Study Announces Discovery of New Species of Crocodile, But Speciation Is Not Evolution, Says Christian Geneticist

A study published by Zootaxa recently outlined the discovery of a new species of crocodile, estimating that the creature arrived on the scene eight million years ago due to volcanic activity in Central Africa.

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However, Dr. Georgia Purdom with the Kentucky-based Answers in Genesis told Christian News Network that while she agrees that there are two distinct crocodile species as concluded by the researchers, she differs with them on the time frame in which the Mecistops leptorhynchus came to be.

“God’s word gives us the truth about the past and since God is a perfect eyewitness and does not lie (Titus 1:2), we can trust His word,” she said. “Around 6,000 years ago, God created the crocodile kind with inherent genetic diversity. About 4,500 years [ago], there was a global Flood that covered the entire world, but God saved Noah and his family and the many different kinds of animals, including the crocodile kind, on the ark. After the Flood, animals migrated to different parts of the world, including crocodiles going to Africa.”

“Many post-Flood catastrophes occurred that caused volcanic eruptions and the formation of mountains that isolated organisms from each other,” Purdom explained. “Natural selection (and other mechanisms) acting on the created genetic diversity that crocodiles already had led to differences in the populations of crocodiles in West and Central Africa, eventually splitting them into two species.”

She said that the speciation occurred within a relatively short period of time, and not over millions of years as the study would suggest.

“This speciation occurred quickly in only a few thousand years, and we see many examples of rapid speciation occurring today even within human lifetimes,” Purdom outlined. “This is only possible because the genetic diversity is already present. Evolutionary ideas predict that species take millions of years to form because the genetic diversity must be generated by random chance mutations. Instead, we observe that organisms must already have this diversity (created by God just several thousand years ago) because species can form so quickly.”

And while Newsweek recently reported that the human-culpable extinction of various mammals, birds and reptiles appears to be “outpacing evolution,” and that in the past, “[m]illions of years of evolution helped replace lost species with new ones,” Purdom contended that speciation is not evolution.

“Crocodiles are still crocodiles, and they aren’t gaining traits that will eventually result in them being a non-crocodile,” she noted. “Species form and become adapted and specialized for their environment. If that environment changes, then they may not be able to survive and [will consequently] die. Thankfully, God created animals with genetic diversity that often allows new species to form that are adapted to the new environments so that His creation is preserved even in a fallen, sin-cursed world.”