Thursday, April 07, 2011

The children of Mount Ararat show that darker skin is not due to evolution

Evolutionists like to trumpet the power of natural selection. Often they speak of it accomplishing a major evolutionary advancement, but natural selection doesn’t think or plan or provide. Does this imaginary mechanism actually “do” anything?

Mount Ararat, rising to 17,000 feet in elevation, is home to hardy Kurdish shepherd families. Inhabitants of mountain clans typically are darker than their city cousins. Living a pastoral life, they usually send their young boys out to herd sheep at an elevation of 11,000 feet or more all summer long.

A darker skin shade  provides a natural barrier to radiation and thus enhances survival chances for the mountain folk. Undoubtedly, many of these boys passed away due to skin cancer before reaching reproductive age. Thus the darker-skinned individuals bore more children. Over the generations, darker skin would become a tribal characteristic in the mountain clans.

But this isn’t evolution. It might appear to be a textbook case of natural “selection,” but is it? Did any selection process even operate at all? All key functions, reproduction, and variability are innate to people. Either the individual possessed a darker skin shade that protected him, or he did not. This was a function of genetic variability, built in from creation and not imposed through selection. The skin shade either resulted in the death or the survival of an individual and the preponderance of a particular trait within the group. Natural selection didn’t “do” anything.

The Kurdish people descended from the Medes of the Bible. They have always been rather brown-skinned, and certainly have always been people.

(excerpted from John D. Morris, Selected by Nature or Designed to Fill? Acts & Facts March 2011, Institute for Creation Research)

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