15 ways to refute materialistic bigotry:
A point by point response to Scientific American
by Jonathan Sarfati
Response to ‘15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense’ by John Rennie (Editor),
Scientific American 287 (1):78–85, July 2002; Feature article on Scientific American Web site,
17 June 2002.
20 June 2002
Introduction
Scientific American’s foundation
Scientific American is a semi-popular journal which publishes attractively
illustrated and fairly detailed, but not overly technical, articles, mostly on science.
It is not a peer-reviewed journal like Nature or
Journal of Creation, but many of its articles are very useful.
Scientific American was founded by the artist and inventor Rufus Porter
(1792–1884), who thought that science glorified the creator God. In the very
first issue, his editorial stated:
‘We shall advocate the pure Christian religion, without favouring any particular
sect …’
And he wrote an article ‘ Rational Religion’, where he wrote:
‘First, then, let us, as rational creatures, be ever ready to acknowledge
God as our Creator and daily Preserver; and that we are each of us individually
dependant on his special care and good will towards us, in supporting the wonderful
action of nature which constitutes our existence; and in preserving us from the
casualties, to which our complicated and delicate structure is liable. Let us also,
knowing our entire dependence on Divine Benevolence, as rational creatures, do ourselves
the honor to express personally and frequently, our thanks to him for his goodness;
and to present our petitions to Him for the favours which we constantly require.
This course is rational, even without the aid of revelation: but being specially
invited to this course, by the divine word, and assured of the readiness of our
Creator to answer our prayers and recognize our thanks, it is truly surprising that
any rational being, who has ever read the inspired writings should willingly forego
this privilege, or should be ashamed to be seen engaged in this rational employment,
or to have it known that he practices it.’
Since Porter, Scientific American
has had only six editors in chief, and the most recent two have diametrically
opposed their founder’s original vision. Now, as will be explained further
in this article, Scientific American works to push an atheistic world view
in the guise of ‘science’, and a number of corollaries such as a radical
pro-abortion,
1 human cloning
2 and population control
agenda. 3
The previous editor, Jonathan Piel, refused to hire Forrest Mims III when Mims admitted
he was a creationist, and when Piel asked Mims whether he was pro-life, Mims replied,
‘Of course—aren’t you glad your mother was?’ Piel admitted
that Mims’ work was ‘fabulous’, ‘great’ and ‘first
rate’, and ‘should be published somewhere’.
4 Scientific American
subsequently published an article about his revolutionary atmospheric haze detector
(see Revolutionary Atmospheric Invention by Victim of Anti-creationist
Discrimination).
Current editor
Now the current editor since late 1994, one John Rennie (b. 1959), has also fervently
promoted the anti-God evolution agenda. Like many anti-creationist propagandists,
he often launches into attacks with a poor understanding, and he has only a bachelor’s
degree in science, so is far less qualified than the leading creationist scientists
at CMI and ICR. Under his editorship, an article was published in the March 2002
issue, vociferously attacking creationists and misrepresenting the Kansas curriculum
controversy. 5
It illustrated the vitriol that can result when there is any attempt to mildly
de-emphasize the treating of evolution from goo-to-you-via-the-zoo as fact—see
What really happened in Kansas?
Earlier, at the height of this controversy, Rennie himself urged scientists on university
admissions committees to adopt bully-boy tactics in notifying the Kansas governor
and the state board of education that ‘in light of the newly lowered education
standards in Kansas, the qualifications of any students applying from that state
in the future will have to be considered very carefully.’
6 In logic, this is known as
the fallacy of Argumentum ad baculum , i.e. ‘Agree with me or else
unpleasant consequences will follow!’ Rennie is far from the only evolutionist
to resort to this.
Now Rennie has become more actively involved in the fray, taking on the role of
the valiant B.S. (B.Sc.) scientist trying to stem the creationist tide. He wrote
the object of this rebuttal, namely ‘15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense’,
subtitled, ‘Opponents of evolution want to make a place for creationism by
tearing down real science, but their arguments don’t hold up’. Even
the magazine’s cover had splashed on the top, ‘15 ways to expose creationist
nonsense’.
But as will be shown, Rennie has only the vaguest ideas about real creationist arguments.
Many of the ‘creationist arguments’ are ‘straw man’ arguments,
which CMI has also rejected. But Rennie’s arguments for evolution are also
nothing new, and have been mostly answered on our Web site. We have also pointed
out many of the logical fallacies common among evolutionists, including inconsistent
definitions of the word evolution— equivocation,
and failing to differentiate between origins
and operational science. We have also pointed out that evolutionary belief
is largely a deduction from materialistic axioms,
which as we will show, Rennie actually agrees with, and he lamely tries to defend
this bias.
Why publish on our website?
What follows is a point-by-point response to Rennie’s ‘arguments’.
We are posting this on the Web site, since we know it would be a waste of time trying
to submit a letter to the editor. Not only has Scientific American shown
that it is willing to practise religious discrimination in its hiring policies with
Forrest Mims, but they also refused to allow Phillip Johnson to defend himself against
a vindictive and petty review by the late atheistic Marxist,
Stephen Jay Gould in the July 1992 issue. So Johnson published Response to Gould on the Web site of Access Research Network
, which promotes Intelligent Design. It’s far more likely that they’d
have the attitude of the editor of Australasian Science, one Guy Nolch
(who, like Rennie, has limited scientific qualifications), who refused to print
a response by CMI to a defamatory and scientifically incompetent attack on creationists
by a proven promoter of fallacies and fabrications—see
More nonsense from Professor Plimer. Rennie’s article is
indented and in coloured text,
while my response is non-indented and in black text. We follow Rennie’s section
headings.
Rennie’s introductory comments
When Charles Darwin introduced the theory of evolution through natural selection
143 years ago, the scientists of the day argued over it fiercely, …
This is true. Darwin’s main opposition came from the scientists (see
Holy War? Who really opposed Darwin?) and much of his support came from
compromising clergymen such as Rev. Charles Kingsley, who applied it to humans to
assert that the African-Americans and Australian Aborigines had not evolved enough
to understand the Gospel (see Darwin’s quisling).
… but the massing evidence from paleontology,
genetics, zoology, molecular biology and other fields gradually established evolution’s
truth beyond reasonable doubt.
This is a debate tactic known as ‘elephant hurling’. This is where the
critic throws summary arguments about complex issues to give the impression of weighty
evidence, but with an unstated presumption that a large complex of underlying ideas
is true, and failing to consider opposing data, usually because they have uncritically
accepted the arguments from their own side. But we should challenge elephant-hurlers
to offer specifics and challenge the underlying assumptions .
Today that battle has been won everywhere—except in the public imagination.
To be honest, I think Rennie underestimates the hold of evolution on the ‘public
imagination’. While many Americans say they believe in creation and reject
evolution, sadly many seem to be evolutionized in their thinking. This is shown
by the widespread idea that their personal faith should not influence their public
life. It’s unfortunate to hear professing Christians who say that they won’t
let their faith influence their public policy, e.g. ‘I’m personally
opposed to abortion, but I won’t enforce my faith on the pregnant woman who
must be given the right to choose’, although the unborn baby has no ‘choice’.
However, atheists are very happy to let their own faith influence their public policy
and enforce their views on people—we rarely hear: ‘I’m personally
in favor of abortion, but I won’t enforce my view on the innocent unborn baby’.
For a refutation of the related fallacy that ‘you cannot/should not legislate
morality’, see Dispelling false notions of the First Amendment: The Falsity, Futility,
and Folly Of Separating Morality From Law. See also
The Separation of Church and Faith and Stephen
Jay Gould and NOMA.
That is why CMI’s primary focus is not on refuting evolution per se
, but rather building a consistent Biblical Christian world view. Refuting evolution
(and millions of years) is a corollary. See Design
is not enough! and CMI's views on the Intelligent
Design Movement.
Embarrassingly, in the 21 st century, in the most scientifically advanced
nation the world has ever known, creationists can still persuade politicians, judges
and ordinary citizens that evolution is a flawed, poorly supported fantasy. They
lobby for creationist ideas such as ‘intelligent design’ to be taught
as alternatives to evolution in science classrooms.
Perhaps the USA is ‘the most scientifically advanced nation the world has
ever known’ precisely because it has been the most Bible-based society the
world has ever known! And that includes belief in the Biblical account of Creation,
the Fall and the Flood. See The Creationist
Basis for Modern Science.
Note, CMI is not a lobby group, and we oppose legislation for compulsion
of creation teaching. For one thing, why would we want an atheist to be forced to
teach creation and, thus, give a distorted view? But we would like legal protection
for teachers who present scientific arguments against the sacred cow of evolution.
As this article goes to press, the Ohio Board of Education is debating whether to
mandate such a change. Some antievolutionists, such as Philip E. Johnson, a law
professor at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Darwin on Trial,
admit that they intend for intelligent-design theory to serve as a ‘wedge’
for reopening science classrooms to discussions of God.
By this ‘reasoning’, he would have to blast Rufus Porter for founding
Scientific American for a similar purpose!
Besieged teachers and others may increasingly find themselves on the spot to defend
evolution and refute creationism. The arguments that creationists use are typically
specious and based on misunderstandings of (or outright lies about) evolution, but
the number and diversity of the objections can put even well-informed people at
a disadvantage.
Perhaps the ‘well-informed’ find the creationist arguments convincing
because they recognize the validity of them? And real scientists, whom Rennie would
call ‘well-informed’, actually have no use for evolution in their work!
See How important is evolution to science,
really?, Is evolution really necessary for medical
advances? and comments by National Academy of
Sciences scientist Dr Philip Skell.
To help with answering them, the following list rebuts some of the most common ‘scientific’
arguments raised against evolution. It also directs readers to further sources for
information and explains why creation science has no place in the classroom.
Cool! We’d love Bible-believing Christians to be confronted with the weak
arguments from Rennie’s article—demonstrating the fallacies will boost
their confidence in witnessing! And it could help some non-Christians to see the
fallacy of materialist thinking—especially as these arguments from the editor
of a major science magazine are presumably the best they’ve got.
1. Evolution is only a theory. It is not a fact or a scientific law.
CMI has also advised against using this, in
this section of Arguments we think creationists should NOT use, because
a ‘theory’ in science means something with a reasonable amount of support,
and gives evolution more credence than it deserves.
All sciences frequently rely on indirect evidence. Physicists cannot see subatomic
particles directly, for instance, so they verify their existence by watching for
telltale tracks that the particles leave in cloud chambers. The absence of direct
observation does not make physicists’ conclusions less certain.
This misses the point—these cloud chamber experiments are still observations
in the present and are repeatable . A dinosaur turning into
a bird 150 Ma (million years ago) is neither observable in real time, directly or
indirectly, nor repeatable.
2. Natural selection is based on circular
reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest.
Here is another argument we have previously advised creationists not to use, in
this section of Arguments we think creationists
should NOT use. Why should we argue this, since tautology is quite common
in science, and natural selection is an important part of the Creation/Fall framework?—See
Q&A: Natural selection.
3. Evolution is unscientific, because
it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed
and can never be re-created.
This blanket dismissal of evolution ignores important distinctions that divide the
field into at least two broad areas: microevolution and macroevolution.
Look who’s talking about ‘ignoring important distinctions’! It’s
evolutionary propagandists who generally conflate them (see this discussed in What is evolution?). Many define evolution
as ‘change in gene frequency with time’ or ‘descent with modification’,
or other such ‘micro evolution’ words, and then go on to use
Darwin’s finches and industrial melanism
in the peppered moths (faked photos and all) as
clinching proof of ‘evolution’ in the ‘macro’ sense
and disproof of creationism! An example is the atheist
Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the pretentiously named
National Center for Science Education, the leading US organisation devoted
entirely to pushing evolutionary indoctrination. She approvingly cited a teacher
whose pupils said after her ‘definition’, ‘Of course species change
with time! You mean that’s evolution?!’
7
Having said that, CMI has advised people not to use the micro-/macro-evolution distinction
in this section of Arguments we think
creationists should NOT use, because the main issue is not the size of the change
but the direction. All observed change involves sorting and loss of genetic
information, while goo-to-you evolution requires an increase in information.
Microevolution looks at changes within species over time—changes that may
be preludes to speciation, the origin of new species. Macroevolution studies how
taxonomic groups above the level of species change. Its evidence draws frequently
from the fossil record and DNA comparisons to reconstruct how various organisms
may be related.
But ‘evidence’ doesn’t speak for itself; it must be interpreted
. As Rennie proclaims at the end, this evidence is interpreted within a materialistic
framework. Then materialists turn around and proclaim evolution as a major evidence
for materialism, which was responsible for it in the first place! Creationists interpret
the same evidence but by a Biblical framework—see
Presuppositionalism vs evidentialism. How creationists treat the fossil
record is explained in the articles in the book and Q&A page (right).
DNA comparisons are just a subset of the
homology argument, which again also makes sense in a Biblical framework.
A common designer is another interpretation that makes sense of the same
data. An architect commonly uses the same building material for different buildings,
and a car maker commonly uses the same parts in different cars. So we shouldn’t
be surprised if a Designer for life used the same biochemistry and structures in
many different creatures. Conversely, if all living organisms were totally different,
this might look like there were many designers instead of one. See
Common structures = common ancestry?
Since DNA codes for structures and biochemical molecules, we should expect the most
similar creatures to have the most similar DNA. Apes and humans are both mammals,
with similar shapes, so have similar DNA. We should expect humans to have more DNA
similarities with another mammal like a pig than with a reptile like a rattlesnake.
And this is so. Humans are very different from yeast but they have some biochemistry
in common, so we should expect human DNA to differ more from yeast DNA than from
ape DNA.
So the general pattern of similarities need not be explained by common-ancestry
(evolution). Furthermore, there are some puzzling anomalies for an evolutionary
explanation—similarities between organisms that evolutionists don’t
believe are closely related. For example, hemoglobin, the complex molecule that
carries oxygen in blood and results in its red color, is found in vertebrates. But
it is also found in some earthworms, starfish, crustaceans, molluscs and
even in some bacteria. The α-hemoglobin of crocodiles has more in common with
that of chickens (17.5 %) than that of vipers (5.6 %), their fellow reptiles. 8 An
antigen receptor protein has the same unusual single chain structure in camels and
nurse sharks, but this cannot be explained by a common ancestor of sharks and camels.
9 And
there are many other examples of similarities that cannot be due to evolution.
These days even most creationists acknowledge that microevolution has been upheld
by tests in the laboratory (as in studies of cells, plants and fruit flies) and
in the field (as in Grant’s studies of evolving beak shapes among Galápagos
finches).
And why should creationists deny such things? All are part of a created and fallen
world, but have never been observed to add new genetic information. And we have
shown that the sorts of changes which are observed are the wrong type to drive the
evolutionary story. See The Evolution Train’s A-coming.
Natural selection and other mechanisms—such as chromosomal changes, symbiosis
and hybridization—can drive profound changes in populations over time.
Again, do these profound changes increase information ? Populations are
seen losing information, and adapting within the constraints of the information
they already have; goo-to-you evolution requires something quite different, the
progressive addition of massive amounts of genetic information that is novel
to not only that population, but to the biosphere.
The historical nature of macroevolutionary study
involves inference from fossils and DNA rather than direct observation. Yet in the
historical sciences (which include astronomy, geology and archaeology, as well as
evolutionary biology), hypotheses can still be tested by checking whether they accord
with physical evidence and whether they lead to verifiable predictions about future
discoveries. For instance, evolution implies that between the earliest-known ancestors
of humans (roughly five million years old) and the appearance of anatomically modern
humans (about 100,000 years ago), one should find a succession of hominid creatures
with features progressively less apelike and more modern, which is indeed what the
fossil record shows.
What the fossil record shows in reality, even granted the evolutionary
‘dating’ methods, is that this clear-cut progression exists
only in the minds of evolutionary popularists. Marvin Lubenow, in his book Bones
of Contention (right), shows that the various alleged ‘ape-men’
do not form a smooth sequence in evolutionary ‘ages’, but overlap considerably.
For example, the time-span of Homo sapiens fossils contains the time-span
of the fossils of Homo erectus, supposedly our ancestor. Also, when the
various fossils are analysed in depth, they turn out not to be transitional or even
mosaic. The morphology overlaps too—the Journal
of Creation paper by creationist John Woodmorappe, titled
The non-transitions in ‘human evolution’—on evolutionists’
terms concludes from the analysis of a number of characteristics that
Homo ergaster, H. erectus, H. neanderthalensis as well as H. heidelbergensis
, were most likely ‘racial’ variants of modern man, while H. habilis
and another specimen called H. rudolfensis were just types of australopithecines.
In fact, H. habilis is now regarded as an invalid name, probably caused
by assigning fragments of australopithecines and H. erectus fossils into
this ‘taxonomic wastebin’.
But one should not—and does not—find
modern human fossils embedded in strata from the Jurassic period (65 million years
ago).
Of course I don’t believe the millions of years in the first place (see The
Young Earth , right, for some reasons), but I know enough to know that
Rennie has made a blooper even under his own perspective. Evolutionists assign the
date of 65 Ma to the K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary) not the Jurassic
period, which is alleged to have been 208–144 Ma. [After this rebuttal was
first posted, the web version of the Scientific American article corrected
their error]
Actually, evolutionists could easily accommodate such ‘out of place fossils’,
as they have with living specimens of the Coelacanth fish and Wollemi Pine. These
are just as sensational from an evolutionary paleontologist’s perspective
as finding a living dinosaur. Since the materialistic paradigm (interpretive framework)
is all important, evolutionists would be able to explain an ‘old’ human
fossil by ‘reworking’ (displacing from the initial burial depth), or
may even reassign such bones to another creature, since after all ‘we know’
that humans can’t be that deep in the fossil record! For example, the famous
fossil footprints at Laetoli, Africa, of an upright walking biped—the University
of Chicago’s Dr Russell Tuttle has shown that these are the same sorts of
prints as made by habitually barefoot humans. But since they are dated at millions
of years prior to when evolutionists believe modern humans arrived, they are regarded
as australopithecine prints, by definition, even though australopithecine foot bones
are substantially different from human ones. And then in an amazing twist, the same
prints are held up as evidence that australopithecines walked upright like humans—regardless
of the fact that other aspects of their anatomy indicate otherwise. Another good
example of how a researcher’s presuppositions can lead to all sorts of special
pleading is the explaining away of clear evidence for a fossil belemnite in
Fossil flip-flop.
The fossil order can be explained in a creationist framework, which avoids some
of the contradictions of the evolutionary view. See Where
are all the human fossils? and The Fossil Record: Becoming
More Random All the Time (more technical).
Evolutionary biology routinely makes predictions far more refined and precise than
this, and researchers test them constantly.
Evolution could be disproved in other
ways, too. If we could document the spontaneous generation of just one complex life-form
from inanimate matter, then at least a few creatures seen in the fossil record might
have originated this way.
This would not ‘disprove evolution’, since big-picture Evolution is
really just a grab-bag of ideas about naturalistic (God-less) origins. Evolutionists
already believe in spontaneous generation, but now call it chemical evolution. They
would actually be delighted if any or multiple examples of spontaneous generation
were documented, because it would vindicate their belief that life came into being
without an intelligent Creator. It would also solve their problem with the DNA in
microbes not showing a pattern consistent with common ancestry—in this regard
multiple spontaneous origins have already been proposed, without any suggestion
that this would ‘disprove evolution’.10
Incidentally, it’s important to note that a non-complex life form is an impossibility,
since it needs to have the ability to reproduce. Even the simplest known true self-reproducing
organism, a Mycoplasma, has 482 genes with 580,000 ‘letters’ (base pairs).
But even this appears not to be enough to sustain itself without parasitizing an
even more complex organism. Most likely, the parasitism resulted from loss of some
of the genetic information required to make some essential nutrients (see Genome decay in the Mycoplasmas). Therefore a hypothetical
first cell that could sustain itself would have to be even more complex.
If superintelligent aliens appeared and claimed credit for creating life on earth
(or even particular species), the purely evolutionary explanation would be cast
in doubt. But no one has yet produced such evidence.
The Bible claims to be a revelation by the Creator of life and the Universe, who
certainly has ‘claimed credit for creating life on Earth’, yet Rennie
does not see this as casting doubt on evolution. And there is excellent evidence
that the Bible’s claims are true (see Q&A: Bible).
But Rennie has apparently already made up his mind that this evidence doesn’t
exist—this would presumably upset his materialistic faith.
It should be noted that the idea of falsifiability as the defining characteristic
of science originated with philosopher Karl Popper in the 1930s. More recent elaborations
on his thinking have expanded the narrowest interpretation of his principle precisely
because it would eliminate too many branches of clearly scientific endeavor.
This is simply an attempt to immunize evolution from the same criticism that’s
advanced at creationists. As often pointed out, it’s hard to come up with
a definition of ‘science’ that includes evolution and excludes creation
unless it’s blatantly self-serving. Sometimes these definitions are self-contradictory,
e.g. some, including Gould, have claimed that Creation is not scientific because
it’s not testable , but then they go on to explain how it has allegedly
been tested and shown to be wrong.
4. Increasingly, scientists doubt the truth of
evolution.
No evidence suggests that evolution is losing adherents. Pick up any issue of a
peer-reviewed biological journal, and you will find articles that support and extend
evolutionary studies or that embrace evolution as a fundamental concept.
It’s logically possible for a belief to lose adherents even if journals still
publish articles supporting this belief. Rennie might benefit from some study of
simple logic (my paper Logic and Creation might
help).
Conversely, serious scientific publications disputing evolution are all but nonexistent.
In the mid-1990s George W. Gilchrist of the University of Washington surveyed thousands
of journals in the primary literature, seeking articles on intelligent design or
creation science. Among those hundreds of thousands of scientific reports, he found
none. In the past two years, surveys done independently by Barbara Forrest of Southeastern
Louisiana University and Lawrence M. Krauss of Case Western Reserve University have
been similarly fruitless.
But would they know what to look for? And as shown below, and above with Scientific
American itself, creationists are hardly likely to want to blow their cover
and risk the discrimination epitomized by Scientific American. Would Nature
or Science, for example, ever knowingly publish a paper favourable
to Creation? Hardly. But in spite of the bias against such publication, creationist
scientists have managed to publish papers when the creationist implications are
disguised subtly enough. This shows that they do carry out real scientific
research. See Do Creationists Publish in Notable Refereed
Journals?
Creationists retort that a closed-minded
scientific community rejects their evidence.
An absolutely amazing comment coming from a journal that’s publicly reached
the nadir of anti-creationist censorship and discrimination, as shown above!
Yet according to the editors of Nature, Science and other leading journals,
few antievolution manuscripts are even submitted.
As shown, there is clear proof of censorship by Scientific American, Science
and Australasian Science, where they have even denied creationists
the normal courtesy of the right of reply. So why would scientists bother to waste
their time? They know that their papers will be rejected, no matter how good the
research! Which is why creationist scientists have, years ago, commenced their own
peer-reviewed journals.
Some antievolution authors have published papers in serious journals. Those papers,
however, rarely attack evolution directly or advance creationist arguments; …
Of course not, with the fanatical censorship.
… at best, they identify certain evolutionary problems as unsolved and difficult
(which no one disputes).
An interesting admission, but that’s hardly the impression that evolutionists
usually give to the public.
In short, creationists are not giving the scientific world good reason to take them
seriously.
So why is Rennie taking us seriously by writing this article?
5. The disagreements among
even evolutionary biologists show how little solid science supports evolution.
Evolutionary biologists passionately debate diverse topics: how speciation happens,
the rates of evolutionary change, the ancestral relationships of birds and dinosaurs,
whether Neandertals were a species apart from modern humans, and much more. These
disputes are like those found in all other branches of science. Acceptance of evolution
as a factual occurrence and a guiding principle is nonetheless universal in biology.
This is double talk, and merely closing ranks against creationists. This is the
old trick of claiming ‘there is no doubt that evolution occurred; the only
disagreement is about the mechanism.’
But modern evolutionary theory is all about providing a plausible mechanism
for explaining life’s complexity without God. If the disputes undermine favored
mechanisms, then the materialist apologetic crumbles. The supporters of various
evolutionary camps score mortal blows against the mechanisms proposed by rival camps,
so it’s perfectly reasonable for creationists to point this out.
For example, with the origin of birds, there are
two main theories: that birds evolved ‘ground up’ from running dinosaurs
(the cursorial theory), and that they evolved ‘trees-down’
from small reptiles (the arboreal theory). Both sides produce devastating
arguments against the other side. The evidence indicates that the critics are both
right—birds did not evolve either from running dinos or from tree-living
mini-crocodiles. In fact, birds did not evolve from non-birds at all!
Similarly, supporters of ‘jerky’
evolution ( saltationism and its relative, punctuated equilibria
) point out that the fossil record does not show gradualism, and that the hypothetical
transitional forms would be disadvantageous. But supporters of gradual evolution
point out that large, information-increasing change is so improbable that one would
need to invoke a secular miracle. Creationists agree with both: punctuational evolution
can’t happen, and gradual evolution can’t happen—in fact, particles-to-people
evolution can’t happen at all!
Unfortunately, dishonest creationists
have shown a willingness to take scientists’ comments out of context to exaggerate
and distort the disagreements.
Pure assertion. This ‘quoting out of context’ is a common fetish repeated
by skeptics and their churchian allies. The silliest thing of all is to write to
the author and ask whether he had been misquoted, which some anti-creationists actually
do, as surprising as it may seem. All one needs to do to demonstrate misquoting
is to compare the quote with the original.
Anyone acquainted with the works of paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard
University knows that in addition to co-authoring the punctuated-equilibrium model,
Gould was one of the most eloquent defenders and articulators of evolution. (Punctuated
equilibrium explains patterns in the fossil record by suggesting that most evolutionary
changes occur within geologically brief intervals—which may nonetheless amount
to hundreds of generations.) Yet creationists delight in dissecting out phrases
from Gould’s voluminous prose to make him sound as though he had doubted evolution,
…
They do no such thing. Rather, they make it very clear that Gould was a staunch
evolutionist, but criticised many aspects of neo-Darwinian theory. Quoting Gould
was the perfectly honorable strategy of using a hostile witness. See
Gould grumbles about creationist ‘hijacking’ [and
his obituary written after this article].
… and they present punctuated equilibrium as though it allows new species
to materialize overnight or birds to be born from reptile eggs.
First, most creationists present Gould’s ideas correctly, and those ideas
are not the exclusive property of evolutionists. Second, even many evolutionists
think that Gould has largely himself to blame because of his injudicious (from an
evolutionary viewpoint) comments. For example, Richard Goldschmidt was famous for
promoting a ‘hopeful monster’ theory, which indeed said something very
much like a bird hatching from a reptile egg. And Gould wrote an article called
‘The return of hopeful monsters ’
11 where he said:
‘I do, however, predict that during the next decade Goldschmidt will be largely
vindicated in the world of evolutionary biology.’
When confronted with a quotation from a scientific authority that seems to question
evolution, insist on seeing the statement in context. Almost invariably, the attack
on evolution will prove illusory.
Easy to assert, but another thing to prove. If there is any ‘out-of-context’
quote on our Web site, for example, we would like to know about it, because we are
not about misleading people. Where such things have very rarely occurred in our
literature over the years, we have willingly corrected them. Rennie has made sweeping
assertions, but without substance.
6. If humans descended from monkeys, why are
there still monkeys?
This surprisingly common argument reflects several levels of ignorance about evolution.
Indeed it does, which is why CMI advised against using this in
this section of Arguments we think creationists should NOT use. In the paragraph
quoted next, Rennie makes the same mistake as many do concerning the common ancestor,
but he does realise the main problem with this argument.
The first mistake is that evolution does not teach that humans descended from monkeys;
it states that both have a common ancestor.
Which, according to G.G. Simpson and Gould would be called an ape or a monkey by
anyone who saw it, so it’s just a petty criticism of those who say this.
The deeper error is that this objection is tantamount to asking, ‘If children
descended from adults, why are there still adults?’ New species evolve by
splintering off from established ones, when populations of organisms become isolated
from the main branch of their family and acquire sufficient differences to remain
forever distinct. The parent species may survive indefinitely thereafter, or it
may become extinct.
As Creation Ministries International pointed out!
7. Evolution cannot explain how life first appeared
on earth.
The origin of life remains very much a mystery, but biochemists have learned about
how primitive nucleic acids, amino acids and other building blocks of life could
have formed …
Actually, they have found out how some major building blocks CANNOT be formed, e.g.
cytosine (see Origin of Life: Instability of building blocks).
… and organized themselves into self-replicating, self-sustaining units,
…
This is just bluff, since spontaneous polymerization is a major hurdle for non-living
chemicals to overcome (see Origin of Life: The Polymerization
Problem). So is producing molecules all of one handedness (see
Origin of Life: The Chirality Problem), and overcoming the inherent
instability of the alleged building blocks (see Origin
of life: instability of building blocks). Chemical evolutionists have yet
to solve these problems, let alone produce any self-replicating system which has
any relevance to cells (Self-Replicating Enzymes?).
… laying the foundation for cellular biochemistry. Astrochemical analyses
hint that quantities of these compounds might have originated in space and fallen
to earth in comets, a scenario that may solve the problem of how those constituents
arose under the conditions that prevailed when our planet was young.
Again, wishful thinking, partly motivated by the hopelessness of current theories
about life spontaneously generating on Earth—see
Sugars from space? Do they prove evolution? and
Did life’s building blocks come from outer space?
Creationists sometimes try to invalidate all of evolution by pointing to science’s
current inability to explain the origin of life. But even if life on earth turned
out to have a nonevolutionary origin (for instance, if aliens introduced the first
cells billions of years ago), evolution since then would be robustly confirmed by
countless microevolutionary and macroevolutionary studies.
Here we go again with the bait’n’switch concerning the meanings of evolution.
Anyway, that downplays the real problem. Evolution is a pseudo-intellectual justification
for materialism, because it purports to explain life without God. So materialism
would be in great trouble if evolution had a problem right at the start (‘chemical
evolution’). After all, if the process can’t even start, it can’t
continue.
8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything
as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by
chance.
Chance plays a part in evolution (for example, in the random mutations that can
give rise to new traits), but evolution does not depend on chance to create organisms,
proteins or other entities. Quite the opposite: natural selection, the principal
known mechanism of evolution, harnesses nonrandom change by preserving ‘desirable’
(adaptive) features and eliminating ‘undesirable’ (nonadaptive) ones.
But the raw material on which natural selection
acts is random copying errors (mutations). If evolution
from goo to you were true, we should expect to find countless information-adding
mutations. But we have not even found one .
As long as the forces of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution
in one direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times.
An example would have been nice.
As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence
‘TOBEORNOTTOBE.’ Those hypothetical million monkeys, each pecking out
one phrase a second, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 26
13 sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison of Glendale
College wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving
the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed (in effect,
selecting for phrases more like Hamlet’s). On average, the program re-created
the phrase in just 336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could
reconstruct Shakespeare’s entire play in just four and a half days.
These computer programs have been widely popularized by the atheist Richard Dawkins,
but are a lot of bluff. Such simulations as Dawkins, and now Rennie, propose as
‘simulations’ of evolution work towards a known goal, so are far from
a parallel to real evolution, which has no foresight, hence a ‘Blind Watchmaker’.
The simulations also use ‘organisms’ with high reproductive rates (producing
many offspring), high mutation rates, a large probability of a beneficial mutation,
and a selection coefficient of 1 (perfect selection) instead of 0.01 (or less) which
parallels real life more accurately. The ‘organisms’ have tiny ‘genomes’
with minute information content, so are less prone to error catastrophe, and they
are not affected by the chemical and thermodynamic constraints of a real organism.
For more information, see this refutation of Dawkins’
book Climbing Mt Improbable , Weasel Words
and Dawkins’ weasel revisited. Also, in the
current issue of TJ ( 16 (2)), we published an article
about a more realistic computer simulation, Weasel
, a flexible program for investigating deterministic computer ‘demonstrations’
of evolution, and the program can be downloaded here.
This shows that the goal is NOT reached if realistic values are programmed, or it
takes so long that it shows that evolution is impossible. For a refutation of the
whole idea of computer simulations of evolution, particularly in the guise of genetic
algorithms, see Genetic algorithms—do they show that
evolution works?—all these problems also apply to the simplistic ‘simulation’
Rennie writes about.
Also, when it comes to the origin of first life, natural selection cannot
be invoked, because this requires a self-reproducing entity. Therefore chance alone
must produce the precise sequences needed, so these simulations do not apply
(see Q&A: Probability). And a further problem
with the alleged chemical soup is reversibility, intensifying the difficulty of
obtaining the right sequence by chance—see Could Monkeys
Type the 23 rd Psalm.
9. The Second Law of Thermodynamics
says that systems must become more disordered over time. Living cells therefore
could not have evolved from inanimate chemicals, and multicellular life could not
have evolved from protozoa.
This argument derives from a misunderstanding of the Second Law.
It would be most surprising, in our experience, if an anti-creationist lacking training
in physics or chemistry understood the Second Law himself. As will be shown, biologist
Rennie is no exception. I should say that Rennie’s formulation of the creationist
argument is not how informed creationists would argue—see
Q&A: Thermodynamics.
If it were valid, mineral crystals and snowflakes would also be impossible, because
they, too, are complex structures that form spontaneously from disordered parts.
No, as usual, this anti-creationist confuses order (repetitive, low information)
with complexity (non-repetitive, high information). See this
answer to another anti-creationist science writer who made the same mistake.
The Second Law actually states that the total entropy of a closed system (one that
no energy or matter leaves or enters) …
It’s more usual for those qualified in physical chemistry to refer to this
as an isolated system , and use the term closed system for one
where energy but not matter can be exchanged with its surroundings.
… cannot decrease. Entropy is a physical concept often casually described
as disorder, but it differs significantly from the conversational use of the word.
We totally agree, and point this out often.
More important, however, the Second Law permits parts of a system to decrease in
entropy as long as other parts experience an offsetting increase. Thus, our planet
as a whole can grow more complex because the sun pours heat and light onto it, and
the greater entropy associated with the sun’s nuclear fusion more than rebalances
the scales. Simple organisms can fuel their rise toward complexity by consuming
other forms of life and nonliving materials.
This energy input is necessary but not sufficient. The proverbial bull
in a china shop produces disorder, but if the same bull was harnessed to a generator,
this energy could be directed into useful work. Similarly, living organisms have
machinery to direct the energy from sunlight or food, including the
ATP synthase motor. But machinery presupposes teleology (purpose), which
means that the machinery must have had an intelligent source.
10. Mutations are essential to evolution
theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features.
On the contrary, biology has catalogued many traits produced by point mutations
(changes at precise positions in an organism’s DNA)—bacterial resistance
to antibiotics, for example.
This is a serious mis-statement of the creationist argument. The issue is not new
traits, but new genetic information. In no known case is antibiotic resistance
the result of new information. There are several ways where an information loss
can confer resistance—see Anthrax and antibiotics:
Is evolution relevant? We have pointed out in various ways how new traits,
even helpful, adaptive traits, can arise through loss of genetic information (which
is to be expected from mutations). See for example, Beetle
bloopers.
Mutations that arise in the homeobox ( Hox ) family of development-regulating
genes in animals can also have complex effects. Hox genes direct where
legs, wings, antennae and body segments should grow. In fruit flies, for instance,
the mutation called Antennapedia causes legs to sprout where antennae should
grow.
Once again, there is no new information! Rather, a mutation in the hox gene results
in already-existing information being switched on in the wrong place. See also Hox
(homeobox) Genes — Evolution’s Saviour? and
Hox Hype — Has Macro-evolution Been Proven? The hox gene did not produce
any of the information that results in the complex structure of the leg, which in
ants and bees includes a very complex mechanical and hydraulic structure by which
these insects stick to surfaces—see Startling stickiness.
These abnormal limbs are not functional, but their existence demonstrates that genetic
mistakes can produce complex structures, which natural selection can then test for
possible uses.
Amazing—natural selection can test for ‘possible uses’ of ‘non-functional’
(i.e. useless !) limbs in the wrong place. Such deformities would be active
hindrances to survival.
Moreover, molecular biology has discovered
mechanisms for genetic change that go beyond point mutations, and these expand the
ways in which new traits can appear. Functional modules within genes can be spliced
together in novel ways. Whole genes can be accidentally duplicated in an organism’s
DNA, and the duplicates are free to mutate into genes for new, complex features.
Gene duplication, polyploidy, insertions, etc. do not help — they represent
an increase in amount of DNA, but not an increase in the amount of functional
genetic information —these create nothing new. Macroevolution needs
new genes (for making feathers on reptiles, for example).
In plants, but not in animals (possibly with rare exceptions), the doubling of all
the chromosomes may result in an individual which can no longer interbreed with
the parent type—this is called polyploidy . Although this may technically
be called a new species, because of the breeding isolation, no new information has
been produced, just repetitious doubling of existing information. If a
malfunction in a printing press caused a book to be printed with every page doubled,
it would not be more informative than the proper book. (Brave students of evolutionary
professors might like to ask whether they would get extra marks for handing in two
copies of the same assignment.)
Duplication of a single chromosome is normally harmful, as in Down’s Syndrome.
Insertions are a very efficient way of completely destroying the functionality of
existing genes. Biophysicist Dr Lee Spetner in his book Not By Chance (see
graphic, right) analyses examples of mutational changes that evolutionists have
claimed to have been increases in information, and shows that they are actually
examples of loss of specificity , which means they involved loss of information
(which is to be expected from information theory).
The gene duplication idea is that an existing gene may be doubled, and one copy
does its normal work while the other copy is redundant and non-expressed. Therefore
it is free to mutate free of selection pressure (to get rid of it) . However, such
‘neutral’ mutations are powerless to produce new genuine information.
Dawkins et al. point out that natural selection is the only possible naturalistic
explanation for the immense design in nature (not a good one, as Spetner et al.
have shown). The proposal is that random changes produce a new function, then
this redundant gene becomes expressed somehow, thus comes under the selective process
and is tuned.
It’s all a lot of hand-waving. It relies on a chance copying event, genes
somehow being switched off, randomly mutated to something approximating a new function,
then being switched on again so natural selection can tune it.
Furthermore, mutations do not just occur in the duplicated gene; they occur throughout
the genome. Consequently, all the deleterious mutations have to be eliminated by
the death of the unfit. Mutations in the target duplicate gene are extremely rare—it
might represent only 1 part in 30,000 of the genome of an animal. The larger the
genome the bigger the problem. This is because a larger the genome, the lower the
mutation rate that can be sustained without error catastrophe, which means one has
to wait longer for any mutation, let alone a desirable one, in the duplicated
gene. There just has not been enough time for such a naturalistic process to account
for the amount of genetic information that we see in living things.
Dawkins and others have recognised that the ‘information space’ possible
within just one gene is so huge that random changes without some guiding force could
never come up with a new function. There could never be enough experiments (mutating
generations of organisms) to find anything useful by such a process. Note that an
average gene of 1,000 base pairs represents 4 1000 possibilities —
that is 10 602 (compare this with the number of atoms in the universe
estimated at ‘only’ 10 80 ). If every atom in the universe
were an experiment every millisecond for the supposed 15 billion years of the universe,
this could only try a maximum 10 100 of the possibilities. So such a
‘neutral’ process cannot find any sequence with specificity (usefulness),
even allowing for the fact that there may be more than just one sequence that is
functional to some extent.
So Dawkins and company have the same problem as the neutral selection theory advocates.
Increasing knowledge of the molecular basis of biological functions has exploded
the known ‘information space’ such that mutations and natural selection,
with or without gene duplication, or any other known natural process, cannot account
for the irreducibly complex nature of living systems.
Comparisons of the DNA from a wide variety of organisms indicate that this is how
the globin family of blood proteins evolved over millions of years.
This is an inference from similarities interpreted under the materialistic
paradigm. There is no actual demonstration that hemoglobin (with four polypeptides)
evolved from myoglobin (with one polypeptide), or any adequate explanation of how
the hypothetical intermediates would have had selective advantages. In fact, it’s
far more complicated than Rennie implies. The α- and β-globin
chains are encoded on genes on different chromosomes, so they are expressed independently.
This expression must be controlled precisely, otherwise various types of a disease
called thallassemia results. Also, there is an essential protein called
AHSP (Alpha Hemoglobin Stabilizing Protein) which, as the name implies, stabilizes
the α-chains, and also brings it to the β-chains. Otherwise the
α-chains would precipitate and damage the red blood cells. AHSP is one of
many examples of a class of protein called chaperones which govern the
folding of other proteins.
12 This is yet another problem for chemical evolutionary theories—how
did the first proteins fold correctly without chaperones, and since the chaperones
themselves are complex proteins, how did they fold? See
The Origin of Life: A Critique of Current Scientific Models (PDF file).
11. Natural selection might explain microevolution,
but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life.
A straw man, because creationists accept new species arising within the kind, since
reproductive isolation can be the result of information loss. See
What is the Biblical creationist model? for more discussion on kinds and
speciation.
Evolutionary biologists have written
extensively about how natural selection could produce new species. For instance,
in the model called allopatry, developed by Ernst Mayr of Harvard University, if
a population of organisms were isolated from the rest of its species by geographical
boundaries, it might be subjected to different selective pressures. Changes would
accumulate in the isolated population. If those changes became so significant that
the splinter group could not or routinely would not breed with the original stock,
then the splinter group would be reproductively isolated and on its way
toward becoming a new species.
Indeed, creationists point out that the allopatric model would explain the origin
of the different people groups (‘races’) when the confusion of languages
at Babel induced a separation of small population groups which spread out all over
the Earth. See How could all the races come from Noah and his family? and
One Blood (right). Of course, the different people groups are NOT reproductively
isolated and are still a single biological species.
Creationists also point out that the montane (mountainous) topography of the Ark’s
landing place would also be ideal for geographical isolation. This would allow much
post-Flood diversification from comparatively few (~8,000) kinds of land vertebrates,
by splitting up the original high genetic variety.
Note that the reproductive isolation is an informationally negative change, even
if beneficial, because it blocks the interchange of genetic information between
populations.
Natural selection is the best studied of the evolutionary mechanisms, …
Yes, it is the best studied, but these studies show that it has nothing to do with
evolution of more complex life forms! All we observe it doing is removing
information, not adding it.
… but biologists are open
to other possibilities as well. Biologists are constantly assessing the potential
of unusual genetic mechanisms for causing speciation or for producing complex features
in organisms. Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and others
have persuasively argued that some cellular organelles, such as the energy-generating
mitochondria, evolved through the symbiotic merger of ancient organisms.
But this endosymbiosis theory has many problems, e.g. the lack of evidence
that prokaryotes are capable of ingesting another cell and keeping it alive, and
the large differences in genes between mitochondria and prokaryotes. See
Did cells acquire organelles such as mitochondria by gobbling up other cells?
Thus, science welcomes the possibility of evolution resulting from forces beyond
natural selection. Yet those forces must be natural; they cannot be attributed to
the actions of mysterious creative intelligences whose existence, in scientific
terms, is unproved.
Mainly because evolutionists reject the possibility of proof of the supernatural
a priori —see these admissions from evolutionists
Lewontin and Todd, and in effect regard
evolution as a religion as Ruse admitted.
12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve.
Again, a straw man, since informed creationists don’t teach this—even
though some day-age advocates do, like Hugh
Ross
Speciation is probably fairly rare and in many cases might take centuries.
But it need not. In fact, speciation can happen much faster than most evolutionists
(and day-age advocates) realize. But creationists following the Biblical Creation-Fall-Flood-Migration
model would expect such rapid non-evolutive speciation—see
Speedy species surprise. One example is a new species of mosquitoes, i.e.
one that can’t interbreed with the parent population, arising in the London
Underground train system (the ‘Tube’) in only 100 years. The rapid change
‘astonished’ evolutionists, but should delight creationists—see
Brisk Biters.
Furthermore, recognizing a new species during a formative stage can be difficult,
because biologists sometimes disagree about how best to define a species. The most
widely used definition, Mayr’s Biological Species Concept, recognizes a species
as a distinct community of reproductively isolated populations—sets of organisms
that normally do not or cannot breed outside their community. In practice, this
standard can be difficult to apply to organisms isolated by distance or terrain
or to plants (and, of course, fossils do not breed). Biologists therefore usually
use organisms’ physical and behavioral traits as clues to their species membership.
We agree. It’s important to note this difficulty in defining ‘species’
whenever evolutionists claim that creationists don’t have a consistent definition
of ‘kinds’ (which we do as discussed before).
Nevertheless, the scientific literature does contain reports of apparent speciation
events in plants, insects and worms. In most of these experiments, researchers subjected
organisms to various types of selection—for anatomical differences, mating
behaviors, habitat preferences and other traits—and found that they had created
populations of organisms that did not breed with outsiders. For example, William
R. Rice of the University of New Mexico and George W. Salt of the University of
California at Davis demonstrated that if they sorted a group of fruit flies by their
preference for certain environments and bred those flies separately over 35 generations,
the resulting flies would refuse to breed with those from a very different environment.
None of this is news to informed creationists. Once again, there is no new information,
but sorting and loss of already existing information.
13. Evolutionists cannot point to
any transitional fossils—creatures that are half reptile and half bird, for
instance.
Actually, paleontologists know of many detailed examples of fossils intermediate
in form between various taxonomic groups.
Actually, Charles Darwin was worried that the fossil record did not show what his theory predicted:
‘Why is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate
links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain;
and this is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the
theory.’ 13
More recently, Gould said:
‘The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as
the trade secret of paleontology. ’
14
But modern evolutionists, including Gould, assert that there are nevertheless some
transitional forms, but they always seem to name the same handful of disputable
ones, instead of the many that Darwin hoped for. It’s the same with Rennie
below.
The fossil bird known as Archaeopteryx (ark-ee-OP-ter-ix), is among the most prized
relics in the world (above: Legitimate artist’s impression of Archaeopteryx,
by Steve Cardno; cf. fossil of Archaeopteryx).
One of the most famous fossils
of all time is Archaeopteryx, which combines feathers and skeletal structures
peculiar to birds with features of dinosaurs.
This hardly qualifies for a fossil ‘intermediate in form’; it is more
like a mosaic or chimera like the platypus. However, Alan Feduccia, a world authority
on birds at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an evolutionist
himself, says:
‘Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound,
feathered dinosaur. But it’s not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount
of ‘paleobabble’ is going to change that.’
15
Archaeopteryx had fully-formed flying feathers (including asymmetric vanes
and ventral, reinforcing furrows as in modern flying birds), the classical elliptical
wings of modern woodland birds, and a large wishbone for attachment of muscles responsible
for the downstroke of the wings.
16 Its brain was essentially that of a flying bird, with a large
cerebellum and visual cortex. The fact that it had teeth is irrelevant to its alleged
transitional status—a number of extinct birds had teeth, while many reptiles
do not. Furthermore, like other birds, both its maxilla (upper jaw) and mandible
(lower jaw) moved. In most vertebrates, including reptiles, only the mandible moves
(see Bird Evolution flies out the window). Finally,
Archaeopteryx skeletons had pneumatized vertebrae and pelvis. This indicates
the presence of both a cervical and abdominal air sac, i.e. at least two of the
five sacs present in modern birds. This in turn indicates that the unique
avian lung design was already present in what most evolutionists claim is
the earliest bird.
17
A flock’s worth of other feathered fossil species, some more avian and some
less, has also been found.
More elephant-hurling without examples. But our Web site has documented that two
famous alleged feathered dinosaurs are ‘dated’ younger than their supposed
descendant Archaeopteryx and more likely to be flightless birds (Protarchaeopteryx
and Caudipteryx), and one famous example,
Archaeoraptor, was a fake.
A sequence of fossils spans the evolution of modern
horses from the tiny Eohippus .
Again, this doesn’t hold up. Even informed evolutionists regard horse evolution
as a bush rather than a sequence. But the so-called Eohippus is properly
called Hyracotherium , and has little that could connect it with horses
at all. The other animals in the ‘sequence’ actually show hardly any
more variation between them than that within horses today. One non-horse
and many varieties of the true horse kind does not a sequence make. See
The Non-evolution of the horse.
Whales had four-legged ancestors that walked
on land, and creatures known as Ambulocetus and Rodhocetus helped
to make that transition [see ‘The Mammals That Conquered the Seas,’
by Kate Wong; Scientific American , May].
If Rennie can hurl elephants throughout his article, then I can be excused for referring
to my analysis of whale evolution from my PBS-Evolution
rebuttal, showing the fragmentary nature of the evidence. More recently, John Woodmorappe
analysed the alleged transitions and found that their various characteristics did
not change in a consistent direction. Rather, they are chimeras—non-whales
with a few minor cetacean ‘modules’, inconsistent with the evolutionary
prediction of a nested hierarchy but consistent with a common designer. 1
Fossil seashells trace the evolution of various
mollusks through millions of years.
Again, what does Rennie mean? One must wonder if he believes the old Ostrea/Gryphaea
story, i.e. that a flat oyster evolved into more and more coiled forms till
it coiled itself shut. Once this was regarded as a key proof of an evolutionary
lineage in the fossil record. But now it seems that the coiling was the oyster’s
built-in programming to respond to the environment, or ecophenotypic change.
19
So the anti-creationist neo-catastrophist geologist Derek Ager wrote:
‘It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned
as a student, from Trueman’s Ostrea/Gryphaea to Carruthers’
Zaphrentis delanouei , have now been “debunked”. Similarly,
my own experinece [ sic ] of more than twenty years looking for evolutionary
lineages among the Mesozoic Brachiopoda has proved them equally elusive.’20,21
Perhaps 20 or more hominids (not all of them our ancestors) fill the gap between
Lucy the australopithecine and modern humans.
First, this is covered earlier. Second, how could these alleged ‘20 or more
hominids’ fill the gap if they are ‘not all our ancestors’? That
is, they are out of the gap and into a side alley.
Creationists, though, dismiss these
fossil studies. They argue that Archaeopteryx is not a missing link between
reptiles and birds—it is just an extinct bird with reptilian features. They
want evolutionists to produce a weird, chimeric monster that cannot be classified
as belonging to any known group.
Actually, as stated, of the few transitional forms usually touted, most are actually
chimeras. No, creationists have long simply requested a sequence of creatures with
certain characteristics consistently following a series, e.g. 100% leg/0% wing →
90% leg/10% wing → … → 50%leg/50% wing → … → 10%
leg/90% wing → 0%leg/100% wing.
Even if a creationist does accept a fossil as transitional between two species,
he or she may then insist on seeing other fossils intermediate between it and the
first two. These frustrating requests can proceed ad infinitum and place
an unreasonable burden on the always incomplete fossil record.
First, this again charges creationists with believing in fixity of species, which
is rather a belief held by compromisers like Hugh Ross. Instead, creationists ask
for transitions between major categories, such as between non-living matter and
the first living cell, single-celled and multicelled creatures, and invertebrates
and vertebrates. The gaps between these groups should be enough to show that molecules-to-man
evolution is without foundation. Second, this is hardly a new charge when made of
fossils transitional between two phyla, for example, and it is hardly unreasonable
for creationists to point out that there are still two large gaps rather than one
even larger gap.
22
Nevertheless, evolutionists can cite further supportive
evidence from molecular biology. All organisms share most of the same genes, but
as evolution predicts, the structures of these genes and their products diverge
among species, in keeping with their evolutionary relationships. Geneticists speak
of the ‘molecular clock’ that records the passage of time. These molecular
data also show how various organisms are transitional within evolution.
Actually, despite the cute diagram in the article, the molecular clock has many
problems for the evolutionist. Not only are there the anomalies and common designer
arguments I mentioned above, but they actually support a creation of distinct types
within ordered groups, not continuous evolution, as non-creationist microbiologist
Dr Michael Denton pointed out in Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (right).
For example, when comparing the amino acid sequence of cytochrome C of a bacterium
(a prokaryote) with such widely diverse eukaryotes as yeast, wheat, silkmoth, pigeon
and horse, all of these have practically the same percentage difference with the
bacterium (64–69%). There is no intermediate cytochrome between prokaryotes
and eukaryotes, and no hint that the ‘higher’ organism such as a horse
has diverged more than the ‘lower’ organism such as the yeast.
The same sort of pattern is observed when comparing cytochrome C of the invertebrate
silkmoth with the vertebrates lamprey, carp, turtle, pigeon and horse. All the vertebrates
are equally divergent from the silkmoth (27–30%). Yet again, comparing globins
of a lamprey (a ‘primitive’ cyclostome or jawless fish) with a carp,
frog, chicken, kangaroo and human, they are all about equidistant (73–81%).
Cytochrome C’s compared between a carp and a bullfrog, turtle, chicken, rabbit
and horse yield a constant difference of 13–14%. There is no trace of any
transitional series of cyclostome → fish → amphibian → reptile →
mammal or bird.
Another problem for evolutionists is how the molecular clock could have ticked so
evenly in any given protein in so many different organisms (despite some anomalies
discussed earlier which present even more problems). For this to work, there must
be a constant mutation rate per unit time over most types of organism.
But observations show that there is a constant mutation rate per generation
, so it should be much faster for organisms with a fast generation time such
as bacteria, and much slower for elephants. In insects, generation times range from
weeks in flies to many years in cicadas and yet there is no evidence that flies
are more diverged than cicadas. So evidence is against the theory that
the observed patterns are due to mutations accumulating over time as life evolved.
14. Living things have fantastically intricate
features— at the anatomical, cellular and molecular levels—that could
not function if they were any less complex or sophisticated. The only prudent conclusion
is that they are the products of intelligent design, not evolution.
This ‘argument from design’ is the backbone of most recent attacks on
evolution, but it is also one of the oldest. In 1802 theologian William Paley wrote
that if one finds a pocket watch in a field, the most reasonable conclusion is that
someone dropped it, not that natural forces created it there. By analogy, Paley
argued, the complex structures of living things must be the handiwork of direct,
divine invention. Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species as an answer to
Paley: he explained how natural forces of selection, acting on inherited features,
could gradually shape the evolution of ornate organic structures.
Indeed, Gould agreed that Darwin was writing to counter Paley. This is another way
of saying that he had an anti-theistic agenda—see
Darwin’s real message: Have you missed it? and my review of
The Essence of Darwinism. This doesn’t stop many
Churchian allies ‘tugging the forelock’ at every pronouncement
made by him and his God-hating successors, who in return regard them as contemptuously
as Lenin regarded his ‘useful idiot’ allies in the West.
Generations of creationists have tried to counter
Darwin by citing the example of the eye as a structure that could not have evolved.
The eye’s ability to provide vision depends on the perfect arrangement of
its parts, these critics say. Natural selection could thus never favor the transitional
forms needed during the eye’s evolution—what good is half an eye? Anticipating
this criticism, Darwin suggested that even ‘incomplete’ eyes might confer
benefits (such as helping creatures orient toward light) and thereby survive for
further evolutionary refinement.
First, this overlooks the incredible complexity of even the simplest light sensitive
spot. Second, it’s fallacious to argue that 51% vision would necessarily have
a strong enough selective advantage over 50% to overcome the effects of genetic
drift’s tendency to eliminate even beneficial mutations—see the discussion
in Eye Evolution: a case study.
Biology has vindicated Darwin: researchers have identified primitive eyes and light-sensing
organs throughout the animal kingdom and have even tracked the evolutionary history
of eyes through comparative genetics. (It now appears that in various families of
organisms, eyes have evolved independently.)
Rennie contradicts himself here. If the evolutionary history of eyes has been tracked
though comparative genetics how is it that eyes have supposedly evolved independently?
Actually, evolutionists recognize that eyes must have arisen independently at least
30 times because there is no evolutionary pattern to explain the origin of eyes
from a common ancestor. What this really means is that since eyes cannot be related
by common ancestor, then since they are here, and only materialistic explanations
are allowed, hey presto, there’s proof that they evolved independently!
15. Recent discoveries prove that even at
the microscopic level, life has a quality of complexity that could not have come
about through evolution.
‘Irreducible complexity’ is the battle cry of Michael J. Behe of Lehigh
University, author of Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
. As a household example of irreducible complexity, Behe chooses the mousetrap—a
machine that |
