No one has ever been able to cross a dog with a cat, or a horse with a cow. It is quite evident in all areas of life that reproduction can take place only within its species. If this were not so, think of the terrible distortions with which the earth would be filled, after these many thousands of years.

What a wise God we have who created everything …

“After Its Kind”

HAVING traced briefly the Genesis account of the creation and fall of man, and having found from the Scriptures that it is the plan of God to recreate the human race to live on this planet forever, let us now compare the findings of science with some of the details of biblical truth in order that we may have a greater faith in the testimony of God’s inspired Word concerning the divine plan for the eternal happiness of mankind. One of the points emphasized in Genesis is the fixity of species. Concerning this we read: “God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: … And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.”—Gen. 1:25,26

The Apostle Paul agrees with this statement of Genesis that each species of animal is constituted by nature to be separate and distinct from all other species, or orders, and that while they are all animals, consisting of flesh, yet they are not the same flesh; that is, they are unrelated. He says, “All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds.”—I Cor. 15:39

All nature, as we know it today, corroborates the foregoing biblical declaration. So far as scientific observation goes, nature is unalterably opposed to the commingling of species or to the formation of new species: and it continually and successfully seeks to prevent it. It allows seemingly endless varieties according to fixed laws, but it has established limits beyond which variations cannot occur.

Furthermore, in the crossing of varieties within a given fixed species, we see retrogression quite as often as we see improvement in the stock; and there is no evidence whatsoever that nature is attempting to move forward by ‘infinitesimal steps of perpetual progress’, as the Darwinists have long theorized.

By artificial cultivation and forced cross-breeding of selected varieties, stocks may seemingly be improved or enlarged up to a certain point; but when left to themselves, nature soon brings them back to an ordinary level, instead of naturally carrying them ‘onward and upward’ by an evolutionary law. Nature, when not interfered with, strives to bring all new varieties back to normal as quickly as possible, rather than inducing in them further progressive changes by ‘evolution’.

Every attempt at crossing two species results either in no descendant at all, or else in a hybrid offspring being produced that is sterile and unable to perpetuate its kind—as occurs when the horse and donkey, or the horse and the zebra, are crossed.

These animals are so structurally similar that they can interbreed; but the resultant offspring is a sterile hybrid that cannot cross with anything. This supplies further proof that the species are fixed, that nature does not allow even very similar species to commingle and change into another, but calls a sudden halt every time any attempt in that direction is made.

Darwin himself, in his “Origin of Species,” made this frank admission: “In spite of all the efforts of trained observers, not one change of species into another is on record.” It is not surprising to Bible students, who have confidence in the story of special creation, as recorded in Genesis, to learn that scientists, after nearly a century of effort, can find no positive proof to support a theory that is obviously at variance with the Word of God.

The late Professor Vernon Kellogg, of Leland Stanford University, added his testimony to the host of his former colleagues. In his Darwinism of Today, page 18, he says, “We only tell the general truth when we declare that no indubitable cases of species-forming or transforming, that is, of descent, have been observed.”

To date, the most that has been accomplished in the effort to develop new species is the production of new varieties. However, some interesting things have been discovered in the field of genetics, such as Mendel’s Laws of Variation, and De Vries’ Mutations, which we may here briefly note.

From 1857 to 1868, Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, experimented with garden peas, crossing different varieties and producing new ones. His notations of the results came to the attention of Professor Carl E. Correns, famous botanist, about thirty years later, and he soon found that Mendel had discovered a hitherto unknown law of heredity. Correns duplicated Mendel’s experiments, using the garden flower four-o’clock instead of peas, and found that they too followed Mendel’s “law.”

Correns crossed a red and a white variety of the flower “four-o’clock,” and, true to Mendel’s “law of segregation,” all the first generation were pink; that is, the red and white were evenly mixed. But in the second generation only half of them came pink—the remainder being pure white or pure red, just like the original parent stocks. They were just as pure as though they had never been mixed and continued to reproduce themselves without variation.

Mendel’s law of segregation is simply this: when any two simple varieties are crossed, only half of the genes, or hereditary elements, of each of the parent cells mix with each other, while the other half remain segregated and dormant; and in the second generation these segregated genes filter out and reproduce themselves in their original form, as though they had never been mixed. Mendel also discovered that if complex varieties are crossed (that is, if there is more than one difference between the parent stocks, as when yellow-round peas are crossed with green-wrinkled peas), not only will the original unmixed genes filter out in the second generation, but in addition there will be two new varieties of hybrids instead of one.

Dr. Thomas Hunt Morgan, when at Columbia University, found that animals obey Mendel’s law the same as do plants, and that finally the original stocks begin to filter out and reappear, even after having passed through successive generations of cross-breeding with other varieties. In none of these experiments, either with plants or with animals, has a new species been produced. Rather, Mendel’s laws seem to prove that the species are fixed and that the tendency of nature is to return to the original parent stocks rather than to get away from them, as Darwin erroneously imagined.

In 1900, Professor G. De Vries, the late Dutch botanist, who had been experimenting extensively with the evening primrose, discovered that occasionally a new and strange variety would crop up, totally different from all other hybrids that were being produced by directly crossing the varieties. These new variants seemed to be freaks of nature, which came up in defiance of Mendel’s law, and yet were able to perpetuate their variety if unmixed with others—although generally they could be readily mixed with any other variety of primrose.

De Vries called these freaks “mutants,” and he formulated a theory which seems to explain their existence. He believed that they result from some accidental scrambling or disarranging of the genes in the fertilized cell or germ plasm, which may happen either at the time of fertilization or subsequently and which prevents nature from taking its ordinary course. Mendel’s law thus represents nature’s normal process, while De Vries’ mutants seem to be the result of some accidental interference with nature.

Now if a mutant should ever be discovered that is so far changed from the original stock as to be incapable of mixing with it and at the same time would be fertile in itself and able to mix with other mutants like itself, then we would have a demonstration of a new species arising, or evolving from an old species—the answer to every evolutionist’s prayer since Darwin’s day. But no such species has ever been discovered, notwithstanding many years of experimentation with this in view.

Even if such a mutant should finally appear, which is exceedingly unlikely (since their genes or hereditary elements are none other than those of the parent stocks), this would not prove the existence of a law of evolution; for these mutants apparently do not result from any law whatsoever but, in defiance of law, due to accident. At most, then, this would be accidental evolution, not ‘natural evolution’. Furthermore, these mutants are freaks and are often dwarfs, or otherwise inferior to the parent stock. Hence they do not obey a law of ‘progress’, such as Darwin’s theory demands.

Thus it is apparent that neither the discoveries of Mendel nor of De Vries, nor of any other experimenters in the field of genetics, have helped the case for evolution. Rather, they have proved to be a boomerang. As to the effects of Mendel’s and De Vries’ findings on Darwinism, let the late Dr. D. H. Scott, the well-known British botanist and erstwhile Darwinist, speak. In an article in Nature magazine, he has this to say: “It has long been evident that all those ideas of evolution in which the older generation of naturalists grew up have been disturbed, or indeed transformed, since the rediscovery of Mendel’s work and the consequent development of the new science of genetics. Not only is the omnipotence of natural selection gravely impugned, but variation itself, the foundation upon which the Darwinian theory seemed to rest so securely, is now in question.

“The mutations of De Vries, though still accepted by many, seem to some at the present time to be nothing more than Mendelian segregates, the products of previous crossings; opinion on this subject is in a state of flux. In fact it is clear that we know astonishingly little about variation.”

Thus has experimental research brought the theorizing Darwinists to the crossroads of science, and they are having difficulty in deciding which way to turn. And perhaps without realizing it, many of them are finding themselves turning more and more in the direction of truth, as it is given in the creation story of Genesis.

A great conflict between truth and error is now being fought by the scientists themselves, and we may be sure that the truth will ultimately prevail. In this connection we are reminded of the following paragraph from the able pen of the late Dr. William Emerson Ritter, professor of Zoology at the University of California, which was published in Science magazine sometime ago. He therein wrote this significant sentence: “If one scans a bit thoughtfully the landscape of human life for the last few decades he can hardly fail to see signs that the whole battleground of evolution will have to be fought over again, this time not so much between scientists and theologians, as among scientists themselves.”

It is truly remarkable that the Bible, written thousands of years ago, before the era of scientific research, should state so accurately and so definitely what now has been established as scientific truth, namely, that species are fixed. Only by divine inspiration could this have been possible. Let us then have confidence in this sacred record as we pursue our further investigation of its God-given truths.

Click here to go to Part 5

| Home Page | Table of Contents |