55 Million years ago is quite a legacy to leave behind, if you’re a horse. Now let me clear up some thing right off the bat, this article is not intended to advocate for an Old Earth model or a Young Earth model of creation. My goal is to analyze from a layman’s perspective (biologically speaking), fossil findings that are claimed to show the evolution from small dog-like horse ancestors to the contemporary version we have today.
The article from the Science Daily provides a succinct view into findings of researchers from John Hopkins Medicine about horse evolution, they are in a group known as Perissodactyla known for their distinct digestion system and both bone and feet/hoof structures. The findings from the Mumbai region in West India are described as a species of animal that, “very little is known of” but could very well be evidence of transition for the Perissodactyla. Much to-do is made of the similarities in the aforementioned structures to that of horses but herein lays a question that seems to never get addressed in most modern textbooks as if assumption triumphs inquire. That question being, could this simply be a horse at its origin? For that to be answered from a Christian Worldview we would only need to understand that Evolution is not a bad word as some might like to portray.
Evolution simply means “change over time,” I could illustrate it this way, my wife is evolving her make up…get it…we see both change and TIME. Now all jokes aside that’s it folks but what begins to make things a little hazy is the details and the different type of evolution that is put forth and not distinguished. The fine researchers at John Hopkins have given us no reason to think that an entirely new kind of animal is coming from this process but only a particular type that is changing over time caused possibly by environmental conditions such as food availability and predation. Let me define some terms that will help us see the forest for the trees. Macro-evolution is what we are taught religiously as brute fact, that all species stem from one common ancestor and the changes are illustrated in offerings such as whales evolved from wolves and dinosaurs evolved into birds. But the findings described in the article do not give us that kind of evidence but what is seen is what we call Micro-evolution which is small changes within a species caused by environmental changes, sickness, habitat, predation, and food supply. The type of changes we would expect from the circumstances described would be exactly what they have found, teeth have changed, feet have adapted to hooves and so on.
Now I am not writing this to discredit science, that is foolish, but to bring clarity to some terms as well as understanding research that is offered to the public. These findings are fascinating and help us do the best we can to understand the history of our planet but in no way undermine the Christian message or the need for an intelligent creator. See, the fact that these animals can change to survive seems more to me the exquisiteness of design with information coding, then chance and time. After all if these are the only changes detected over the process of 55 million years then we may have observed something magnificent but I would not say we have seen any dramatic change from a species into a new animal altogether which is what Neo-Darwinism portrays. If there were an intelligent creator we would expect to see such robust processes moving a species forward. So in the end as a Christian I don’t see anything that overly challenges the scriptures message but actually confirms it.
For some more info on micro and macroevolution check out Reasons To Believes podcast here.
Johns Hopkins Medicine. (2014, November 20). Out of india: Finding the origins of horses, rhinos. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 20, 2014 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141120081752.htm