A new article in Evolution: Education & Outreach (volume 18, 2025) by University of Nebraska biologist Prof. Robert M. Zink reviews the Genesis flood narrative and finds that every biological element collapses under modern evidence.
Zink contrasts the more than 1.7 million described species alive today with the 3,500 “baramins” that creationist writers claim could have boarded the Ark. To fill the gap, he calculates that insects alone would have had to diversify at a pace of roughly two new species every day for the past 4,375 years—an explosive rate absent from both fossil deposits and modern observation.
Genetics raises a second hurdle. Drawing on the well-documented decline of the Habsburg royal line, the paper argues that pairs emerging from the Ark would have faced “catastrophic” in-breeding within a single generation, making long-term survival implausible.
Environmental chemistry poses another problem. If all fresh and salt water had mixed, Zink notes, global salinity would have remained close to that of today’s oceans, a level fatal to freshwater plants and animals and their microscopic food webs.
The study lists a dozen further points—among them the absence of parasites, the logistical impossibility of housing dinosaurs and polar fauna together, and the failure to explain how eight people could maintain thousands of animals—but concludes that the daily-speciation requirement alone “renders the model fatally flawed.”
Zink closes by invoking Hitchens’ razor: claims presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. He urges educators to keep faith narratives and empirical science distinct, writing that supporters of a literal Ark “have failed the burden of proof.”
Assisted by a news-analysis system.