Sins of the Fathers
by Mike Shaver

The Bible teaches that the sins of the fathers are sometimes visited upon the children. This observation is common in daily experience. For example, the family of an alcoholic suffers; the broken families of adulterers suffer; and sometimes, the willingness to dabble in evolutionist heresy causes children to suffer as well. A case in point: The children of Erasmus Darwin.

Erasmus Darwin is not a household name, but his son Charles Darwin is. It was from Erasmus Darwin that Charles plagiarized many of his ideas (most of his ideas were plagiarized—many from Erasmus and many from creationists of the time such as Edward Blyth) regarding evolution.

Erasmus’ ideas may also be responsible for Charles’ bitterness in life having helped move him away from God. Although Charles won academic notoriety, he didn’t lead a happy life. There is good cause to think Charles suffered from depression (Koster, 1989). “…for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music… The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

Another young mind touched by Erasmus was his nephew (and therefore Charles’ cousin) Sir Francis Galton (1866-1911) who founded the field of “Eugenics.” He combined the evolutionary ideas of his family with the newly emerging insights of genetics and concluded that biological progress could be had by the selective breeding of people. But which people? The good ones, of course! Who is good? That’s what eugenics is all about —deciding who is “evolved” and who isn’t. Conversely, since he thought only the good should reproduce, Galton had disdain for Christian ideas of helping the weak, or showing charity to the poor. Doesn’t he sound like a nice man?

The Galton family admired Erasmus Darwin and, though their background was Quaker, Francis’ father converted to the Anglican Church to facilitate Galton’s education. So much for religious conviction. Francis received a large inheritance, but drifted into depression. After a trip to Africa, he returned with ideas about inferior races —a conclusion supported by Erasmus and cousin Charles. Inspired by evolutionary ideas, he developed a zeal for superior races. “Galton, himself an agnostic, found in eugenics an emotional equivalent for religion.” (Haller, 1984, p. 17, quoted by Bergman, pg. 173) He believed the state should rank people based on their evolutionary status and that the state should encourage the “best” and discourage the “worst” from having children. It isn’t a far leap to the Nazi death camps.

I find no information about Galton being depressed in old age. But his legacy is depressing. Eugenics became the reason for laws in the 1920s intended to restrict the influx of “inferior races” (Southern Europe and China). He is the reason laws in most states forbade interracial marriages at one time.

Although his theories ebbed from popularity with the decline of Nazism, he helped inspire Margaret Sanger, who hoped to eliminate the “lower races” through birth control performed through her organization Planned Parenthood. In part, she is responsible for the deaths of millions of babies.

Is it coincidence that from one family came two prominent theoreticians for future holocausts? Wouldn’t the world have been a better place had Erasmus Darwin just kept his evolutionary ideas to himself?

Bergman, Jerry. Darwin’s Cousin Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) and the Eugenics Movement. Creation Research Society Quarterly, December 2002, p. 169-176.

Koster, John P. The Atheist Syndrome Wolgemuth & Hyatt Publishers, Inc. : Brentwood, TN., 1989.

God Created Wind Pollination
by Stephen B. Austin

Evolutionists often claim that wind pollination is a primitive and inefficient way to propagate plant species, suggesting it wastes pollen. They claim it is the oldest surviving method of pollination, and Karl J. Niklas, an evolutionist specializing in wind pollination, wrote, “perhaps one in 1,000 grains of pollen reaches the female organ of a target plant. Most of the rest collide with a variety of unreceptive objects, such as leaves, branches, telephone poles or human nasal passages.” Even so, Niklas concedes in the sub-title of his article, “Many plants are almost perfectly engineered to capture pollen from the wind. Cones, flower clusters and other structures channel the airflow —and sperm-producing pollen—toward reproductive surfaces.”

It has occurred to this writer if there were no such thing as wind pollination, and insects were needed to pollinate the millions of acres of grasslands and forests throughout the world, such an environment would no doubt be an even more unfriendly one for mankind. Think of the millions and millions, even billions and billions of additional bees and wasps and other insects that would be needed to pollinate the prairie grasses floret by floret. Indeed, it might even require gnats, and those who are acquainted with the notorious “no-see-ums” would groan at that prospect. Also, what incentive could be offered to such pollinators? Grasses produce no nectar to induce them.

Consider how farmers employ crop dusting planes to spread chemicals designed to kill weeds and marauding insects, such as grasshoppers and weevils. This is far more efficient than spreading these chemicals by hand. Today, prairie grasses and coniferous forests generally form large communities, dominated by one or a few species. So, instead of being wasteful, wind pollination is the most efficient system, one that effects pollination more rapidly. Thus, when our benevolent God created the plants on the third day, He foresaw the problem of pollinating such vast monocultures of plants and designed wind pollination of plants as a way around this dilemma.

Without wind pollination of our grasses, most of our food plants, such as corn, wheat, and rice, would disappear, and the world would be faced with mass starvation. And without the wind pollination of those trees that require such pollination, where would we obtain the lumber needed for our homes?

We can easily comprehend that our benevolent and loving Creator, the Lord Jesus Christ, has made provision for us.

Meeuse, Bastiaan & Sean Morris (1984). The Sex Life of Flowers, pp. 111-120. NyC; Facts on File Publications.

Niklas, Karl J. (1987). Aerodynamics of Wind Pollination.

American Journal of Botany. 71(1): pp. 90-95.

The Pancreas: An Important
Organ that Defies Evolution
by David A. Demick, M.D.

The pancreas is a human body organ that is easily overlooked. It lies quietly in a fold of the upper small intestine, and does its job without much fanfare. Ancient anatomists didn’t think it did much of anything. Yet, it is a marvel of chemical engineering, precisely designed to do its important work of good digestion.

The exocrine, or duct-secreting, portion of the pancreas actually does most of the chemical work of food digestion. (There is also an endocrine, or bloodstream-secreting, part of the pancreas, but that’s another story.) Pancreatic exocrine cells manufacture protein catalysts or enzymes, which quickly break down food molecules. This is a formidable chemical job, for the food we eat is a very complex mixture of organic molecules. By way of comparison, just imagine for a moment putting into a car’s gas tank all the different things that are used by the human body for fuel! The car’s engine would be utterly unable to process them, as it can only use a few simple hydrocarbons. Yet, the body is able to process thousands of different kinds of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. How is it able to do this?

Most food molecules are polymers, or giant molecules made from many smaller subunits. For instance, proteins are made from many amino acids, starches and polysaccarides are made from simple sugars, and fats are made up of fatty acids. The enzymes which break down these other proteins are called proteases. Those that break down starches are called amylases, and those breaking down fats are called lipases. Enzymes from each of these three groups are made in the pancreas. These enzymes work on food molecules with surgical precision, breaking them down to their subunits so that they can be efficiently reused to make new biomolecules, or else sufficiently burned to release energy. Enzyme action is a marvel of chemical engineering, and shows every indication of purposeful and intelligent design.

However, there is another engineering problem that must be overcome to make this chemical digestion system operational. Since pancreatic enzymes are made within cells, and cells are made mostly of proteins and fats, what keeps newly made enzymes from destroying the very cells making them? Pancreatic cells solve this problem by also making inhibitors of the enzymes, to keep them from working until needed in the intestine. This problem is highlighted by the fact that, with loss of inhibitors through death or disease, the pancreas breaks down very quickly, as it literally digests itself!1

The chemical problem of evolving, by blind chance, a corrosive and a container that can hold it at the same time is a difficult one for evolutionists. It is astronomically improbable that a series of digestive enzymes would evolve by chance, but it would also be necessary for inhibiting proteins to evolve simultaneously in order for a digestive system within a living organism to work. Considering that not even one functional enzyme has ever been produced by chance, it strains evolutionary faith to the utmost to believe that a whole host of finely counterbalanced functional proteins making up an integrated system could just happen by luck.

Another way the pancreas defies evolution is through its comparative anatomy. The pancreas in chordates occurs in two main forms, compact (one main organ) and diffuse (multiple small organs). Evolutionary theory would lead us to expect a steady progression of anatomic structure through fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. This is not what anatomists have found.2,3 Instead, compact and diffuse forms occur in apparently random fashion in fishes and mammals, while reptiles and amphibians have a compact form. This creates an evolutionary conundrum. Why would a rodent pancreas look more like a fish pancreas than a human pancreas? This is another deep puzzle for evolutionists, but no problem at all for creationists.

To conclude, even the inconspicuous pancreas, as part of the human body, shows many wonderful design features which confound evolutionary explanations of its origin. Thus, like the rest of the created order, it gives glory to its Maker.

1Guyton, Arthus C. Textbook of Medical
Physiology, 8th Ed., W.B. Saunders Co., 1991,
p. 718.

2Cubilla, A. and Fitzgeral, P. Tumors of the
Exocrine Pancreas, 2nd Series, Armed Forces
Institute of Pathology, 1984, p. 2, 42.

3 Patt, D. and Patt, G. Comparative Vertabrate
Histology, Harper and Row, Inc., 1969,
p. 195-197.