In my 9th grade biology class we were covering heredity and genetics when we learned about the state of the cheetah gene pool. The common school of thought in the biology community is that the cheetah population was at one point reduced to an extremely small number, somewhere around 7. As a result, the entirety of the cheetah population today is like a whole species of identical twins. There is virtually no genetic variation, so all of the cheetahs are susceptible to the same things, making them very fragile as a species in that they could all be wiped out by one disease. This would be even more extreme if a species had descended entirely from only two individuals. As somebody who had gone to a religious school beforehand, but come from a predominantly atheist family, I have always looked for ways to judge the validity of the creation theory, and I was quick to compare my new and scientifically proven information on heredity to the Creation Theory as stated in the Bible.

One of the most believed, if not the most believed theory as to the creation of humans and life overall is the Christian/Jewish Creation Theory. The Creation Theory states that all life on earth was brought into existence by a divine designer and creator, this creator being God. The creation theory contradicts the Evolution Theory, developed by the biologist Charles Darwin. To simplify things this critique of the Creation Theory will concentrate for the most part on humans.

According to the Creation Theory, God created Adam, the first man, and then removed one of Adam's ribs while he was sleeping and created Eve from it, Eve being the first woman. According to this theory, all humans descended from Adam and Eve, or if you consider being fashioned from somebody"s rib to be descending from them, all humans descended from Adam. The problem that this presents is that there are only two, if not only one, sets of genes from which all of humanity must spring.

This causes some serious problems. Offspring receive their genes from their parents, and so if the Adam and Eve theory is true, all humans must have the same genes, making us all like identical twins. Seeing that we are not all alike, it is unlikely we have all descended from the same parents. The same problem is presented by the story of Noah's Arc and the flood. According to this biblical story, only two of every type of animal survived a great cleansing flood (this cleansing being quite similar to what we now call genocide) that wiped out all of the people and animals that were not aboard Noah's great ship, the Arc. Once again, we see the gene pool reduced to only two sets of genes per species.

One somewhat significant strike against the validity of the Creation Theory is that we do not all look the same. Genetic traits in people vary immensely, no two people being totally alike, identical twins having the nearest to identical genetic makeup. This alone makes the creation theory very improbable, but there is more. If all people or animals of any one species had the same set of genes, they would all be susceptible to the same diseases, and be unable to evolve. This means that one disease epidemic could and likely would eliminate or at the very least decimate the population. If there is a good amount of genetic variation, only the portion of the population that is not susceptible will survive, this being part of evolution. As an example of people having a certain distinct genetic makeup being less susceptible to a disease that others are susceptible to, people with one of the genes associated with sickle cell anemia are resistant to malaria.

The consequences of not having a diverse gene pool are severe and do not take long to appear. In this modern day we know that many diseases are foreshadowed by certain genetic traits. If the creation theory is true, and evolution is not, Adam and eve would have to have all of these genetic weaknesses, and there would be no other sources of genes to dilute or replace these disadvantageous genes. Also, only dominant genes would be expressed, and as a result, among other things, there would be no people with blonde hair, and everybody would have six fingers per hand. The gene for blonde hair is recessive, and so it would have been almost certainly phased completely out of the gene pool, unless Adam and Eve both had blonde hair, in which case all of humanity would also have blonde hair. As for the six fingers issue, it is little known that the gene that causes offspring to possess somewhat more digits per hand than the usual is dominant over the five-finger gene. Why don"t we all have six fingers? You guessed it, the groups in which this curious deviation in finger count appears most often (the Amish) keeps primarily to their own secluded gene pool. This brings us to the highly apparent fact that inbreeding is bad for the survival of the species, and if we all came from the same parents, we would be completely inbred, and extremely unlikely to survive.

In conclusion, the only way in which we could possibly not all be the same if we all originated from the same parents, is if our genotypes changed over time, but that would be divergent evolution, which would be impossible without having a diverse gene pool to begin with, which according to the bible we did not, and which would be of course, evolution, which is exactly what the Creation Theory is not.


Please base the way in which you treat this write up on the validity of its arguments and the manner in which they are presented, rather than whether or not they ar in accordance with your personal beliefs. This is merely a presentation of one argument on the subject, and i may post an argument for the Creation Theory's validity at a later date.

In response to Whiteninja's w/u. In order for evolution to be effective, there must already be a suitably diverse gene pool. Without a considerably large gene pool natural selection will not work except to eliminate the species, being that they are identical. natural selection cannot aid developement if there is only one genotype to be selected. as for evolution without natural selection, it is very rare for new genes to pop into existence, and yet rarer that they do anything, benificial or harmful. it is far more likely that a species with no variation would die out before the many millions of genes necessary for a decent amount of variation popped up in the gene pool. also, regardless of whether or not evolution would save the species, it would be evolution, which goes against the creation theory. Good ideas though, whiteninja.

It's completely frivolous to judge the Creation Theory nowadays. More than 90% of all Jews and Christians recognize the story as a figurative way to explain the one simple fact: that God created the World, and that God created the human soul. The religions of Christianity and Judaism for the most part do not conflict with science anymore, only a few fundamentalists do. And this is perfectly acceptable, considering the Bible itself was not written until very long after God revealed himself to Abraham. The Creation story became oral tradition, and the only important part was the idea that God did it all. Of course, in older times, there was no way of knowing the science behind things, and people took what was most definitely oral tradition literally. I attended Catholic schools my whole life, and was always taught evolution.

As to whether or not matter can be created or destroyed...The Big Bang, where did all of that come from? Science does not yet have a valid explanation, but the answer is that it had to come from somewhere. Whether from God or what we do not know. But it somehow came into existence somewhere. The Bible is not a science or a history book, and it should not be treated as such by either Judeo-Christians or non-Judeo-Christians. To do so is moronic. It is a book of Scripture intended for spiritual purposes, which has been taken out of context by Christians and non- Christians alike.

Ultimately, the Book itself, while believed to be inspired by God, was written by humans, and is subject to human flaw. Any true scholar or critic of the Bible knows all this, and does not make the mistake of treating it as a science book. If the Bible was ever meant to be taken literally, then why are there two stories back-to-back in the Book of Genesis that describe the creation of man and woman in two different ways? How does Cain find a wife after he is exiled? The answer is just that the Bible was never meant to be taken literally.

First off, I'm an atheist as well, but I'd like to point out some flaws in Phrump's logic.

His argument rests upon the concept that an entire species begat of two individuals will be a species of twins, much like the cheetahs he mentions. This holds true for a number of generations, but due to the concept of evolution (which Phrump is amusingly arguing for), after a number of years, there will be sufficient genetic variation, so that the species will not suffer the negative effects of inbreeding. Or else, the species will be overcome by suceptibility to disease (like the cheetahs Phrump mentions) or some other flaw, and die off. This is known as natural selection.

Phrump is correct, there is a huge amount of genetic variation in the human species alone. Just look around you while you're on the bus. What he doesn't account for, is the rather large chunk of time between 2003 A.D. and the birth of the first homo sapien, or even the birth of an ancestor of the homo sapien. The population of cheetahs only recently (evolutionarily speaking) hit the low of 7, and there has been very little time (on an evolutionary scale) since this drastic reduction in population. Were the cheetah population to be left untouched by humanity, it would die off completely, as it is in a very precarious evolutionary position.

Also, two mere sets of genes can produce incredibly varied offspring over a course of generations due to genetic mutation and meiosis. So, an offspring can, after a number of years, have completely different traits from its ancestors. As long as a species survives the rigorous test of natural selection (which only some do, as is shown by Cro-Magnon man, dinosaurs, and a slew of others), it could have possibly have been created from two individuals (I admit this option is more possible than, plausible). The point here is, I agree with Phrump, Creationism is scientifically flimsy, but I feel that many of his arguments are less than sound.

By the way . . . this is not just some malicious attack on Phrump. He's a friend of mine, and it's all in good fun.

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