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God Doesn't Need Evolution

by Jeanne Gowen Dennis

Note: Although animal tracks are almost the oldest writing in the world, the writing that God placed inside every creature is even older. That writing is the design that He built into people, animals, and plants through their genes.

In another issue of Barefoot for Kids we discussed how God created everything from nothing, just as He said. (See Genesis chapters 1 and 2.) Everything needed to produce all the new species that have developed since the beginning of creation was already built-in when God created the first animals. Read on to find out some fascinating information about the way you were designed. There's even an activity you can do to learn more about the science of genetics.
 
You've probably learned in school and on television that everything evolved. For example, you might have been taught that people have different skin colors because they lived in different parts of the world and natural selection helped only the ones fitted for that region to survive. They might say that dark skinned people evolved in hot regions, because their skin could handle the sun better, and light-skinned people evolved in cold regions where the sun was less intense.

Everything in your body—your eye shape, skin color, hair curliness, how you look, and so on—is determined by the genes that you inherited from your parents. You inherited the same number of genes from each parent. It's really complicated, but here is a simple diagram to show you how it works.

We'll use Adam and Eve as the parents, since they were everyone's first parents. If Creation is true, then our first parents had to have all the traits in their genes that anyone ever born afterwards would have later on. They probably started with the same set of genes, because God made Eve from Adam's rib. The Bible tells us that they had other sons and daughters besides Cain, Abel, and Seth, so there were many possible ways that Adam's and Eve's traits could have been inherited.

The science of genetics is a study of how parents (all parents, including people, animals, and plants) pass on traits to their children. It is much more complex than what I will show you here. But this should help you understand a little bit about how it works.

Let's say that each colored box represents a gene for a characteristic or trait that the parent passes down to a child. It could be for skin color, eye color, height, or any of a number of things.

We will start with a trait that requires four genes to be passed down to produce the trait. The child or offspring would receive two boxes from each parent to make a total of four. I will show every possible way the traits could be inherited.

For our purposes, the colors in the boxes can be placed in any order. We will not worry about whether the traits are inherited from the father or the mother. If we did that, several combinations would be repeated, but in a different order. For now, let's just look at the possibilities, not how often they might show up.

As you can see, there are sixteen possible ways the children can inherit two of the four genes from each parent. The parents can also have more than one child with the same combination of these genes.

Now the fun begins. If two of these children were to marry and have children of their own, the children would only be able to inherit the traits that their parents inherited from Adam and Eve. Let's take Child A and Child C, for example. Together, they have only red, blue and green traits. There is no way for their children to inherit the yellow trait, because neither parent inherited the yellow trait. Now let's look at the possibilities for Child A and Child C's children (Adam and Eve's grandchildren from those parents):

As you can see, some of the grandchildren will not inherit all the traits their parents had. For example, look at Grandchild F and Grandchild G. Grandchild F has only the red trait. Grandchild G has no red trait at all. So in only two generations, much of the original parents' genetic information can be lost in some of their offspring.

As I said before, genetics is much, much more complicated than this little exercise can possibly show. There are so many genes and so many traits that even a computer probably couldn't find all the combinations. This little exercise does show us that it is the LOSS of genetic information that brought about so many differences in people, animals, and plants, not the addition of information as evolution teaches. God placed all the genetic information that was necessary to bring about the diversity in people, animals, and plants into the original Creation.

Activity

Try putting some of Adam's and Eve's imaginary children and grandchildren together and see what combinations of colors you discover. Then praise God for creating such a wonderful and easy way for so many different traits to show up, generation after generation.

© 2004 Jeanne Gowen Dennis

© 2005–2009 Jeanne Gowen Dennis. U.S. and Worldwide rights reserved.