DAY FIVE

Genesis 1:20-23

Having on the previous days established the Earth as a suitable environment for life -- by providing land, sea and water, air and daily and seasonal light patterns -- God now begins to repopulate it, starting with creatures that swim and fly.

The first verse may be rendered: "Let the waters teem with living creatures." The English word "teem", from a root meaning "to give birth", implies large numbers, or swarms and shoals. The word translated as "creature" comes from the Hebrew word "nephesh", which is rendered "living soul" when it is later applied to man, apparently indicating an organism that breathes oxygen to live. Thus the waters and the seas were to be filled with air-breathing organisms, both great and small.

The word rendered "monsters", or "whales" in the King James Version, comes from a Hebrew word meaning "to stretch out" and may refer to creatures such as eels, crocodiles, whales, and perhaps also the Loch Ness type of monster, if such exists. However, it can also simply mean "creature". Likewise, the word translated as "birds" can also mean more generally "flying creatures".

Notice that the fish and birds were created according to their "kind", as were the plants. However, by way of contrast, God commanded them to "be fruitful and multiply" -- apparently conferring on these male and female creatures the instinct to reproduce, a process which is not automatic as it is with the plants where insects and the wind are the agencies.

As organisms reproduce according to their kinds, a certain amount of variation does obviously occur. The extent of the variation potential that God built into the Genesis kinds is well illustrated by Darwin's own meticulous investigations into pigeon breeding. For example, the number of tail feather was found to vary from the normal 12 or 14 up to 30 or 40. Some had much elongated bodies, legs and wings. By dissection he studied variation in the number of vertebrae and ribs. He even studied the skin growth between the toes, the shape and size of eggs, disposition, manner of flight and even voice. Yet despite all this, any mongrels produced by crossing any two breeds were still found to be fertile, one with another, showing them to belong, at least by the modern definition, to the same species.

As a naturalist attached to H.M.S. Beagle on its famous five-year trip (1831 to 1836) to the Galapagos Islands, some 600 miles off the west coast of South America, Darwin assiduously observed and catalogued the habits of yet more birds – including the fourteen now-famous families that inhabited the different islands of the chain, and also the Cocos Islands to the north, families later identified by his ornithologist friend John Gould, after his return to England, as being species of finches.

As a result of his marvelous field-work, Darwin began in 1837 to suspect that the accepted "species" of any organism were not permanent and immutable as was the orthodox belief of the time. Was it even possible that not just finches and birds in general, but the entire mind-boggling myriad of Earth’s life-forms had all have developed from a common primordial ancestor, by the continuous accumulation of tiny variations – given enough generations and given enough time, of course? An exciting idea, but how would it work? The additional insight he needed in order to properly formulate his theory was found the following year, 1838, when he read "An Essay on Population", by Thomas Malthus -- leading him to comment later: "Here at last I had got a theory by which to work."

Although the groups of finches Darwin observed were very similar, they had adapted to different island habitats -- some living on the ground, others in bushes and trees or in the forest. There were also differences in diet, some eating seeds, some insects, others buds and fruit -- and he was amazed to observe that differences in beak shape between the groups fitted them for efficient gathering of those different sorts of food. It seems uncanny that one of the types of finch he studied was, according to Taylor, one of the most extraordinary birds in the world -- the only known of a tool-using bird, having the habit of holding a twig in its beak and using it to prise insects out of holes in tree bark!

Assuming that all 14 species had developed from one original species that had somehow made the 600-mile trip from the mainland – Darwin concluded that the different types had developed in the habitats in which their beaks made them most fit to survive in the endless battle with others for limited food resources, just as Malthus had described.

Dominated by his desperate desire to negate the Genesis account of creation and trace all creatures back to a common ancestor, Darwin's crucial error at this juncture was to speculate far beyond the reliable range of the data he had collected – not only his observations with the finches, but also with horse breeding and his own experiments with pigeons – and to assume as a result that infinite variation was possible.

In his book "The Mystery of Evolution", devout evolutionist Gordon Rattray Taylor admits that although many biologists are happy to accept that limited variation and natural selection might operate to create new species from existing ones – a process called "Micro-evolution" -- they find it very difficult to accept that it could ever bridge the vast chasms that lie between more diverse groupings of organisms, such as classes and phyla, in other words, between the Genesis kinds that God originally created -- a very radical process that would require "Macro-evolution".

Taylor cites the massive differences that exist, for example, between an insect and a fish, and admits that even he cannot stretch his Darwinian faith that far. The truth of the matter seems to lie, as usual, between the two extreme views, namely, that God created "kinds" with a built-in capacity for limited variation, for the purposes of adaptability – so that Micro-evolution is an observed fact of life, fully in line with the Genesis account, but Macro-evolution is a myth.