mecha-nism of evolution. Whitney was willing to accept evolution within broadcategories, if it meant that he could avoid the embarrassment of advocatingrigid species fixity. The Nelson/Whitney debate spilled over into the pagesof the fundamentalist periodical The Bible Champion. Nelson continuedpressing his case in militaristic terms,

My point is this: We ought to concede to development whatis necessary, but not more than is necessary, or is justifiedon the basis of present scientific evidence. New speices –meaning by a species a ‘group of organisms of marked

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characteristics in common and freely interbreeding’ (Bate-son) – are not being formed today (Nelson 1929b).

Whitney responded with his characteristic zeal,Look here. Take a rabbit species, just one rabbit species,and make twenty rabbit species out of it as different as canbe. Have them all natural species (whatever that may be),or species which are perfectly sterile with one another. Itwould be only lateral evolution, or evolution without onenew organ, without any constructive up-building of theorganism whatever. Evolution cannot get anywhere on thatsort of business. It might make lots of change, but it wouldnot build any organs, and evolution does not amount to asnap of one’s fingers unless it does some real up-building(Whitney 1929).

This same conflict arose again in the Price/Clark/Marsh debate of the1940s. Harold W. Clark was a science professor at Pacific Union College(PUC) who earned a master’s degree in ecology from Berkeley in 1933(Numbers 1995a, p ix). Clark had been a student of Price’s, and he hadpublished a book called Back to Creationism and more than 60 creationistarticles in the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) periodical Signs of the Timesprior to earning his master’s degree (e.g., Clark 1923, 1924, 1925, 1926,1929, 1931, etc.). As a professor, Clark was challenged about Price’sview of geology, and after spending a summer studying the issue firsthandwith petroleum geologists in the American midwest, Clark changed hisviews and accepted the geologic column as a legitimate summary of strati-graphic evidence. He stopped using Price’s New Geology as a textbook inhis science courses at PUC and began to develop his own ecologicalexplanation of the fossil record (see Numbers 2006, p 142-148).

When Price discovered Clark’s views, he instigated a bitter crusadeagainst Clark that would last at least a decade. Since Price believed himselfspecially guided by the “enlightening Spirit of God” (Price 1941a), heprobably viewed all dissenters as heretics. Price accused Clark of spreading“Theories of Satanic Origin,” the title of an anti-Clark pamphlet writtenabout 1946 and privately distributed by Price (reprinted in Numbers 1995b).Although Clark responded with Christian grace, Price continued to houndhim with vitriolic letters, even threatening him with a lawsuit in Februaryof 1947, which he apparently never carried out (Price 1947).

In the early stages of the conflict with Price, Clark’s new book Genesand Genesis appeared, with its proposal that hybridization explained speci-ation. Clark also claimed that animals such as Archaeopteryx, the platypus,

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the hyena, and the wildebeest originated by hybridization (Clark 1940,p 103-105).

The question may be raised, ‘Why call these hybrids? Maythey not be as valid creations as any others?’ It must beadmitted that dogmatic assertions cannot safely be made;nevertheless it should be pointed out that according to thecreation record, plants and animals were made each ‘afterhis kind.’ The original types must have been so distinct thatthere would be no difficulty in deciding in which categorya plant or animal should be classified. The confused speciesdug up from the rocks and in some cases living today are aplain suggestion of crossing of original types (Clark 1940,p 105).

Clark’s views on hybridization were inspired by statements made byEllen G. White about “amalgamation.” She wrote in 1864, “Since the Flood,there has been amalgamation of man and beast, as may be seen in thealmost endless varieties of species, and in certain races of men” (White1864, p 75). Price (1931) believed that these statements referred to breedingbetween different races of humans with other races of humans and likewiseamong races of animals (“amalgamation of man and [of] beast”), but thisview contradicted the views of Ellen White’s son William and her personalsecretary D.E. Robinson (White & Robinson 1933). Clark favored themore traditional view of man-with-beast over Price’s newer interpretationof man-with-man and beast-with-beast.

Price read the manuscript for Genes and Genesis before he initiatedthe fight over geology, and he originally reacted very favorably to Clark’swork (Numbers 2006, p 143-144). After publication of the book, though,Price took the opportunity to expand his anti-Clark war to include Clark’sunusual views on hybridization. Price’s criticism included scathing lettersand harsh but veiled references in published articles. Price claimed thatClark’s views on human/animal hybridization were “nothing short ofblasphemy” and a “grotesque interpretation” of Ellen White’s statements(Price 1941c).

In 1938, Price published an article called “Nature’s Two HundredFamilies,” in which he repeated his view on speciation from Phantom ofOrganic Evolution, “We may admit that many changes have come aboutwithin the family, that families have split up and have produced manyvarious forms, without being obliged to admit that this process of splittingor differentiation has gone any further than this.” When that article wasrevised and published in Price’s 1942 book How Did the World Begin?,

18 ORIGINS 2008

Price no longer endorsed speciation within families. Instead, he wrotethat Darwin had

...said that there really is no such stable entity as a ‘species’;it is only a name for a half-way stage in the change fromvarieties or races on to genera and the wider differences offamilies, etc. On this basis, the tendency for nearly a centuryhas been to split up ‘species’ into smaller and still smallerunits, thus erecting varieties or races into so-called ‘species,’and the original species into “genera” (Price 1942, p 90).

Price’s new argument was adapted from Richard Goldschmidt’s(1940, p 165-168) recently published Material Basis of Evolution (seePrice 1941b). The argument was effectively indistinguishable from hisoriginal opinion, since it essentially viewed biological change within“families” to be possible. Price merely insisted that modern “families”were really species and not families at all. This allowed him to use theargument not only to attack evolutionists but also to reject Clark’s ac-ceptance of speciation and hybridization. Recent University of NebraskaPh.D. graduate Frank Lewis Marsh (1943a) dismissed Price’s argument,“it seems that it is your personal pride which to a large extent holds you toyour present position rather than for any logical or sensible reason.”

Frank Marsh was the first SDA to earn a doctorate in biology, andshortly thereafter in 1944, he published the well-known book Evolution,Creation, and Science (ECS). As he would later confess to TheodosiusDobzhansky, his goal in writing the book was to demonstrate that theminority view of creationism was a legitimate alternative to evolution.“My avowed purpose is to present a theory of special creation which hasa sound scientific basis and which will be recognized by most evolutionistsas an alternative view of origins in case a person wishes to view thingsfrom that angle” (Marsh 1945). Accordingly, Marsh was irritated by Clark’sviews on hybridization. Marsh feared that Clark’s ideas, and in particularhis approving citation of a stag/horse hybrid reported by Ripley’s Believeit or Not! (Clark 1940, p 96), damaged creationists’ credibility (see Numbers2006, p 150). Marsh believed, as Price did, that Ellen White’s amalgamationstatements could best be understood as “amalgamation of man and [of]beast” (Marsh 1941, ch 8-10). This interpretation allowed Marsh to rejectClark’s unlikely examples of wide hybridization without rejecting thewritings of Ellen White.

Marsh believed that hybridization was limited to members of the same“Genesis kind” or baramin. He endorsed the “law of reproduction” (Marsh1944, p 32), his term for the idea that Genesis taught that reproductioncould only occur within “created kinds.” Although Marsh was not the

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first to insist that Genesis taught the reproductive isolation of “kinds”(e.g., see Morris 1871, p 476; Price 1917, p 98; Nelson 1927, p 19), he wasthe first to integrate the possibility of interspecific hybridization with thissupposedly biblical law of reproduction. Thus Marsh accepted the occur-rence of interspecific hybridization (which Price rejected on semanticgrounds) but argued that any hybrids could be produced only betweenorganisms that belonged to the same “created kind.”

Because “kind” is a non-technical term, Marsh proposed a new word,baramin, that he coined from the Hebrew words for “create” and “kind”(Marsh 1941, p 100). With regard to evolution within baramins, I previ-ously depicted Marsh as an innovator (Wood & Murray 2003, p 15-17),but Marsh actually came at the end of a long heritage of speculations aboutthe nature of species and created kinds. Marsh was more of a synthesizerthan an innovator. He integrated the recognition of real systematic species(which Price and Nelson rejected), true interspecific hybridization (whichNelson rejected), variation within kinds (which the antievolutionists re-jected), and true speciation (which Nelson rejected) to produce his ownunique view of creationist biology. Surprisingly, Marsh seems to havebeen unaware of most of the history of these ideas. He might have knownabout the Whitney/Nelson correspondence, but even Dobzhansky (1945)noticed his apparent ignorance of Wasmann. Herbert seems almost entirelyforgotten.

The response to Marsh’s book Evolution, Creation, and Science, wasdecidedly cold. Price had already published his new view of species, inwhich he re-affirmed species fixity. Price was not about to relinquish thisnew anti-Clark position, but he eventually relented and endorsed Marsh’sideas, possibly since Marsh agreed with Price about the danger of Clark’sgeological views (Price 1945). Other creationists of the day were equallyskeptical of Marsh’s book. Walter Lammerts, professional plant breederand future co-founder of the Creation Research Society, rejected Marsh’sproposal (see Numbers 2004). William J. Tinkle, also a future co-founderof the CRS, preferred Nelson’s biological views, although he did mentionMarsh’s baramin in his 1967 book Heredity: A Study in Science and theBible. Lammerts and Tinkle both demanded empirical demonstration ofvariation before accepting any kind of evolution, and both endorsed thekind of Mendelian mechanisms proposed by Nelson.

Marsh’s responded to his critics in a fifteen-page manuscript titled“Confessions of a Biologist,” dated August 25, 1943. Though Marshthanked his critics for their advice, he was clearly exasperated with them.He opened the “Confessions” by addressing the “wild rumor which comesto me that some of you men think I am an evolutionist” by reviewing once

20 ORIGINS 2008

again his own views of earth and life history. He then tackled sixteendifferent criticisms of the yet-unpublished ECS manuscript. The criticismsof Marsh ranged from insightful to misunderstandings, but they all ex-pressed an extreme skepticism about speciation. In the words of one ofMarsh’s critics, “If we are willing to allow as much variation in animals assome of our most devout variationists call for, in the period between theflood and the present, it is going to be a little hard to talk to evolutionistsabout what might have happened in a few hundred millions of years”(Marsh 1943b). Marsh’s response was an emphatic “Variation is not evo-lution! Yes, it could be, possibly, but it never goes that far.”

Marsh’s ongoing disagreement with Clark over amalgamation culmi-nated in a 1947 meeting with fifteen SDA church officials, including thenSDA president James McElhany (see Shigley 1982). For slightly morethan an hour, Clark and Marsh presented their differing views on amalga-mation, then fielded questions several hours after. Clark defended theview that Ellen White taught hybridization between humans and animalshad taken place before and after the Flood. Marsh argued for his modifiedview, derived from Price, that hybridization can only take place within thelimits of the created kind. The discussion focused most critically on Clark’sview, with most of the SDA officials favoring Marsh’s new interpretation(Shigley 1982). This might seem like a minor chapter in the history ofcreationist biology, but it helps explain why Marsh persistently seemed tohold a circular view of baramins. He claimed both that the defining charac-teristic of the kind was the ability to interbreed and that there is no evidenceof interbreeding between kinds. The first claim is his scientific proposal.The second claim is an anti-Clark apologetic.

After publishing ECS, Marsh never really changed or developed hisideas to any significant extent. Instead, he spent the rest of his careerpromoting his species concept to his fellow creationists and on occasionto evolutionists as well. His neglect of actually identifying specific baraminsmight seem mystifying, especially since in the second edition of ECS hewrote, “through the very real laboratory test of fertility it is possible clearlyto mark off the boundaries of all the kinds today” (Marsh 1947, p 180). Inhis correspondence, however, he repeatedly denied that possibility. Forexample, in “Confessions,” he wrote, “I hold that it is quite impossibletoday to tell which forms are members of an original kind....Failure tounite in fertilization does not necessarily indicate membership in two differ-ent kinds because of mutational changes which may produce infertility”(Marsh 1943b).

In the end, Marsh became more of an apologist for his own view thana scientist concerned with understanding nature. That ECS was met with

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such a cool response probably explains much of his work to spread hisidea of the baramin without much work to apply it. In retrospect, it wasprobably good that he continued this self-promotion since future generationsof creationists would be more receptive to his proposals. Indeed, manyindividuals involved in the recent revival of baraminology (see Wood 2006)became aware of Marsh’s ideas through his 1976 book Variation andFixity in Nature, an updated version of ECS.

CONCLUSION

In a 2004 article, Numbers effectively argued that modern creationismhas embraced limited evolution within “kinds” nearly since its inceptionwith George McCready Price. In this work, I have extended that historyto Europeans such as Wasmann who had little or no knowledge of Price,and to pre-Darwinians such as Herbert who were not encumbered withanti-evolutionary apologetic thinking. This work demonstrates that theconcept of limited evolution is not merely a concession to monophyleticevolution on the part of creationists, nor is it linked to a particular interpre-tation of scripture (as Wasmann demonstrates). Instead, the concept oflimited evolution within basic kinds of organisms appears to have an in-trinsic intellectual appeal to scientists acquainted with species and taxonomy.That the history reviewed herein is fragmentary and not continuous onlyfurther supports the appeal of these ideas. Had Price, Nelson, and Marshderived their ideas from Wasmann, Wasmann from Herbert, Herbert fromLinnaeus, etc., one could more easily dismiss limited evolution as somethingof a “mutant offspring” of earlier ideas. This would be similar to thestrategy employed by Numbers in reducing creationism (particularly floodgeology) to an offshoot of Seventh-day Adventism (see Numbers 1999).In the case of species and limited evolution, however, there seems to belittle, if any, intellectual continuity between Herbert, Wasmann, and Marsh.The recurrence of their views cannot be easily dismissed.

Unfortunately, even today conflict exists within creationism betweenthe more liberal scholars who accept wide variation (like Marsh or Whitney)and more conservative scholars who demand more empirical evidence(like Nelson or Tinkle). This conflict is nothing new, but I hope that wecan take from this history at least a lesson of civility. Little is gained bydenouncing the other side as obscurantists, evolutionists, or purveyors of“theories of satanic origin.” What is needed instead is serious and ongoingresearch to resolve these issues. What is the mechanism of speciation thatproduces diversity within kinds? How far can it go? Is there independentevidence of baraminic membership? Is there evidence of wide speciation

22 ORIGINS 2008

apart from baraminic membership inferences? By working on these questions,we can hope to understand better the nature and extent of baramins.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the Center for Adventist Research at AndrewsUniversity for permission to study the Price, Marsh, and Numbers Col-lections and Paul Nelson for permitting me to study Byron C. Nelson’spapers in his possession. The librarians at Southern Adventist Universitywere also very helpful in collecting articles from SDA publications. Specialthanks to Gary Shearer for his numerous bibliographies and his enthusiasticadvice and assistance during my visit to the Pacific Union College HeritageRoom. This research was supported by funding from the Center for OriginsResearch at Bryan College.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bishop TB. [1918]. Evolution Criticised. London: Oliphants Ltd. and Scripture UnionOffice.

Bowler PJ. 1983. The Eclipse of Darwinism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Bree CR. 1860. Species not Transmutable. London: Groomsbridge & Sons.

Buteo J. 1559. Opera Geometrica. Lyon: Michael Iovium.

Clark HW. 1923. Fourteen points against evolution. Signs of the Times 50(22):11-12, 15.

Clark HW. 1924. Indictments of evolutionary theory. Signs of the Times 51(15):5, 14-15.

Clark HW. 1925. Five reasons why I teach creationism. Signs of the Times 52(42):4-5.

Clark HW. 1926. Christianity and evolution in contrast. Signs of the Times 53(13):8-9,14.

Clark HW. 1929. Creationism stands the test. Signs of the Times 56(16):8-9.

Clark HW. 1931. Are our ancestors important? Signs of the Times 58(49):1-2, 14.

Clark HW. 1940. Genes and Genesis. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Assn.

Darlington CD. 1937. The early hybridisers and the origin of genetics. Herbertia 4:63-69.

Darwin C. 1859[1964]. On the Origin of Species [A Facsimile of the First Edition].Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Darwin F, editor. 1897. Life and Letters of Charles Darwin I. NY: D. Appleton and Co.

Dobzhansky T. 1945. Book review: Evolution, Creation, and Science. The AmericanNaturalist 79:73-75.

Futuyma DJ. 2005. Evolution. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates.

Goldschmidt R. 1940. The Material Basis of Evolution. New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress.

Gray A. 1860. Darwin on the origin of species. Atlantic Monthly 6:109-116, 220-239.

Griffith T, Monnette N. 2007. Johannes Buteo’s Noah’s Ark. CORE Issues in CreationVol. 2.

Guimond AA. 1966. The Honorable and Very Reverend William Herbert: AmaryllisHybridizer and Amateur Biologist. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin,Madison.

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Guimond AA. 1980. William Herbert. In Gillespie CC, editor. Dictionary of ScientificBiography. NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, vol. 5, p 295-297.

Hale M. 1677. The Primitive Origination of Mankind, Considered and Examined Accordingto the Light of Nature. London: William Godbid for William Shrowsbery.

Herbert W. 1837. Amaryllidaceae. London: James Ridgway and Sons.

[Jenkin F.] 1867. Book review: The Origin of Species. North British Review 46:277-318.

Klein HS, Schiffner DC. 2003. The current debate about the origins of Paleoindians ofAmerica. Journal of Social History 37(2):483-492.

Landgren P. 1993. On the origin of “species:” ideological roots of the species concept. In:Scherer S, editor. Typen des Lebens. Berlin: Pascal Verlag.

López-Morillas F, translator. 2002. Natural and Moral History of the Indies. Durham, NC:Duke University Press.

Lustig AJ. 2002. Erich Wasmann, Ernst Haeckel, and the limits of science. Theory inBiosciences 121(3):252-259.

Marsh FL. 1941. Fundamental Biology. Lincoln, NE: self-published.

Marsh FL. September 5, 1943a. Letter to George McCready Price. Box 2, folder 1, GeorgeMcCready Price Papers. Center for Adventist Research, James White Library, AndrewsUniversity.

Marsh FL. August 25, 1943b. Confessions of a biologist. Box 2, folder 1, George McCreadyPrice Collection. Center for Adventist Research, James White Library, AndrewsUniversity.

Marsh FL. 1944. Evolution, Creation, and Science. Washington, DC: Review and HeraldPublishing.

Marsh FL. February 21, 1945. Letter to Theodosius Dobzhansky. Box 1, folder 5, FrankLewis Marsh Papers. Center for Adventist Research, James White Library, AndrewsUniversity.

Marsh FL. 1947. Evolution, Creation, and Science. 2nd ed. Washington, D.C.: Review andHerald Publishing.

Milam JW. 1926. Specie Permanata: Opposed to Evolution. Nashville: self-published.

Mivart G. 1871. On the Genesis of Species. London: MacMillan and Co.

Morris HW. 1871. Science and the Bible. Philadelphia: Ziegler & McCurdy.

Morton HC. [1925]. The Bankruptcy of Evolution. 2nd ed. London: Marshall Brothers.

Nelson BC. 1929a. What was in the ark? The Bible Champion 33(4):229-231.

Nelson BC. 1929b. More about the origin of species. The Bible Champion 35(10):539-540.

Numbers RL, editor. 1995a. The Early Writings of Harold W. Clark and Frank LewisMarsh. NY: Garland Publishing.

Numbers RL, editor. 1995b. Selected Works of George McCready Price. NY: GarlandPublishing.

Numbers RL. 1999. Creating creationism: meanings and usage since the age of Agassiz. In:Livingstone DN, Hart DG, Noll MA, editors. Evangelicals and Science in HistoricalPerspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 234-243.

Numbers RL. 2004. Ironic heresy: How young-earth creationists came to embrace rapidmicroevolution by means of natural selection. In: Lustig AJ, Richards RJ, Ruse M,editors. Darwinian Heresies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p 84-100.

Numbers RL. 2006. The Creationists. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Paley W. 1830. The Works of William Paley, D.D. Volume IV Natural Theology. London:C.J.G. and F. Rivington.

Pennock RT. 1999. Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism. Cambridge,MA: MIT Press.

Piggliucci M. 2003. Design yes, intelligent no: a critique of intelligent design theory andneo-creationism. In Campbell JA, Meyer SC, editors. Darwinism, Design, and PublicEducation. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, p 463-473.

Price GM. 1917. Q.E.D. NY: Fleming H. Revell.

Price GM. 1924. The Phantom of Organic Evolution. NY: Fleming H. Revell.

Price GM. 1931. The problem of hybridization. The Ministry 4(4):13-14.

Price GM. 1938. Nature’s two hundred families. Signs of the Times 65(37):11, 14-15.

Price GM. 1941a. Some early experiences with evolutionary geology. Bulletin of DelugeGeology and Related Sciences 1(4):77-92.

Price GM. February 6, 1941b. Letter to H.W. Clark. Box 1, folder 5, George McCreadyPrice Collection. Center for Adventist Research, James White Library, AndrewsUniversity.

Price GM. February 16, 1941c. Letter to Harold Clark. Box 1, folder 5, George McCreadyPrice Collection. Center for Adventist Research, James White Library, AndrewsUniversity.

Price GM. 1942. How Did the World Begin? NY: Fleming H. Revell.

Price GM. 1945a. Book review: Evolution, Creation, and Science. The Ministry 18(1):14.

Price GM. February 17, 1947. Letter to Harold W. Clark. Box 2, folder 1, George McCreadyPrice Collection. Center for Adventist Research, James White Library, AndrewsUniversity.

Ralegh W. 1829. The Works of Sir Walter Ralegh, Kt. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ray J. 1717[1691]. The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation. London:R. Harbin for William Innys.

Redi F. 1668. Esperienze Intorno alla Generazione degl’Insetti. Florence: Stella.

Ridley M. 2004. Evolution. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Shapiro BJ. 1969. John Wilkins 1614-1672: An Intellectual Biography. Berkeley, CA:University of California Press.

Shigley G. 1982. Amalgamation of man and beast: what did Ellen White mean? Spectrum12(4):10-19.

Stearns SC, Hoekstra RF. 2005. Evolution. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tinkle WJ. 1967. Heredity: A Study in Science and the Bible. Houston, TX: St. ThomasPress.

Wasmann E. 1909. The Berlin Discussion of the Problem of Evolution. St. Louis, MO:B. Herder.

Wasmann E. 1910. Modern Biology and the Theory of Evolution. 3rd ed. St. Louis, MO:B. Herder.

White EG. 1864. Spiritual Gifts: Important Facts of Faith, in Connection with the Historyof Holy Men of Old. Battle Creek, MI: Steam Press of the Seventh-day AdventistPublishing Association.

White WC, Robinson DE. 1933. “Amalgamation” and “confused species.” Unpublishedmanuscript, file DF316, Center for Adventist Research, James White Library, AndrewsUniversity, Berrien Springs, Michigan.

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Whitney DJ. September 14, 1927. Letter to George McCready Price. Box 1, folder 3,George McCready Price Collection. Center for Adventist Research, James WhiteLibrary, Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan.

Whitney DJ. 1929. The confusion about Darwin. The Bible Champion 35(9):479-482.

Wilkins J. 1668. An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language. London:Sa. Gellibrand and John Martyn.

Wilkins J. 1675. Principles and Duties of Natural Religion. London: Basset, Brome, andChiswell.

Wood TC. 2007. Bishop John Wilkins, F.R.S. (1614-1672) and his discussion of Noah’sArk. Occasional Papers of the BSG 9:1-9.

Wood TC. 2006. The current status of baraminology. Creation Research Society Quarterly43(3):149-158.

Wood TC, Murray MJ. 2003. Understanding the Pattern of Life. Nashville, TN: Broadmanand Holman.

Woodward J. 1695. An Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth. London: Ric. Wilkin.

Zirkle C. 1946. The eary history of the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters andof pangenesis. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 35(2):91-151.

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*Other annotations are available on our website: www.grisda.org

A N N O T A T I O N S

F R O M T H E L I T E R A T U R E*

ANTHROPOLOGY: SMALL HUMANS WITH ARCHAIC FEATURES

Berger LR, Churchill SE, De Klerk B, Quinn RL. 2008. Small-bodiedhumans from Palau, Micronesia. PLoS ONE 3/3:e1780. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001780.

Summary: The Palau Archipelago is situated in the Pacific Ocean,approximately 600 km east of the Philippines, the nearest large land masses.Abundant human skeletal remains were uncovered during exploration oftwo caves on smaller islands of the archipelago. These cave depositsyielded skeletal material both from the surface and a small test excavation.Associated skeletal elements were very rare and the recovered humanremains appeared to be disturbed and redeposited, possibly by reworkingof the cave deposits during storms and by bioturbation. The large numberof collected remains implies that bones from several tens of individualsare preserved in the two sites.

Radiocarbon dating of skeletal material from the test excavationindicates that, despite disturbance of sediment, stratigraphic order is main-tained in the deposits and that the skeletal assemblage can be roughlydated as 940-2890 years old. Older specimens have size distribution com-patible with an extremely small-bodied population of Homo sapiens, whoseaverage body mass at an adult developmental stage was estimated atapproximately 30-50 kg. It appears that individuals of this populationpossessed a number of morphological traits (such as small brain size,enlarged supraorbital tori, and absence of chins) which are usually con-sidered primitive for the genus Homo. The small body size of the Palauhuman fossils is interpreted as a result of insular dwarfism and theoccurrence of archaic skeletal features as developmental correlates ofsmall body size in pygmoid populations.

Comment: The small-bodied human fossils from Palau represent adramatic example of human morphological plasticity. The peculiar traitsof this population suggest that phenotypic modifications of skeletal elementsmay be triggered by specific ecological and environmental conditions inshort time spans and without necessarily implying the generation of new

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species. The occurrence of archaic skeletal traits in the Palau fossils evi-dences how some morphological attributes often considered sufficient todiscriminate between lineages may instead reflect adaptations to ecologicalconditions well within the variability of the same genetic pool. Finally, thestudy of the Palau fossils is also likely to have an impact on the interpretationof the recently discovered Homo floresiensis remains, which are currentlythe subject of an acrimonious debate within the paleoanthropologist com-munity. (RN)

DESIGN: EVOLUTIONARY CHALLENGE TO THE FLAGELLUM

Wong T, Amidi A, Dodds A, Siddiqi S, Wang J, Yep T, Tamang DG,Saier MH (Jr). 2007. Evolution of the bacterial flagellum. Microbe 2(7):335-340.

Renyi L, Ochman H. 2007. Stepwise formation of the bacterial flagellarsystem. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 104:7116-7121.

Summary: The bacterial organelle of locomotion, the flagellar system(FS), consists of more than fifty proteins. They include a filamentouspropeller, a basal body, an interconnecting hook complex, a rotary motorthat is driven by the flow of either hydrogen or sodium ions, a secretion/assembly system, a secretion-energizing ATP-ase and regulatory proteins.Michael Behe cited the FS as an example of an irreducible complex system,the origin of which was not addressed by evolutionary theorists.1 Morerecent publications, however, began suggesting possible evolutionaryhistories of the FS.2 The two articles considered here propose furtherelaborations on this theme.

Based on sequence homologies, Wong et al suggest that the com-ponents of FS originated from several different sources via gene dupli-cation, domain recruiting and mutation. The filament may be formed fromadhesins, the motor from the proton conducting channel complex, theflagellar subunit secretor from virulence related type III secretion systemand the ATP-ase from rotary F type ATP-ases.

Renyi and Ochman examined sequence homologies among 41 flagel-lated species of microorganisms from eleven bacterial phyla. They identifieda core set of twenty-four structural genes that were found in every species.Moreover, based on similarities among these genes, the authors proposethat they were derived from one another and suggest their sequence of

28 ORIGINS 2008

origins. Accordingly, the earliest flagellar proteins were those closest tothe inner (cytoplasmic) membrane, followed by proteins spanning thegram negative organism’s outer membrane, followed by the outermoststructures. These are the hook, junction, filament and capping proteins.Thus the order of flagellar assembly recapitulates its evolutionary history.Using arguments of sequence homologies, the authors conclude that theFS started out as a primitive secretion system and gradually became theorganelle of locomotion.

Comment: The evolutionary paradigm forces its adherents to interpretsequence homologies as proofs of common ancestry. In the pursuit ofthis logic, the authors leave a gaping hole in their explanation. In suggestingthat newer genes arose by duplication and modification, an explanation isrequired how and why the organism would select for and retain manydozens of temporarily functionless genes, for a future irreducibly complexsystem.3 (GTJ)

ENDNOTES

1. Behe M. 1966. Darwin’s Black Box. NY: The Free Press, p 73-75.

2. Pallen MJ, Matzke NJ. 2006. From The Origin of Species to the origin of bacterialflagella. Nature Reviews 4:784-790.

3. Javor GT. 2007. Letters to Editor regarding the article “Evolution of the bacterialflagellum.” Microbe 2 (10):473.

GENETICS: ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE

Maurice F, Broutin I, Podglajen I, Benas P, Collatz E, Dardel F. 2008.Enzyme structural plasticity and the emergence of broad-spectrumantibiotic resistance. EMBO Reports AOP. DOI:10.1038/embor.2008.9

Summary: Bacteria utilize a number of antibiotic resistance enzymespassed around on plasmids and other natural vectors such as integrons.One class of enzyme that confers resistance to aminoglycoside antibioticsare the aminoglycoside 6’-N-acetyltransferases (AAC(6’)). These generallyhave relatively narrow specificity and thus, while they may inactivategentamicin or other naturally occurring aminoglycoside antibiotics, othermodified versions, like Amikacin, may remain effective against gramnegative bacteria because addition of a side chain prevents binding to theenzymes active site. Comparison of the crystal structures of ACC(6’)versions that maintain a narrow aminoglycoside specificity and a versionthat has a broad specificity, reveals that the broad-spectrum version has amuch more flexible and open binding site.

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Comment: The antibiotic ACC(6’) exists in different forms. One form,ACC(6’)Ib

11, is a broad-spectrum form, while ACC(6’)Ib is a narrow-

spectrum version. These two forms differ by only two amino acids, thusit falls within the “edge of evolution” defined by Michael Behe.1 Further,ACC(6’)Ib

11 demonstrates the recurring principle of loss of specificity, a

common theme of antibiotic resistance evolution. The difficult question iswhere these antibiotic resistance enzymes came from in the first place.Some may well be degenerated forms of enzymes or other proteins thathave other functions within bacteria, but degenerate forms of proteinsthat still do something do not explain either the ultimate origin of theseproteins or why they naturally occur in more narrowly specified forms.(TGS)

ENDNOTES

1. Behe MJ. 2007. The Edge of Evolution: The search for the limits of Darwinism. NewYork: Free Press.

PALEONTOLOGY: BAT EXPLOSION

Smith T, Rana RS, Missiaen P, Rose KD, Sahni A, Singh H, Sing L. 2007.High bat (Chiroptera) diversity in the Early Eocene of India. Naturwissen-schaften DOI 10.1007/s00114-007-0280-9.

Summary: Bats are absent below the Lower Eocene, where theyhave been found in Western Europe (the Paris Basin), North America(Green River Formation) and Australia (Queensland). Smith et al. reportfossil bats from the Lower Eocene Cambay Formation of India that areremarkable for their diversity and affinity with the Lower Eocene batfauna of Western Europe. Only one Asian species from the Lower MiddleEocene of China, Lapichiropteryx, appears to be a genus close to thesebats reported from India.

Comment: Sudden appearance of diverse and widely geographicallydistributed fossils of organisms lacking obvious evolutionary ancestors isan increasingly common pattern evident in the fossil record. The mostspectacular example is the appearance of various animal phyla in Cambrianrocks, but smaller “explosions” are seen in birds, other organisms andnow bats. This runs counter to Darwinian predictions which requires thatinformation about fossils coninues to increase as the fossil record beprogressively viewed as less informative about evolutionary history. (TGS)

30 ORIGINS 2008

PALEONTOLOGY: CRETACEOUS FEATHERS

Perrichot V, Marion L, Neraudeau D, Vollo R, Tafforeau P. 2008. Theearly evolution of feathers: fossil evidence from Cretaceous amber ofFrance. Proceedings of the Royal Society (London) B. DOI:10.1098/rsb.2008.0003

Summary: Feathers are specialized complex structures well adaptedfor their role in bird flight and insulation. Because these structures areunique to birds, how they could have evolved from integumentary structuresfound in other creatures, such as dinosaurs, is not obvious. Putative step-by-step morphological stages of feather evolutionary development havebeen proposed,1 although they lack a specific detailed mechanism andsupporting fossil evidence is “desperately missing.”

Perrichot et al. report on several 2.3 mm and smaller feather fragmentsfound in Upper Albian (top of the Lower Cretaceous) amber from France.These minute feather fragments have a rachis with barbs, but lack thebarbules that knit together the barbs of feathers on many modern birdfeathers. These feathers are presented as an intermediate stage of featherevolution providing at least some of the “desperately missing” intermediatefossil evidence. The authors speculate that these feathers may well befrom a feathered theropod dinosaur rather than a bird.

Comment: The remarkable technique used in this research to obtaindigital reconstructions of fine details of the feather fragments offers greatpromise for the study of other small inclusions in amber; however, theactual results reported do not provide evidence of a gradual evolutionarydevelopment of feathers. Feathers with a rachis but lacking barbules onthe barbs are found on modern birds such as kiwis. These feathers areinterpreted as derived rather than primitive. Further, even though it maybe possible to argue that the Upper Albian feathers reported here lack anexact modern analog, they are found in strata well above the numerousbird fossils of the Upper Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous. These birds,including neornithean (modern) birds contemporary with or below theAlbian feathers,2 had modern-appearing feathers with well preservedbarbules.3 (TGS)

ENDNOTES

1. Prum RO. 1999 Development and evolutionary origin of feathers. Journal ofExperimental Zoology B (Molecular and Developmental Evolution) 285:291–306.(DOI:10.1002/(SICI)1097-010X(19991215)285:4!291::AID-JEZ1O3.0.CO;2-9);Prum RO, Brush AH. 2002 The evolutionary origin and diversification of feathers.Quarterly Review of Biology 77:261–295 (DOI:10.1086/341993) Xu, X. 2006

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Feathered dinosaurs from China and the evolution of major avian characters. IntegrativeZoology 1:4–11 (DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-4877.2006.00004.x).

2. For example: You H, Lamanna MC, Harris JD, Chiappe LM, O’Connor J, Ji S, Lu J,Yuan C, Li D, Zhang X, Lacovara KJ, Dodson P, Ji Q. 2006. A Nearly ModernAmphibious Bird from the Early Cretaceous of Northwestern China. Science 312:1640-1643.

3. For example: Waldman M. 1970. A Third Specimen of a Lower Cretaceous Featherfrom Victoria, Australia. The Condor 72(3):377.

PALEONTOLOGY: DINOSAUR RESPIRATION

Codd JR, Manning PL, Norell MA, Perry SF. 2007. Avian-like breathingmechanics in maniraptoran dinosaurs. Proceedings of the Royal Society(London) B. DOI: 10:1098/rspb.2007.1233.

Summary: Some maniraptoran dinosaurs appear to have uncinateprocesses on their ribs. These processes extend dorsally from approxi-mately the midpoint of ribs and resemble uncinate processes on bird ribs,particularly those found on diving birds. In birds uncinate processes werethought to function in stiffening the ribcage to withstand forces exertedby the pectoral and other muscles during contraction to move wings duringflight. More recently it has been shown that they also play a role in theunique way in which birds breath. From this Codd et al. argue that mani-raptoran dinosaurs exhibited a respiratory system homologous to that foundin birds.

Comment: Explaining the evolution of birds’ respiratory system via aDarwinian mechanism is challenging. If it was also present in some dino-saurs, how it evolved is still not explained. The problem is simply broadenedand, within evolutionary thinking, the time to achieve this remarkable systemis reduced. Furthermore; the morphology of dinosaur uncinate processesalong with the rest of the bones in their chests is different enough frombirds that the argument of Codd et al. seems strained. In birds the uncinateprocess is physically joined bone-to-bone to the ribs, while what are beingcalled uncinate processes in maniraptorans are thought to have beenattached via cartilage. As cartilage is rarely preserved, uncinate processesare generally disarticulated and may be lost or misidentified as gastralia(abdominal ribs).

Structures resembling uncinate processes have been found in someornithischian dinosaurs, some “early” tetrapods, Sphenodon punctatus(tuataras) and crocodiles. While it is only possible to speculate on howsystems worked in extinct creatures, living creatures — like tuataras andcrocodiles — can be studied and these do not exhibit respiratory systemsthat resemble birds. Ultimately, the argument that because maniraptoran

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uncinate processes most resemble those found in diving birds and thusthese dinosaurs breathed in the same way seems remarkable given thatratites are considered to be closest to the non-avian maniraptorans andthey essentially lack, or have massively reduced, uncinate processes. Whybirds that most resemble maniraptorans in morphology and habits wouldleast resemble them in terms of their uncinate processes and how thislogically leads to the opinion that they used a fundamentally similar respi-ratory system is not obvious. Further, the absence of uncinate processesin some Upper Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous birds, which was con-sidered to be a primitive trait, must be called into question. If these birdshad uncinate processes that were similar to those found in maniraptoransthen they may have been overlooked. If they do actually lack them, thenthis must be reevaluated as a derived rather than a primitive trait. (TGS)

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LITERATURE REVIEWS

Readers are invited to submit reviews of current literature relating to origins. Mailing address: ORIGINS, Geoscience Research Institute, 11060 Campus St., Loma Linda, California 92350 USA. The Institute does not distribute the publications reviewed; please contact the publisher directly.

A NEW BLIND WATCHMAKER: DESIGN BY HOMEOSTASIS

The Tinkerer’s Accomplice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself. J. Scott Turner. 2007. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 304 p. Hardcover $27.95.

Reviewed by Jerry Bergman, Ph.D. Department of Biology and Chemistry, Northwest State College

Archbold, Ohio

Almost one hundred and fifty years after Darwin’s seminal publication, “there is still little agreement” on the main question that he attempted to answer: the origin of species. Scott Turner eloquently addresses this problem, demonstrating that modern “evolutionary biology doesn’t really have a good answer” to many fundamental questions, including how “an unintentional process” such as natural selection “can produce intentional beings” like us (p 29). Turner stresses that “dogmatic insistence” on Darwinian mutation and selection as the only agent of design “has encumbered us with blinders that keep us from seeing an answer” (p 29).

After noting that modern scientists have “eschewed design” as a solution, even opposing those who feel design is a fruitful area of research, Turner concludes “modern biology’s most glaring blind spot is...design” (p 12-13). In contrast to Dawkins’ selfish gene ideology, Turner shows that “without the thermodynamic machines that underpin function, the gene is nothing more than an interesting polymer, utterly incapable of anything, let alone the tinkerer’s kind of adaptation” (p 13).

For this reason Turner attempts to take a “fresh look at design and evolution,” concluding that all organisms exhibit “marvelous harmony of structure and function,” an attribute Turner calls “designedness — not because natural selection...has made them that way, but because agents of

34 ORIGINS 2008

homeostasis build them that way” (p 14). In other words, homeostasis — the ability of an organism or cell to maintain equilibrium by adjusting its physiological process by biological feedback loops — can produce design that is not directly the result of genes.

Using his study of termite chimneys (the tall thin homes termites build out of mud) as an example, Turner concludes that certain aspects of termites’ complex behavior are not the result of mutation and selection, but rather homeostasis. Because “termites are ‘comfortable’ with particular carbon dioxide concentrations, humidity, and so forth”, they evolved the ability to modify their chimney home in order to maintain the optimal conditions for themselves (p 27). This conclusion fails to address why, rather than evolving complex behavior to maximize their environmental conditions, termites don’t evolve greater tolerance to normal environmental variations in carbon dioxide concentration, temperature and humidity fluctuations.

Turner deals extensively with homeostasis and human anatomical system development, such as the development of the blood circulatory systems (Ch 4), the skeletal system (Ch 5), the embryo (Ch 6), the digestive system (Ch 7), the visual system (Ch 9), and the brain (Ch 10). Each chapter contains much detail that elegantly expresses the wonder of life’s complexity in terms very similar to Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box. The difference is Behe documents the fact that these systems are both irreducibly complex and that evidence is lacking for their evolution.

Although Turner uses the term “irreducibly complex” only once, to argue that this concept is a “God of the gaps” view that puts faith in an “ever diminishing God,” his physiology discussions eloquently support Behe’s concept (p 138). He correctly adds that Behe’s critics are also “prone to a kind of God-of-the-gaps mentality” because “their faith lies in the essentially atomist notion that all phenomena...can be explained by a few simple rules that govern interactions among mindless and indivisible units. Neo-Darwinism is an example of this faith…” (p 138).

In documenting many “self-organizing systems” Turner raises a major problem for Darwinism as indicated by his coining the term “designedness” — a word that openly implies design — to explain these systems. The theory Turner proposes, homeostasis, essentially makes designedness an emergent property of homeostasis. Ultimately, his theory fails to explain the irreducibly complex self-organizing systems he details as necessary to achieve homeostasis. The purposefulness that Turner attributes to homeo-stasis ignores more major questions including how life survived until

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homeostasis evolved, how the mechanisms of homeostasis came to be, and why life often has very narrow set points.

One characteristic of an excellent book is that it raises more questions than it answers. Judging by this criterion, Turner’s book succeeds marvel-ously. It is also an important book because of its effective critique of Darwinism. Absent is the seemingly obligatory paragraph bashing Intelligent Design (ID). In its place are over a dozen references to ID, and all are respectful, thoughtful, and all too brief. One section that fails to maintain this high standard deals with eye evolution where Turner relies heavily on common misperceptions and does not carefully review the literature (such as p 161).

Turner is more successful in pointing out the shortcomings of Darwin-ism than proposing a better theory. He documents that one feature of Darwin machines is “their utter absence of intentionality or goal-directedness.” His homeostasis theory is “frankly teleological, imbued with the goal- seeking behavior and purposefulness that is at the heart of homeostasis” (p 28) but ultimately his theory is as inadequate as Darwin’s theory. Although Turner’s teleological view is against the grain of modern biology, he concludes teleology is required to explain the natural world. The book is written for general audiences, is highly informative, well organized, and written with obvious enthusiasm using the first person style. The author freely expresses his opinions and experiences that were influential in helping him to arrive at his conclusions, even noting some potential methods to falsify his theory.

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LITERATURE REVIEWS

Readers are invited to submit reviews of current literature relating to origins. Mailing address: ORIGINS, Geoscience Research Institute, 11060 Campus St., Loma Linda, California 92350 USA. The Institute does not distribute the publications reviewed; please contact the publisher directly.

OVER THE EDGE

The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. Michael J. Behe. 2007. NY: Free Press. 336 p. Hardcover $ 28.00.

Timothy G. Standish Geoscience Research Institute

Michael Behe’s sequel to Darwin’s Black Box, The Edge of Evolution, has apparently driven many of his critics figuratively over the edge. So sure are some that Behe must be wrong that they clearly have not bothered to actually read the book before writing “reviews,” focusing more on Behe’s intelligence and sanity than addressing his carefully constructed argument and the exhaustive empirical evidence he marshals in support of it.

So what is it that has driven Behe’s critics over the edge of civil discourse into a frenzy of ad hominem attacks? Like most brilliant insights, at first inspection the only thing apparently remarkable about Behe’s latest is the fact that no one has articulated it previously. A long-held claim of Darwin-doubters has been that while the neo-Darwinian mechanism of mutation coupled with selection may be capable of doing something, it is incapable of turning an amoeba into a giraffe or algae into an oak tree. The Darwinian claim is that small changes can accumulate over vast time periods resulting in large cumulative changes. Behe pointed out in Darwin’s Black Box that some structures cannot be produced by small cumulative changes. These irreducibly complex (IC) structures require a set of parts to all be present before they can function. Given that natural selection can only select functional things, components lacking function outside of IC structures cannot be selected prior to the existence of the IC structure; they cannot accumulate in many small steps over any amount of time via mutation and selection.

In Darwinian evolution, time is the magic that allows transformation of various types of organisms into very different kinds. Organisms repro-

36 ORIGINS 2008

duce over time: with more time, more reproductive events occur resulting in more potentially mutated individuals on which natural selection can work. The essence of Behe’s argument from IC in Darwin’s Black Box is that given any amount of time and natural selection, the jump between nothing and a novel irreducibly complex entity like the bacterial flagellum is larger than the neo-Darwinian mechanism can span and thus it does not account for the IC structures and biochemical pathways that abound in nature. Checking Behe’s IC argument against history is impossible, particularly given the time spans invoked by Darwinists.

In The Edge of Evolution, Behe uses malaria as a case study to circumvent appeals to the magic of deep time. Because the malaria parasite Plasmodium reproduces in such stupendous numbers within infected humans and its mosquito vectors, the probabilistic resources Plasmodium has to draw on in its battle against the human immune system and anti- malarial drugs are immense. The millions upon trillions of Plasmodium parasites living at any moment soon eclipse the probabilistic resources available to mammals over the putative 200 million years since they emerged as shrew-like creatures around the same time as dinosaurs. The evolutionary possibilities available to mammals over hundreds of millions of years are modeled well over the past century of well documented Plasmodium history. It turns out that mutations have been capable of making tiny changes rendering Plasmodium immune to treatments like Chloroquine, but not to the sickle cell or thalassaemia mutations that have occurred in humans making them, at great cost, immune to malaria.

Plasmodium can be viewed as a natural experiment illustrating what capabilities the neo-Darwinian mutation-selection mechanism possesses. Despite its remarkable reproductive abilities, Plasmodium has not developed new molecular machinery to deal with new drugs or human adaptive mutations. The edge of evolution – the limit to what mutation coupled with selection can achieve – seems to be restricted to mutations that disrupt to varying degrees the normal function of already existing proteins. Production of novel new molecular machines or biochemical pathways – with one or two possible exceptions like antifreeze proteins, which Behe discusses – appears beyond its abilities irrespective of time. This same phenomenon is also commonly illustrated in bacterial antibiotic resistance.

Arguments about creation and evolution aside, Behe demonstrates in The Edge of Evolution the very practical importance of assuming design and understanding what unguided natural processes can really do. Malaria has killed innumerable people over the course of history and the carnage

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continues in areas where it is endemic. Any treatment strategy must take into consideration what mechanisms Plasmodium has at its disposal to counter current and future therapies. The pessimistic assumption of infinite adaptive abilities will do no good. Understanding the very real limits to adaptation in Plasmodium can rationally inform the quest for more effective treatments like, for example, the use of multiple drugs in combination to overwhelm what can be realistically expected from Plasmodium mutations in its victims.

In many respects Behe is Darwinists’ worst nightmare come true. He espouses common descent, has no problem with long periods of time, quotes no holy books (unless The Origin of Species counts) and provides a logically coherent argument rooted in empirical evidence. As a bio-chemist, Behe’s expertise in the areas he writes about overshadows that of many of his Darwinist critics. All that seems to be left for his critics to do is to attack his character and intelligence, but as he is in fact a nice guy, a tenured professor at a prestigious university and a brilliant productive scientist, these attacks seem to reflect more on the desperation of his opponents than on Behe himself.

The Edge of Evolution is an eminently readable book, perhaps easier to follow than Darwin’s Black Box. It should be at the top of the reading list of all who truly wish to understand what unguided mutation and selection can achieve. This should include advocates of religiously charged theories about the history of life, like Darwinism and creationism, as well as advocates of more religiously neutral ideas like Intelligent Design and those who are simply interested in the science. Aside from those interested in the philosophical aspects of design in nature, Behe has broken new ground for ID advocates, producing a book that contains ideas of philo-sophical depth and practical use in the fight against malaria, one of humanity’s greatest scourges.

Editor’s Note: Original pagination was p 35-38.

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GENERAL SCIENCE NOTES

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS, THE FOURTHCOMMANDMENT AND DEUTERONOMY 5

Timothy G. StandishGeoscience Research Institute

Exodus 20:11 refers to the six-day creation as the reason for remember-ing to keep the Sabbath-day holy. This is reiterated in Exodus 31 wherethe fourth commandment is restated in verses 13-17. In both cases, theentire fourth commandment, including the reference to the six-day creationis attributed to God who is said to have both spoken the words and thenwritten them on tables of stone.

Whether or not one believes God actually wrote that He created in sixdays, it seems reasonable to say that the author of Exodus clearly wishedreaders to understand that the Sabbath is inextricably connected with thesix-day creation. However, a third version of the fourth commandmentexists in Deuteronomy 5:12-15. In this version, the salvation God wroughtin bringing Israel out of slavery in Egypt is mentioned in place of thecreation as a reason for keeping the Sabbath, or at least for letting one’sslaves rest on the Sabbath. It may be argued, based on this differencebetween the texts, that the original command to keep the Sabbath was notlinked to the creation or the Exodus, but that these reasons for keeping theSabbath holy were inserted into the text by uninspired authors or editorsand that the reference to the six-day creation is thus not what God spokeor wrote.

An ancient Dead Sea scroll which is part of an exhibition currently atthe San Diego (California, USA) Natural History Museum may shed somelight on this situation. In this manuscript, 4Q41, the fourth commandmentis given in an expanded form that includes Moses’ comment linking theSabbath to redemption from slavery in Egypt while also including theoriginal reference to the creation given in Exodus 20 and 31. An Englishtranslation of 4Q41 is given in the exhibition catalog. Starting at Column IIILine 9 which corresponds to Deuteronomy 5:12, it reads:1

Column III

9 Deut 5:12Observe //// the Sabbath day and keep it holy, asthe LORD your God has commanded you.

10 Deut 5:13Six days you shall labor and do all your work,

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11 Deut 5:14But on* the seventh day is a Sabbath of the LORDyour God; you shall not do any work on it*

12 you, † your son, † your daughter, † your male or femaleslave, † your ox or your ass,

Column IV

1 or**** your cattle, † the stranger in your settlements,//// so that your male and females slave may rest

2 As you do. Deut 5:15Remember that you were a slave //// inthe land of Egypt and

3 the LORD our God freed you from there with a mightyhand //// and an outstretched arm;

4 therefore the LORD your God has commanded you ////to keep***** the Sabbath day

5 to consecrate it.* Ex 21:11For in six days the LORD madeheaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, butrested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessedthe Sabbath day and consecrated it. //// Deut 5:16Honoryour father and your mother, as . . .

* Not in the Masoretic Text (MT)

† The MT has “and”

**** The MT reads “any of”***** The MT reads “to observe”

//// Indicates where text is broken or illegible

Strawn2 (and others) attribute this and other “expansions” of theMasoretic text in 4Q41 to an attempt to harmonize Deuteronomy with therest of the Pentateuch, noting a similar pattern in the Samaritan Pentateuch(although it does not include Exodus 20:11 in Deuteronomy 5). Whateverwas intended, the ancient version of Deuteronomy 5 recorded in 4Q41clearly shows that at the time it was transcribed, between 30 BC and1 BC, there were people who believed the truncated version of the FourthCommandment spoken by Moses in Deuteronomy 5 – with his reminderthat the Israelites were once slaves and thus should give their slaves Sabbathrest – did not invalidate the more complete versions spoken and writtenby God and recorded in Exodus 20 and 31.

The fact that examples are unknown of Exodus 20 being “harmonized”by insertion of the comments about slavery in Egypt from Deuteronomy 5may indicate that the Exodus renditions of the Fourth Commandmentwere considered to be the authoritative versions they appear to be in theMasoretic text. In addition, given that 4Q41 is among the most ancientcopies of Deuteronomy, it may call into question the theory that the six-

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days in the Fourth Commandment were inserted by an editor who livedafter Moses. The 4Q41 example shows that when such harmonizationwas done in ancient times, the inserted text was copied verbatim from analready existing text in the Pentateuch, not made up by an editor seekingto add in information or a summary reference to another part of thePentateuch. Second, if more ancient manuscripts are considered to bemore definitive, then it could be argued that the six-day creation wasedited out of the Deuteronomy 5 Fourth Commandment rather than editedinto Exodus 20 and 31. In either case, arguments against the Divine Handinscribing the claim that God created in six literal days appear to besubstantially weakened by the existence of 4Q41.

ENDNOTES

1. Kohn RL. 2007. Dead Sea Scrolls. San Diego, CA: San Diego University Press, p 19.

2. Strawn BA. 2006. Excerpted manuscripts at Quamran: their significance for textualhistory of the Hebrew Bible and the socio-religious history of the Quamran communityand its literature. In: Charlesworth JH, editor. The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls.Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, p 119.

42 ORIGINS 2008

GENERAL SCIENCE NOTES

SCRIPTURAL GEOLOGY, 1820-1860: AN ESSAY AND REVIEW

Warren H. JohnsUniversity Libraries

Loma Linda UniversityLoma Linda, California

Terry Mortenson, now with Answers in Genesis (Florence, KY), hasdone a great service by providing his scholarly analysis of the historicalroots of modern creationism to be found in the “Scriptural geology” move-ment. Many scientists and clergy of the period 1820 to 1860 in Englandand America countered the uniformitarian, non-catastrophist approach ofthe fledgling science of geology with an approach to earth history basedupon three premises:

1) The age of the earth is not more than about 6000 years old, notthe millions of years needed by uniformitarian geology.

2) The days of creation were literal days, which started with thebeginning of time, not being preceded by millions of years as inthe “ruin-restitution” or “gap theory.”1

3) The Biblical Deluge was a major agent of geological change inearth history and was worldwide in scope.

This intellectual movement is designated as “Scriptural geology.” It is bestsummarized from a creationist viewpoint in Terry Mortenson, The GreatTurning Point: The Church’s Catastrophic Mistake on Geology Before Darwin(2004).2 The more comprehensive treatment of the topic is found in hisdoctoral dissertation: “British Scriptural Geologists in the First Half of theNineteenth Century” (1996).3

In his dissertation, Mortenson provides the reader with a lengthysummary of the historical conditions leading up to Scriptural geology,which was a reaction against both uniformity and multiple catastrophesfound in early geology. The “father of uniformitarianism” was the Scottishgeologist James Hutton, who in a 1788 lecture iterated the maxim that thepresent is key to the past in the words, “the results of our investigationtherefore is that we see no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”The “father of stratrigraphy” was the British canal engineer William Smith,who first published his map of the geological strata of England and Wales

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in 1815. This is the year that marks the rise of the “Scriptural geology”movement, which was a Biblically-based approach grappling to explainthe order of the geological strata.

If Hutton was the father of uniformitarian thinking and Smith was theone who provided the geological framework for its explanation, then SirCharles Lyell, writing his three-volume set in 1830-1833 and using hislawyer mind, provided the greatest articulation of uniformitarianism inBritish nineteenth-century geology. Scriptural geology’s main pillar of beliefwas that the ultimate catastrophe, the Biblical Flood, explains the geologicalstrata of the earth.

Mortenson’s dissertation focused upon thirteen of the several dozen“Scriptural geologists” from that era and has limited the scope to onlythose writing from England in the period 1820-1840. They are as follows(alphabetically listed, not in the order Mortenson discussed them):

Best, Samuel (1802-1873) – Cl. Gisborne, Thomas (1758-1846) – Cl. Brown, James Mellor (1796-1867) – Cl. *Murray, John (1785/1786-1851)*Bugg, George (1769-1851) – Cl. *Penn, Granville (1761-1844) Cockburn, William (1774?-1858) – Cl. * Rhind, William (1797-1874) Cole, Henry (1792?-1858) – Cl. *Ure, Andrew (1778-1857)*Fairholme, George (1789-1846) *Young, George (1777-1848) – Cl. Johnsone, Fowler de (pseudonym) – Cl.

About half of these are clergy-scientists, denoted with the abbreviation“Cl.” An asterisk designates only those Scriptural geologists discussed inhis 2004 work, which is a condensation and revision of his doctoral thesis,and is now available in electronic format.4

MORTENSON’S REASONSFOR THE DEMISE OF SCRIPTURAL GEOLOGY

In the above two works Mortenson grapples with the question ofhow and why the Scriptural geology movement died out after reaching itspeak at about 1840 in England. First, he lists the following reasons whythis movement grew rapidly into prominence:

1) It was a time of great change and turbulence in British society;Scriptural geology opposed radical changes in understanding ofgeology.

2) Atheism, deism, and the French revolution were challenging theauthority of the church; Scriptural geologists without exceptiondefended the authority and inerrancy of the Bible.

3) Science was growing rapidly and achieving a new status in societyand was promoting an independent means of discovering “truth;”

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Scriptural geology was pointing out weaknesses in the speculativeaspects of science, especially earth science.

4) England had a long tradition of writers who believed in naturaltheology and who related the Biblical Flood to geological phe-nomena; Scriptural geologists continued to uphold that approach.

5) The effects of the Flood were being debated at the time whenleading geologists were giving up belief in a universal Flood;Scriptural geology was a reaction against these compromisepositions by leading geologists, many of whom were also men offaith.

6) The ultimate effect of reinterpreting the Bible on the basis of sciencewas the undermining of the authority of Scripture, a trend whichthe Scriptural geologists felt compelled to oppose. These con-servative ideas resonated with the majority of the educated Christianpopulation in England at that time.

Second, Mortenson discusses three possible reasons why Scripturalgeology as a movement disappeared almost as rapidly as it had risen:

1) The major scientific and educational institutions and scientificjournals were controlled by individuals who were hostile totraditional beliefs, thus preventing a new generation of Biblically-believing geologists to be trained.

2) The professionalization of geology as a science made it difficultfor part-time geologists, such as the Scriptural geologists in everycase were, to have a voice.

3) Liberal theology was slowly replacing orthodox theology as thedominant view in the Church, and this gave less impetus to thetraditional views on Genesis and the Flood.

AN ADDITIONAL REASON SUGGESTED BY STILING

If Mortenson had extended his study to writings beyond 1840 andbeyond the confines of Great Britain, he could have added an additionalreason why Flood geology began to wane rapidly — the shifting of theFlood to higher and higher strata, leaving most of the geological strata asantediluvian. Rodney L. Stiling notes this trend in his doctoral dissertation,“The Diminishing Deluge: Noah’s Flood in Nineteenth-Century AmericanThought.”5 Flood geologists began ascribing the Flood to higher stratigraphiclevels, so that what is now known as Paleozoic and Mesozoic depositswere considered to be antediluvian, while the Flood was thought to berepresented by Tertiary and Quaternary deposits, in contrast to earlier viewsof putting all “secondary” formations (upper Paleozoic and Mesozoic in

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today’s terminology) within the Flood. Most scientists and professors ofgeology, whether young-earth or old-earth advocates, who believed in auniversal Flood in the period 1820-1840, understood the Flood as formingwhat were then called the “diluvium,” or diluvial deposits.6 Starting in the1840s in both Europe and America these deposits became assigned to theagency of ice and water, rather than solely liquid water, and an “ice age”was postulated, largely under the influence of a Swiss pastor’s son andprofessor in geology — Louis Agassiz. This essentially eliminated theconcept of the Flood as a geological agent, a process completed by 1860.In essence the ice age removed the need for a catastrophic Flood to explainthe burial grounds of large mammals in caves, in peat deposits, and inriver banks, such as the deposits of the mammoths and mastodons of thehigh latitudes in North America, South America, and Europe. The rise ofDarwinism, which emerged full-fledged in 1859 with the publication ofDarwin’s On the Origin of Species, was, therefore, not responsible for thedisappearance of Flood geology.

One of the striking examples of how Scriptural geology shifted thepre-Flood/Flood boundary higher and higher in the geological column isprovided by the case of George Fairholme. Fairholme’s 1833 work, AGeneral View of the Geology of Scripture, suggested that the Flood wasresponsible for forming all the non-marine secondary formations and allthe marine and non-marine tertiary formations.7 But four years later in hissecond work on Scriptural geology, he acknowledged that he had erred inthe way he assigned the Flood to the geological strata:

In a desire to vindicate Scripture upon points which geologi-cal theories had invaded, I fell into the too common error ofpushing even a sound argument too far; and of thus attri-buting to Diluvial action alone, formations which I havesubsequently found, must have been in existence, as solidrocks, before the period of that event.8

He had made the mistake of putting all the great coal beds of Europestratigraphically above the “chalk beds” (now known as Cretaceous”).For him in 1833, the top of the chalk beds marked the transition fromantediluvian to diluvial deposits.9 This meant that the coal beds must havebeen formed by the Deluge. Four years later in assigning the coal beds toa position below the chalks beds as all other British geologists had alreadydone, Fairholme in essence was viewing the coal beds as being antediluvian,thus correcting the “error” in his 1833 treatise.10 This interpretation ofFairholme runs counter to most twentieth-century creationist writers,starting with George McCready Price and ending with Terry Mortenson,who have used Fairholme’s publications to support the idea that the Floodformed the entire fossiliferous geological column.11

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A proper interpretation of Fairholme’s Flood model is critical to under-standing the reason(s) why Scriptural geology had lost its support by theyear 1860 in Britain and America. Limiting the Flood to the superficialgravels, loams, and erratic blocks, accompanied by the bones of mammoths,mastodons, rhinoceroses, and even humans in the upper Pleistocene, meantthat ice became a plausible agent for their burial, not water as in a Deluge,when the concept of an “ice age” was developed in the 1850s and 1860s.When George McCready Price initiated the revival of “Scriptural geology”under the rubric of “Flood geology” in the early twentieth-century, thefirst thing he attempted to do was to eliminate any concept of an “iceage,” the great nemesis of Scriptural geology.12 Fairholme was writingprior to the time that an ice age had become an established geologicaldogma. In his earlier writings, Fairholme initially connected the Floodwith the formation of the geological strata. In his later book, Fairholmeappeared to limit the Flood to the upper portion of the geological strata. Hepostulated that, rather than creating the terrestrial geological strata onland, the Flood reversed the relative positions of the land and seafloor.13

This happened at a time no more than 10,000 years ago, he calculated, andmore likely 5,000 years ago, using geological chronometers, and it occurredafter the strata had been laid down and had become indurated.

Two further examples can be given of how starting in the late 1830sScriptural geologists began to limit the stratigraphic extent of the Flood,even though geographically it was considered universal. One work mentionedby Mortenson, but not analyzed by him, is Facts, Suggestions, and BriefInductions in Geology, published under the obvious pseudonym BiblicusDelvinus in 1838, and republished in 1839.14 This mysterious individual isprobably the Scriptural geologist, George Bugg, who published his firstwork The Geology of Scripture (2 vols., 1826-1827) anonymously. Thefact that he employed the same two publishers, Seeley and Hatchard, forboth works, when other Scriptural geologists with one exception werenot employing both publishers, leads to the conclusion that George Buggand Biblicus Delvinus are to be equated.15 This conclusion is significant inthat Bugg over the twelve years after his first publication in 1826-1827changed his position on the young earth. His later view was that creationhappened millions of years ago with the creation of invertebrate ocean life,thus assigning the “transition strata” (today’s lower Paleozoic) to a periodprior to the six days’ creation. The reasoning was simple — Genesis 1 doesnot speak of invertebrates being created, and the first created animal life isthat of vertebrates on days 5 and 6 of creation. The “secondary strata,”having evidence of only invertebrate life, then were produced prior to Creationweek.16

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Another example of a Scriptural geologist who added millions of yearsto the geological record is Samuel Best, discussed at length in Mortenson’sdissertation but not in his 2004 work. In 1837 Best critiqued William Buck-land for his old-earth views, but by 1871 he must have relented somewhat.His second of two works on creation was Sermons on the Beginning of AllThings as Revealed to us in the Word of God.17 In this work he viewed thefirst three days of creation as being non-literal because in his words “thesun...had not yet [by the end of the third day] assumed its office in theheavens, and time could not be counted by its rising and setting.”18 Duringthe much-expanded “day” of creation, the vegetation that is now preservedin Carboniferous coal beds grew from the light and heat of internal fires fromthe earth, he speculated, not from the sun.19 Best placed all of the lowerPaleozoic rocks (up through the Carboniferous) within the first three daysof creation, whereas his predecessor Biblicus Delvinus (=George Bugg)ascribed those same formations to the “without form and void” period ofGenesis 1:2. The shifts of thinking we observe in the dual works producedeach by Fairholme, Bugg, and Best indicate a movement away from theidea that most of the fossil record was produced in the year of the Flood.This shifting process started in 1837-1838 (with Fairholme and Bugg) andwas complete by 1871 (with Best).20

THE LACK OF HUMAN FOSSILS A FACTOR IN SCRIPTURAL GEOLOGY’S DEMISE

Another more crucial factor than the reasons proposed by Mortensonand Stiling to account for the demise of Scriptural geology was the lackof human fossils or human artifacts in geological strata. Some Scripturalgeologists hypothesized that the antediluvian population was great, perhapsequaling in concentration if not in numbers the population of WesternEurope at the beginning of the nineteenth century.21 One detects a note ofdespair in the writings of all the Scriptural geologists at not having foundevidence of human remains in the lower portions of the geological strata.Forone example among many of human skeletons found in “Diluvial” or upperTertiary strata, see the 1824 illustration taken from William Buckland inFigure 1. The only well-documented human skeletons were in “tertiary”strata. If the Flood was designed by God to wipe out a significant populationof rebellious human beings by means of water, then one would expect tofind their remains well preserved in diluvial strata. That was the main reasonfor placing the Flood in the “diluvium” because those deposits were knownto contain bones of humans in association with those of extinct mammals.

Scriptural geologists offered five possible reasons for this apparentlack of finding human fossils in the “transition” and “secondary” strata ofthe earth:

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1) The most common reason given was that at the time of the Floodthe land and sea exchanged places.22 The antediluvian seas wereuplifted to become the postdiluvian lands, and the antediluvianland became the bottom of present-day oceans. No humans havebeen found because they currently lie buried in the ocean floor.

2) Antediluvian humans all lived in the region now known as Asia.Bones of humans had not been discovered in Asia (as of the 1840s),but it was thought they would be discovered there in the futurewith greater exploration.

3) Antediluvian humans were concentrated around what was thegarden of Eden. This was the last place God chose to destroy atthe time of the Flood, so that humans were the last creatures Hedestroyed with Deluge waters, thus depositing their remains atthe top of the geological strata.

4) The antediluvian population was very small in contrast to themillions of land animals that were thought to be in existence whenthe Flood came. Hence, one would not expect to discover largebone beds with human remains. Also, scientific exploration wasstill in its infancy, and thus increased exploration at some futuredate would uncover the scant human remains in the lower reachesof the geological column.

5) Antediluvian humans were much more intelligent than any othercreature, and they would have fled to the highest points of landduring the Flood, and thus were the last creatures to be buried byrising Flood waters.

The lack of antediluvian fossil humans remains a problem to this day,the lowest confirmed strata with remains of Homo sapiens being the Pleisto-cene above the top of the Cenozoic. At various times creationists havereported on the occurrence of human-like tracks in the lower reaches ofthe geological strata, but none of the reports have been substantiated.Thus, Scriptural geologists were forced to limit the Flood eventually tothe upper “tertiary” strata, where there were reported human remains, orto the “diluvium” where there were plentiful human remains. But whenglaciation and not a worldwide Deluge was determined to account for theorigin of the diluvium, the Flood disappeared almost entirely from thegeological scene. This occurred by the end of 1840s in Britain and the endof the 1850s in America.

Figure 1. Plate 21 of William Buckland’s Reliquiæ Diluvianæ (1824, London:John Murray), giving one example of human remains found in deposits labeled“Diluvial,” in the Sea Cliffs near Swansea. Photograph from the author’sprivate collection.

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FINAL ATTEMPTS TO RESTORE SCRIPTURAL GEOLOGY

Two creative attempts to defend a waning Flood concept in the decadeof 1850-1860 were submitted by William Elfe Tayler and Thomas A. Daviesagainst the old-earth views of Hugh Miller, Scottish stone mason.23 Thefirst was the anonymously published Voices from the Rocks, now knownto have been written by the English clergyman William Elfe Tayler in 1857.24

It was a sharp critique of the newly published Testimony of the Rocks byHugh Miller in 1857.25 Tayler claimed to have found one devastating evi-dence that would overturn Miller’s old-earth views — the presence ofhuman footprints in the Old Red Sandstone, which Miller described inexhaustive detail in his 1857 work as being classified as Paleozoic. Thesefootprints, which can now be viewed on the Internet,26 appear to havebeen cleverly carved in the sandstone. Other than the purported humantracks in Paleozoic sediments, Scriptural geologists in the 1850s had nonew evidences by which to connect the Biblical Flood to geological strata.

The second major critique of Hugh Miller was by a military man,Thomas A. Davies, who later ran for United States President in 1872. Hiswork, published in 1860, was entitled Answer to Hugh Miller and TheoreticGeologists.27 The problem was that Davies was even more speculative andtheoretical than Miller himself, for he proposed that the entire fossil recordwith “sedimentary” rocks were created within the six literal days of Creationweek.28 He conjectures that there exist three kingdoms: animal, vegetable,and fossil/mineral. God created the entire pre-Adamite fossil record duringthe first three days of Creation, which were literal days, as archetypesthat provided patterns for the living forms created during days three throughsix.29 This idea may have been spawned by reading Philip Gosse, Omphalos:an Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot (1857), although Davies neveracknowledged reading Gosse. At any rate both men advocated that thefossil record was created instantly in order to counter the day-age viewsof Hugh Miller and other Christian geologists.

THE SHIFT AWAY FROM THE HARD FACTS OF GEOLOGY

The extreme views of William Elfe Tayler, Philip Gosse, and Thomas A.Davies illustrate an additional reason why the views of Scriptural geologistsnearly disappeared from the geological scene after 1860: the more Scripturalgeologists moved away from discussing the facts of the geological recordand into the realm of speculation, the less credibility they had with thegeneral public. A good example of a work that was nearly devoid of anygeological facts was written by Fowler de Johnsone, Truth, in Defence ofthe Word of God–Vanquishing Infidelity. A Vindication of the Book of Genesis.Addressed to the Rev. William Buckland.30 “Fowler de Johnsone” is clearly

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a pseudonym. There is no British author with the surname “de Johnsone” writing inthat period.31 Who then is this intriguing Fowler de Johnsone?

The following facts, as gleaned by Mortenson, help us narrow down the field ofpossibilities:

1) He was a clergyman, possibly Anglican.2) He lived in or near London.3) He had a first-hand acquaintance with the writings of Martin Luther on Genesis.4) He did not enter the debate about the nature and extent of the Flood, and wrote

only one and a half pages on the Flood itself.5) The title of his 1838 work shows that it was in the form of a letter “addressed

to Rev. William Buckland.”6) He had written a previous work in which he was attacked for his views.32

Since “de Johnsone” had written previously on the subject of geology, for whichhe was criticized, we can narrow down the field of candidates to those Scripturalgeologists writing prior to 1838. Of the Scriptural geologists discussed by Mortensoneight were clergymen: Samuel Best, James Mellor Brown, George Bugg, William Cockburn,Henry Cole, Thomas Gisborne, and George Young. Of these eight, only two fit the rest ofthe six criteria laid out by Mortenson for the author using “Fowler de Johnsone” as apseudonym, Henry Cole and William Cockburn. William Cockburn could not have beenDe Johnsone because Cockburn wrote his first work in 1838: A Letter to Prof. Buckland,Concerning the Origin of the World.33 He wrote no previous work on geology. Moreover,Buckland was addressed with the title “Prof.” by Cockburn and “Rev.” by de Johnsone,suggesting the works had been authored by two different individuals. Besides, Cock-burn would not have written two books in 1838 criticizing Buckland, the one publishedunder a pseudonym and the other published under his real name.

The third point above, the fact that de Johnsone had a first-hand knowledge ofLuther’s commentary on Genesis points then to only one of the remaining seven clergydiscussed by Mortenson: Henry Cole. This factor alone is sufficient to limit theidentification of de Johnsone to Cole because as far as we are aware no other Scripturalgeologist writing in 1838 or earlier mentions Luther’s Genesis commentary as anargument in support of the universality of the Flood. The reason is simple: Luther’scommentary on Genesis had not been translated from Latin into English as of 1838,and Henry Cole was the first one to translate a portion of it into English in 1858.34

Mortenson, who is thoroughly familiar with the writings of both men, takes exceptionto the proposed identification of “Fowler de Johnsone” as Henry Cole and asserts thatboth men are not to be equated because of different writing styles and modes ofargumentation.35 Assessments of style and methodology, however, are more subjectivein contrast to the six points above.

On the other hand, an analysis of style is important and should not be under-estimated. “De Johnsone’s” style is more pedantic and vitriolic than any other Scripturalgeologist studied by Mortenson. Of his style, Mortenson has this to say:

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Throughout his book he used a very pompous style with plentyof metaphorical and symbolic language and conveyed anattitude that he was THE defender of the Bible.... It is hard toimagine who might have been convinced by “de Johnsone’s”lengthy but shallow argument written in his unusual style.36

Cole/de Johnsone believed that he could use flowery language and astrong Biblical emphasis to convince the old-earth geologists of the errorsof their ways, but such style without geological substance did not winany converts. Prior to the 1840s Scriptural geologists as a whole emphasizedthe importance of accepting the “facts” of geology while disagreeing withthe speculative “theories” of geologists. Cole/de Johnsone was the firstScriptural geologist to ignore the facts of geology, while emphasizing thatScripture provides all final answers needed to combat the fledgling scienceof geology.

MORTENSON’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE DISCUSSION

While Terry Mortenson disagrees with the above identification ofFowler de Johnsone with Henry Cole, he is to be commended for pro-viding a wealth of valuable and accurate information for developing abalanced view of the writings of the Scriptural geology movement. Hedemonstrates that they were for the most part highly educated and oftenwidely published writers, not geologically illiterate individuals as theiropponents often portrayed them as.37 They were not writing against geologyas a science per se, but against those speculative aspects that collidedwith the Biblical world view of a short chronology.38 Mortenson thereforewould take exception to Rodney Stiling, who describes “Scriptural ge-ologists” as not being geologists. Stiling writes: “Thus, while it may beproper to speak of Scriptural Geology, it is not really accurate to speak ofScriptural Geologists.”39 One must keep in mind that most of the earlynineteenth-century geologists did not have formal training in geology, butwere largely self-educated, because geology as an academic science wasonly in its infancy.

Mortenson’s dissertation was not designed to be exhaustive in coveringall the Scriptural geologists, but rather representative.40 Not mentioned atall by Mortenson was Henry Browne, an obscure Scriptural geologistwhose book The Geology of Scripture was published in 1832.41 Browneadvocated a universal Flood and presumably a short chronology, althoughfor him the Flood was limited to the upper part of the geological column,apparently concentrated at the “Diluvium.” Scriptural geologists who begantheir writing careers after 1840 gave less and less importance to the Floodin the geological column. And, as shown by the links between Henry Cole

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and Fowler de Johnsone and between George Bugg and Biblicus Delvinus,Scriptural geology began shifting away from an emphasis on the facts ofgeology and moving into the realm of speculation. While Mortenson doesnot mention these connections in writing his dissertation, he has offered afresh, new perspective on the Scriptural geology movement from asympathetic perspective, and already his contribution is being recognizedby the scholarly world.42

CONCLUSIONS

What can the modern creationist movement learn from the Scripturalgeology movement of the early nineteenth century? It is fitting that wereview Scriptural geology after having passed the 100th anniversary of thefounding of the modern Flood geology movement with close historicaland conceptual ties to Scriptural geology.43 The list of what can be learnedhas positive as well as negative elements. On the negative side, we learnfrom the failures of Fowler de Johnsone (i.e., Henry Cole) in employing astrategy of attacking the views of one’s opponents with a polemical andsometimes caustic writing style. This type of style gets people’s attention,but does not make a lasting contribution to the cause of creationism.Unfortunately, George McCready Price in the first half of the twentiethcentury exhibited much the same writing style, but was perhaps a littleless inflammatory than Cole/de Johnsone. Calmly reasoned positions basedupon hard data hold greater power to convince than outright attacks onthe character, theology, or methodology of one’s opponents.

On the positive side of the ledger, Flood geology today has much tolearn from the earlier Scriptural geologists, of which I have selected fivepertinent observations:

1) The primary theological defense of a conservative creationistposition is holding to the six literal days of creation forming thefirst week of time, after which all other weeks have been patterned.This was the motivating factor, or modus operandi, of virtually allthe Scriptural geologists and more recently of all the Floodgeologists. This is the starting point in building one’s young-earthcreationist worldview. Significantly, the Scriptural geologistsrepeatedly referred to the Ten Commandments, and in particularExodus 20:8-11, as the major theological/exegetical argument infavor of literal creation days.44

2) Scriptural geologists all accepted geology as a legitimate science.They quarreled not with the “facts” of geology, but with the“inferences” derived from the facts that collided with a straight-forward, literal reading of Scripture.45

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3) Because they accepted the facts of geology, the Scriptural geolo-gists discussed by Mortenson accepted the reality of a geologicalcolumn — the reality of a sequential arrangement of strata in apredictable order.46 George McCready Price’s major differencewith Scriptural geologists was over this point, the reality of thegeological sequence, which he categorically rejected. Yet no onehas come up with a better way of discussing the relationships ofstrata in the past two centuries of research!47

4) There were as many differences among Scriptural geologists overthe question of where to put the Flood in the geological column asthere are today among Flood geologists. Of the 13 (in reality 12)Scriptural geologists discussed by Mortenson, only George Youngbelieved the Flood to be responsible for forming the entirefossiliferous geological column.48 In the twentieth-century GeorgeMcCready Price, John C. Whitcomb, and Henry M. Morris followedthe thinking of Young by including all or nearly all the geologicalcolumn in the Flood.49 Several Scriptural geologists limited theFlood mainly to the uppermost strata called the “tertiary,” or evento the uppermost stratum, the “diluvium,” which now is equatedwith the Pleistocene —Henry Browne, Samuel Best, John Murray,Andrew Ure, and George Fairholme (in his 1837 work only).Others, such as George Bugg, Granville Penn, Thomas Gisborne,and William Cockburn, assigned the Flood to the strata nowequivalent to the upper Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic,assigning the lower Paleozoic to the antediluvian period fromCreation to the Flood, to Creation week itself, or even to a pre-Creation week period (as in the case of Bugg/Delvinus). Thediscussion about the validity of differing Flood models inrelationship to the geological strata is just as important today as itwas nearly two centuries ago. No one Flood model avoids all theproblems; hence we need to examine carefully a variety ofpossibilities on the topic.

5) Regardless of where in the geological column Scriptural geo-logists detected the work of the Flood, they all agreed thatstrata containing human fossils should be assigned to the Floodas a minimal consideration. Today creationists as believers in ahistorical Deluge may wish to take that position at least as astarting point. “Ancient” human remains found in deposits otherthan in caves can rightfully be considered as valid candidatesfor burial by catastrophic action, namely the Deluge. Criteriathen can be deduced from the nature of those sediments to

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identify other sediments lower in the geological record as beingpossible candidates for Deluge catastrophism. Unfortunately,most efforts today among Flood geologists are expended inidentifying the beginning of Flood activity in Paleozoic or evenpre-Paleozoic deposits with little or no consideration as to howthe human fossil record relates to that. The question raised bya review of Scriptural geology is this: Would it not be moreprofitable to start at the top of the geological column, wherewe do find evidence of catastrophically-buried humans, andthen work downward in the column in deciphering the natureand timing of catastrophic activity? In the end, there still remainsthe challenge of explaining why the fossil record of humankindapparently does not extend below Quaternary deposits.

Because Flood geologists today continue to wrestle with major issuesconfronted by Scriptural geologists, it is all the more imperative that webecome aware of the views of those who have suggested solutions whiletrying to do justice to the validity of both Scripture and science. TerryMortenson’s two works are by far the best resource for getting acquaintedwith the historical roots of the modern creationist movement, which canbe linked directly with the Scriptural geology movement of the earlynineteenth century.

ENDNOTES

1. The “gap theory” is the concept that Gen. 1:1-2 describes a creation happening “inthe beginning” perhaps millions of years prior to the creation of the six days describedin Gen. 1:3-31. It is inferred that the Creator destroyed that original creation aboutsix thousand years ago and made the new creation on top of the old one; hence thedesignation “the ruin-restitution” view.

2. 2004. Green Forest, AR: Master Books.

3. 1996. Ph.D. thesis, Coventry University, Coventry, England.

4. Select chapters from his dissertation have been revised and reprinted, and are nowavailable on the Internet: http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/archive/ . Type“Mortenson” in the author box to view articles on nine Scriptural geologists.

5. 1991. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin - Madison.

6. The geological period now deemed equivalent to the “diluvium” is the Pleistoceneperiod, according to conventional geological thought.

7. Fairholme G. 1833. A General View of the Geology of Scripture. Philadelphia: Key andBiddle. The “transition’ period is roughly equivalent to today’s lower Paleozoic (Cam-brian up through Devonian), the secondary is somewhat parallel to today’s upperPaleozoic (Carboniferous-Permian) and Mesozoic formations, while the tertiary isequivalent to the Cenozoic. For a helpful discussion of how the geological columncame to be categorized, see: Ritland RM. 1982. Historical development of the currentunderstanding of the geologic column: Part II. Origins 9(1):28-50, which is now onthe Internet: http://www.grisda.org/origins/09028.html.

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8. Fairholme G. 1837. New and Conclusive Demonstrations, Both of the Fact and Periodof the Mosaic Deluge. London: James Ridgway and Sons, p 64.

9. Fairholme, Geology of Scripture, p 207ff.

10. In chapter IX of his previous 1833 work, Geology of Scripture, Fairholme devotes asection to the “Diluvial Origin of Coal,” in which he assigned coal deposits to theDeluge. According to his own words, this was his biggest mistake, which he repudiatedfour years later: “Amongst various geological errors, to which I have myself to pleadguilty, that respecting the diluvial origin of coal, is one of the most important. I wasformerly led too hastily to adopt this idea, in the obscurity which was, and still is, sopalpable, with regard to this interesting member of the series. Feeling assured of thefact of the Deluge...and satisfied that it occurred only once, in the history of ourplanet, I was led to connect this unity, with that above described, as belonging to thecoal strata....Subsequent study from nature, has convinced me of the error of thathypothesis.” Mosaic Deluge (1837), 386, note. Creationists in the twentieth-centuryhave overlooked this significant footnote in his 1837 work, as we shall observeshortly.

11. Mortenson states that Fairholme’s shift in thinking resulted in an expansion of theFlood to include all the geological column – the opposite of what I am proposing: “Inhis Mosaic Geology (1837), Fairholme stated that further personal study of thegeological evidence convinced him that he had made some errors in his first book.The line of argument then in 1837 is quite different and more limited in scope,focusing completely on the Noachian flood, which he now believed, contrary to hisearlier book, laid down virtually all the sedimentary fossiliferous rocks.” Mortenson,The Great Turning Point, p 129. Both of Fairholme’s works are available and searchablein full text on the Internet. See “Google Books.”

12. However, Price’s student and successor, Harold W. Clark, defended the concept of an“ice age” upon writing his first major treatise on Flood geology, The New Diluvialism(1946. Angwin, CA: Science Publications). Most Flood geologists today accept atleast some evidence for an ice age, although greatly compressed in time comparedwith the conventional ice age.

13. According to Fairholme, at the time of the “Mosaic Deluge...an event of most unusualmagnitude then occurred, by which the ancient seas and lands were transposed.”MosaicGeology (1837), p 65. At the end of the discussion of the surface features of the landsof the earth, he concludes: “We are, therefore, naturally led to infer, that the wholeDesign of the Great Designer, both as to the elevation of the beds, and the more readyaccess to them by deep valleys, was brought into effect, by one and the same event.”Ibid., p 102. Fairholme’s 1837 view of the Flood was that it was primarily an erosionalevent, whereas his 1833 view was that it was primarily a depositional event. Fordocumentation of this, see his works on “Google Books.”

14. 1938. London: L. and G. Seeley; 1839. London: L. and G. Seeley, and Hatchard andSon.

15. As already indicated, no other Scriptural geologist (with one exception) publishedworks by Seeley and Hatchard under this same imprint on the title page. The oneexception is Henry Cole, who published The Principles of Modern DissentientEvangelism Disclosed (1839. London: Nisbet; L. and G. Seeley; and Hatchard andSon), but Cole as we will note later in this study took on the pseudonym “Fowler deJohnsone,” not “Biblicus Delvinus.” The use of the identical publisher twelve yearsapart is sufficient evidence then to equate George Bugg with Biblicus Delvinus. Inaddition, both works have an extensive discussion of the meaning of the phrase, “andthe Spirit of God moved upon the waters” (Gen. 1:2), interpreting it to mean “brooded,”as a mother hen might brood her chicks. As far as is presently known, no otherScriptural geologists interpreted this phrase as meaning “the Spirit brooded over thewaters of the deep.” For evidence, see Anon. [George Bugg]. 1826. Scriptural Geology.

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London: Hatchard and Son; Seeley and Son, vol. 1, p 123-124, and Biblicus Delvinus[George Bugg]. 1839. The Facts, Suggestions, and Brief Deductions in Geology.London: L. and G. Seeley; L. and G. Seeley, Hatchard and Son, 2nd ed.), p 11. For therevised 1839 ed., see the full text on www.archive.org, and enter the term “BiblicusDelvinus.” A careful comparison of the similar discussion of the Spirit’s “brooding”over waters supports the identity of Delvinus as none other than George Bugg.

16. Bugg’s interpretation of the Spirit’s role in “brooding” (Gen. 1:2), which can besupported in the original Hebrew, is crucial to his argument in 1838 (as “Delvinus”)because the term “brooded” suggested that the first forms of life were created in the“without form and void” period of earth’s history. As a result, he proposed that the“transition” strata, which includes living creatures, should be placed prior to the sixdays of creation. Bugg along with Granville Penn and George Fairholme can be con-sidered among the three “founding fathers” of the Scriptural geology movement andthe three most influential of the Scriptural geologists, according to Nicolaas Rupke.1983. The Great Chain of History: William Buckland and the English School ofGeology, 1814-1849. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p 44-46, and Millhauser (1954),p 70-73.

17. 1871. London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co. Available at http://books.google.com.

18. Ibid., p 44.

19. Ibid., p 53-54.

20. Another Scriptural geologist, Thomas Hutton, who shifted the Flood higher in thegeological strata, conjectured that the “primary” rocks were formed over the span ofnearly two million years prior to Creation week, the “transition” and “secondary”formations (Paleozoic and Mesozoic) were deposited during the 2262 years of theantediluvian age (Septuagint chronology), and the “tertiary” deposits of the ParisBasin were deposited in 194 years after the Flood. Hutton J. 1850. The Chronology ofCreation; or, Geology and Scripture Reconciled. Calcutta: W. Thacker and Co.,p 471-479. After 1850 no Scriptural geologist assigned the majority of the fossilrecord to the Flood.

21. As per Scriptural geologist George Young, according to Mortenson, “British ScripturalGeologists,” p 340.

22. George Fairholme in both his 1833 and 1837 works suggests this. An American Scripturalgeologist who based his Flood model entirely upon the exchange of land and sea isDavid Lord, who wrote Geognosy: or, The Facts and Principles of Geology againstTheories (1855. NY: F. Knight). Lord’s book was used as a geology text at Battle CreekCollege, where the Flood geologist George McCready Price first gained his collegeeducation. Lord’s view may have had an impact upon Price.

23. Milton Millhauser documents a “half dozen” works written in the last half of the1850s critiquing the writings of Hugh Miller. See “The Scriptural Geologists,” p 80.

24. Anon. (William Elfe Tayler). 1857. Voices from the Rocks; or, Proofs of the Existenceof Man during the Paleozoic or Most Ancient Period of the Earth. London: Judd andGlass. See Google Books for the full text.

25. Miller H. 1857. The Testimony of the Rocks: or, Geology in Its Bearings on the TwoTheologies, Natural and Revealed. Boston: Gould and Lincoln. The full text of the1871 edition is available through Google Books.

26. The title page, showing an engraved plate with a picture of two human tracks, can beviewed on Google Books. See http://books.google.com, and do a title search on Voicesfrom the Rocks.

27. (1960. NY: Rudd and Carleton).

28. Note especially: Davies TA. 1960. Answer to Hugh Miller. Rudd and Carlton, p 116-118. Elsewhere he asserts: “Hence, if the pre-Adamite fossils and the rocks which

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contain them were not made in those six days,...then the Mosaic account, the fourthcommandment, and the Scriptural dependencies thereon, are false and utterly unworthyof being received as the basis of a true faith.” (Davies, p 127, emphasis in original).

29. Davies, p 32-35.

30. 1838. London: R. Groombridge.

31. A careful check of OCLC’s WorldCat database as well as the British consortium’sdatabase, COPAC, fails to turn up anyone else with the surname “de Johnsone.” TheBiography and Genealogy Master Index (1980. Detroit: Gale Research Co.) with its3,200,000 entries covering the period 1300 A.D. to the present has only one namewith the surname de Johnsone: Fowler de Johnsone.

32. These six points are discussed in greater detail in Mortenson, “British ScripturalGeologists,” p 271-274. For example, in point no. 6 we find that de Johnsone wasanswering the charge that he had insufficiently addressed “geological” issues, whichsuggests that he had written previously on the subject. That was one of the mostpointed critiques of his writings. Ibid., 272. For Mortenson’s 2004 study of Fowler deJohnsone, see: www.creationontheweb.com/images/pdfs/tj/j18_1/j18_1_76-77.pdf.

33. 1838. London: J. Hatchard and Son.

34. The first complete English translation of Luther’s Genesis was accomplished in1904-1910, according to WorldCat. The early chapters of Luther’s Genesis werepublished by Henry Cole, tr., Luther Still Speaking: The Creation, A Commentaryon the First Five Chapters of the Book of Genesis (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1858).

35. Mortenson describes his own view: “Cole wrote 19 works (many of them controversial,like his attack on Adam Sedgwick and old-earth geology) from 1823 till his death in1858 and always identified himself as the author. Also the content of his argument wasmuch more substantive than and his style was very different from Fowler de Johnsone’swork and his openly authored criticisms on geology in 1834 were four years before deJohnsone’s weird book. So Cole was most definitely not de Johnsone.” Personalcommunication, Terry Mortenson to Warren Johns, 9 June 2005. We do have oneexample of a Scriptural geologist who wrote one of his two works anonymously: JohnMurray. His Portrait of Geology (1838) was published anonymously seven years afterhis previous work on geology was published under his own name. Why would HenryCole (=Fowler de Johnsone) publish pseudonymously four years after publishing underhis real name? It was probably because he was severely attacked, and in fact castigated,for his criticisms of Adam Sedgwick in 1834. See Mortenson, “British ScripturalGeologists,” p 183-184 for evidence of his being attacked. Pseudonymity offered hima shield from personal attacks.

36. Mortenson, “British Scriptural Geologists,” p 271, 274. In his revised chapter onFowler de Johnsone, Mortenson adds this comment to the above words: “This stylewas utterly different from anything else I read from this time period by either scripturalgeologists or others.” Mortenson, “British Scriptural Geologists: Part 10. Fowler deJohnsone,” TJ 18(2004):77, n.3. While the tone was more extreme and very pompous,the writing style was the same as Henry Cole’s. He had a definite preference forhyphenated words combining a noun with a gerund as in “peace-destroying streams”(Fowler de Johnsone, cited by Mortenson, “British Scriptural Geologists,” p 273), cf.Cole’s use of “revelation-subverting philosophy” (Cole H. 1834. Popular GeologySubversive of Divine Revelation. London: Hatchard and Son, p vi).

37. One exception to this is Henry Cole, who gave very little attention to the subject ofgeology itself. Mortenson states of him: “When he came to a five-page analysis ofthe geological arguments for an old earth, he manifested his ignorance of the detailsand current state of geology.” Mortenson, British Scriptural Geologists, p 192.

38. Even Henry Cole, whose major work on geology was entitled Popular Geology Sub-versive of Divine Revelation, appears in 1834 to have had respect for geology as a

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science. Mortenson quotes Cole as saying that “geology is a legitimate science.” Ibid.,p 186. Yet Mortenson acknowledges that Cole is not always clear whether he wasattacking only the old-earth aspects of geology or perhaps the entire theoreticalaspect of geology. Ibid., p 187. Once it is acknowledged that Fowler de Johnsone is apseudonym for Henry Cole, then we can better determine that in the end Cole wasattacking the science of geology as a whole.

39. Stiling RL. 1999. “Scriptural Geology in America,” in: Livingstone DN, Hart DG,Noll MA, editors. Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective. NY: OxfordUniversity Press, p 187.

40. Mortenson acknowledges the contributions of other British Scriptural geologists duringthis time period: Frederick Nolan, Sharon Turner, George Croly, L. Vernon Harcourt,William Eastmead, Robert MacBrair, Charles Burton, Joseph Sutcliffe, William Kirby,Thomas Rodd, William Brande, William Martin, Walter Forman, Robert Fitzroy,William Cuninghame, David Morison, and the anonymous “Biblicus Delvinus.” SeeMortenson, British Scriptural Geologists, p 12-13.

41. Browne H. 1832. The Geology of Scripture, Illustrating the Operation of the Deluge,and the Effects of Which It Was Productive. Frome, Eng.: W. P. Penny.

42. The authoritative Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004. Oxford UniversityPress, vol. 39, p 959) cites Mortenson as an authority on the Scriptural geologist JohnMurray.

43. The modern Flood geology movement, according to most historians, started with theprolific writings of George McCready Price, whose first work was published in 1902:Outlines of Modern Christianity and Modern Science (Mountain View, CA: PacificPress Publ. Assn.). Rodney L. Stiling, however, finds no direct connection between theScriptural geologists of the early nineteenth century and Flood geologists of thetwentieth century. He writes: “Interestingly, American flood geology seems to havehad no genetic relationship with the earlier Scriptural Geology. The phenotypicresemblance, so to speak, is there, but an examination of the genotype turns up noconnection.” Stiling, “Scriptural Geology in America,” p 187. Stiling does not mentionthe fact that Price had the works of two Scriptural geologists in his personal possessionat the time he was writing his works on Flood geology: Granville Penn (1825, 2 vols.)and George Young (1838), indicating their impact upon Price’s thinking. For evidenceof this see Price GM/ 1925. Science and Religion in a Nutshell. Washington, D.C.:Review and Herald Publ. Assn., p 7-8.

44. According to Mortenson, the following Scriptural geologists relied upon the use ofExo. 20:8-11 as a lead argument in favor of the literal creation week: J. Mellor Brown,George Bugg, Henry Cole, Thomas Gisborne, and Andrew Ure. Mortenson, BritishScriptural Geologists, p 268, 133, 190-192, 207, 166.

45. Biblicus Delvinus (=George Bugg) gives the title Facts, Suggestions, and Brief Inductionsto Geology to his 1838 work, wherein he reasons that geological “facts” were not theproblem, but certain “inductions” that were derived from the facts. The majority ofScriptural geologists I have examined make this same point. The influence of FrancisBacon and “Baconian induction” is apparent at this point.

46. George Fairholme, in Mosaic Geology, p 81-82, gives a detailed chart of the geologicalcolumn as it was understood in his day. His comments indicate that he accepted thereality of the column: “It is now an unquestioned fact that a certain order andsuccession exists, which, though rarely, if ever, complete, in all its parts, on any onespot, is never found to be actually inverted.” Fairholme, p 8, italics in original. GeorgeMcCready Price took issue with Fairholme on this point and found examples ofinverted order. But in all such cases, the inversion takes place in regions of greatmountain uplifts, presumably causing strata to slide into a different position thanoriginal. Geologically these are known as “overthrusts.”

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47. Creationists today can certainly accept the concept of the relative sequence of thegeological column while rejecting the absolute dating of the column without compro-mising one’s young-earth creationist position. The bulk of the creationist literaturepublished today supports this thesis.

48. According to Mortenson, Young in his 1828 work concluded that “all the strata had anearly contemporaneous deposition” and in his 1838 work Young still suggested “thatthe sedimentary rock record is largely the result on one depositional event, theNoachian Flood.” “British Scriptural Geologists,” p 332, 336.

49. See Whitcomb JC, Morris HM. 1961. The Genesis Flood. Philadelphia: Presbyterianand Reformed Publishing Co.