Plants could have survived the Flood (Talk.Origins)

Claim CH542:


 * All existing kinds of plants could have survived Noah's Flood.

Source: Woodmorappe, John, 1996. Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study. Santee, CA: Institute for Creation Research, pp. 153-162.

CreationWiki response:

In wording this claim Talk Origins has reduced an entire chapter to one sentence. In addition Talk Origins is ignoring the effects of post-Flood adaptation indicating that many plants may be more sensitive than their pre-Flood ancestors.

Woodmorappe deals with this by indicating that some seeds have protective covers (like pine cones) before being released from the plant that would keep the seeds from getting soaked. Floating on or in any number of types of floating debris would also protect them.

Furthermore, such sensitivity could be the result of post-Flood adaptation.

Both of these problems are most likely the the result of post-Flood adaptation. It is possible that these seedless plants had ancestors that could have survived being uprooted or reproduced by vegetative propagation. The same could be said for plants whose seed would not survive a full year before germinating. Furthermore, such a limited seed life could have degenerated from a longer seed life that could have survived the Flood.

Some may have gone extinct for just this reason.

This is a straw man argument since by definition those seeds and plants buried too deep would not survive.

Such special requirements are most likely the result of post-Flood adaptation and as such it is not relevant.

Besides the possibility of these being post-Flood adaptations, the Flood would have left wood and other material that could have burned when it dried out.

It can be shown that it would be possible for insects to survive outside the Ark. But even if they were all on the Ark, some insects are prolific and can fly great distances. So some insects could have spread around the world quickly after the Flood, particularly if encouraged to do so by God.

These communities are almost definitely post-Flood adaptations, making this point moot.

This a misrepresentation of Woodmorappe's work. In the areas where "'He notes that 'many' could survive the flood conditions," he is not ignoring those modern varieties that could not, but simply providing a list of traits that would have aided survival.

Woodmorappe spends the last five chapters of the book dealing with post-Flood adaptation, a factor ironically ignored by the evolutionists at Talk Origins. The fact is that those modern varieties that could not have survived the Flood are descended from parents that could and did survive, but have lost some degree of flexibility though adaptation to post-Flood environments.

Besides the fact that Talk Origins is ignoring post-Flood adaptation, they are ignoring the most important piece to the puzzle, God. It is not Noah who would have rebuilt ecologies, but God Himself.

WRONG! Flood geology predicts no such thing, so this is just another straw man argument. Talk Origins is confusing species and kind. The Biblical term kind is broader than species and most often refers to genus, but can be as broad as family. The genera of most species that are limited to one continent are found all over the world. The individual species are post-Flood varieties that have adapted to the habitat they are found in. Even if a particular genus, or even family, is found on only one continent, it means only that that particular kind was unsuccessful any place else.