Feedback for February 2000

The flap arose because the fossil, which was thought to strengthen not prove the bird-dinosaur link (also Professor finds clues to origin of birds), had not been subjected to peer-review by other scientists before being described in a proper journal, no offense to National Geographic. It was never the "proof" of evolution. That was proven long ago, to everyone's satisfaction in the biological field. Interesting that scientists picked the mistake, not journalists or creationists.

Life left the sea several times, first as plants, then as insects and other animals, then as vertebrates. Plants seem to have been necessary for animals, including insects and worms, to make a living on land.

The last common ancestor of plants and animals may not have been a many-celled organism, but a single celled organism. Plants and animals are known as "eukaryotes", which means we both have a nucleus, a membrane surrounding our genetic material, and this probably occurred through the fusion of two older forms of cells, known as prokaryotes, which do not have nuclear membranes.

What is different between plants and animals is also cellular. Plants have rigid cell walls, while animals have cell membranes which are more flexible, and plants include a cellular organelle (component) called a "chloroplast", itself the fusion of a eukaryote cell with another older form of cell known as a blue-green algae. The chloroplast enables plant cells to photosynthesise the sun's energy. Animal cells have different organelles.

Plants do not evolve, and did not evolve, into animals. Not all animals have central nervous systems. I hope this helps, but you really need to consult a biology textbook for more information.

As to the origin of the universe and other such matters, consult your local cosmologist.

The FAQ shows nicely why your objection is no problem at all. The stored chemicals do not explode when mixed. That is a common creationist misconception, and unfortunately some creationists continue to teach this, despite it being quite false. The two main chemicals actually react quite slowly.

An additional catalyst is required to get an explosive reaction, and the FAQ suggests that cells secreting the catalyst may have evolved outside the mixing chamber, which resolves your problem.

The idea of evolution has nothing to do with Hindu incarnation philosophy, and it was certainly not taken from that source.

Evolutionists can come from all kinds of religious traditions. They generally have a world view that encompasses the findings of science in biology, geology, astronomy, etc; and which also encompasses a religious view point. These two can go hand in hand in the sense of making up part of someone's total world view; but there is no one religious view shared by evolutionists, just as there is no one religious view shared by geologists.

From the T.O archive:

• Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ
• Fossil Hominids
• The Archaeopteryx FAQs
• Horse Evolution

And from my own webpages:

• On Creation Science and "Transitional Fossils"

Archaeopteryx was claimed to be a hoax by Lee Spetner and Sir Fred Hoyle. A very rigorous investigation into the claims resulted in a firm finding that the fossil specimens were not a hoax. Charig et alia's 1986 article lays out the various lines of evidence which repudiate the charge of hoaxing.

Dave, though, may have confused recent reports on the Archaeoraptor fossils with Archaeopteryx. Archaeoraptor appears to be a chimera, a joining of two distinct organisms in one fossil, probably done by a fossil collector in order to obtain a better price for the specimen. But Archaeoraptor is not the same thing as Archaeopteryx. As far as I can tell, our FAQs related to Archaeopteryx are still just fine.

Wesley

Your problem is not yet a matter of whether to believe evolution or not. You need to make the effort to actually understand evolution, before your decision to accept or reject it has any significance. This is hard work, but ultimately well worthwhile. And even then, evolution will not explain everything there is about how the universe started. Biological evolution is pretty much limited to how life changes over time.

Measurements of historical ¹⁴C/¹²C ratios (such as this one) demonstrate that the ¹⁴C/¹²C ratio has been both higher and lower in the last thousand years than it is today. This one fact demolishes your two key points: (1) the existence of the calibration refutes the claim that there's an assumption of an initial ¹⁴C/¹²C level or atmospheric equilibrium (the historic ratios are computed by dating objects of independently known age); and (2) the fact that the ¹⁴C/¹²C ratio has been both higher and lower than it is today refutes your claim of consistent non-equilibrium increase. Further, the constancy of decay rate is not a mere assumption, it is instead a conclusion based on a wide range of both experimental data and theoretical considerations.

Perhaps the next time you "have the time," we shall see if your arguments against other dating methods are any better than what you've produced here.

That is an interesting question. I didn't know of any transitional sequences proposed to connect two separate animal phyla via some common ancestor. But Jonathan Woolf pointed out something to me:

For an example of a phylum-level transitional, please see THE CRUCIBLE OF CREATION, by Simon Conway Morris, pp. 185-95. Conway Morris uses details of micro-anatomy to connect the Cambrian fossils called _Wiwaxia_ and _Halkieria_ to each other and also to the modern phyla of Mollusca, Brachiopoda, and Annelida. One of the most impressive fossils in this series is a species of halkieriid which looks sort of like a big worm with shells covering the tops of its anterior (head) and posterior (tail) ends. From what we currently know of genetics, it probably wouldn't be very difficult to shorten the length between the shells, then bend in the middle so that the posterior shell is below the anterior shell, and finally attach the two shells together. The final result of this would be something very similar to a primitive brachiopod.

Further evidence for this comes from a living species of brachiopod, called _Neocrania_. _Neocrania_ starts life as a mobile, wormlike animal. As it grows, it builds shells at both ends, then folds in the middle and anchors itself to become a proper, sessile, shelled brachiopod.

But this brings up an interesting second question: How likely might it be that we would find some phylum-level split among animals in the fossil record?

Obviously, a phylum-level split is simply another speciation event when we get down to the last common ancestor that links two phyla. We have some numbers for estimates of how many species have been described from fossils and estimates of total species numbers over life's history on earth. Raup is commonly cited in this regard, and gives about 250,000 described fossil species, as compared to about 5 billion total species that have ever lived on earth. I don't have a precise number for animal phyla, but between living and extinct groups the number probably does not exceed 100. If we considered it possible that any two phyla could be linked (an obvious error, but one which favors the anti-evolutionary interpretation if anything), we could be seeking any of 10,000 speciation events in order to find one such phylum-to-phylum transition. But observations of species is not the same thing as observations of fine-grained speciation events in the fossil record. In this case, the anti-evolutionary interpretation would be better off if we over-estimated the proportion of fine-grained species-to-species transitions. Let's say that 10% of observed fossil species include fine-grained species-to-species transitions.

OK, we have a bunch of numbers biased toward, if anything, the anti-evolutionary side of the ledger. What about the kicker, our expected likelihood that we should have seen a phylum-to-phylum transition? That would be the proportion of observed fine-grained species-to-species transitions to total species times the proportion of possible species-to-species events that could represent phylum-to-phylum events to total species. Or...

(Total fossil species * Fine-grained speciation proportion) / Total species

*

(Number of possible transitions of interest / Total species)

=

(250000 * 0.1 / 5000000000) * (10000 / 5000000000)

= 0.000005 * 0.000002

= 1x10^-11

In other words, the odds that we might expect to have already have an event representing a animal phylum-to-phylum link among our already known fossils is 1E-11.

1E-11 is a very small number. An event meeting these odds would be like winning a couple of lottery jackpots in a row.

The fossil record is not like a videotape recording every event in life's history.

Wesley

Your analysis is flawed because you think that evolutionary theory says God cannot be involved in the process. That is simply not true. One can have both God and evolution, despite what you may have been told. There is certainly no reason why an omnipotent God cannot be far more subtle in His creative acts than you suspect.

One further point: You say "If we evolved than we have no souls, because something as powerful and emotional as a soul can only come from a divine creation." On what basis do you make that assertion? To put it crudely, why can't the souls be stapled on later? Or why can't souls evolve too? One must be very careful when assigning qualities to things that one cannot see or detect by normal means.

In any event, Gould's point is that the "complexity" of an organism, however one measures it, has little relation to the time or conditions of its evolution or the quality or quantity of its genetic information. More importantly, evolution does not represent a "march of progress" towards ever-increasing complexity.

Your final question is properly addressed to creationists rather than to the archive, but I will point out that the question contains assumptions that creationists might not accept. The methods by which we establish great age, though not really controvertial in science, may never-the-less be challenged by creationists.

I also wish to take a considerable liberty with your feedback! It just so happens that the very next feedback on our list considers the written quality of feedback contributions. Your feedback has a number of typos, and I wish to refer to it as a bad example, showing that it is not only creationists who make such mistakes. Your feedback is still welcome and appreciated, and I hope you will forgive me for not editing it in any way, and for refering to some writing errors that do not really bear on the substance of your comments.

When we writing feedback responses, we are able to edit the feedback itself. I usually try to correct obvious spelling errors or typos, but not always. Some of the other feedback responders don't edit at all. So I'll take this opportunity to request all of our readers who send in feedback to please look over their feedback for obvious errors before actually sending it.

By the way, incredible though it may seem, every month we get feedback that is so confused and laden with errors that there is no point attempting to make it readable or provide any response. You never get to see these gems.

Despite all my provisos expressed above, you are correct that creationism is inversely corrolated with level of education. Exceptions abound.

Evolutionary theory assumes that similar functions will generate similar structures. If they are homologous in the embryo, then this information is informative about phylogenetic trees. If they are not, they are called homoplasies ("same shape") and are considered uninformative about phylogenetic history.

The following references give the arguments internal to biology:

De Beer, Gavin Rylands. 1971. Homology: an unsolved problem, Oxford biology readers. London: Oxford University Press.

Hall, Brian K. 1994. Homology: the hierarchical basis of comparative biology. San Diego; Sydney: Academic Press.

Hall, Brian K, ed. 1999. Homology, Novartis Foundation Symposium 222. Chichester; New York: John Wiley and Sons.

These two classics discuss the issue from a non-Darwinian viewpoint, and are well worth reading, or, in the case of Thompson, browsing at length:

Russell, E. S. 1917/1982. Form and function: a contribution to the history of animal morphology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Thompson, D’Arcy. 1917/1980. On Growth and Form. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.

However, irrespective of the finer philosophical points, science must choose the least complex account that fits the observations both in the past and in the future, because there are a literal infinity of possible models (they are trivially easy to generate - consider this: X caused A ... X and Y caused A .. X and Y and Z caused A ... X and (an infinite number of other causes) caused A).

Since science aims to deal with the world in a way that is both manageable and useful, it must by definition take the least hypothesis. Otherwise, science is not workable.

As to the Pascal's Wager, I look forward to reading your paper (could you email it to me or post it on talk.origins the newsgroup?), but it also suffers from a plethora of alternatives that in terms of rational argument makes any single bet approach zero probability. If there are an infinite number of possible god-situations, and there are (trivially so, as with the possible models), then the probability that any one of them is correct is very nearly zero. In my book, this makes it a non-question, and undercuts the rationality of choosing one alternative.

I do not think that Quine said that only scientific beliefs are justified, but if you have a ref, I'd love to check that up. Some philosophers this century have made that claim, but they got caught on a problem of self-defeating belief (is the belief that only scientifically justified beliefs are justified itself a scientifically justified belief? If not, then the principle is false, but if so, then what does scientifically justified actually end up meaning?).

In my opinion, and that's all it is, some people do have practical reasons for believing in a god. And that will bias their calcualtion of the probabilities. But this does not translate to a scientific question, rather a metaphysical one, and so it is outside the purview of science.

BTW: when someone's name ends in an "s", the possessive case is either "s'" or "s's".

Methodological naturalism on the other hand is merely a claim about what we can discover and know about. It says that no matter what exists - invisible leprechauns, spiritual particles or tachyons - unless evidence can give us information about them, we cannot know them. Traditional Christian theology from Augustine to today agrees - "things unseen" are only known by faith, not by evidence and reason.

Science is a cognitive enterprise. Consequently, if we cannot know about something using evidence, experiment and logic, we cannot know it scientifically. But this does not commit any scientist to the inescapable conclusion that nothing else exists but what can be known by scientific means.

Some scientists draw that conclusion, while others are happy in their religious faith and see no contradiction between the two. It's not a conclusion that is forced upon a scientist by the methodology of science itself.

The philosophical context of science is largely irrelevant to the enterprise. It is not required of science that it accept a theistic or atheistic premise as a starting point. One idea that seems to be at the heart of science is that the universe runs pretty much the same way all the time, and so we can use empirical data as evidence. This may be an assumption made necessary by the very goals of science. If you can't use empirical data as evidence, science will collapse. But this does not do much harm, for those who oppose the theoretical conclusions of science don't challenge that, at least in principle, or why do they attempt to give a quasiempirical footing to their religious attacks on it?

In brief, the notion that the second law of thermodynamics is any kind of problem for evolution is just silly.

Human cognitive and mental abilities are unique, so far as we know, although at one time there were several hominid species all, presumably, with similar abilities. But the differences are of degree, not kind. Something akin to those features we treasure most exist in other species, such as reasoning, morality, humour, and art. We are unique not in the abilities as such but in the degree and constellation of those abilities. But if there were orchid theologians or biologists, imagine them saying how special they were because they could trick bees and wasps into fertilising them! And they'd be right.

We are just another animal, and like other animals, we are special and unique in our own way, and of course, that way matters very much to us.

We do have some FAQs on thermodynamics and entropy, but your concerns are really about a quite different notion of complexity. Entropy is a very precisely defined concept, and it does not correspond to order in the sense you speak of. The energy of the Sun is more than sufficient to account for the thermodynamics of life on Earth; but this has nothing much to do with complexity of living systems. The explanation for living complexity is evolution, and this is in no conflict with any thermodynamic principles.

I appreciate that you are probably skeptical of the efficacy of natural processes for producing the obvious complexity of living creatures, but that is a whole other topic. As a start, you may like to look at our FAQ on The Evolution of Improved Fitness.

As for the cause of the Big Bang, nobody knows what made it bang in the first place. But you can no more prove that God did it, than anyone else can prove that God did not.

• God and Evolution
• Evolution and Philosophy
• Cosmology Tutorial
• Introduction to Cosmology

Moral systems are prescriptive not descriptive. They do not say what does happen, they say what should happen. If nobody ever treated their parents with respect, then if the Ten Commandments are the foundation of morality, the fourth commandment would still be morally right. But if everybody treated their parents badly, that is not the basis for a morality that everyone should.

Why you think the origin of something makes it right or wrong is not clear to me. It is a common view, but it is a fallacy. Good things can come out of bad, and vice versa, and whether the physical world has any moral meaning is entirely distinct from whether the biological world evolved over time or not.

I realise you think this is a knockdown argument against evolution, but all it really is is a lack of relection on the basis for moral standards.

And "talkorigins" refers to the newsgroup talk.origins this site is a set of FAQs for.

If the reader has a specific point to take up with any of the material that I have written, I know that I am willing to correct anything that can be shown to be wrong or misleading. I believe the other contributors also are quite interested in correcting any errors of fact that may be found within archived articles here.

I typically sleep just fine, although sometimes I worry that I am not doing enough to counter the anti-science activities and falsehoods of anti-evolution advocates.

Wesley

Statistics on the prevalence of creationist teaching in secondary schools is a topic researched by Dr. Eugenie Scott at the National Center for Science Education. Look on their web site for a variety of useful information on the topic.

Wesley

1. I do not think anyone proposes life arises from the chance formation of DNA strands. DNA does encode instructures for how to build proteins, which regulate the development of a cell, and it does require a lot of extra biological machinery to carry out those "instructions". This is pretty much why people do not think life forms from randomly generated DNA. We have two relevant FAQs on biogenesis you may like to read, but you will want to read much more widely to really understand the kind of ideas people are exploring for the origin of life.
   • The Probability of Abiogenesis
   • Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations
2. Your second point is essentially a statement of the philosophy of vitalism (the link is to the on-line Encarta [changed to Wikipedia -- Editor]). This is the notion that living creatures have a special non-physical activating force. This idea has little support today. You may find interesting this article about revival of ancient bacteria spores.
3. We have a FAQ on Bombardier Beetles and the Argument of Design.

Most people have views of some kind on God, without thinking that they know everything there is to know about God. The question you ask usually appears when one person has certain ideas about God which conflict with the ideas another person has about God. The first person then questions the value of the opinions of the second person because of their incomplete knowledge, but somehow fails to appreciate that this applies equally to themselves.

There is a religious tradition in which God is quoted as saying "My thoughts are not your thoughts". I suggest those who apply this saying should properly apply it equally to us all, fundamentalists, liberals, believers, unbelievers, inerrantists, Christians, Bahais, etc.

The maintainers of this archive do not have a consistent view on these matters. We are concerned with what can be known about origins by empirical means, and are mostly content to let our different views on the subject of God remain unresolved.

You ask: "Would you have to have supernatural intelligence to understand supernatural phenomena?"

This archive is not concerned with the supernatural. It addresses natural phenomena, like fossils, rocks, life, evolution, etc. For example, we observe that there has never been a global flood, because there are empirical traces of the past which show that certain areas have not been disturbed by large floods for millenia. Proposing a supernatural flood does not resolve this problem of the empirical evidence it did not leave behind; which is why creationists propose a kind of flood geology as a failed attempt to explain what we see in the natural world today.

You ask: "Does your theory have an "eye-witness" account?"

There are eye witness accounts of evolution and speciation and many of the processes of our theory; but there is no eye witness account of events in prehistory. However, in science, as in law, empirical or forensic evidence (if available) is often considered a more reliable guide than eye witness accounts. An eye witness account which cannot be double checked by empirical means is scientifically very weak. If you place special value on eye witness accounts for the past, then you have a problem. There is no eye witness account for many of the matters we discuss, like origins of humanity, or Noah's flood. The one account many people propose as an alternative to what is revealed by empirical evidence is the biblical account, which was written long after those events and therefore does not qualify as an eye witness account.

Science considers that the study of empirical evidence is a good way to discover things about the world. This archive has little to offer those who disagree. We are mainly concerned with those who think the empirical evidence is incorrectly interpreted by mainstream science.

Diamond, Jared M. Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997.

Diamond, Jared M. Guns, germs and steel: a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years. London: Vintage, 1998.

Everyone is required to take his books to class.

Substituting his or her is unwieldy, yet substituting their would be grammatically incorrect (though this is the likely direction English will take). Another makeshift is to alternate masculine and feminine pronouns, or to simply use feminine pronouns throughout.

I try to alternate my use of masculine and feminine pronouns, but a better choice is to avoid the problem altogether through one of the following methods:

Delete the pronoun reference entirely.

"The reader should read the FAQs on thermodynamics as soon as he can." [Replace with possible.]

Change the pronoun to an article or deictic term (that, these, those, etc.).

"A person holding a deep-seated belief may find it hard to give up his belief." [Change to that.]

Pluralize, so that he becomes they.

"A reader should carefully examine his beliefs so he knows their foundations." [Change to Readers should carefully examine their beliefs so they know the foundations of those beliefs.]

Use the relative pronoun who, especially when the generic he follows an if.

"If a person does not understand the scientific method, he cannot make informed judgments about scientific results." [Change to A person who does not understand the scientific method cannot understand scientific results.]

Repeat the noun, especially after a long distance between uses.

"When reading about science, a person must be willing to search for the works referred to. In short, he must be willing to work." [Change to the person.]

I commend to all Bryan A. Garner's marvelous Dictionary of Modern American Usage (Oxford Press) and its entry on sexism.

We all agree that water carved the canyon. The real issue is that actual study of the sediments shows that they were deposited at different times.

For example, the Coconino sandstone layer is several hundred feet below the top of the canyon. It contains tracks and burrows, and is believed to be formed from desert sand dunes. The next layer down is the Hermit shale, believed to have been formed from silt in shallow swamps or lagoons. This shale also contains reptile tracks. Much lower down in the canyon, although still not at the bottom and still above several more sedimentary sandstone layers, there are the Cardenas lavas, which are are mainly basalt. This layer is formed by volcanoes, and is emphatically not a sedimentary deposit.

The existence of tracks, and lava flows, in the middle of canyon layers demonstrates that they were not laid down in a single flood. There is a lot more evidence than this, but these examples are simple enough to be appreciated by any casual reader.

For further reference:

• A Criticism of the ICR's Grand Canyon Dating Project, which includes some simple pictures of the form of the layers of the canyon.
• Easy description of Grand Canyon geology (offsite).
• Trace fossils in Coconino sandstone from near the Grand Canyon (offsite).
• A more technical article on tracks found in layers of the Grand Canyon (offsite).

The rest of your feedback makes a number of points which I cannot respond to in detail. I'll just make two further comments.

First, if you can give specific examples where archive files quote bible verses out of context, this would be useful. However, be aware that the context of verses refers to the immediately surrounding verses. Sometimes people confuse the real context of the verses with one particular interpretation of those verses according to a preferred doctrinal perspective. However, doctrinal models are not context, and people really can have different views on the bible while still reading all verses in context.

Second, real interpretation of evidence strongly limits the reasonable conclusions. It is not the case that evidence can be interpreted to fit any model you like. The bible does not say how the Grand Canyon was formed, and belief that it was formed by the global flood is inconsistent with the available evidence. Flood geologists simply ignore most of the evidence (some of which is given above) and try to cast doubt on aspects of standard geological models without ever giving a comprehensive model that actually makes sense of what we see.

You may be confusing the terms theory and hypothesis. Whatever you may think of evolution, you should be aware that scientists who speak of evolution as a theory are using the word in a standard scientific/mathematical sense, like theory of calculus. This does not mean uncertain or unproven. See the Evolution is a Fact and a Theory FAQ.

There is no conflict between these two fundamental scientific principles. People who think there is a conflict do not understand thermodynamics. We have two FAQs on thermodynamics you may like to read.

Colin Patterson was an influential and prolific evolutionist. He was well aware of the evidence of evolutionary transitions in the fossil record. Your quote actually refers to the fact that we can never be completely sure if one fossil is a direct ancestor of another, or simply a near relative. Do please read our FAQ.

Sadly, Colin Patterson died in March 1998. Here is an obituary which gives you a picture of the man, his life and work, and his legacy.

The protocell is likely to have been far less complex than even the simplest of modern cells. It probably had a membrane of fatty acids, and a number of molecules within it that reacted to each other so that one was used to catalyse the other, forming a closed catalytic cycle. The "food" molecules passed through the membrane to serve as raw material to this process. Other hypotheses suggest that proteinoids formed microspheres spontaneously (this has been demonstrated int helaboratory to occur) which grew through chemical reactions to split through mechanical instability.

It is very likely that the protocells incorporated RNA, although it is equally likely that RNA had no strict role as a "genetic" material at that stage. As simple as they were, the parts probably were not "essential" in that if a protocell lacked one component, it may have grown in a different manner or it may have simply used another similar molecule. "Function" is a hard thing to apply to such simple systems.

Once a variety of protocells existed, normal Darwinian competition for resources would kick in, and ecological diversification would commence. This means that different "species" of cells would be competing and would co-evolve, and that "similar" cells would compete for the same resources. Selection would then sharpen up the specialisations of molecules within these cells.

For more information, see Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations and references.

As for the vapor canopy hypothesis, it holds no water. If it had existed, the canopy would have blocked out virtually all sunlight from reaching the Earth's surface, killing off all plant life. Moreover, the extreme temperature and pressure such a canopy would create would parboil antediluvian people and animals. You'd think someone would have noticed these effects. See the article The Vapor Canopy Hypothesis Holds No Water for details.

There is a set of guidelines for responses to feedback to help remind us that if any particular feedback item gets one of us too exercised to keep civil that it is best to let one of the other volunteers handle that message.

We do have a page here that discusses Behe.

Behe's Irreducible Complexity (IC) does not erect any absolute bar to such a structure being developed through descent with modification.

William Dembski did endorse IC as representing cases of "specified complexity" in his framework for design detection. I have a page devoted to links to criticism of Dembski's works.

I presented at the 1997 "Naturalism, Theism, and the Scientific Enterprise" conference. Other presenters included Johnson, Meyer, Dembski, Nelson, and Wells. So, yes, some of us here do have some familiarity with the Intelligent Design Creationist movement.

Wesley

Christians sometimes take this aspect of modern cosmology to show that God does not simply create at a certain time, but that God is outside of time altogether, and time is just another part of his creation.

Your question also assumes that the energy of the universe is non-zero. However, this cannot be simply assumed. Energy is an abstraction we find useful for describing the universe, and some forms of what we call energy, such as gravitational potential energy, are actually negative.

Your question also contains another assumption; and that is that the origin of energy must be personal. We don't know all about the very origins of the universe. Even if you could establish that there was a point in time in which conservation of energy was violated, it does not follow that there was a person who did the violation.

Generally, from a theological perspective, it is not a good idea to focus on the distant past, and on places where there are gaps in scientific knowledge, for attributing the creative activity of God. If you cannot see God's creative activity in your own origins as an individual person, despite the fact we can observe and study the biological processes involved, then God's involvement with you becomes rather distant.