Robert M. Zink is Professor, School of Natural Resources and School of Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Curator, Nebraska State Museum; and Author of The Three-Minute Outdoorsman (2014) and The Three-Minute Outdoorsman Returns (2018). He teaches evolution and avian biology.

Over the last few years in my evolution class, I bring up some of the claims made about the biological accuracy of the Noah’s Ark narrative. The students were fascinated to learn that some think that Noah brought dinosaurs on the Ark; naturally, questions began to fly. The first is, inevitably, how could there be two velociraptors on the boat and any other animals left alive? Or, there was a dinosaur that was 6 stories high, how’d that work? When I pointed out that some have claimed that Noah might have brought juveniles, or fed them plants or meal worms, the eye rolling was dizzying.

One of the students made an amazing point that I had missed – if Noah had taken animals from deserts, prairies, tropical rain forests, polar ice caps, etc., when the flood waters receded, were their environments just like before and full of food? It’s hard to imagine flood waters disappearing and the tropical rain forest reappearing intact.

The notion of two-by-two immediately hits anyone who has had a genetics course because they’re aware of the devastating effects of inbreeding. Even though Noah didn’t bring only his wife, but also three sons and their wives, the level of inbreeding would have rivaled that of the Habsburgs and been a crushing genetic blow to the rekindling of humanity.

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A colleague just alerted us to an article, Fearing paper on evolution might get them deported, scientists withdrew it, in the April 10 edition of the Washington Post. According to Mark Johnson, the author of the Post article, the paper “described ways in which evolution unfolds in both living and nonliving systems, a subject relevant to the search for life elsewhere in the universe.”

Michael L. Wong, an astrobiologist and the editor of the paper, confirmed that the paper had been withdrawn because two of the authors who are based in the United States feared retaliation, including possibly deportation. Dr. Wong told the Post,

“I was so looking forward to reading this paper because I think the ideas in it are potentially transformative,” Wong said. “But the fact that people, scientific researchers, are afraid of just engaging in normal scientific discourse, putting their well thought out ideas into the public sphere so that everybody can see them, read them, come to their own conclusions about them and then debate them ― it is so disheartening.”

As I suggested in an earlier article, quoting the Righting America blog, this is where we are, 100 years after the Scopes trial.

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According to a recent blog post by Susan Trollinger and William Trollinger, A Century After Scopes: Much Has Not Changed, and Much Has Changed. I was most interested in their observation that William’s father was a fundamentalist who passionately opposed evolution. But he was also a geologist who searched for oil, believed in an “old earth,” and subscribed to what is known as “day-age theory,” that is, the belief that the “days” in Genesis are not literal, 24-hour days, but rather represent ages. Thus, at the time of the Scopes trial, creationism realistically accepted the vast age of the earth.

Today, thanks primarily to Henry Morris, creationists do not accept an old earth and consequently are forced to deny, for example, geological science. Ultimately, they undermine virtually all of science and, according to Trollinger and Trollinger, promote an alternative education system which is

"not just about getting creationism, the Bible, and white Christian nationalism into the public schools. It is also about funding private schools, including fundamentalist schools. It is about expanding the right-wing subculture. It is about taking dominion over the culture."

This, they say, is where we are 100 years after the Scopes trial.

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Photograph by Ole Lundin.

Photography contest, Honorable Mention.