Christian Answers: Rainforest Creationism

Come one, come all, ladies, gentlemen, and children (especially the kiddies) to another Saturday, the day when I tear apart something from the Kid Explorers section of the pile of cyberass that is Christian Answers. This week we're venturing into the tropics for a virtual expedition through the rainforest, where we'll meet the remarkable Jacana bird in this week's article...

"Animals of the Rainforest,"
also known as "What Kind of Pets do Rainforest People Have?"

I love the phrase "rainforest people." It's just so cute and racist. Well, this aricle is one of the stranger ones I've seen yet at Christian Answers. It is in two distinct parts written by two different authors, though only one is named. The first part answers the "Rainforest People Pets" question in a childish first person:

We have so many animals here in the rainforest. We start learning about the animals and birds even when we are babies. Some animals we hunt for food so we don't go hungry, while other animals we use for fun as pets.

The author of this section is unnamed, so the "we" is completely ambiguous. There are lots of different "rainforest people" in lots of different rainforests. Generalizing here is ignorance of the highest degree and it definitely doesn't pass any accurate information to the children reading it. I imagine the first-person perspective was chosen to suck the children in and make them more involved; they're being told all about this by a real rainforest person! Following this is a list of pets that the rainforest people like to have, and then the following quote:

Unfortunately, certain animals have become endangered in the rain forests because of their popularity as pets in other parts of the world.

I'm forced to wonder if this is some sort of subtle anti-environmentalism. "Rainforest species are endangered because people like them as pets, not because the jungle is being systematically destroyed." This is really little more than speculation on my part, but the quote really does seem a strange one.

The next part of the article is subtitled "The Remarkable Feet of the Jacana," and excerpted from a book by one Fred John Meldau entitled Why We Believe in Creation Not Evolution. When the very title of your book can't get its grammar right, I feel I have no reason to believe anything you say. You're probably stupid, your editor is definitely stupid, your publisher is stupid...why would the book be filled with smart things? Besides, the book was published in 1967. a 40-year old book on evolution is hardly useful for modern debates. However, given the constant use of the strawman "Darwinism," it is not at all surprising.

The quote describes a rainforest bird called the jacana. The bird apparently has long, slender feet with long, slender toes. It uses these odd appendages to walk on lily pads, its feet distributing its weight evenly so the lily pad doesn't sink. They ask this hard-to-answer question:

In all seriousness, HOW could a bird with short stubby feet EVER develop the long, slender feet and spreading toes necessary to walk on lily pads? Every time a bird with short stubby feet tried to walk on a lily pad, it would sink, and the poor thing would die of frustration in less than a week - if it did not drown before that!

In all seriousness, are you a fucking retard, Fred John Meldau? I think you are. Die of frustration? Either this was a very poor attempt at humor or you're just stupid, though I'm not overlooking the possibility that both are true. Let me answer your question with the greatest of ease.

First of all, you have no evidence that there was ever a proto-jacana with short, stubby feet. You're generalizing based on the short, stubby feet you see on most birds in your comfortable North American climate. Regardless, your little "drowning bird" scenario is hardly the absurdity you want it to be. A bird without the jacana's adaptation probably would drown when attempting to cross a river. What does that prove? Who knows why they were trying to cross the river? Who cares? At one point, the jacana's ancestors did not have a need to cross a river. For whatever reason, that changed, and crossing the river became an evolutionary imperative. One bird born with a random mutation that allowed it to better cross the river, even if it just barely made it, would be better able to survive and pass its genes onto the next generation. It's just non-random natural selection of birds with a specific trait. Over many generations, the adaptation becomes more refined as birds with better lily-pad-crossing feet. The birds did not have to be "designed" to specifically fit their lily pad environment. Less successful generations of birds died out, and those that could walk on the lily pads survived.

Oh shit, though, they have a rejoinder:

And so the jacana, unintentionally, becomes another witness for God and divine creation, for it is clear to all that the feet off the jacana HAD to be as they are, from the very beginning, in order to do what the jacana does - walk on lily pads. FEET ANY LESS THAN OR ANY DIFFERENT FROM WHAT THE JACANA HAS WOULD NOT WORK AS THE JACANA USES THEM. No theory demanding “gradual change” by chance mutations can account for a highly specialized organ as the feet of the Jacana.

Wow. QED. He told me. Those capitals prove that his argument is true. I wonder what will happen if I countered with "YOU ARE WRONG"? With the truth of both our mutually exclusive arguments confirmed by the use of capital letters, would all logic everywhere implode and permanently change life as we know it?

Seriously, now. I fail to see at all how the feet of the Jacana needed to be exactly as they were for all time. Why is it so hard to understand that a bird can have feet that are less successful for crossing lily pads than the janaca's, but still be able to do it? If I was missing a few fingers, it would certainly make it harder for me to type, but it's not like I just couldn't This is not an all-or-nothing proposition. These bald assertions without any rationality or evidence behind them are really starting to piss me off. A far more acccurate statement would be (caps removed) "Feet any less than or any different from what the jacana has would work less effectively as the jacana uses them." That the jacana is remarkably fit for its environment is an argument for evolution more than anything. A theory based on gradual change can easily account for the bird's feet, as I demonstrated above. And I'm not a biologist. But, thankfully, I'm not an idiot, either.

What struck me the most about this bit on my first read-through was how similar the jacana's specialization is to Darwin's finches. The baker's dozen species of finches on the Galapagos Isles played a large part in dispelling Darwin's faith in top-down divine design, primarily because they were very closely related yet separate species, each finely tuned for its own environment. The jacana is no different. It evolved, like everything on the planet, to best fit into its ecological niche. Pointing out how well an animal fits into its environment will never be proof of goddidit. These people are beginning to wear me out. Their stupidity is of the highest degree.

Maybe I'll take next week off.