Did you watch Planet Earth 2? (I loved the racer snake segment)

Those animals; did God make them like that, or do you think they evolved naturally?

Because ‘Answers in Genesis’ believe neither. Ken Ham & AIG have pivoted in recent years and now teach post-flood super-speed evolution.

AIG presents a ‘biblical evolution’ model that compresses massive amounts of evolution into a small amount of time – something that is neither supported by evidence gathered from the natural world or the Bible.

Ken Ham’s Biblical Evolution? I Have a Book That Says Otherwise

The AIG books I grew up with in the late ’90s and early 2000s claimed that the animals we see today were basically the same species Noah took on the ark. Fast forward to today, and the narrative has shifted significantly.

For example, in the 2000s AIG estimates 8,000 to 20,000 animal pairs on the Ark. According to the current Ark Encounter website, the “worst-case scenario” is now 1,500 pairs. This implies that each pair would need to evolve into roughly five times more modern offspring than previously claimed. It seems there’s been a dramatic leap in the hypothesized speed and scale of evolution that AIG requires to make this work.

Lets compare that to selective breeding in an animal with a short generation time: After 40 generations of intense selective breeding, foxes showed only minor adaptations. Now, consider elephants: with a generation time of about 25 years, 40 generations would take roughly 1,000 years. Elephants also have long gestation periods and typically give birth to just one calf at a time. Yet, according to AIG, a single progenitor “elephant kind” on the Ark would have had to evolve into African and Asian elephants, mastodons, woolly mammoths, and around 500 other extinct species. These animals would have had to spread across Africa, India, America, and Russia, rapidly increase in population, and then—for most species—go extinct.

How long did they have to accomplish that? Well AiG allows just 250-350 years between the Ark and the extinction of Mammoths. And, Indian elephants are depicted on Indus River Valley seals dated 2500–1900 BCE – only 450 years max after the flood.

Perhaps the reformed church needs to re-examine its endorsement of these institutions.

Dr. Joel Duff is Professor of Biology at University of Akron. He holds a M.S. and Ph.D in Botany from the University of Tennessee, and a B.S. in Biology from Calvin College. Joel comes from a line of Orthodox Presbyterian Church pastors and is himself a practicing Christian and an elder in a reformed church. He is an active writer and speaker exploring the intersection of science and Christian faith.