This is another example of the reality denial that creationists have to live with. It’s from Ken Ham (ol’ Hambo), the ayatollah of Appalachia, the world’s holiest man who knows more about religion and science than everyone else. The title is Is Your City Driving Evolution? Here are some excerpts, with bold font added by us for emphasis:
Hambo begins with what he regards as a wild claim by evolutionists, and the brackeded stuff is in his post.
If you live in a city, stop and look around — life might be evolving before your eyes! A new study looked at data from 192 separate studies and determined that cities are “pushing some [organisms] to evolve and even spawning new species more quickly and more often than you might think.” (Spoiler alert: this isn’t really evolution!)
We’re grateful to Hambo for the spoiler alert. Then he says:
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard the claim that humans are somehow driving evolution. Articles about lizards “rapidly evolving” and bird beaks being shaped by birdfeeders were in the news recently. A new study found that this “evolution” is occurring in city-dwelling groups as diverse as mammals, plants, birds, and insects and that “there’s actually now an overwhelming surge of evidence just in the last five to 10 years that a myriad of species are evolving in cities.” [Links omitted.]
What does Hambo think of these claims? First he quotes some of the linked articles (we haven’t verified the quotes):
This article defines evolution as
the change in species over generations caused by changes in how common different genes are in the population. Those genes, in turn, can have huge effects on how organisms look, behave, and respond to their environment.
One of the researchers involved with the project defines evolution this way:
Evolution is defined in its simplest form as a change in the frequency of alleles or genes within a population through time.
He goes on to say that, as you track these changes in gene frequency, you have “direct observable evidence for evolution.”
Hambo can’t allow that! He asks:
Is this really observable evidence for evolution? Well, if you use either of those definitions for evolution, creationists agree — “evolution” happens. But what they are doing (and I find secularists often do this, especially in the public schools to brainwash students) is a “bait-and-switch.”
[*Gasp!*] It’s a bait-and-switch! Hambo explains:
They say “look, we see small changes within a species—that’s evolution,” and then they’ll also use the word evolution to describe amoebas eventually turning into man. They use “evolution” to describe natural selection and adaptation (which is observable) and then use evolution for massive changes between kinds (which has never been observed). It’s a bait-and-switch!
Those scientists are really sneaky! Hambo continues:
But natural selection and adaptation are not the same thing as evolution. We observe animals adapting to their environments — and adapting very rapidly within just a few generations. But this adaptation doesn’t add any new information into an organism’s genome. It eliminates or reshuffles existing information — it doesn’t add it.
[*Begin Drool Mode*] Ooooooooooooh! [*End Drool Mode*] Information! Let’s read on:
Evolution requires the addition of massive amounts of brand-new genetic information. To change a single-celled organism into a man, you need to add huge amounts of information to code for arms, legs, hair, eyes, and so on. But there is no known process that creates brand-new genetic information!
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! See Phlogiston, Vitalism, and Information.
And now we come to the end:
This study does nothing to bolster evolutionary ideas. Rather, it further shows that God has created each kind of organism with a remarkable amount of genetic information. This allows kinds to adapt to new and diverse environments (if they couldn’t do this, life would quickly go extinct as conditions change). This study highlights the wisdom of our Creator who designed all life with the genetic information it would need to adapt in a changing world.
Amazing, isn’t it? He sweeps away the visible evidence of small acts of evolution caused by mutations and natural selection — because that’s not evolution — it’s a bait-and-switch! He demand evidence of gigantic changes all at once — which we never see — because it requires a divinely created ark-load of “information.”
Copyright © 2017. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
The Sensuous Curmudgeon 
Evolution requires the addition of massive amounts of brand-new genetic information. To change a single-celled organism into a man, you need to add huge amounts of information to code for arms, legs, hair, eyes, and so on. But there is no known process that creates brand-new genetic information!
No, you don’t actually.
No amount of even direct evidence would ever convince someone as arrogantly and willfully ignorant at the HAMster. By the way, biology does not claim that modern amoebas turned into people (amoeba apparently being the name for all single celled animals for someone as ignorant as Ham). But ironically there is an amoeba with a genome that is about 230 times *larger* than the human genome, so even Ham’s wrongness is wrong.
http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/02_01/Sizing_genomes.shtml
” there is an amoeba with a genome that is about 230 times *larger* than the human genome”
Well, there you have it! Proof that God created the Amoeba, and then it “adapted” into every other kind of animal. That one Amoeba had ALL the DNA information it needed!
But “molecules to man”? Fuggetaboutit.
Zatopan is completely right. To this I add that creationism is toxic. A few weeks ago I met an 18 years old American girl, who defended YEC. It already was impossible to teach her anything new, to make her quit her beloved strawmen and other logical fallacies. Ol’Hambo would be proud.
In Ark-Ham’s reasoning, the first and the last frame of a single-scene film must be virtually the same because the gradual steps in between cannot possibly end up in the last one being irrecognisable from the first. It’s still the same framekind!
Ark Ham. It broods over the stricken landscape, a monument honoring the Old Gods, the ancient deities of the endless oceans, of the deeps lost to light, clefts impossibly profound, where He Who Must Not Be Named still lies, dreaming of things far beyond human nightmare. Do not approach, oh traveller! Let that uncouth squamous shape dwindle in the rear-vision mirror, but look not back, lest you see what may overtake you!
– H P Lovecraft, “The Shadow Between the Stars”. unpublished ms, 1934.
Ham is a huckster selling snake oil and it works because so many people want nothing more from life than to be comforted. Silly and childish.
I can’t figure out whether Ken Ham is just revealing his ignorance, cynically baiting the rubes or both. certainly he knows there’s gold in them thar hicks; his Ark ripoff proves that.
As readers here know, directly observing large evolutionary changes isn’t possible because of the time scale involved, so scientists have to go with the evidence at hand–just as detectives do, and just as historians do, and . . .. But creationists say “Were you there?” The same question could be asked about Biblical creation, but of course if it were they’d answer “But it’s in the Bible!”
There’s no arguing with such reasoning, because it isn’t reasoning.
But they go beyond what is in the Bible. They tell us about the barrier to microevolution, about the burst of microevolution after the Flood, how the Flood carved the Grand Canyon, about the Ice Age, the layering of deposits, etc. all without any Bible basis.
Ken Ham a moron as always does not understand science whatsoever and the Bible is not an science book at all.
hambo says: “This study highlights the wisdom of our Creator who designed all life with the genetic information it would need to adapt in a changing world.”
Then why have so many life forms gone extinct?
Sounds like deism to me.
And I doubt that there is anything about genetics or information or adaptation in the Bible.
It is a little bit interesting:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6363/eaam8327.full
“The studies reviewed here and in Table 1 and table S1 provide ample evidence that fragmentation, founder effects, and human intervention result in greater genetic drift in urban compared with nonurban habitats. This causes a loss of genetic variation within populations and contributes to greater genetic differentiation between urban populations than their nonurban counterparts.”
“Kettlewell’s study of peppered moth was the first to show that urbanization can affect selection on populations (69).” 🙂