Biogeography falsifies the worldwide flood.

I believe the currently observed biogeography is explained by a mix of naturalism and miracles - natural repopulation sure but at the gross level I suspect that God directed the major groups just as he brought them to Noah.Here is a balck and white statement about races of people from the New Testement:Acts 17:26 "From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live."We all tend to believe everything is chance and luck but the Bible makes it very clear that God gave different peoples to different lands. I would be not suprised at all if this is the same with animals.Once animals (and man) settled then, sure I'm a Galapogos man, and naturalism takes over.

^ When Scripture quite clearly indicates a miracle I will not try and construct scientific theories to account for it!On the other hand when Scripture indicates a process I will not pretend that a global event (eg the flood) will not leave evidence!PS - some have estimated that there were 2200 kinds on the ark, mostly below sheep size. I think these may correspond to the Linnean terrestial families. Your hyper-speciation may have primarily been hybridization and then Galapogos type microevoltuion. By completely standard mathematical processes every new state (eg the selected species after the flood) rapidly find a shifted equilibrium in the new environment. The rapid speciation would settle down quickly. Just like a heat transfer rate is high and settles down as the temperature differntial drops. I think this has even been observed in artificial bacterial evoltuion. Stress a bacteria and it will rapidly change or die and then settles down. (And before you get too excited that change is always to an existing gene's existing properties).[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 08-22-2002]

^ We see hybridisation between horses and zebras every day and in my previous insititue we saw hyperspeciation of viruses every day. It's natural. Fascinating but it's not like the ancients were seeing new limbs popping up.You get beak shapes changing over hundreds of years. No offence to the ancients but why are they going to have noticed that? Did European agriculturalists start saying that man evolved from monkeys when they were able to breed cattle with beneficial feautres? No. Only a hand full of scientists followed that up.

Randy I'll admit that biogeography probably falsifies the flood as a completely natural event but I'll leave a tiny bit of room for natural repopulation.