What does the biblical text actually say about animals changing?
(1) In Genesis 3 he cursed all the animals with a passive (continuing in unbroken continuity) curse. All the animals are to passively change. Previously, he commanded them to reproduce after their kinds. Animals don’t change into other kinds. Change happens to all animals, the serpent more than the others. However, God did not cause the changes since the curse is passive voice. In a similar manner, God cursed the ground with a passive continuing in unbroken continuity curse. He did not create the thorns and thistles, they passively sprang out of the ground because of Adam’s disobedience. All animals change passively for the worse. This is the opposite of evolution since it is degenerative.
(2) God himself continues to change nature as he explains in Job 38 - 40. He is loving to all he made. For example, in Job he talks of the mountain goat. Mountain goats have special adaptations for climbing up almost vertical cliffs. God gave them these since creation because there were no mountains in the early Earth (Genesis 2). God says he feeds the lions and the ravens, carnivores and omnivores. (Job 38). Yet these animals were fruit eaters in the garden phase. Countless genetic and lifestyle changes are needed to change a herbivore into a carnivore. God claims it was He who did these. In Job 38-41, God claims He changes many things in the world of physics and among the animals, since creation. Change that preserves life we should ascribe to God, not to random mutations that degrade all living things. (By the way, carnivores were needed when the world was no longer covered with thick vegetation. Now the herbivore eat the vegetation and the carnivores eat the herbivores and this allows for twice as much life as plants alone could support).
By the way, Job 14 is one of the best places in the Bible to understand how our ancestors lived long ago. Job says man who is born of woman is of few days. A tree can die, its roots parched in the ground. However, at the scent of water it sends up shoots and lives again. But man, when he dies will not rise until the resurrection. Job says I will wait until my change comes. You will call and I will answer. He expects that with his own eyes he will see his redeemer.
Then Job lists what it was like when dinosaurs wallowed in the Jordan river. He uses the dried Mediterranean sea (Hebrew word west) as one of his markers for a lifetime. Indeed, drill cores show that the Med dried repeatedly leaving thick layers of plankton oozes sandwiched between layers of salt and gypsum. (Scientists claim the last Med drying was five million years ago. Biblical Job was a distant descendant of Noah. Another of Job’s lifetime markers was that water wears away stones and washes away the dust of the Earth. Near Job’s home, the Nile river wore a canyon into granite deeper than the Grand Canyon. Evidently the water was rushing down to the mostly evaporated Mediterranean. (A channel at Gibraltar shows how the Med refilled from the young Atlantic). Job also states that water washes away the dust of the Earth. The Nile completely filled up its canyon and covered it with a great delta after the Med filled up again. Job ends his poem on the brevity of life by claiming their faces intensely changed in unbroken continuity before they died (verse 20). If you lived long enough to watch the Mediterranean dry, to watch vast, slow geological changes, you would grow thick Neanderthal brows from vast age. (The skull is the only part of our skeleton that gradually changes as we age.) Neanderthal child skulls look like modern children, clear evidence that Neanderthals grew their features from old age. They were not precursors to humans. Their genetics was probably purer than ours, since they lived for vast geological ages in few days, as Job explained.
Victor