In his youth, Marsh desired to become a physician, but lacked the financial means, so he became first a nurse, then a teacher instead. He studied geology at
Emmanuel Missionary College under
George McCready Price, whose protégé he became. While teaching at a
Seventh-day Adventist school in the
Chicago area, Marsh studied advanced biology at the
University of Chicago and in 1935 obtained an M.S. in zoology from
Northwestern University. He joined the faculty of
Union College in
Lincoln, Nebraska, later completing a PhD in botany on plant ecology at the
University of Nebraska in 1940. Marsh was married to dietitian
Alice Garrett Marsh. They had two children, Kendall and Sylvia. In his book
Fundamental Biology, Marsh described himself as a "fundamentalist scientist". He argued that modern human races are degenerate forms of first-created man and warned that the living world is the scene of a cosmic struggle between the
Creator and
Satan. Marsh claimed that Satan is a "master geneticist" and speculated that amalgamation and hybridization are his ways of destroying the original harmony and perfection among living things. Marsh viewed dark
skin color as one of the "abnormalities" engineered in this way. In
Fundamental Biology, Marsh coined the term
baramin for the Genesis "kind". In
Evolution or Special Creation? (1947), Marsh argued for the scientific accuracy of the Bible and concluded: "surely the time is ripe for a return to the fundamentals of true science, the
science of creationism". From the publication of this work onward, Marsh avoided mentioning
Ellen G. White, co-founder of Seventh-day Adventism, as he believed such references would repel non-Adventist readers. Marsh commented that "The Bible knows nothing about organic evolution. It regards the origin of man by special creation as a historical fact... In view of the subjectivity of the evidence upon which a decision on the matter of origins must be made, creationism and evolutionism should be respected as alternate viewpoints". His creationist views have been criticized by biologists for having no scientific basis. For instance,
Theodosius Dobzhansky said that Marsh assumes that all dogs, foxes, and hyenas are members of a single
kind descending from a common ancestor in less than 6000 years, a speed of evolution far faster than any evolutionary biologist could conceive. ==Publications==