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This article is from
Creation 17(4):4, December 1994

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Editor’s note: As Creation magazine has been continuously published since 1978, we are publishing some of the articles from the archives for historical interest, such as this. For teaching and sharing purposes, readers are advised to supplement these historic articles with more up-to-date ones available by searching creation.com.

Love affairs and supergerms

Editorial

by Robert Doolan

Love is blind, the old saying goes. Love is kind, the Bible says. Love is unkind, unfaithful, devious, adulterous, and treacherous … but it's supposedly all OK because, according to an article in TIME magazine, evolution has made people that way (TIME Australia, August 15, 1994).

In a deplorable example of where belief in evolution can lead, author Robert Wright has turned wrong into right by mustering 'evolutionary psychology' to explain infidelity, polygamy, dumping your spouse, promiscuity, and lechery. We have simply 'evolved' to be that way, he says.

Wright rounded up research on the behaviour of langur monkeys, the height of gorillas, and the weight of apes' reproductive glands to try to prove his point. He notes that many societies have allowed men more than one wife, and suggests men are prone to spouse-replacement—just look at TV host Johnny Carson (four wives) and tycoon J. Paul Getty (five). (Wright ignores much-wed women—such as actress Elizabeth Taylor who has had more spouses than any of the men he names.)

Tragically, the unfaithfulness which Wright's 'evolutionary psychology' seems to condone brings heartbreak and agonizing emotional distress. Lying to, and cheating on, your partner involves more than just self-centredness and lack of self-control. It wrecks lives, punishes innocent children, produces illegitimate babies, costs millions of dollars in counselling, legal and other fees, and allows sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS to flourish.

The Bible has admirably superior advice. Marriage is to be monogamous, faithful, loving and kind. The children are to be loved, taught right from wrong, disciplined when necessary, and taught to be godly, so they too will eventually raise loving and godly children. If the Bible's injunction of one man for one woman was followed by all, sexually transmitted diseases would be virtually wiped out (you can't spread them if you don't get them).

Continuing its wearisome and predictable promotion of evolution, TIME ran a story a few weeks later about deadly bacteria, viruses and 'supergerms' (September 12, 1994). It told readers that the nine most deadly diseases kill more than 15 million people each year. This 'killer germs' article said older diseases like tuberculosis are 'rapidly evolving into forms that are resistant to antibiotics.' The article specifically challenged 'anti-evolutionists' to note that microbes' resistance to antibiotics 'is a textbook case of Darwin's theory in action.'

A textbook case of Darwin's theory?

The problem with this 'evolving resistance' idea is that it is scientifically wrong. We have pointed this out numerous times in Creation magazine (Vol.11 No.2 and Vol.12 No.3 for instance), and in a recent Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal (Vol.8 Part 1, pp. 5–­6).

Most such 'textbook' cases involve an antibiotic's killing all but a few microbes. It doesn't kill those few because they already have resistance to the antibiotic—so when they breed, the next generation of microbes inherits this resistance, and a whole population of resistant microbes arises. A new drug is needed to knock these out. A few may again be resistant, so the cycle continues. No evolution has taken place, because the microbes were resistant before they encountered the antibiotic.

The occasional case in which a mutation causes such resistance to arise does not prove microbe-to-man evolution. Mutations do not give a microbe more information to build itself into something else. Such accidental copying mistakes tend to cause defects, which can occasionally cause resistance. For example, a bacterium with a defective cell wall pump may not be able to absorb a poison easily. Past-President of the French Academy of Sciences, Pierre-Paul Grassé, has pointed out that 'mutations do not coincide with evolution.'

Microbes can reproduce so quickly that the equivalent of millions of years of evolution should have been observed in, say, Staphylococcus and Escherichia coli bacteria—yet they are the same today as when first described by Robert Koch last century. No evolution has taken place. In fact, some species of microbes are recognizable as microfossils from rocks claimed to be billions of years old. Evolutionists can't have it both ways—claiming rapid evolution where resistance to antibiotic drugs is concerned, yet remaining unchanged over vast time-spans where fossils are concerned.

Huge amounts of money are being squandered on useless evolutionary research, such as studying apes' reproductive organs and using a leap of logic to claim, erroneously, that this somehow means humans are programmed to be unfaithful. If this money were used on basic medical research, minus the evolutionary assumptions, perhaps science would be further advanced in treating those major killer diseases TIME listed.