Top Stories in Biology: Year in Review 2019

Absent from the Body

As most of our web audience knows, the Lord saw fit to take home one of his beloved servants, Dr. Tommy Mitchell: a highly requested speaker for the ministry and a dear friend to many of us here at Answers in Genesis, including our founder Ken Ham. His wonderful laugh and lovable personality combined with his in-depth knowledge of the Scriptures, biology, and medicine made him an incredibly popular speaker. He will continue to be sorely and deeply missed, but we look forward to seeing him again. Dr. Mitchell gave his testimony of going from a theistic evolutionist to a committed creationist in a Pure Flix interview that was published just three months before he left us. One of Dr. Mitchell’s last projects for Answers in Genesis before he passed away was his contribution to our new book Glass House, which was published earlier this year. Edited by Ken Ham and Bodie Hodge and written by some of the world’s most qualified creationists, this excellent new resource goes through the most common arguments for evolution and systematically debunks them using empirical science. It also provides a Scriptural outlook on these issues in a simple, easy-to-follow manner that leave no doubt that evolution is a myth.

AiG’s Website: A Major Outreach

Our website continues to serve as a repository for thousands of articles, with the goal of bringing glory to the Creator and to demonstrate his hand in creation. In 2019, our web content had a particular emphasis in botany. This emphasis was driven, in part, by an influx of botany-related news items throughout the year.

On founder and CEO Ken Ham’s blog, he discussed a “gender-fluid” tomato species that was described in Australia and heralded by the media as proof that the normal gender binary of humans is a “fallacy.” Ham pointed out that simply because some plants and even animals can change genders does not mean that the same can be applied to humans. God uniquely created man male and female in the beginning, and since God created, he has the right to the last word.

Forays into botany continued as Ham explained to some confused evolutionary researchers where flowering plants came from: and it was not the primordial soup. Plants were made on the third day of creation about six thousand years ago. They did not take millions of years to evolve.

Plants Are Weirdly Amazing

It turns out that far from being passive receivers, plants are able to communicate with each other and with other organisms in the environment.

While plants did not evolve, some aspects of plant biology are periodically used as evidence for evolution, particularly polyploidy. However, as one of our feedback articles pointed out, polyploidy cannot be evidence for evolution. Newly formed polyploids are simply extra copies of existing information. Nothing new has been added.

Going even further into the botanical world, we discussed how plants communicate. It turns out that far from being passive receivers, plants are able to communicate with each other and with other organisms in the environment. They carry on these communications both above and below ground. Communications between different types of plants mystify evolutionists, who admit that there are no good evolutionary explanations for this beyond a generic “benefit” for survival.

Connecting to the Bible

In 2019, Tim Chaffey and Michael Belknap of the Ark Encounter wrestled with some issues that relate to biblical accounts, explaining how Noah fit all the animals on the ark, the size of the ark, the size of animals, and how many would have been on board. The article demonstrated conclusively that the necessary kinds of animals would have all fit comfortably on the ark.

Answering another intriguing Bible question, AiG web author Troy Lacey examined a recent study which discussed the possibility that snakes once had legs. He explained that the Darwinian explanation for snakes being limbless doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Instead, the far-better explanation comes from God’s Word and the curse God put on snakes.

In Other News

Dr. Gordon Wilson, well known for his documentary The Riot and the Dance, wrote about birds dying off and found that there was some cause for concern. Dr. Stuart Burgess wrote a well-illustrated article on eyes for Answers magazine. Dr. Burgess makes it clear that the evolutionary story of eye development is simply impossible. Another article highlighted the blood of icefish—blood which is well adapted to their environment. Responding to a news article, we explained how multicellularity did not come from unicellularity. We also addressed the issue of classification and cladistics and whether Christians could continue to support the Linnaean system, which has been infiltrated with evolution.

These papers, published in our Answers Research Journal, demonstrate that humanity is, in fact, descended from Adam through Noah.

In genetics, the year was highlighted by Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson publishing two thorough papers on the Human Y chromosomal molecular clock. These papers, published in our Answers Research Journal, demonstrate that humanity is, in fact, descended from Adam through Noah. Dr. Jeanson also published a less-technical article explaining genetic drift and why it actually hampers evolution. We also published an article that discussed tube anemones and why their mitochondrial DNA is troubling to evolutionists.

2020 Vision

2020 looks to be an equally exciting year, and we are already planning some wonderful, stimulating articles for the months ahead. Some of the planned topics are horizontal gene transfer, ORFan genes, immunity, a summary of Dr. Jeanson’s work with Y chromosomes, phylogenetics, and carnivorous plants, among many others. Be sure to check back daily for continued creation content throughout the year and beyond as we seek to fulfill our 2020 vision.