Page 15 - Masters Sample Courses

Biologists have created a taxonomy of organizing living things in groups according to how they think
they have evolved. They are kingdom, phylum (division), order, family, genus, species.
Recently they have added another one called domain which is above kingdom. This system
is based on the work of Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, who built on John Ray’s work.
1
Linnaeus was a Christian who was passionate about science. What he noticed was that God
created living things which were diverse yet had some like characteristics. He believed that
the Creator used similar features in various living things because they worked well. The
similarity of animals and plants meant that one Creator made them all.

When Charles Darwin came along, the classification system that Linnaeus envisioned was hijacked to
imply that similar structures or characteristics inferred a common ancestor or that the animals or plants
had a continuous relationship into the past. In other words, Linnaeus’s vision become the structure of
the classification system where life became a giant, universal family tree of life. While this was not
Linnaean intent, it is what classification has become in the modern world.
2
The classification system today promotes the new dogma: “common design equals common ancestry.”
In other words, if creatures share similar characteristics, then it is presumed that they have a common
ancestor in their past. From today’s classification system, scientists argue that “homologous” (similar)
structures denote evolutionary relationships.

As the theory of evolution became entrenched within the
scientific would of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the
imagination of evolutionists increased to believe that the
development of an animal from egg to birth followed the
evolution of the animal through the eons of time. “Ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny” was the theory written into the
science books of public education. The recapitulation theory,
popularized by Ernst Haeckel in the 1860s, simply means the
development of the embryo from fertilization to gestation or
hatching reenacts the history of the evolution of that species.
For example, a human embryo during development has folds
on the neck which look like gills. They say that once humans
were fish with gills, and then the gills evolved into lungs.

Modern embryologists have forsaken the theory of embryological recapitulation. As they studied the
development of various animals and got beyond the superficial appearance level, they soon discovered
that no higher embryo develops along the same route as is assumed for common-ancestry evolution.
There are just too many exceptions to the theory to have any credence. In fact, many structures
3
develop an order that is the reverse of that assumed by evolution. As modern science has matured,
Haeckel’s recapitulation theory has been abandoned, but can still be found in modern encyclopedias
and in some public science books today as a validation for the evolution theory.

1 https://answersingenesis.org/theory-of-evolution/how-should-christians-view-biological-classification/
2 Ibid.
3 Luther D. Sunderland, Darwin’s Enigma, p. 121.