By Sally Morem
In the late Nineties, science students in the Wahpeton-Breckenridge area (twin towns set on either side of the North Dakota-Minnesota border) learned some extraordinarily bad science from a self-styled educator/scientist/geologist from Australia named John Mackay. His formal title is the International Director of Creation Research. His mission, which he chose to accept (unfortunately), is to debunk evolutionary theory in the schools and to “…prove that man did not evolve from ape-like ancestors.”
According to the Wahpeton Daily News, the Twin Towns Evangelical Pastors Fellowship invited him to the area. Church interest in the man was understandable. But, what are we to make of the fact that the public schools got involved in his visit? Local high school biology teacher John DelVal was asked by the Fellowship for permission to allow Mackay to speak to his class. He gave it. As you will see, his students are going to have to relearn some major tenets of geology, biology, and genetics if they wish to pursue excellence in any scientific discipline.
School administrators tried to forestall any problems with First Amendment issues by stating that they “had no problem with Mackay speaking in the high school as long as he understood the concept of separation of church and state in government entities.” However, no word was forthcoming on his manifest ignorance of many basic concepts in science.
Am I being too hard on Mackay? You be the judge. The following statements in bold are taken from an article in the Wahpeton Daily News on Mackay’s talk to the high school students:
He claimed that no fossil is older than 6,000 years old.
That is flat out impossible. Sedimentary rocks (in which the fossils are embedded) can’t form in such a short time. Not only that, but several very different dating methods concur on the antiquity of the many fossils gathered by paleontologists over the decades.
He asked his listeners, ‘Why if we are evolving, is everything getting smaller instead of bigger? He compared fossils of 15-foot-tall kangaroos to today’s seven-foot-tall kangaroos.
Here he reveals a double misunderstanding of the evolutionary process. First, bigger doesn’t always mean better. Kangaroos and other animals can become too tall to be efficient organisms. Those few humans who have grown over eight feet tall have suffered from serious respiratory and circulatory problems. Also, consider what would happen if the organism’s environment changed. For example, if the amount of available food decreased, a large animal would find itself at a serious disadvantage compared to a smaller animal that ate the same food.
Second, evolution doesn’t always mean better—it means different. Evolutionary change happens if and only if a species’ environment changes. Changes in size, shape, mating instincts, feeding patterns, and survival ‘strategies’ of species occur as the importance of individual and family genetic differences are magnified by changes in climate, vegetation, populations of predators and prey, sudden geological activity, etc.
The arrow of evolutionary change can gain a definite direction if a certain family’s genetic line produces a particularly effective response to the changing conditions. This could be called progress, for want of a better term. We can also admit that the overall trend of Earth’s evolutionary development is toward larger and larger aggregates of cells and organisms, as well as greater complexity of structure (such as that found in the evolutionary history of the human brain). But we cannot say in advance, without placing the organisms in their ecological and historical context, which changes will be improvements and which will be degenerative.