Lie #307. Gen 6:13 "The end of all flesh is come before me" Gen 6:17 "...everything that is in the Earth shall die." Does this not mean all living things, including plants? Do not fish and plants take in oxygen (the breath of life)? Gen 6:19 "And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark..." Doesn't this mean everything? Doesn't every sort mean every species?

Hovind: "Many animals sleep, hibernate, or become very inactive during bad weather."

Lie #308. In the comfort of their own home in winter, yes. Confined in the dark on an unstable boat in rough seas? No! Most animals would die. If you doubt this, find out how many slaves died in similar conditions on a simple trip across the Atlantic lasting a couple of months. These people were treated like animals and were doubtlessly scared, but at least they had a better understanding of their circumstances than any panicked animal would do. They were human, and many of them died under those conditions. Where does Hovind get off imagining that real and petrified animals would do better?

Hovind: "All animals (and people) were vegetarians before and during the Flood according to Gen. 1:20-30 with Gen. 9:3."

Lie #309. Animals were a mixture of herbivorous _and_ carnivorous according to the fossil record of their teeth. Hovind either has to find that fossil layer showing only herbivores, or he has to come up with the science to explain how carnivorous dentition was able to masticate plant material - and while he is at it, explain where all the aquatic species found all the plant material.

Hovind: "The pre-Flood people were probably much smarter and more advanced than people today."

Lie #310. Obviously they were not smart enough to avoid pissing off their god so much that he flooded them. Hovind needs to do the science here. If people back then were smarter, how come the further we look back, the smaller the human's brains were? I know within a certain range, brain size does most definitely correlate with intelligence, but there is a limit to this dictum. There is a consistent record of hominid cranial capacity increasing at a higher rate than body size in the geological record, whether you believe the record covers 6,000 years or 6 million.

Hovind: "The Bible says that the highest mountains were covered by 15 cubits of water. This is half the height of the ark. The ark was safe from scraping bottom at all times."

30 feet of water? Hovind needs some consistency. Were the highest mountains lower than 30 feet or did the water go 30 feet above the highest mountains? The Bible is completely unclear on this, and the consequences are dramatically different in each case..

Hovind: "The continents were not separated until 100-300 years after the Flood (Gen. 10:25). The people and animals had time to migrate anywhere on earth by then."

Lie #311. The evidence shows that the continents have been drifting around for many millions of years, not 4,000 years.

Hovind: "Why would any plant or animal want to reproduce more of it's kind since this would only make more mouths to feed and decrease the chances of survival?"

Lie #312. I shall ignore Hovind's atrocious grammar and ask him who it was who ever said that animals consciously plan their families and their evolution.

Hovind: "How can mutations (recombining of the genetic code) create any new improved varieties?"

Lie #313. This is more like sleight of hand than a lie, but it is so brazen I am calling it. If Hovind has a problem with genetics, ask him how he supposes animals evolved after the flood from a few kinds to literally thousands of varieties seen all over the world with no mutation and no evolution permitted. Ask him how the Peppered moth varieties even arose if there is no improvement from mutation.

Hovind: "Should we continue to use outdated, disproved, questionable, or inconclusive evidences to support the theory of evolution because we don't have a suitable substitute (Piltdown man, recapitulation theory, Archaeopteryx, Lucy, Java Man, Neanderthal Man, etc.)?"

Lie #314. I am pleased that he admits that there is no suitable substitute to evolution, but Hovind includes Piltdown man which was a hoax that was revealed by science, not by religion. Either he is too stupid to know that Piltdown was exposed years ago, or he is deliberately throwing a known lie into the mix.

Next time you see Hovind, ask him about the faked 11'6" 'skeleton' of a man supposedly found in a coal mine. Ask him about the faked "Freiberg skull" that was fashioned out of coal and which Henry Morris, godfather of creationism, tried to pass off as real. Ask him about creationist Carl Baugh's discovery of a fossil human tooth that turned out to be a fish tooth. I can guarantee you if you compare a list of honest scientific mistakes, all of which were exposed by scientists, and deliberate creationist fraud - again, all of which were exposed by scientists), the latter will be the longer by a huge margin.

Hovind finishes off his appendix with a bunch of quotes from various people. As usual, he offers no references so that we can check up on these quotes. Creationists do not like references because they usually quote evolutionists out of context to dishonestly encourage the idea that there is a big fight going on about whether evolution happened. This is a lie. There is debate about details, but no serious biologist has any doubt that evolution is a fact. Fortunately, E.T. Babinski has tracked down many of these quotes and found out the truth about them. His comments can be found on Cretinism or Evilution? A "Devilish" Quotation.

It was with the aid of this material that I compiled my comments below.

Some of Hovind's quotes are wildly inappropriate. One, for example, is a quote (if we can trust Hovind to get it right) by Dr. T. N. Tahmisian, of the American Atomic Energy Commission. So what? Who is this guy to comment on evolution? Sure, anyone can comment, but it doesn't matter a damn if you are an employee of the AEC or some six year old kid - your opinion is of no scientific value if you are speaking from a position of ignorance. If an employee of the AEC told you that your favorite singer or sports star was an incompetent amateur, would you consider that an expert opinion? Tahmisian's comment on evolution is no different.

Hovind attributes this: "Evolution is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless." to Professor Louis Bounoure, supposedly the former president of the Biological Society of 'Strasbourg'. A creationist web site actually gives a reference: The Advocate, March 8, 1984, p. 17

Lie #315. E.T. Babinski actually contacted French authorities. They revealed that Louis Bounoure never served as Director or even a member of the CNRS. He was a professor of biology at the University of Strasbourg. Bounoure was a Christian but did not affirm that Genesis was to be taken to the letter.

The beginning of the quotation, "Evolution is a fairy tale for adults" is not from Bounoure but adapted from Jean Rostand, a member of the Academy of Sciences of the French Academy. Rostand also wrote that "Transformism may be considered as accepted, and no scientist, no philosopher, no longer discusses the fact of evolution." (L'Evolution des Especes [i.e., The Evolution of the Species], Hachette, p. 190).

The end of Bounoure's quotation is from his book, "Determinism and Finality." It runs, "That, by this, evolutionism would appear as a theory without value, is confirmed also pragmatically. A theory must not be required to be true, said Mr. H. Poincare, more or less, it must be required to be useable. Indeed, none of the progress made in biology depends even slightly on a theory, the principles of which are nevertheless filling every year volumes of books, periodicals, and congresses with their discussions and their disagreements."

In other words, Hovind's quote is complete fiction and he is too incompetent and dishonest to correct it or even check up on it.

Hovind quotes Lyall Watson, the same guy who published a book some years ago that claimed plants had feelings. This is where Hovind steals his 'coffin' quote from without attribution: "The remarkable fact is that all the physical evidence we have for human evolution can still be placed, with room to spare, inside a coffin!"

This quote dates back almost 20 years. It is no longer accurate or relevant, and for Hovind to use it is to demonstrate how clueless, dishonest, and out of date he is.

Malcolm Muggeridge is nothing more than a journalist. He is entitled to his opinion, but basically, he is no better informed than the journalist who wrote the article claiming Dewey had defeated Truman in 1948.

Why Hovind quotes Stephen Gould - one of the best-known and foremost proponents of evolution, I have no idea. How he can pretend that this quote: "This notion of species as 'natural kinds' fits splendidly with creationist tenets of pre-Darwinian age...But how could a division of the organic world into discrete entities be justified by an evolutionary theory that proclaimed ceaseless change as the fundamental fact of nature?" supports creationism or denies evolution is a mystery.

Lie #316. Hovind dishonestly misquotes Richard Dawkins - another outstanding supporter of evolutionary theory: "The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less can we believe that it just happened by blind chance. Superficially the obvious alternative to chance is an intelligent Designer." If Hovind had had the decency to finish the quote instead of removing it from its context, you would have gone on to read: "But Charles Darwin showed how it is possible for blind physical forces to mimic the effects of conscious design, and, by operating as a cumulative filter of chance variations, to lead eventual to organized and adaptive complexity..." (In 'The necessity of Darwinism'. New Scientist, vol. 94, 15 April 1982, P. 130.

Another quote:
"And in Man is a three-pound brain which, as far as we know, is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe." Dr. Isaac Asimov

How that quote supports creationism, I have no idea! This is just Asimov's opinion - he offers no criteria by which to gauge his assessment. It is the easiest thing in the world to add to this that the human brain is no more complex than that of the whale, dolphin, or ape. If Hovind is aiming at entropy here, then he has been defeated in previous argument. If he is trying to claim that only an intelligent designer, smarter than his design, could create a brain, all I have to say is, if that is true, then only an intelligent designer smarter than god could have created god's brain.

Hariot's claim quoted by Hovind: "The universe we see when we look out to it's furthest horizons contains a hundred billion galaxies. Each of these galaxies contains another hundred billion stars. The silent embarrassment of modern astrophysics is that we do not know how even a single one of these stars managed to form. There's no lack of ideas, of course; we just can't substantiate them." is not strictly true, either. Suggesting a lack of substantiation is not the same as proving something wrong. The creationist theory here seems to be that if we cannot immediately explain a facet of nature down to the last detail, then the law is that this facet of nature must be the work of god. Well when the creationists to prove that theory and I'll take them seriously.

Hovind quotes Gould: "In fact evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils."

Lie #317. I am counting this because it is dishonest of Hovind to present Gould as supporting the creationist position, especially by quoting him out of context. This quote is familiar to me, but I have been so far unable to find it in my copies of his books, so in response, let me add a few quotes of my own, taken from these books, which more accurately portray Gould's position.

"We have oodles to learn about how evolution happened, but we have adequate proof that living forms are connected by bonds of genealogical descent." (Bully For Brontosaurus, ch 30.)

"One of the phoniest arguments raised for rhetorical effect by "creation scientists" tried to deny scientific status to evolution because its results take so much time to unfold and therefore can't be seen directly." (Eight Little Piggies, ch. 13.)

"Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible god would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce." (The Panda's Thumb, ch. 1.)

"Many central features of our anatomy link us with fetal and juvenile stages of primates: small face, vaulted cranium, and large brain in relation to body size." (Mismeasure of Man, ch. 7.)

"Still, our creationist incubi, who would never let facts spoil a favorite argument, refuse to yield, and continue to assert the absence of all transitional forms by ignoring those that have been found..." (Dinosaur in a Haystack, ch. 28.)

The moral of this story? Never ever trust a creationist quote of Gould again.

If we are to trust this quote of Ronald West of Kansas State University:

"Contrary to what most scientist write, the fossil record does not support the Darwinian theory of evolution because it is this theory (there are several) which we use to interpret the fossil record. By doing so we are guilty of circular reasoning if we then say the fossil record supports this theory."

We finally have something to work with, but given that the singular 'scientist' is used where the plural is clearly required, I suspect Hovind has misquoted this one, also.

West is wrong in his view, however (assuming Hovind is even close to what he said). The Darwinian theory began not with the fossil record, which was very sparse in Darwin's day, but with living things. Once Darwin's theory was developed from observation (thereby proving evolution is a science, and not a religion), the prediction was inevitable that support for evolution would be found in the fossil record. This proved to be the case. There is no circular reasoning here, any more than there is to say that if there was a big bang, then the universe should be expanding, and it is expanding, which means there was a big bang. You can 'circularize' anything you care to in this fashion! How about this one: the Bible is inerrant, therefore when the Bible writers say something is true, it must be so. What's more circular than that?

Hovind quotes Chester A. Arnold, supposedly a Professor of Botany at the University of Michigan: "As yet we have not been able to trace the phylogenetic history of single group of modern plants from it's beginning to the present."

To begin with, there is no Chester Arnold at Umich - I checked. Perhaps there once was, but how reliable is the out of date creationist quote if we cannot find the person who supposedly said it? I couldn't find any Chester A. Arnold in MI! Secondly, so what if we cannot trace from beginning to present? All we have to do is trace a significant portion of the trail - or several portions. Does Arnold's quote deny this? No!

Hovind offers this quote, supposedly from W. E. Swinton of the "British Museum of Natural History in London": "The [revolutionary] origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved."

First of all this is inaccurate - there are several transitional forms extant - although if this quote is ancient, as many creationist quotes are, perhaps it was true when it was made. I was unable to find any mention of a Swinton or a W.E. Swinton in a search of the web site of this establishment, which is called, 'The Natural History Museum' - not "The British Museum of Natural History."

Hovind quotes a Dr. Robert Martin, supposedly a senior research fellow of the Zoological Society of London. I can find several such people in London, but no email address, and no society web page to check the membership. If this Martin exists, he is probably on the faculty of some university, but without that information, I am not going to spend my life searching every educational establishment in the UK to try and track him down.

So all I have is Hovind's word for this quote: "In recent years several authors have written popular books on human origins which were based more on fantasy and subjectivity than on fact and objectivity. At the moment science cannot offer a full answer on the origin of humanity..." which does not deny evolution! It is sad that the lying, cheating, and fundamentally dishonest creationists use the honesty of scientists against them. Here is a guy (if we are to trust Hovind) admitting that science does not know all the answers, yet Hovind quotes him as though it is some sort of indictment against evolution - that if we do not know every tiny detail, the whole edifice crumbles down.

Hovind takes another run at C14 in his quotes, which I shall ignore because it is so patently pathetic. Next he quotes a Dr. Robert Gentry, supposedly a research physicist, again offering no way to track the guy down. However, the quote is a farcical example if offered in support of the creationist position. Here it is: "The Big Bang is presumed to have produced just hydrogen and helium, only 2 of the 92 elements of the earth's crust."

So? What point is Hovind trying to make? No scientist ever said that the big bang produced anything more than this. The heavier elements were produced in supernovae and this has been the position of cosmologists ever since the details were worked out! For Hovind to offer this as some sort of proof of the inadequacy of (his definition of) evolution to explain the elements is merely to demonstrate what a mindless and incompetent moron he is.

Hovind: "How to collect the $10,000...Prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the process of evolution...is the only possible way the observed phenomena could have come into existence. Only empirical evidence is acceptable. Persons wishing to collect the $10,000 may submit their evidence in writing or schedule time for a public presentation. As in any fair court of law, the accuser must also rule out any other possible explanations. To the best of my ability, I will be fair and honest in my evaluation and judgment as the validity of the evidence presented."

Lie #318.

Hovind: "Evolution has been accused of being the only process capable of causing the observed phenomena. As with any just court, the burden of proof rests on the accuser."

Lie #319. Say what? Can you believe this mindless drivel? No - the accuser is the creationist camp in claiming that evolution does not explain our origins. If they disagree with evolution, it is incumbent upon them to disprove it.

Hovind: "Most thinking people will agree: 1. A highly ordered universe exist."

I would say, 'exists'.... Of course, the words, 'highly ordered' are Hovind's - I think his definition is very debatable, especially when you consider it in terms of what might have existed if a god truly had made everything.

Hovind: "2. Man appears to be the most advanced form of life on this planet."

Lie #320. Again his sexism is rife, but the lie is in declaring humanity to be the most advanced form of life. By what definition? It would be quite easily arguable that various other forms of life are more advanced than humans, depending upon your definition of 'advanced'. Each species alive today is at the pinnacle of its evolution. By this definition, we are no more advanced than anything else.

Hovind: "3. No one has ever observed life spontaneously arising from non-living matter."

Lie #321. German scientists, as reported on various web news sites recently have now observed this phenomenon - reproducing molecules arose in a laboratory experiment, proving that the first step on the road to life - what creationists call life from inanimate matter - has been observed.

BBC News Story on the German scientists

Hovind: "4. Matter cannot make itself out of nothing."

Quantum physicists might disagree. Part of quantum physics is that this very thing does apparently occur (at least from the perspective of what turned into our universe). Quantum tunneling and zero-energy ballooning could cause a universe to come into existence from a previous universe. Since passage between the two is not navigable, this, in effect, constitutes a universe arising out of nothing.

In addition - or perhaps in connection - apparently the vacuum of space is not such a vacuum at all, but experiences quantum energy fluctuations all over the place in the absence of both matter and energy. There is a lot we do not know about this universe. What the creationists have done, like the supposed ostrich in denial, is to stick their heads in the dirt and keep chanting "Godidit!" Scientists are braver and more honest than that. Unlike the creationists, scientists have a compulsion to find the truth no matter what it reveals.