Fast lizard changes delight creationists

Creationists have long pointed out that natural selection helps living things adapt to new environments—by sorting (culling from) the built-in genetic variation.1 This is not ‘evolution, since it adds no new genetic information, as ameba-to-man evolution would require.

Differing species of lizards of the genus Anolis, like Darwin’s finches in the Galapagos, have almost certainly adapted in this way to varying conditions on many different islands,2 perhaps even beginning from one pair.

Such a mechanism is important in a creationist understanding of earth history. Noah’s ark presumably did not contain dingoes, coyotes and wolves; the genetic information in one ‘dog’ pair was sufficient for these to arise afterwards (therefore no evolution, because no new information is involved).

But could such changes have been fast enough to happen since the Flood? It was encouraging to see that since Anolis lizards were released on to several small islands in the Bahamas some 20 years ago, minor adaptive changes in leg lengths happened very rapidly—in fact, some 2,000 times faster than evolutionists expected!3

1. C. Wieland, Variation, Information and the Created Kind, CEN Technical Journal 5(1):42–47, 1991.

2. C. Wieland, Latin Lizards: Logos vs Lottery, CEN Technical Journal 10(2):170, 1996.

3. Nature 387:15–16, 70–73, 1 May 1997.

[Creation Ministries International—Ironically, uninformed evolutionist science writers have thought this was a Darwinian triumph, despite no new genetic information arising!]

https://creation.com/focus-194#trex