Creation vs. Evolution

Tayllor Hanson
Ms. Mott
English 11
8 May 2013
Creation vs. Evolution: One major debate that has been around for many years is “Creation vs. Evolution.” “Creationism is the doctrine that matter and all things were created, substantially as they now exist, by an omnipotent Creator, and not gradually evolved or developed.” “Evolution is the continuous genetic adaptation of organisms or species to the environment by the integrating agencies of selection, hybridization, inbreeding, and mutation.” Charles Darwin published his book “ On the Origin of Species” in 1859 which proclaims the theory of evolution. The controversy of Darwin’s theory comes from the book of Genesis which says that God created the universe in 6 days with man being created on the 6th day. James Usher, an Irish archbishop and scholar, calculated by using information in the Bible that God created the universe in 4004 B.C. However, Science calculates the earth to be 4 ½ to 5 billion years with life appearing approximately 2 ½ billion years ago. In 1974, Donald Johanson discovered something in northeastern Ethiopia that seemed to be the skeleton of an ape. The skeleton was 40 % complete. It consisted of skull fragments, a lower jaw, ribs, an arm bone, a portion of a pelvis, a thighbone, and fragments of shinbones. It was thought to be a female adult about 3.5 million years. Dr. Johanson believed that this ape was very human-like and said that she started evolving into a human. Close to the skeleton, they found footprints that were in the shape of a human foot. Dr. Johanson called this Australopithecus afarensis. Peter Schmid, paleontologist at the Anthropological Institute in Zurich studied Lucy for a long while and here is what he said: “When I started to put the skeleton together, I expected it to look human. Everyone had talked about Lucy as being very modern, very human, so I was surprised by what I saw. I noticed that the ribs were more round in cross-section, more like what you see in apes. Human ribs are flatter in cross section, but the shape of the rib cage itself was the biggest surprise of all. The human rib cage is barrel shaped, and I just couldn’t get Lucy’s ribs to fit this kind of shape, but I could get them to make a conical shaped rib cage, like what you see in apes.”
Anatomist Dr. Charles Oxnard has shown that Lucy’s big toe sticks out as in Chimpanzees, and it was also found that Lucy’s wider sacrum and shallower pelvis gave her a smaller, kidney-shaped birth canal compared to modern females. She did not need a larger one because her newborn infant’s brain would not have been any larger than a chimpanzee infant’s brain. That being sad, why was this fossil not categorized within the chimp family? It has been shown that if Lucy was an ape, the shape of her Pelvis was not structured correctly to give birth, because it was too narrow to accommodate an Australopithecine fetus. Hausler and Schmid noted that Lucy’s pelvis was ridgeless and heart-shaped, meaning “she” was more than likely a “he.”