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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Genetic Gymnastics

How Creationists Distort DNA to Deny Evolution

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

In the debate over human origins, one would hope that hard genetic evidence might bring clarity. Yet among young-earth creationists, the science of genomics is routinely manipulated to serve a theological agenda. Nowhere is this more apparent than in their confused and inconsistent treatment of genetic differences between species—especially between humans and chimpanzees.

Creationists claim to take the Bible literally, and with it, the idea that all life descends from a limited number of "created kinds" (baramins) a few thousand years ago. But their ad hoc strategies for defining these kinds, and their selective deployment of genetic data, reveal an enterprise driven less by evidence than by ideological necessity.

The Genetic Difference Shell Game

Depending on the method used, the genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees is reported to be anywhere from 1% to 15%. This wide range reflects not deception, as creationists often claim, but different kinds of measurements:

• The famous 1.2% difference refers to single nucleotide substitutions in aligned regions of the genome.
• If you include insertions and deletions (indels), the number climbs to about 4–6%.
• Add in unshared sequences, gene duplications, and structural variants, and the difference rises toward 10–15%.

Rather than explain this complexity, creationists seize on the higher end of the range to assert: "See? Humans and chimps are way too different to be related!"

Yet the irony is devastating: creationists routinely accept larger genetic differences within what they claim is a single “created kind.”

The Great Baramin Double Standard

To preserve the biblical notion of distinct "kinds" on Noah's Ark, creationists must account for the explosive diversification of life in just a few thousand years after the flood. This has led them to lump enormously divergent species into the same baramin. For instance:

By these standards, humans and chimps are genetically closer than zebras and horses, yet only the latter are deemed related. This is a textbook case of special pleading.

Worse, to explain such dramatic variation in such a short time, creationists implicitly endorse rapid evolution—at a rate far exceeding anything proposed by mainstream science. Dogs evolving from a common ancestor into Great Danes and chihuahuas in a few thousand years? That's hyper-evolution. But humans and chimps sharing a common ancestor over 6–7 million years? "Impossible," they say.

The Evolution They Pretend Not to Believe In

Creationists call evolutionary theory implausible, yet smuggle it into their own model when it suits them. Post-Flood animal diversification? Rapid speciation. Changes in morphology, behavior, and ecology? Evolution by another name—just constrained to a “kind.”

They accept natural selection, mutation, and adaptation within baramins, but draw an artificial and undefined line when it comes to cross-baramin change. They fail to define how much genetic difference is too much, or what mechanisms supposedly allow massive change in one case but not in another.

No Objective Definition of “Kind”

Despite decades of trying, creationists have failed to define baramins in any scientifically consistent way. Their categorizations are:

• Morphologically arbitrary
• Genetically inconsistent
• Biologically incoherent

They often rely on the ability of species to hybridize (e.g., horse x donkey), yet ignore that many species can't hybridize and are still obviously related. Worse, humans and chimps share endogenous retroviruses, pseudogenes, and even a fused chromosome (human chromosome 2)—clear molecular evidence of shared ancestry that can't be explained by baraminology.

Degeneration Disguised as Evolution? The Creationist Escape Hatch

To fend off accusations of inconsistency, many young-earth creationists insist that post-Flood diversification is not evolution at all, but a form of degeneration or variation within a biblical “kind.” In their view, all animals alive today are descendants of the original baramin “archetypes” created by God and preserved on the Ark. The changes since then, they claim, are not examples of new complexity but a loss of genetic information over time.

This narrative serves two strategic functions:

• It accepts microevolutionary processes (like natural selection and mutation) to explain the vast variety of life seen today.
• It simultaneously denies macroevolution—the emergence of new kinds or lineages over geological time.

But this logic is fundamentally flawed, both biologically and conceptually.

Mutation and Selection Work the Same Way—Regardless of Scale

There is no sharp biological line between microevolution (changes within a population) and macroevolution (larger-scale divergence between species or genera). The mechanisms are the same: mutation, genetic drift, recombination, and natural selection. Macroevolution is simply microevolution plus time.

When creationists say that wolves diversified into foxes, jackals, and domestic dogs in just a few thousand years, they are describing speciation—the very process they reject when applied to humans and apes.

Claiming that this is “degeneration” is a semantic trick. Many so-called “degenerative” mutations are actually adaptive losses:

• Cavefish lose eyesight to conserve energy.
• Flightless birds lose wing function on predator-free islands.
• Arctic animals reduce pigmentation to match snow.

These are not failures of evolution—they are clear examples of natural selection shaping traits for specific environments. Sometimes complexity is lost because simplicity is more adaptive. Evolution is not a march toward complexity; it is adaptation, full stop.

The Myth of “Loss of Information”

Creationists often invoke vague language about “loss of genetic information,” yet never define what they mean by “information” in a measurable way. Is a wolf genetically “richer” than a chihuahua? What about a zebra vs. a donkey? If they accept that functional traits and entire body plans can change due to mutations, then they are already on the playing field of evolution.

In fact, gene duplication, exon shuffling, and retrotransposon activity can all increase genetic information—processes all observed in nature and documented in genomes.

So even if some post-Flood changes involve loss of function, others demonstrably involve gain, repurposing, or reorganization—in short, evolution.

Baraminic Diversification Is Evolution Wearing a Fig Leaf

When you strip away the theological framing, what creationists are describing post-Flood is this:

• Rapid speciation from a common ancestor,
• Driven by mutation and selection,
• Leading to adaptive radiation across ecological niches.

That's Darwin's finches on steroids. The only difference is that creationists put an artificial ceiling over the process: it can produce all modern horses from a pair on the Ark, but it mysteriously stops at the chimpanzee–human boundary. No explanation is given for why the mechanism should be powerful enough to create zebras from horses in 4,000 years, yet incapable of producing humans and apes from a common ancestor over 7 million years.

The Bottom Line

Calling it “degeneration” doesn't save creationism from its contradictions—it just rebrands evolutionary processes to fit a mythological framework. Whether genes are gained, lost, duplicated, or reshuffled, the mechanisms at play are those of modern evolutionary biology. The only thing degenerating here is the coherence of the creationist model.

Conclusion: A Strategy of Convenience, Not Science

Creationists do not follow the evidence—they massage it to fit a preexisting conclusion. Their entire framework is built on selectively amplifying or ignoring data, depending on whether it threatens or supports their theological model. When pressed, they resort to rhetorical sleights of hand:

• Inflating genomic differences when denying common ancestry.
• Minimizing those same differences when defending baraminic diversification.
• Cherry-picking species for inclusion or exclusion from kinds without a coherent rulebook.

In short, creationist baraminology is not a scientific taxonomy—it's damage control for a collapsing worldview. And the closer we look at the genome, the more obvious our evolutionary kinship becomes—not just with chimps, but with the entire tree of life.