Posted by Brian Mariani on Mar 6, 2018 in Creation Nuggets | 4 comments

Recently, we were contacted asking about how we would respond to this documentary “Amazing Virus Evolution” from the National Geographic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wy6EmhhR7I).

Though there are many examples given that appear to support Evolution, we are not at all convinced. Here are some of our notes regarding the video. You may want to save these notes in case someone wants to challenge you with this topic claiming that viruses are evidence of evolution. We hope this helps you!

• This video is filled with so many assumptions and claims. But my question is: is there enough evidence to back up their assumptions and claims?
• This is ultimately the crucial question: how did genetic information arise? This is a fundamental-foundational problem before we ever even get to the topic of viruses.
  • This article shows from the laws of chemistry, how there are huge problems with trying to get chemicals to build up to create the complex life. www.creation.com/origin-of-life
  • At one point in the Nat Geo documentary, the scientists suggest that possibly viruses originated as some of the first evolved things. But viruses are protein shells with genetic information (RNA) inside. This means that they do not have the ability to duplicate themselves on their own – though the scientists suggest maybe this one could – that sounds like just a loose guess. We should ask “what’s the evidence?” Here are a couple of quotes from the following article:
    • “A virus is very different—it consists of a protein ‘shell’ or coat, containing a small amount of this ‘blueprint’ material (RNA or DNA). Note that it has no ‘factory’ of its own—it cannot move itself, it has no power source, and it has no machinery with which to duplicate itself.”
    • “Without a fully functioning, living cell, the virus cannot reproduce (or should we say, arrange its own reproduction). So, whether you are an evolutionist or a creationist, a virus will not appear before a cellular creature is on the scene. Viruses do not really fit anywhere on the evolutionary ‘tree of life’, since they are obviously not the ancestors of one-celled creatures.” https://creation.com/origin-of-viruses
• Life is still too complex and this is evidence of the design of a Creator.
• Thinking from the Creationist perspective, I wonder if God had designed the vole populations with the genetics for monogamous relationships, but that mutations (which show the genetics are getting worse) may have caused a loss in that genetic information. Possibly God’s design in the beginning was that viruses would be a way of preserving genetic information that can get lost. Therefore that genetic information can be reintroduced. (see especially the more technical article by Answers in Genesis). https://answersingenesis.org/biology/microbiology/were-retroviruses-created-good/
  • Explained again in this article “It is possible that God made viruses as tiny robots to carry life-enhancing genetic information from one cell to another.⁵ At some point after the Fall, the once-balanced cell-virus interactions would have begun to falter and fail.” http://www.icr.org/article/were-viruses-created-or-evolved/

• Ultimately, too, evolutionists have a huge problem with Genetic Entropy. The scientists in the Nat Geo video talk about how viruses allowed humans to evolve from lower beings, but mutations are building up (called Genetic Load) to continually make the DNA worse and worse over time. Many scientists question something to the effect of “if the human species has been around for 200,000 years or more, how come we have not yet gone extinct due to the building up of harmful mutations?” That is a serious problem that the evolutionist cannot answer well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY98io7JH-c

Photo Credit: By biology pop – biology pop, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58318330