How did Animals Cross the Ocean? Humans did it, after the Flood!

The Bible records for us the world wide flood of Noah's day, and how two of every animal found refuge in the Ark so that they could re-populate the earth. Soon afterward, mankind spread across the whole earth, travelling across the seas, and brought animals and plants with them. How do we know? Ancient coins, stone heads with negroid features, platypus, elephants, pineapples, peanuts, in wrong places everywhere! Creationists require miracles at the beginning to explain this, evolutionists require miracles at every turn...

Selections from Biogeography: A Creationist Perspective, by Bill Johnson.

(These selections by Marko Malyj are of the article published in Creation Research Society Quarterly Journal, Volume 48, Number 3, Winter 2012)

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Why is it that animals and plants are not equally distributed over the face of the earth? In Part 1 of this article, Evolution says, uhhh..., we saw how Evolutionists have three totally different methods they they mix and match to explain the distribution of animals and plants across the face of the earth: Land Bridges, Oceanic Dispersal, and the Pangaea supercontinent. If one doesn't sound right, try the other! Now we will find out whether the worldwide flood of the Bible offers a better explanation...

Transportation by Human Agency

The creationist view has always maintained that from his inception man was endowed with great intelligence, ingenuity, and technological abilities. Humans made numerous voyages across our great oceans long before Columbus. Most of the biogeographical enigmas that haunt evolutionists can be easily explained by this view.

The most convincing evidence for these transoceanic voyages comes from archaeology. The American continents, especially North America, have turned up numerous ancient coins from such places as China, Rome, Greece, and Egypt (Mahan and Braithwaite, 1975; Epstein et al., 1980). These coins cannot be easily dismissed as “recently lost” for several reasons: (1) Some coins have been found in undisturbed soil twenty-five feet deep (Deans, 1884) or in ancient Indian gravesites with stone tools found in the same locality (Butler, 1886); and (2) Chinese coins are confined to the west coast (i.e., Oregon and British Columbia), whereas Roman coins are east of the Mississippi, a pattern you would not expect to see if the coins were randomly dropped in modern times.

Archaeologists in Central America also have unearthed evidence for pre-Columbian contact from Africa, Asia, and Europe. Many large stone heads (some 9 feet high and 22 feet in circumference circumference) from southeastern Mexico display clear negroid characteristics (Stirling, 1940; Von Wuthenau, 1975). The same Olmec culture also produced a two-foot-high basalt statuette of an oriental man, which is presently housed in a Mexico City museum (Coe and Miller, 2004). And recently, a rediscovered black terracotta head from the 1930s identified as European was dated to be 1800 years old (Knight, 2000).

The traditions of the Polynesian people also support long sea journeys. Anthropologist Roland Dixon documented the types of canoes used and their varying lengths (some were 90 feet long and could accommodate as many as 100 people). He also documented the distances of many of their excursions (Dixon, 1934). Tangiia, a man from Fiji, traveled as far as 4,000 miles to Rapanui—the native name for Easter Island (Dixon, 1934). Many others made these long excursions, including Paao priest of Upolu in the Samoan Islands, who traveled a distance of 2,300 miles to Hawaii (Emerson, 1893). Had the early explorers reached as far as Easter Island and Hawaii, the journey eastward to America would not have been difficult.

Early humans traveled often and far for exploration, trade, and colonization. Couple this with G. G. Simpson’s (1940) observation that people have always had a fascination with animals from distant places, and creationists can explain not only island distributions but even continental ones. It is far more reasonable to believe that some of Hawaii’s fauna and flora arrived from southeastern Polynesia carried by humans, or that an early Polynesian explorer took back to Fiji the banded iguana than it is to believe that they transported themselves. Even some evolutionists accept this approach and have recently argued that the arrival of the coconut (Ward and Brookfield, 1992) and the Polynesian chicken in America are best explained by human transportation (Storey et al., 2007).

Postdiluvian Dispersal of Land Animals

“How did kangaroos and giant earthworms make their way across the oceans to their present home in Australia?” (Coyne, 2009, p. 89). Contrary to the evolutionist claims, creation is not only consistent with the facts, but also provides a much simpler and non-miraculous explanation for continental distributions.

How exactly did marsupials get to Australia, and why are they mostly confined to this continent? Creationists have utilized two slightly different ways to explain these distributions, depending on when they believe continental drift took place. Some creationists have suggested that the continents were separated during the Flood and that marsupials got to Australia either by a land connection (i.e., since this area is still tectonically active) or by island hopping/rafting. This was followed by an extinction of marsupials in Asia. This view should not be ridiculed, especially since this was the dominant explanation given by evolutionists up until the acceptance of plate tectonics.

Other creationists believe the continents were still united after the Flood and every animal was more or less widely distributed, some even reaching as far as North America. Almost 400 years after the Flood, the continents separated (cf. Gen. 10:25 "Two sons were born to Eber: One was named Peleg, because in his time the earth was divided"), and some animals (e.g., marsupials) were spared the competition that their close cousins were suffering in other parts of the world (e.g., Asia). Due to competition, as well as other environmental factors, some members of a species died out while others flourished. What are seen are not evolutionary centers of origin followed by miraculous dispersals, but relicts, or survivors, of a once wide continuous range.

Evolutionists have flirted with what is essentially a creationist explanation. This simple way of explaining animal distributions (i.e., moving continents rather than animals) is explicable only by a theory of contemporaneous creation; that is, where all animals were present and widely distributed before the fragmentation of the world’s landmasses. Furthermore, the empirical evidence for a more or less widespread distribution becomes more impressive with each passing year. Prior to 1985, there was no evidence for marsupials anywhere but Australia and the New World, and evolutionists took this absence of evidence as evidence of absence, but now marsupial fossils have turned up in many unexpected places, including Africa Bown and Simons, 1984), Madagascar (Krause, 2001), and even Asia (Benton, 1985; Ducrocq et al., 1992).

We are discovering that more animals are proving to have a wider distribution than previously thought. The monotremes (e.g., platypus, spiny anteaters) were for the longest time believed to have been confined to Australia, yet to the amazement of many, a monotreme fossil was discovered in the early 1990s in South America (Pascual et al., 1992). Even elephants were far more widespread  than evolutionists were willing to admit. Elephant remains (i.e., bones, teeth) and man-made objects of elephants also place this creature in southern Mexico (Anonymous, 1903; Nomland, 1932), South America (White, 1884; Carter, 1989), and even possibly Australia (Vickers-Rich and Archbold, 1991).

Another factor that increases the chances of extinction is human introductions. As more exotic animals escape or are released in the wild, some will colonize these locations and force others into extinction.

Survival and Dispersal of Plants

Up until the time of the Flood, the world was lush with vegetation. All kinds of fruits, vegetables, flowering plants, and numerous other plant species were widely distributed on Pangaea. This tropical paradise was completely destroyed by the Flood, and only some species of plants, through the survival of their seed, succeeded in leaving representation in the postdiluvian world.



Wind-dispersed seeds & fruits in different plant families.

After the Floodwaters abated, seeds were scattered over the face of the earth, further dispersal occurred by other means: dispersal of seeds attached to animals’ bodies, seeds inside animals’ bodies, by physical expulsion and wind. Add this to human interest in many plants (e.g., fruits, vegetables, angiosperms) and our ability to facilitate dispersal.



Stone carving of a pineapple
in a cave temple
in Udaiguri, India.

The evidence from archaeology provides overwhelming support for a wide distribution of plants, especially fruits and vegetables. The pineapple, for example, was widespread in South and Central America when Columbus and other explorers came to the New World (Collins, 1948). As a result, it was long assumed that this fruit originated in Brazil until a wealth of archaeological evidence confirmed that the pineapple also existed in the Old World from very early times. The pineapple is clearly depicted in old Indian temple art (Gupta, 1996), found on pottery in Egyptian tombs (Wilkinson, 1837), represented on murals in Pompeii(Carter, 1953), and, to the amazement of nineteenth-century archaeologists, the pineapple was carved on walls in ancient Nineveh (Layard, 1853; Rawlinson, 1885).



Remains of peanuts found
in Peruvian mummies.

The peanut was once believed to have originated in the Old World because of how widespread it is there. When archaeologists recovered peanuts from ancient Peruvian tombs, it was then believed that the peanut originated in South America and was carried over to Asia in recent times. Archaeologists have recently discovered several-thousandyear-old peanuts in China (Chang, 1973) and in caves on the island of Timor, Indonesia (Glover, 1977).

Many other plants thought “native” to one hemisphere also existed early in the other hemisphere. Ancient Indian temple art clearly depicts plants that supposedly originated in America, such as the cashew nut, custard apple, and chili pepper (Gupta, 1996). The custard apple also was discovered in caves on the island of Timor (Glover, 1977), and the chili pepper had a history in Tahiti before European contact (Langdon, 1988).

Evolution depends more on miracles

The evolutionary claims for this wide transoceanic distribution of plants is unconvincing because plants have limited mobility and are poor dispersers.
 
Evolutionists, however, have an a priori commitment to naturalism; thus they are forced to explain away the evidence. They also distort and misrepresent the creationist position to give the impression that their theory is the only viable explanation.

The creationist explanation is the better argument. The idea of a contemporaneous creation dispersed widely on the earth followed by partial extinctions is a simple approach, especially when dispersal is facilitated by humans. This view also fits with the archaeological evidence. The problem of biogeography from an evolutionary perspective is that all of life is stretched out over half a billion years, with the fragmentation of the world occurring late in the history, leaving a large percentage of plants and animals to disperse in a miraculous way.

Creationists are often chided for reliance on miracles. They require them, though only in the beginning. Evolution, however, requires them at almost every turn, especially when dealing with the geography of life.
 
References (selected)

Anonymous. 1903. Elephant remains in Mexico. American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal 25:395–397.
 
Benton, M. 1985. First marsupial fossil from Asia. Nature 318:313.
 
Bown, T.M., and E.L. Simons. 1984. First record of marsupials (Metatheria: Polyprotodonta) from the Oligocene in Africa. Nature 308:447–449.
 
Butler, J.D. 1886. Roman coins found in Oshkosh. American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal 8:372.
 
Carter, G. 1989. A note on the elephant in America. Epigraphic Society Occasional Publications 18:90.

Chang, K.C. 1973. Radiocarbon dates from China: some initial interpretations. Current Anthropology 14:525–528.

Coe, M., and M. Miller. 2004. Olmec wrestler: a masterpiece of the ancient Gulf Coast. Minerva 16:18–19.

Collins, J.L. 1948. Pineapples in ancient America. Scientific Monthly 67:372–377.
 
Coyne, J. 2009. Why Evolution Is True. Viking, New York, NY.
 
Deans, J. 1884. Chinese coins in British Columbia. American Naturalist 18:98, 99.
 
Dixon, R. 1934. The long voyages of the Polynesians. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 74:167–175.
 
Ducrocq, S., E. Buffetaut, H. Buffetaut-Tong, J. Jaeger, Y. Jongkanjanasoontorn, and V.Suteethorn. 1992. First fossil marsupial from South Asia. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 12:395–399.
 
Emerson, N.B. 1893. The Long Voyages of the Ancient Hawaiians. Hawaiian Gazette Co., Honolulu, HI.
 
Epstein, J., D.B. Buchanan, T.V. Buttrey, G.F. Carter, W.L. Cook, C. Covey, S.C. Jett, T.A. Lee Jr., B. Mundkur, A.C. Paulsen, H.J. Prem, J.E. Reyman, M.R. Dorado, and N. Totten. 1980. Pre-Columbian Old World coins in America: an examination of the evidence. Current Anthropology 21:1–20.

Glover, I. 1977. The Late Stone Age in Eastern Indonesia. World Archaeology 9:42–61

Gupta, S. 1996. Plants in Indian Temple Art. B.R. Publishing Co., Delhi, India.

Knight, J. 2000. Did Roman sailors shake hands with ancient Mexicans? New Scientist 2225:7.
 
Krause, D. 2001. Fossil molar from a Madagascan marsupial. Nature 412:497–498.

Langdon, R. 1988. Manioc, a long concealed key to the enigma of Easter Island. The Geographical Journal 154:324–336.
 
Layard, A. 1853. Discoveries among the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon. John Murray, New York, NY.

Mahan, J., and D. Braithwaite. 1975. Discovery of ancient coins in the United Sates. Anthropological Journal of Canada 13:15–18.

Nomland, G.A. 1932. Proboscis statue from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. American Anthropologist 34:591–593.
 
Pascual, R., M. Archer, E. Jaureguizar, J.L.Prado, H. Godthelp, and S.J. Hand. 1992. First discovery of monotremes in South America. Nature 356:704–705.

Rawlinson, G. 1885. The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World. John Alden, New York, NY.

Simpson, G.G. 1940. Mammals and land bridges. Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 30:137–163.

Stirling, M. 1940. Great stone faces of the Mexican jungle. National Geographic 78:309–334.

Storey, A., J.M. Ramırez, D. Quiroz, D.V.Burley, D.J. Addison, R. Walter, A.J.Anderson, T.L. Hunt, J.S. Athens, L.Huynen, and E.A. Matisoo-Smith. 2007. Radiocarbon and DNA evidence for a pre-Columbian introduction of  Polynesian chickens to Chile. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 104:10335–10339.
 
Vickers-Rich, P., and N. Archbold. 1991. Squatters, priests and professors: a brief history of vertebrate paleontology in Monaghan, R.F. Baird, and T.H. Rich (editors), Vertebrate Paleontology of Australasia, pp. 1–39. Monash University Publications, Melbourne, Australia.

Terra Australis. In Vicers-Rich, P., J.M.

Von Wuthenau, A. 1975. Unexpected Faces in Ancient America. Crown, New York, NY.

Ward, R.G., and M. Brookield. 1992. The dispersal of the coconut: did it float or was it carried to Panama? Journal of Biogeography 19:467–480.

White, R.B. 1884. Notes on the aboriginal races of the north-western provinces of South America. Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 13:240–258.

Wilkinson, J.G. 1837. Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians. J. Murray, London, England.

Turkish Workers take a break to watch Christian TV

A worker on a thirty man construction crew in Turkey recently phoned the 24-hour Christian satellite television channel and said, "In the evenings, as a group, we watch the Life Channel (Kanal Hayat) and discuss the programs. Could you send us four New Testaments? When we retire to our rooms we like to read."

Ask God to call each of these men to the fellowship of His Son.

(from a Christian prayer letter, May 2012)

Vision Forum under Siege by Gay Activists

Vision Forum, which provides family-building books, films, CDs, and toys to Christians, has come under siege by gay activists for their defense of traditional marriage. This is from their email bulletin:

In the early hours of May 17, Vision Forum began to receive the first in an ongoing and unprecedented attack to neutralize our website. The attack coincided with what appears to be a concerted and ongoing effort from within the atheist and homosexual community to manipulate an online poll to VF readers, and transform the VF Facebook page into a forum for homosexuals and opponents of Christianity to mock Christianity. The attack successfully curtailed our ability to make some products available to customers today, successfully undermined the integrity of an online poll, and was successful in placing profanities, blasphemies, and offensive content on our Facebook page.

Here is the story as we presently understand it:

Vision Forum is a ministry dedicated to the defense of the Christian family. We believe that God alone has the right to define marriage, and it is intended to be between a man and a woman. Over the course of the last week, Vision Forum has been posting articles expressing our opposition to President Obama’s declaration in favor of same-sex marriage. We have pointed out the anti-Christian and unbiblical nature of the President’s support of homosexual marriage. We have pointed out that his declaration promotes an agenda which is inconsistent with the historic statutory and common law foundations of Western law which are rooted in Christianity. We have also pointed out that the President has unleashed a nationwide campaign of scoffing at Christianity and the biblical definition of marriage.

On Wednesday afternoon, we launched a poll through Doug’s Blog which asked the question: Do you support President Obama’s declaration favoring same sex marriage?

As of midnight that night, there were just under 1,600 votes, approximately 90% of which expressed disapproval for the President’s support of homosexual “marriage. ” By 7 o’clock the next morning, the number of votes had jumped to just under 25,000 voters, and the demographic had switched to close to 90% of Vision Forum readers voting in favor of the President’s declaration. We realized that something fishy was going on for there to be a 2000% increase in pro-sodomite voting during the early hours of the morning.

The D-DOS Attack on Our Website

But something else was also afoot.

Around 3:00 a.m. Thursday morning, Vision Forum began experiencing a Distributed Denial of Service (D-DOS) attack on the website, VisionForum.com. This type of attack uses large numbers of compromised computers, hundreds in this case, to send repeated requests to a website in an attempt to overload it. The result is that it can become very difficult, if not impossible, to use a website under such an attack.

If you were one of the hundreds of people who had problems loading the Vision Forum pages yesterday, it is because of this D-DOS attack which coincided with the efforts of others to populate our Facebook page with inappropriate material, and to undermine the integrity of our poll.

What is Causing the Inflated Pro-Homosexual Results?

At the time of this writing, the poll shows more than 50,000 voters, more than 47,000 of which support same-sex marriage. The numbers are growing with almost exact frequency each minute, and the proportionality of the votes have remained a general constant, at least since we have been tracking it early this morning.

Is this a case of the “people speaking”? Hardly!

There are two explanations for the dramatic change in proportionality of the vote and massive increase in voters. First, the pro-sodomite community could have rallied more than 40,000 supporters to vote in a time period of the last ten hours or so. This would show the power of anti-Christian hate groups to create a viral response to Christians who take a public stand against redefining marriage to accommodate the homosexual agenda.

How Anti-Christian Groups Deliberately Manipulated the Data

The second primary explanation is that the poll was deliberately manipulated by an individual or individuals wanting to interfere with the poll. An online poll of this kind provided by the PollDaddy service used on Doug’s Blog could easily be skewed through use of a macro script or browser plug-in such as the iMacros add-on for Google Chrome.

So what happened?

The evidence indicates that internet trolls and activists have tampered with at least a portion of the polling process.

We have verified, for example, by mid-afternoon that at least 4,500 of the votes are duplicates coming from the same IP address. This is almost indisputable proof that “there is something fishy going on.” Another 17,000 votes are from outside the United States of America, which means either that Vision Forum is either experiencing an unprecedented amount of international traffic, or that individuals may be using anonymizing networks to make their IP addresses appear unique while actually “rigging” the poll in their favor. It does not appear to be a hack of PollDaddy’s servers, but instead someone employing an automated script to vote repeatedly.

Presently, a user is claiming responsibility for skewing the results using a macro script of this kind. As early as 1:00 a.m. on Thursday morning, a link to my blog post with this polling question “Do you support the President’s stand on same-sex marriage?” was shared in the Atheism section of the social site Reddit, encouraging visitors to participate. The item received more than 500 responses including acknowledgements of participation, many of which contained specific statements in opposition to the Christian definition of marriage.

It was on the Reddit atheist forum that a user boasted of their use of a specialized computer script to dramatically inflate votes in our poll in favor of President Obama’s position and urged other readers of the Reddit forum to employ the same method to further skew the poll results. Several of these individuals identified themselves as homosexuals and posted glee-filled obscenities about their behavior within the context of their attempt to hijack our poll. Their boasting simply reveals what the common IP addresses point to — the manipulation of the poll by a few, thus rendering the results highly imbalanced.

Pro-Homosexual and Atheists Target the VF Facebook Page

But if bots and macro sabotage scripts were not enough, atheists, sodomites and pro-homosexuals from around the world targeted our Facebook page to populate it with hundreds of profanities, hateful dialogue, scoffing, blasphemy, and more. This prompted the posting of the following statement:

“This Facebook page has been targeted by the atheist and homosexual community, members of which have generated a spate of posts which violate the guidelines of this page. We remind our readers: We are a Christian company that takes seriously the Third Commandment. It is one thing to charitably post an alternative opinion, it is another to mock God, his Scriptures, or to take His name in vain. If you use this Facebook page for scoffing (Proverbs 22:10), for posting defiling communications, or if you in any way violate the Third Commandment in your posts, or encourage others to do the same, you will be deleted and banned. ”

What Are We to Make of This Attack?

Last year, atheist groups targeted the Facebook page of Ken Ham, filling it with pornographic material and hateful and filthy language. Yesterday Vision Forum was the object of attack (and still is). Tomorrow, it will be someone else.

While these plots to sabotage our poll and website, or to pollute our Facebook page with inappropriate dialogue can be a nuisance, they are not surprising. In fact, they are entirely predictable. They are a predictable tactic of radical groups known for bad behavior, groups made up of individuals who have little respect for Christianity or decency. What Vision Forum is presently experiencing is the predictable consequence of taking a stand against the radical pro-homosexual and atheist communities.

Of course, the battle on the Vision Forum website points to a much bigger and defining cultural battle that confronts us today: Will we embrace God’s program for marriage and the family and seek to personally model it in all its power and beauty, even as we fight for its sanctity — or will we cave to societal pressure and call “evil, good ” as it relates to homosexual behavior and attempts for unlawful recognition of practicing homosexuals, in defiance of God’s standards given to us in the Bible? The choice is simple: God’s law or chaos.

May God Receive All the Glory

Since our inception, Vision Forum has embraced the Bible as the standard for all of life and has sought to encourage the restoration of the biblical family by reinforcing godly masculinity and femininity — calling on men to act as noble men and women to embrace the high calling of virtuous womanhood and biblical femininity. Part of this mission has been to extol the glories of godly marriage as first pictured in the Garden when God brought Eve to Adam as his perfect helpmeet. The institution of marriage was the capstone of Creation Week, as God declared that “it is not good that man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18); that Adam needed a wife to aid him in his dominion work. Eve was God’s gift to Adam, and through Adam’s union with her, they were to bring forth children — to “be fruitful and multiply” — even as they worked together as dominion stewards of God’s creation. It’s this grand model of God-ordained marriage that Vision Forum has sought to advance since our founding more than fourteen years ago.

The battle against biblical marriage is likely only to escalate. As the pressure increases, we as Christian must fight against compromise and uphold God’s standard concerning this foundational institution.

Your grateful friend in the battle
Douglas Phillips
President, Vision Forum Inc.

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How did Animals Cross the Ocean? Evolution says, uhhh...

Evolutionists have three totally different methods they they mix and match to explain the distribution of animals and plants across the face of the earth: Land Bridges, Oceanic Dispersal, and the Pangaea supercontinent. If one doesn't sound right, try the other! Is this Science? Are we in the midst of another paradigm shift and a return to “a science of the improbable, the rare, the mysterious, and the miraculous”? Or maybe the worldwide flood of the Bible offers a better explanation...

Selections from Biogeography: A Creationist Perspective, by Bill Johnson.

(These selections by Marko Malyj are of the article published in Creation Research Society Quarterly Journal, Volume 48, Number 3, Winter 2012)

(To receive new uMarko posts via a daily email, please click Subscribe)

Why is it that animals and plants are not equally distributed over the face of the earth? Why are some animals, like giraffes and lions, confined to only one location—Africa, whereas other plants and animals are either ubiquitously or discontinuously distributed? Biogeography, or the geography of life, has been an active field of study for centuries. Early creationists tried to explain these distributions a variety of ways. Universal Flood geologists postulated that all animals dispersed from the Middle East. Can this be true? From the mid-nineteenth century to the present, evolutionists have dominated the biogeographical debate, and creationists have largely remained silent on the issue. As a result, it is commonly believed that evolution best explains the geography of life. But macroevolutionary biogeography is far from proven.

Land Bridges

Until recently, it was widely accepted that the continents as we know them have always been in their current locations. Belief in the permanence of the continents led many evolutionists to explain distributions by postulating land bridges between the continents. These land bridges crisscrossed every ocean and were thrown up or torn down wherever and whenever their theory required. Up until the second half of the twentieth century, most evolutionists employed this line of reasoning. Ernst Haeckel is a case in point:



The Lemuria land bridge of nineteenth-century geology.

Even Europe and America have been directly connected. The South Sea at one time formed a large Pacific continent... The Indian Ocean formed a continent which extended from the Sunda Islands along the southern coast of Asia to the east coast of Africa (Haeckel, 1892, pp. 375–376).

Everywhere there was a disjunct distribution to explain, evolutionists like Haeckel “sharpened their pencils and sketched land bridges between the appropriate continents” (Corliss, 1970, p. 61). Some of the land bridges were small and plausible; others, such as the landmass that stretched across the entire Pacific Ocean to allow bears, raccoons, and other animals to gain access to the American continent, were of continental proportion. After the fauna and flora reached their appointed destination the evolutionists’ “eraser disposed of the bridge when it had outlived its usefulness as evidenced by the divergence of species on the sundered continents” (Corliss, 1970, p. 61). The problem with continental land bridges and their sudden disappearance after they served their purpose was that in nearly every case there was absolutely no geological evidence for their existence. The only reason for their construction was to explain away the puzzling distributions of life.

Even Darwin, who was once an avid land bridge builder, eventually saw just how convenient it was to throw up land bridges to explain distributions. In a letter to J. D. Hooker he noted that some conjure up land bridges “as easily as a cook does pancakes” (Darwin, 1959, p. 432).

Oceanic Dispersal

Another way to explain the puzzling distribution of life is to have animals and plants crossing formidable water gaps by means of rafting, or, in the case of birds, postulating island colonizations achieved by transoceanic flights. Ernst Mayr used oceanic dispersal to explain how the banded iguana came to reside in the south Pacific.

The lizard family Iguanidae is confined to the Americas, except for one genus (with two species) found in Fiji and Tonga …a long time ago they floated there on logs and flotsam carried by ocean currents (Mayr, 2001, p. 32).

Mayr’s explanation seems plausible until one realizes that the Fiji Islands are 5,000 miles away from America. Granting a generous thirty miles of drift per day for this treacherous journey (which required a sail mate of the opposite sex), the iguanas would have arrived in Fiji eight months later!

Mayr and Phelps claimed the Hawaiian Islands house many land birds that supposedly migrated there from the American continents. These birds would have had to fly over 2,000 miles without the aid of intervening islands to serve as “steppingstones” (Mayr and Phelps, 1967). Some of these long-distance colonizations
seem miraculous.
 
How about the dispersal of freshwater fish (i.e., cichlids) found only in Africa and South America? Phillip Darlington, the most prominent biogeographer of the twentieth century, flirted with a south Atlantic land bridge but favored the hypothesis that these fish traveled out of Africa, up through Asia, across the Bering land bridge, down North and Central America, and finally into South America (Darlington, 1957). The most amazing part of this story is the disjunct distribution is also explained by extinction in the intermediate parts of a wide distribution that did not leave a single fossil behind!

Continental Drift



Generalized reconstruction of the supercontinent,
Pangaea in latest Paleozoic time.

 In the 1960s many evolutionists opted for what is called vicariance biogeography, i.e., that most plants and animals were widely distributed on the super continent Pangaea and the discontinuities we observe today are largely due to the breakup of this continent. The cichlids, along with other fish, would not have had to travel tens of thousands of miles from Africa to South America (as Darlington claims); they needed only to disperse a short distance while the continents were still together. With vicariance it appeared that evolutionary biogeography was saved from the embarrassing theories of the past. Or has it?

For example, if the continents were once connected, why are there not more fauna and flora similarities between the southern continents?

Also, it requires many taxa to have originated preceding the breakup of Pangaea. Recently, evolutionary dating methods have shown that many plants and animals evolved after the continents separated. This would include freshwater fish (i.e., aplocheiloid, cichlid), ratite birds, parrots, frogs, baobab trees, and anolis lizards (Briggs, 2003; De Queiroz, 2005). Evolutionists are now forced to acknowledge that longdistance dispersalism must have played an even greater role than many have suspected.

So which is it, Land Bridges, Oceanic Dispersal, or Pangaea? Are we in the midst of another paradigm shift and a return to “a science of the improbable, the rare, the mysterious, and the miraculous” (Nelson, 1978, p. 289)?

Is this Science?

Evolutionary biogeography has now come full circle. The “recent flood of evidence” that McGlone and others talk about is not evidence, per se; rather it is lack of evidence for drift. Alan De Queiroz (2005, p. 70) notes, “A main objection to dispersal hypotheses is that they are unfalsifiable and thus unscientific … However, this can be countered by noting that, if plausible vicariance hypotheses are falsified, then dispersal is supported by default.”

The explanations given for the dispersal of freshwater fish are just as eclectic. Evolutionists originally postulated a land bridge between Africa and South America (Eigenmann, 1909). Darlington (1957) followed this idea by moving these fish across almost every continent. Along came vicariance with its explanation of short-distance dispersal before the continents fragmented (Stiassny, 1991; Murphy and Collier, 1997).

Now that many freshwater fish are judged as too young to have been moved by drift, the explanation is that they are tolerant of saltwater and made the long journey across the Atlantic Ocean.

Biogeography can “explain” every distribution in a multitude of ways, while never making a prediction that could subject the theory to falsification. Even evolutionists have long recognized that it is an explain-all theory. How is this Science?

We began by with the early creationists, who were Universal Flood geologists. They postulated that all animals dispersed from the Middle East, as suggested by the Biblical worldwide flood described in the book of Genesis. In the second part of this article, we will reexamine this old viewpoint. It turns out to be a far superior explanation.

References (selected)

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Darwin, C. 1959. Life and Letters of Charles Darwin. Basic Books, New York, NY.

De Queiroz, A. 2005. The resurrection of oceanic dispersal in historical biogeography. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 20:68–73.

Eigenmann, C. H. 1909. The fresh-water fishes of Patagonia and an examination of the Archiplata – Archhelenis theory. In Scott, W.B. (editor), Reports of the Princeton University Expedition to Patagonia 1896–1899, pp. 227–374. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
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Mayr, E. 2001. What Evolution Is. Basic Books, New York, NY.

Mayr, E., and W.H. Phelps. 1967. The origin of the bird fauna of the south Venezuelan highlands. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 136:273–327.

Murphy, W.J., and G.E. Collier. 1997. A molecular phylogeny for aplocheiloid fishes (Atherinomorpha, Cyprinodontiformes): the role of vicariance and the origins of annualism. Molecular Biology and Evolution 14:790–799.

Stiassny, M. 1991. Phylogenetic interrelationships of the family Cichlidae: an overview. In Keenleyside, M.H.A. (editor), Cichlid Fishes: Behavior, Ecology and Evolution, pp 1–35. Chapman and Hall, London, UK.

Parents of 12 children? That's not possible!

Olga and Anatoliy Sukach, Christians living in Ukraine, had the desire to adopt a girl after their 4th son was born. But years of home troubles and routine hid the intention. A good while later, the family visited a church in Dubechne village. Olga and Anatoliy had a good time communicating with the pastor, Mykola Krykota, who adopted three boys and is part of the Orphan Care program. After all they heard about orphans, Olga and Anatoliy felt a great desire to adopt a child that minute. The couple got the detailed information from the pastor and the next day started the document process. They wanted to adopt a girl, but instead they were offered four biological brothers and sisters. Though Olga and Anatoliy had not expected it, they trusted their Father in Heaven, Who through the Holy Spirit led them in the process of adoption. That's how 5) Olya, 6) Vitya, 7) Natalya, and 8) Vasyl came to the family.

Two years then passed and Olga read a newspaper article about children from Chernivtsi who lost both parents almost simultaneously. She read it to her husband and they decided to adopt those children. Looking at the picture in the newspaper, they already imagined how the kids would feel at home with them. But then the dream was broken when they were told they could not adopt children from another region. Since this couple was so ready to adopt again, they made their way to the Kovel Rehabilitation Center, where they were offered three brothers: 9) Roma, 10) Misha, and 11) Oleg. A girl named Vika, who is the boys' aunt, was with them in the center. Olga and Anatoliy adopted the brothers and promised Vika that they would find her a good family too. But a year later, they adopted 12) Vika as well.

Sukach family.

If someone would have told Anatoliy and Olga just a few years ago that they would be parents of 12 children today, they would have simply laughed and said that's impossible ...

Seeing what has done in this family, I am reminded that for God, all things are possible. I have the privilege of seeing this again and again, and I am so happy to share this example with you, my dear friends!

For more information on the New Hope Ukraine Orphan Care Program, see Change the World for One Child)

(from New Hope International, May 2012)