In the Challenging Evolution thread, one poster has been commenting on how much the Theory of Evolution has changed since she studied it in high school, and how much it now resembles the "theory of creationism".
This poster, like many on both sides of the creo-evo debate, is unaware of the historical developments. The Theory of Evolution (TOE) has NOT changed to become more like creationism.
(It has changed, but for different reasons having to do with the discovery of genetics and DNA structure.)
Historically, it is
creationism that has changed to agree more and more with TOE.
Of course, leaders of the creationist movement will never admit this. Keeping their followers in the dark about their own history is a necessary component of creationist strategy. It is the only way they can adopt 99.99% of the TOE and still claim that "evolution does not happen".
Historically we can see how creationism has changed its stance in order to avoid admitting the reality of evolution.
It has done so by changing from scientific terminology to a specialized creationist terminology for the
same observations.
Phase one: creationism before Darwin
As Darwin discovered, the common viewpoint of the time could be called
"fixity of sub-species". Darwin was a pigeon fancier, among other things, and a member of two pigeon breeding clubs. He spends several paragraphs of the first chapter of
Origin of Species describing the differences of different breeds, and then explaining why he personally believes, despite these differences, that they are all descended from one wild species
Columbia livia the common rock-pigeon. He found this opinion was not shared by his fellow breeders, nor by the breeders of other plants and animals:
One circumstance has struck me much; namely, that all the breeders of the various domestic animals and the cultivators of plants, with whom I have ever conversed, or whose treatises I have read, are firmly convinced that the several breeds to which each has attended, are descended from so many aboriginally distinct species. Ask, as I have asked, a celebrated raiser of Hereford cattle, whether his cattle might not have descended from long horns, and he will laugh you to scorn. I have never met a pigeon, or poultry, or duck, or rabbit fancier, who was not fully convinced that each main breed was descended from a distinct species. Van Mons, in his treatise on pears and apples, shows how utterly he disbelieves that the several sorts, for instance a Ribston-pippin or Codlin-apple, could ever have proceeded from the seeds of the same tree.
Emphasis added.
Darwin also noted that this common assumption that each domestic breed originated in a distinct wild species led to some ridiculous conclusions:
The doctrine of the origin of our several domestic races from several aboriginal stocks, has been carried to an absurd extreme by some authors. They believe that every race which breeds true, let the distinctive characters be ever so slight, has had its wild prototype. At this rate there must have existed at least a score of species of wild cattle, as many sheep, and several goats in Europe alone, and several even within Great Britain. One author believes that there formerly existed in Great Britain eleven wild species of sheep peculiar to it!
This notion of fixity of breeds was applied, even by scientists of the day, to the human species as well, with a number of prominent scientists (e.g. Louis Agassiz) taking the position that humans of different races had each been created separately. i.e. Africans, Orientals, Amerindians, and Caucasians at least were separate original "kinds" each owing their origin to a separate creation event.
Phase two: "fixity of species"
Darwin's own work pretty much put an end to the extreme creationism described above. For the next few decades, creationists agreed that several sub-species could have a common ancestor in the originally created wild species. But they still insisted that species themselves did not change and that a species could not change to the point that it became another species (or several species). In short, they insisted that each of Darwin's Galapagos finches was a separate creation, and that as a group, they did not owe their origin to a common ancestor from South America. However, by the early 20th century, it became impossible to deny the observed evidence that species do change and can be ancestors of new species. To save the assertion that evolution does not happen, creationist leaders replaced "fixity of species" with "fixity of kinds".
Phase three "fixity of kinds"
This is still the mainstream position of creationism, and the one I was introduced to as a teenager way back in the 1950s. This position divorces the Genesis term "kind" from the scientific term "species" and agrees that several closely related species can have a common ancestor in an originally created "kind".
A corollary of this position is that humanity is an originally created kind, and not related by descent to any other kind. * (See further note on this below.)
Creationism also began to use the terms
micro-evolution and
macro-evolution proposed in 1927 by the Russian scientist, Iurii Filipchenko, but with a different meaning. Filipchenko simply used the terms to distinguish between evolution within a species and evolution on a larger scale. Creationists, however, changed the notion of scale to a difference of kind and began to claim that
macro-evolution was a different process than micro-evolution.
Micro-evolution, in this perspective, is the observed variation which allows a kind to diversify into several species and sub-species so that it can adapt to various environments. It is "ok" evolution.
But macro-evolution demands a mechanism that allows one kind to become another kind, and that mechanism does not exist, nor is there any evidence of one kind becoming another kind. So macro-evolution, according to this theory, is "not ok" evolution and does not happen.
There is both strength and weakness in this form of creationism. Scientifically, all evolution beyond the species takes place at the point of speciation (and therefore within the "kind"), so by granting that a "kind" is a wider grouping than a species, the actual observed evolution from one species to another becomes allowable in creationism.
On the other hand, this form of creationism has always been plagued by two objections. 1.The first is the definition of "kind". If it is not a species, what is it? Creationists have always resisted attaching it to any recognized scientific category. But the groups that have been suggested as "kinds" range from a single species (
Homo sapiens) to a whole domain of many phyla (bacteria).
2. The second objection is that from a scientific perspective
there is no known mechanism which differentiates micro-evolution from macro-evolution. Scientifically, these are not seen as different processes, but as phases of the same process: within a species and beyond the level of species. Creationists have never been able to demonstrate that such a mechanism, which keeps evolution within the bounds of a kind, exists.
Phase four: changing the vocabulary
Perhaps it became too confusing to discriminate between "good" (micro-) evolution and "bad" (macro-) evolution. In any case, within the last decade I have noted a trend among creationists to drop the term "micro-evolution" and to use the term "evolution" to refer only to what was formerly called "macro-evolution".
What was formerly called "micro-evolution" is now often referred to as "variation" or "adaptation". And I have seen more than one creationist assert that "variation (adaptation) is NOT evolution."
To someone in science, or to someone who knows the history of the conflict between creationism and the theory of evolution, this is an astounding statement.
In effect it says that "Evolution is not evolution."
For a biologist, evolution IS precisely variation in a species from one generation to the next. Such variation is often adaptive and may give rise to new species.
Yet a new generation of creationists is being raised with the notion that variation and evolution are not at all the same thing.
So, it is not science that has made big changes in its terms, but creationism. The changes in creationist terms have been adopted solely in order to avoid admitting that evolution is an observed process and therefore a fact.
It was precisely because the original (and still scientific) definition of species led to the unavoidable conclusion that one species/kind does change over time and does give rise to new species/kinds that creationists abandoned the attempt to identify kinds as species.
And now they are using a new tactic: to describe evolution as "variation" "adaptation", even "speciation" and yet claim that this is not "evolution".
This is how creationism has evolved to agree 99.99% with evolution and still be able to affirm that evolution does not happen.
*Note
That humans are a specially created original "kind" with no relationship to a non-human ancestor is the fundamental heart of creationism. Niles Eldredge once observed that it would appear creationists really don't care about the relationships between non-human species. As far as creationism is concerned, they could all have one common ancestor.
As long as the human species is kept separate. Unfortunately for this promising solution, there are no scientific grounds for exempting the human species from an evolutionary origin among the primates and a relationship to other species of primates. Quite the reverse.
The Evolution of Creationism 
Linear Mode
