SEATTLE – An evolution-promoting author has released an illustrated children’s book, titled “Grandmother Fish,” that uses whimsical text and drawings to convince preschoolers that they are the products of evolution and the descendants of animals.
“Grandmother Fish: a child’s first book of Evolution” is a 40-page children’s book written by Jonathan Tweet. The book begins by introducing its readers to a fish from whom all humans supposedly descended.
“This is our Grandmother Fish,” the book’s opening line says. “She lived a long, long, long, long, long time ago.”
“She could wiggle and swim fast,” the next page says. “Can you wiggle?”
Tweet then introduces other important figures in the evolutionary tree—a reptile, a mammal, an ape, and then a primitive human. Other creatures, including sharks, dinosaurs, horses, whales, and elephants, are described as “cousins.” The book closes with a description of evolutionary concepts for parents to explain to their children.
Tweet, who is a Seattle-based game designer and evolution promoter, hopes “Grandmother Fish” will cause young children to accept evolution.
“The book engages a young child’s imagination with sounds and motions that imitate animals, especially our direct ancestors,” he wrote on his website. “The book lets children see for themselves that we are related in form and function to the nonhuman animals that came before us. It’s our story of where we came from, told so simply that a preschooler can follow it.”
Since the book’s recent release, various evolutionists have enthusiastically endorsed it.
“Aren’t kids of this age too little to be taught evolution?” asked NPR’s Barbara King. “My answer is no—not too young.”
“We all know by now that more than 40 percent of Americans say that God created human beings in our present form in the last 10,000 years,” King continued. “…That dismal situation cries out for big efforts in science education and … there’s hard evidence to show that the storybook route can be effective in kids’ mastery of evolutionary concepts.”
P.Z. Myers, an ardent atheist and outspoken evolutionist, praised Tweet’s book as “a great idea” that will make kids believe evolution from an early age.
“Get ’em young,” he wrote on his blog.
However, Dr. Georgia Purdom, a geneticist with Answers in Genesis, described “Grandmother Fish” as “deceptive” and “sad.” Tweet’s book, Purdom wrote in an online review, promotes several flawed arguments.
“The book compares animal behavior to human behavior,” she stated. “…This seduces children into thinking because they can do the same types of things they must be related to the animals.”
“Well, certainly children can wiggle (every parent can attest to this!), but that doesn’t mean humans are related to fish,” she explained. “It’s no secret that humans and animals have some similar behaviors, but as we have reported many, many times before this isn’t because of shared ancestry. Instead, God designed animals to be intelligent, but their intelligence pales in comparison to that of humans who are made in the image of God.”
“Grandmother Fish” claims that evolution unfolded over hundreds of millions of years. But Purdom says, scientifically, that is impossible.
“As a professional geneticist, I can attest to the fact that time is not the key but rather what is needed is a genetic mechanism that adds new and novel information so that organisms can evolve from fish to humans,” she stated. “The problem is that with all the thousands of papers published on mutations, no such mechanism has ever been observed.”
“All the time in the world is useless if there is no genetic mechanism to add what is needed for molecules-to-man evolution,” she said.
Photo: Facebook
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