Picking up again on a series of very short comments on the processes of evolution (which occur throughout the Universe and human society at all levels).

Creationists argue that the Bible states that the first human being was made of clay. However, human beings are NOT made of clay. Clay is composed of tiny grains of minerals, mostly aluminum, silicon and oxygen. There is very little silicon and essentially no aluminum in the human body (aluminum is extremely toxic and we have efficient mechanisms in our digestive tracts to resist absorbing it). And humans are not composed of microscopic grains of rock. Humans are composed of exactly the same chemicals as all other Earthly life - amino acids, nucleic acids, lipids, carbohydrates, etc - arranged in exactly the same patterns (simple repeating molecules polymerized into chains).

Take a handful of clay and put it on the ground. Wait days and weeks. Not much happens. It doesn't go away.

Put a human body on the ground and wait days or weeks. The flesh is consumed by microorganisms and quickly disperses. Not the same stuff at all.

Now, some thinkers have pointed out that clay minerals can act as sites for catalyzing some of the above-mentioned polymerizations. Seeking to preserve the Biblical account, they suggest that such processes may be the basis for God creating living things, as a more technical description of what the Deity was doing given in Genesis. Maybe, but frankly I find that stretching things. Early Prebiotic reactions were doubtless VERY complex, with reactions occurring in open water, in layers of precipitated organic sludge on shallow seabeds, in the sunshine on damp beaches, in the lightning-shocked atmosphere (and precipitating in rain) and on the slopes of hydrothermal vents. In that constant turnover of material over the whole world, with clumps of molecules from all these sources ceaselessly mixed together, with seas increasingly enriched in those combinations of molecules which happened to be more stable than others, life arose almost inevitably.

As an aside, I have read accounts fundamentalists who demanded we believe that men have one less rib than women because Genesis says that man made woman from a rib (bone marrow sample) from Adam. In spite of the fact that ribs can be counted. To that, I would reply that if God molded you out of clay, shouldn't you be covered with giant fingerprints?