Mickey Mouse?

The New York Times yesterday had a long, loving profile of a teacher who explains evolution to evangelical kids disposed to criticize the doctrine. Times reporter Amy Harmon tells how the teacher "started with Mickey Mouse. On the projector, Mr. Campbell placed slides of the cartoon icon: one at his skinny genesis in 1928; one from his 1940 turn as the impish Sorcerer's Apprentice; and another of the rounded, ingratiating charmer of Mouse Club fame."

When Campbell asks whether Mickey had changed, students call out answers: Tail gets shorter, eyes get bigger, he looks cuter. The teacher has made his point: "Mickey evolved," he said. "And Mickey gets cuter because Walt Disney makes more money that way." Journalist Harmon evidently thinks she had made her point: The kids are able to see how things evolve, and later on the teacher will "get to the touchier part, about how the minute changes in organisms that drive biological change arise spontaneously, without direction. And how a struggle for existence among naturally varying individuals has helped to generate every species, living and extinct, on the planet."

Game, set, match? Not exactly, for two reasons. First, Mickey's change is microevolution (change within kinds) rather than macroevolution (change from one kind to another). No one doubts that microevolution occurs: Look at dogs, for example. Darwinists who argue for macroevolution often give microevolution examples to purportedly prove changes. The famous "proof" of moths changing colors as pollution darkened trees was actually a fake, but it could have happened-and that would prove nothing about Darwinism, which postulates that one kind of creature over time and through chance will change into another kind.

Secondly, Mickey's change was not a matter of chance, but the product of intelligent design by Walt Disney, who was not God although some called him so.