One of my first posts on this blog was on the question of whether dark-skinned people moved south to be comfortable and the other way around, or if we changed to match our environment.

I’ve been looking for the answer ever since and am rather surprised by how little we know about this, at least for people.  In fact, this draft has been sitting in my stack for some time while I’ve tried to puzzle out just what we know about the variety of features we see in people around the world.

When I first started looking at what we know about adaptations (the ability an animal or plant has to change), I was getting very confused. Turns out bacteria can adapt quite a bit, very quickly to the environment they are put into. But after just a little time that ability to keep changing slows way down.

In fact, bacteria being able to survive environments specially designed to try to destroy them is one of the Evolutionist’s favorite ways to show that Evolution must be true.  What they don’t tell you is that there has never been a case where new pieces of DNA (the tiny books inside every cell) got written from nowhere.

But this doesn’t tell us much about ourselves, because we sure don’t see people adapting to a new climate the way bacteria do.  In fact, there are a number of populations that have been transplanted (willingly or not) from the kind of environment you expect to see such people in, to very different ones.  It’s been over 200 years since dark-skinned Africans have been living in North America, and some of them have been living in England and Canada for well over a hundred years.  There have also been pale people originally from Europe living in Australia and across Africa for several hundred years.  In each of these places, unless they marry local people who have different skin color and such, their great, great grand children still look the same as their overseas cousins when they’re born (of course, you’re more likely to later get a tan if you live in a sunny, warm country, but that’s not changing your genetics).

What’s going on then?  How did we get from Noah and his wife, their three sons and their wives to all the variations we see today?

Evolutionists have one answer for this.  The only reason anything is different from an amoeba is Mutations.  They have no other answer, don’t want there to be any other answer, so they don’t look for anything else.

But what about Creation Scientists?  I’ve been studying and asking around the Creationist community for a couple of months now and was starting to get frustrated.

Disclaimer:  The following rant is all me.

First, I refuse to accept the idea that the reason some people (like me) have freckles is because we’re mutants!!  I don’t see how God didn’t pre-plan for some of us to have really curly or super-straight hair, almond-shaped eyes, very light or dark skin, or extra narrow or wide noses.  These things are not caused by mutations, but by variation in our DNA books.

Think about what we know of God’s nature.  He doesn’t make the same snowflake twice! No one claims they are different from each other because they’re all mutants.  Study the planets and stars.  Not one of them is the same as another, but, like the snow flakes, they don’t have any DNA to mutate.  Yet God made them all different.

God is a God of variety and uniqueness.  Sometime, when I find the right pictures, I’m going to post about how a potter uses the same clay to make many types of objects.  Usually, you can tell they were done by the same artist, but they are never exactly the same.  Why should we be any different?  If you study out the chances of there being a person exactly like you in existence, the numbers of zeros behind the odds are mind-blowing!  These statistics aren’t based on mutations but on the complexity of human DNA.

I was very pleased when my newest edition of Acts & Facts from the Institute for Creation Research came this week. In the middle there was a short article on Genetic Diversity by Dr. Jeffrey Tomkins.  He was very honest about what we know and don’t understand yet.  Like me, Dr. Tomkins sees God using existing DNA to allow for and cause much of the variety we see in living things.  He said, “Clearly, genetic variability is part of God’s design for plants and animals, but it is employed as an engineered system with limitations. These systems of genetic variability are just beginning to be understood.”

The last thing he mentions is, “Biology researchers at ICR are currently reviewing creationist and secular literature on non-coding DNA to determine new venues of research into the field of genetic diversity and the role it plays in adaptation.”  This tells us scientists still have a lot of studying to do to understand what’s going on in genetics.  Unfortunately, since all the work done by Evolutionists is going to assume all change is caused by mutations, Creation Scientists will have to do a lot of screening to find the truth.

Now, there are certainly things we carry in our bodies that are mutations.  Anything that causes us to get sick, develop a disease or be at risk for early death is caused by the curse on Adam and his race.  There are also some variations, such as the ability to still digest milk as an adult that seem to be caused by mutations.  There are even some people who are born with pale skin and hair to dark skinned parents with no known pale ancestry.  This is probably in the same category as an albino.  But that doesn’t prove all pale people are just albinos!

God is a great and powerful Creator.  We are still just beginning to understand just how wise and deep His design truly is after several hundred years of really trying!

For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.  I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.  My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.  How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them!  If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: when I awake, I am still with thee. Psalm 139:13-18