March of the Penguins

Not long ago, my niece celebrated her 2nd birthday. (She's in that extremely cute phase.) One of the presents she got was a book featuring March of the Penguins, which was the surprise sleeper-hit documentary of emperor penguins in the Antarctic. (My niece loves books. She can't read yet, but she loves turning pages. Keeps her occupied for hours!)

Curious about it, I Netflixed the movie and watched it. It's quite good! But it got me thinking. Penguins don't fit very well into a creationist context, do they? They're so well adapted to the unbelievably harsh polar environment, and yet we know from core-drilling that Antarctica was once a lush rainforest.

Now, creationists explain this away by saying that Antarctica was green and lush before the Fall of Adam, and afterward, with Sin in the world, the region went cold. But does that really work? The answer is no. If Antarctica went suddenly cold, could penguins have become suddenly well adapted to living there at the same time? The idea is absurd. The opposite idea could be that penguins were perfectly designed for cold weather living at the beginning. But that makes no sense either, since nothing "perfectly designed" would include animals freezing and suffering in such harshly cold temperatures.

And this is just the beginning. What about Noah's flood? Did the penguins have to migrate all the way to the Ark and all the way back again? One creationist hypothisis is that continental drift happened suddenly as the flood waters gushed forth from the deep recesses of the Earth. If so, Antarctica would have been lush and green, then suddenly drifted during the Flood event. But that doesn't fit either, because then nothing would have survived on Antarctica, let alone penguins.

There is only one thing which explains the presence of penguins on Antarctica. Slow, creeping continental drift over millions of years. Slowly, the birds on that continent would have become better adapted to cold-weather living, until they could survive the harshest environment known. Slowly, all but the best adapted animals would be wiped out. Survival would be harsh, but would happen. Penguins show that Darwin was right.

So let's hear it for the penguin, the new champion of evolutionary fact. And let's hear it for March of the Penguins. It's success at the box office and DVD sales hails the day when creationism will be a curious footnote in history.

Eric