Re: Oldest Plant species?

Glenn Morton (grmorton@waymark.net)
Tue, 07 Oct 1997 16:55:57 -0500

At 07:25 AM 10/7/97 -0700, Arthur V. Chadwick wrote:
>Glenn :
>You wrote:
>
>>But one thing seems problematical to the global flood view: If the fossil
>>record is the remains of the preflood world, why are there so few living
>>forms found in the fossil record?
>
>If yu are going to insist that preflood organisms remain postflood
>unchanged, you have lost me. In Genesis 3, God Himself declares all nature
>is going to change because of the fall.

Obviously, the problem I see with a global flood position is that we have
animals getting on the ark, everybody who was outside the ark died and was
buried in the flood sediments. The animals have one year on the ark in which
to be significantly transformed into more modern forms of life. This seems
to imply super-evolution or rather hyper-evolution.

> As a scientist who gives credence
>to the biblical account, I would have to see change. Far from alarming me
>it is required. But the limits fo change are also recorded. In Hawaii,
>for instance, there are more endemic forms than anywhere else even though
>the Hawaiian chain is fairly recent geologically. THere are by some
>estimates over 600 species of Drosophila that are endemic to the Hawaiian
>Islands. They are still all Drosophila.

This is precisely my point about the species problem of the 1 year global
flood. If the Hawaiian chain which I recall is around 750 kyr old, have only
allowed enough evolution for speciation, how do we get entirely different
genera and possibly familes during the one year flood? Surely Christians who
want to hold to a global flood are not advocating that hyper-evolutionary
rates are possible are they?

>Likewise for the plants. Thus
>creationists are more evolutionary than evolutionists, considering the time
>frame, but they just stick closer to the data, not getting lost in
>speculating about what might have happened to give rise to the first
>Drosophila, etc.

Art, you might be more evolutionary than most creationists, if I understand
your position correctly. Most of the followers of the ICR clan would be
horrified to consider the implications of the amount of physical and
morphological change which the data says must have occurred during that
single year.

glenn

Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm