biblical creationism-6
I intend to describe data to look for, and predictions (pre-expectations) one would expect to find if Biblical Creationism was correct. Before I do so, I intend to show what would be expected by the main competitor theory so one can easily recognize the differences between the concepts.
With Evolutionary theory, there are two main proposed explanations for the patterns seen in the fossil record. Darwin's Evolution By Natural Selection, and Evolution by Punctuated Equilibrium. Each has weaknesses and strengths. I will not get into that, but will point to what one would expect to see as compared to the past discussion.
Darwinian Evolution By Natural Selection is a process where species keep "improving" over time due to elimination of the weak and imperfect. What we see in the fossil records are "snap shots" of life of a period due to fairly local disasters such as the Mount Saint Helen's Explosion, the Manumission in Indonesia. Each one buries and later fossilizes the life as it was seen at that moment. The changes in life are slow, unacceptable in a dozen human lifetimes. The different species we see in the fossil record are simply the forms they became by the time the next local event happened.
Evolution by Punctuated Equilibrium proposes that the changes seen in the fossil record is caused where ecologies become isolated, possibly under different conditions than before. The isolated ecologies change from what they were. This is caused by a limited genetic diversity that would normally absorb the changes. When they expand back into the rest of their old territory, they have changed enough to not normally breed with each other and later to be considered a new species.
Catastrophic Evolution differs only in the cause of the isolation. Global catastrophic wipe out most of the ecology the survivors lived in. When they expand out, there is usually little else of the old ecology to compete against. The survivors are usually changed only in size and the physical requirements to deal in gravity, and to deal with new available food sources.
With either of these explanations for the fossil record, Changes happen fast, then stabilize and remain so until the next isolation.
By the most popular theories of Evolution, one is not expected to find obvious signs of change in forms for long periods of times.
This then brings us to what we would expect of Biblical Creationism.
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