Carnival Cruise line tried to make a bizarre connection between humans having evolved from the sea to taking a cruise with the tag line “back to the sea.” The company featured a 60-second ad during the Super Bowl promoting its cruise line that makes use of a speech given by former President John F. Kennedy to establish the connection between people and the sea.

Kennedy’s speech was delivered in 1962 at Newport, Rhode Island:

“It is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it, we are going back from whence we came.”1

Maybe that’s what JFK’s brother, Ted Kennedy, was trying to do when his car went off a narrow bridge into Poucha Pond and overturned in the water. Kennedy was able to escape from the vehicle, but Mary Jo Kopechne did not. Maybe he was disoriented and tried to re-enter the primordial womb of the sea. He thought he heard the sea calling to him.

Was JFK’s claim that it’s a “biological fact” that humans have “the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean”? First, this is a logical fallacy of the first order. Two things that are related in one way does not mean they are related in other ways. A better explanation for the existence of common traits in life forms is that they had a single designer who used the same creational “stuff” to make our world.

It’s similar to the way humans design, develop, and manufacture automobiles, houses, and computers. Even though there are variations among all the styles and models of automobiles, there are remarkable similarities because of their functional requirements.

Evolutionist Tim Berra tries to compare biological evolution to the “evolution” of the Corvette. “The revolutionary fiberglass Corvette evolved from more mundane automotive ancestors in 1953. . . . The point is that the Corvette evolved through a selection process acting on variations that resulted in a series of transitional forms and an endpoint rather distinct from the starting point. A similar process shapes the evolution of organisms.”

Who or what is doing the “selecting” in the evolution of organisms? Berra’s Corvette analogy is a fallacy of the highest order as is his equivocating on the meaning of “evolution.”2

Second, all manufactured goods required designers, manufacturers, and laborers to put the pieces together. Did the ships that Carnival uses to float millions of people on the oceans evolved from some primordial sea of ship-building material?

It’s a fact that human beings are far more complicated and sophisticated than anything man has designed and manufactured, and yet evolutionists insist that something came from nothing and over vast periods of time and evolved into the marvel that’s the human body and unseen mind.

Third, let’s take a look at the science part of the claim. There is not “a single empirical study in scientific journals that supported the ocean salt/human blood connection.” Dr. Jerry Bergman writes:

“[I]n a specialized computer search of over 15 million scientific articles, using the BIOSIS database accessed through OhioLink on March 15, 2010, I was unable to find a single article that scientifically supported this claim. The literature simply does not provide evidence for the supposition that the salinity level in the oceans gives credence to the abiogenesis theory of life’s origin in the sea.”

Fourth, while the sodium content in our bodies is similar to what’s found in the oceans, as it might be in a Bloody Mary or Margarita, the same cannot be said for potassium, calcium, magnesium, and chlorine.

I suspect that even some evolutionists cringed when they saw the commercial, but as long as it convinced people that abiogenesis is true, what the heck. Anything for the cause.

1. John F. Kennedy, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. Washington, D. C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, page 684. [↩]
2. Tim Berra, Evolution and the Myth of Creationism: A Basic Guide to the Facts in the Evolution Debate (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 118–119. [↩]