Devoted to the Propagation and Defense of New Testament Christianity
VOLUME 13
August 10, 1961
NUMBER 14, PAGE 3

The Bible And Science

Gordon Wilson, Culver Center, California

As evidence begins collecting to indicate that man is only about ten thousand years old, or less, it becomes necessary for the believer in evolution to make some adjustments in his theory. Such adjustments are being attempted at the present time, and scientific investigations are showing that the old theory of skeletal development is incorrect. So-called links, ape-man skulls, etc., are being thoroughly debunked. Dr. Sherwood L. Washburn, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago had done considerable research concerning the relationship of bone structure to the weight of attached muscles. In one experiment, Washburn removed the jaw muscle from one side of baby rats. When the rats were full grown they were killed and their skulls examined. On the side from which the muscle was removed the skull was smooth while the other side had the usual deep ridges and creases! Later Washburn went to Uganda to collect and study monkeys:

"Washburn spent the hot days dissecting and preparing them. Every significant muscle was meticulously studied and weighed. Some of the skulls were furrowed with a great crease across the forehead; there were bony ridges around the eyes, and an extremely wide flat nose. Others had smooth contours.

" 'If these skulls had been found as fossils,' said Washburn, 'one would have been tempted to call the first a Peking Man monkey and the other a modern type. But as it happens both are of the same species and lived at exactly the same time.' " (Man, Time. & Fossils, by Moore, p. 385)

In the light of these experiments, how could the evolutionist be absolutely certain that the "cave man" or "ape-man" skulls are not from one type of man? Muscular differences would explain the variations in the skeletons. Thus, away go the links between man and animal! And away goes the last hope for the evolutionist, as science once more allies itself with the truth of God's word.

But even if a link could be established between man and an animal ancestor, the most important link of all would still be missing from the chain of evolution. I refer to the link between living and non-living matter. The experiments of Louis Pasteur in the last half of the 19th century permanently established that life comes only from life. Materialistic scientists do not deny the conclusions of Pasteur, but they do claim that there may have been a time, in the remote past, when life could have been developed from non-living substances. It is admitted that the conditions of the earth would have had to been greatly different from the conditions of the present. It is the problem of the biochemist to attempt to duplicate these conditions in which life might have been spontaneously produced. Professor Walter R. Hearn of Iowa State College, Ames, Iowa, is currently working on this problem. Contrary to popular belief, no case of creating life has yet been recorded:

"This does not mean that scientists will necessarily ever be able to 'create life,' although this certainly seems within the range of scientific possibility." (Pamphlet, "The Origin of Life," by Hearn & Hendry, Revision of 1958, p. 19)

The reports we hear about how scientists have succeeded in producing life in a test tube are untrue, and have their basis in a misunderstanding of what biochemists actually have done. Dr. Hearn explains what has been done, and gives his opinion about its meaning:

"And now biochemists have even taken certain viruses apart to yield stable smaller particles which could be put back together to yield the original virus with the same infective properties. This work is certainly a long way from 'creating life,' as some newspaper stories called it, but it is impressive." (Ibid. p. 15)

This is impressive indeed, but the catch is that viruses are not metabolizing systems, therefore cannot be identified as living things. And when scientists succeed in doing the same thing with a living organism it will be time enough to be impressed. But the success of even such an experiment as that would seem to prove, not that life is just a complex arrangement of atoms, but that there is an independent life principle, which man can neither create nor destroy. We must conclude that the link between living and nonliving matter has not been found yet. As a believer in the Bible I shall, in the meantime, continue to insist that such a link never existed.

One example of evolutionary "monkey business" will suffice here to show the extremes of desperation reached by advocates of that false philosophy: In Science Digest of February, 1961, is an article titled "Blood Research Supports Evolution Theory." A Dr. Emile Zuckerkandl tells how an analysis of hemoglobin (red blood pigment) proves that man and the higher apes have a common ancestor. The method is supposed to work on this principle:

"The more related two kinds of animals are on the evolutionary scale, the more alike are the sequences of the amino acids in the various chains of their hemoglobin molecules."

By this rule it is shown that the ape is closely related to man. But if this is true, then the blood of the common ancestor would have to be suitable for both man and the ape. Therefore, the blood of the ape and the man ought to be interchangeable, which it is not. We might expect Zuckerkandl to explain this discrepancy on the grounds that the process of evolution has brought about a great change in the hemoglobin of both ape and man since the days of their common ancestor. However, he blocks his own escape route when he admits:

"The evidence suggest that the hemoglobin of man and the higher apes has changed very slightly since their common ancestor was alive, 10 million to 35 million years ago."

So BOOM! and down goes one more "support" from under the evolution theory. Everywhere we turn we see that the Bible is confirmed by genuine science.