Mark Lyons for The New York Times

While John Tierney is on vacation, other science reporters are contributing to TierneyLab.

The most amazing thing about the Creation Museum is that it espouses evolution.



In this week’s Science Times, I wrote about a group of professional paleontologists visiting the Creation Museum, which fits into all of cosmic history into the 6,000 or years of a literal reading of the Bible.

The key event for the young Earth creationist interpretations of geology and biology is the great flood, which the museum places at 2348 B.C. Obviously, Noah’s ark could not fit two of every single land animal. The exhibit notes that the Bible says two of every “kind” of animal, so there weren’t two dogs, two wolves, two dingo dogs, etc., but rather one pair of wolf-like dogs. After the flood, the two wolf-like dogs multiplied and “diversified” into a panoply of species.

The descendants of the ark dog include foxes, states one of the museum signs. This is pretty incredible if you don’t accept the theory of evolution. Dogs (and wolves) have a genome of 78 chromosomes. The red fox has 34 chromosomes. By most any measure, dogs and foxes are different species and yet here in the Creation Museum, it was stated that foxes had diversified from dogs, with major changes in appearance and genetic make-up, in an incredibly short time of less than 4,500 years — far, far faster than an evolutionary biologist would claim.

Usually, creationists make a distinction between “microevolution” — antibiotic resistance among microbes, for instance, which they accept — and “macroevolution” — the appearance of new species, which they dispute. If dog to fox is microevolution, then it seems that hominid to human would also be microevolution.

In reporting the article, I talked with Andrew Snelling, the museum geologist who helped put together the flood exhibit. He said the rapid diversification occurred because of the open ecological niches after the flood and the geographical isolation of small population groups.

His explanation fit with the usual biological explanation of how evolution works.