Feedback for October 1999

The reader misquotes Colby's FAQ. Colby did not say that "Creation is 100% crap." What Colby said is that "Scientific creationism is 100% crap." Colby went on to document that his statement was in fact true. Scientific creationism is a specific doctrine promulgated by YECs designed to supplement or supplant discussion of evolutionary biology in secondary school science classrooms. It is not the same thing as "Creation". Saying that "scientific creationism is 100% crap" may be harsh, but I find that it is accurate. There are many other views of creation, as Robert Pennock ably documents in his book, "Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism".

Wesley

I have often given permission for my own oervres to be distributed in hard copy for discussion purposes.

Who is it that claims to already have the answers in hand? That sounds like the theistic anti-evolutionists. Perhaps our anonymous correspondent should take this up with one of the anti-evolutionary pages that actually espouses such a stance.

Wesley

The main inconsistency between the two camps is the quality of the science. In creationism, the outcome that the bible is literally true is all that really matters, and any scientific finding or empirical evidence that contradicts this preconceived conclusion is ignored or demonized.

The study of evolution does not endorse any religious viewpoint, as can be seen from the fact that people of ALL beliefs accept it as true. Evolution is true science by virtue of it being formed from the evidence, not (as in the case of creationism) before the evidence or even in spite of the evidence.

For a group to be a superorganism, it would need to have a high degree of cohesion of the right kind, and be able to reproduce, to a high degree of accuracy, the properties that are being selected. Groups do have properties, but they are rarely hereditable (other than biogrography, or niche constructions like beaver's dams).

Now I greatly respect Sober and Wilson's work, but I don't think they have established that groups are ever of the kind of individual that can by definition undergo selection. I much prefer Elisabeth Vrba's Effect Hypothesis - the properties of groups (including species in some circumstances) leads them to be sorted but sorting is a superset of selection, and does not involve group-level heredity.

However, on the view I adhere to, species are not the sort of groups that could even be sorted in that way, unless they were identical with demes (effective populations in the biogeographic and reproductive sense).

I hope this helps.

No matter how many people look at it, the Berlin specimen of Archaeopteryx lithographica continues to clearly display feather imprints. Observation... and repeatability... all right there.

A necessary aspect of scientific research is that it proceeds by intersubjective experience. This does not make necessary that all phenomena have to be reproducible in a lab in order to be explored via scientific methodologies. Historical events sometimes leave behind evidence, and this evidence allows us to make observations and inferences with just as much validity as those which result from laboratory work.

Evolution as such has been observed, both in the lab and in the field. There is evidence of evolutionary change in populations, whether the correspondent wishes to recognize it or not.

Wesley

Some browsers, like Netscape, allow one to override the font and color choices in pages. This can be very handy for those who have trouble reading certain pages.

For Netscape 4.5+, click on "Edit", select "Preferences", then select "Appearance". Under that, there are options for specifying one's own font and color scheme and for forcing pages to be rendered using those rather than the ones specified by the page.

Wesley

This web site archive is run by volunteer effort. There is no one person who handles incoming mail. That's why we have the very nice feedback system that Brett Vickers has coded. It allows a number of interested volunteers to respond to issues raised in feedback.

That said, there are many email addresses available here. Most of the FAQ files have email addresses for the authors. In the feedback section, one will find almost every response comes with the email address of the person making a response. Pick someone whose interests seem to cover the topic and send them email. Or better yet, use the talk.origins newsgroup to post items aimed at widespread exchanges of information.

Wesley

Internet Infidels keeps a listing of what you are looking for.

As long as there are cosmic rays there will be ¹⁴C. But the abundance in the atmosphere is not constant, and has to be calibrated. One common method is to use treerings, but there are other ways as well. The Radiocarbon Web is a good place to find out about the details & applications of radiocarbon dating. Also, I might add that my own Radiometric Dating Resource List has more links to radiocarbon dating explanations, as well as many other radioisotope (radiometric) dating methods, and specific criticisms of creationist arguments.

The intrinsic rate of increase poses no bar to six billion humans arising from some small number of forebears in a relatively short period of time.

But the facts of genetics argue strongly that humans had no recent genetic bottleneck of the sort posed by the tale of Noah's ark.

Wesley

Evolution does not deal with anything other than living organisms that reproduce and change over time in response to environmental pressures and genetic variables. Evolution does not even deal with the origin of living cells.

And, by the way, you're right that a dog, seeing itself in a mirror, sees itself as another dog. But a chimpanzee, humanity's closest relative, can indeed recognize itself in a mirror, just like we can. Do you feel that this is a coincidence?

In my opinion, the real problem is that creation "science" is very bad science, regardless of the value of the religious beliefs it is used to support. When the issue is approached from any scientific perspective ("mainstream" or not), creation "science" has little value to offer. In writing the Age of the Earth FAQ, I'd gladly have included legitimate scientific data that stands up to critical inspection and indicates an age of 6,000 years for the Earth, if there were any. In a way it was like writing a "round Earth vs flat Earth" FAQ -- it's simply not possible to be totally "balanced" because the evidence is so one-sided. Without being misleading (e.g., using arguments that are demonstrably false) it is not possible to even make a decent-looking (let alone truly solid) scientific case for a 6,000-year-old Earth. If you think you can demonstrate otherwise, feel free to contact me offline. I'll always listen to new information, but to date the young-Earth crowd hasn't had much success in dealing with my nearly-a-decade-old FAQ.

We try very hard to keep a civil tone on this site; after all, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. I'm glad you found that to be the case.

The trueorigins site illustrates the adage about imitation and flattery. It is the nature of anti-evolutionary material to be presented with great confidence. Unfortunately, it does not appear to be a tradition that these materials also be compatible with empirical evidence. Without exception, I have found anti-evolutionary arguments to be erroneous, mistaken, misleading, outdated, oversold, or some combination of the foregoing.

I entered this debate with my attendance at a SciCre lecture given by someone billed as a geologist. As a zoology student, I knew very little concerning geology, and it seemed to me that some of the arguments that the lecturer gave were very compelling. I talked with him after the lecture, and he kindly gave me a copy of a little book by Dr. Henry M. Morris of the Institute for Creation Research. The title was, "The Scientific Case for Creation". I thanked him and went off.

When I started reading Morris' little tome, I started finding things that were disturbing. Either much of every science class I had taken was in error, or Morris was rather badly missing some basic points. I started marking each sentence which was to my knowledge incorrect. Within a short while, most pages in the book contained one or more such marks. I soon came to the conclusion that either Morris was almost completely inept or that he was being deliberately deceptive. The aggressive promotion of his authority as a scientific writer, though, made it less tenable to simply chalk it up to ineptitude.

This exposure to anti-evolutionary ethics or lack thereof has caused me to since become involved in opposing arguments made in that mode. I find that quotes provided by anti-evolutionists make me want to read the original source, or that arguments made make me want to find expositions outside the anti-evolutionary genre. When I do these things, I routinely discover more shenanigans being pulled by anti-evolutionary authors. One doesn't have to be a technical whiz to look up a quote and find that the original author made a point inconsistent with what the anti-evolutionist quoting him claims he said. Do this a few times and one will take with a large grain of salt anything such a person says.

Wesley

It seems to me that much of the archive is devoted to taking up claims made by anti-evolutionists of "unanswered questions" or "errors" on the part of biologists and showing how those claims are wrong. If there is some "correct" anti-evolutionary belief, I would like to make its acquaintance. Perhaps "lk4" could post the details to the talk.origins newsgroup. In the meantime, this archive is host to one of the most extensive list of links to online anti-evolutionary materials that one can find. "lk4" is invited to nag some of those sites concerning parity in their listing of arguments and in their making available links to opposing viewpoints.

Wesley

Just as "creationism" is not synonymous with the doctrine of creation in orthodox theisms, neither is evolution a belief system.

Your personal opinions about anyone else's theological beliefs you should keep to yourself. Such issues do not, I repeat do not enter into any scientific discussion. You have not addressed a single scientific issue in your letter.

It's not possible to do a "probability of abiogenesis" calculation in any meaningful way.

However, let us note that the above quote is lifted directly from the introduction to Ian's FAQ! Ian also makes the same point again in his conclusion. His calculations are not intended to be actual measures of the real likelihood of abiogenesis. They rather show the enormous effect of unstated assumptions used by people who do propose worthless probability calculations as meaningful criticisms.

The particular calculation to which you allude, which assumes a sea filled with a dilute solution of amino acids, is not proposed as a realistic model of biogenesis, and the opening paragraph of that section reads as follows:

So lets play the creationist game and look at forming a peptide by random addition of amino acids. This certainly is not the way peptides formed on the early Earth, but it will be instructive.

I think that you and I and Ian are all basically agreed that probability calculations and statistical analysis of this kind are not sensible as measures of how things actually happened. So if you can find a direct extract or quote from the FAQ which implies or suggests that the calculations are based on knowledge of exactly how things did happen, let us know, or even propose a better wording. I cannot see any such phrases myself, however; and plenty of disclaimers to make clear that this is not the intent.

In recent years a movement known broadly as the evolutionary epistemology school has tried to defend the reliability of human knowledge from Humean doubts, by arguing that it has to be reliable or it would not have evolved.

This is obviously panadaptationist and overly optimistic. That Darwin saw this problem is to his credit, and it remains a major reason why the evolutionary epistemology movement has either become more subtle or is not acceptable to modern philosophy.

However, this is a problem whether you think we have evolved from organisms with less cognitive skill or are descended from fallen angels, or are mystified by the illusory nature of things. In other words, it's a general problem to anyone that thinks we learn about the world in some way, not just to Darwinian thinking. If one accepts the value of scientific knowledge, then being fallible is part of it. It makes as much difference to engineering, astronomy and accounting as it does to evolution.

Neandertals are not thought to be the same species as humans, but a closely related species in the same genus. The Linnean species name used does not indicate this, and recently the taxonomic name for neandertals and modern humans has been changed: they are Homo neandertalensis and we are Homo sapiens, one of two major forms (the "modern"). In fact, some modern scholars even think that we and erectus are the same species.

A recent claim was made that sapiens and neandertals routinely hybridised in Portugal. This is disputed, but people I trust who are paleoanthropologists think it is either true or plausible. On that account, the two species are sibling species - close enough to occasionally hybridise.

DNA differences are not a perfect guide to cross-fertility. Many species have massive regional and subspecific genetic variation and yet are able to crossbreed, and some distinct species have very similar genetic structure and makeup and yet cannot, and all combinations in between. It is likely that we are distinct species from neandertals, but the possibility remains that we aren't.

I hope this clears up your confusions on the matter.

Nothing is "proven" in science the way it is in mathematics or logic. A scientific proposition is "proven" when the overwhelming weight of the evidence points in its direction.

On death: Most Christian denominations hold that the "death" the Bible speaks of is not physical death, but the death of the soul to sin. And what makes you think "evolutionists" don't want to accept God? Plenty do. See the God and Evolution FAQ.

Evolution operates on preexisting, reproducing, organisms. It doesn't care where those organisms came from. Space aliens, magic pixie dust, abiogenesis, the Voice of God -- it doesn't matter a whit to evolution.

I did look at your quotes. You have done what so many others have done -- taken quotes out of context and substituted them for real argumentation. Rather than quote-mining from some pamphlets, why not examine what those scientists actually say and believe? Better yet, why not read a good textbook on evolutionary biology? It sounds to me like you need to learn what evolution actually says, rather than what creationists say it says.

I wonder if you have written to any creationist websites, similarly chastizing them for their lack of fair and balanced treatment towards the evolutionist view. They prolifically present their opinions, and it is only fair that the evolution side of this debate be accurately presented by evolutionary scientists. That is what this site is for.

Computer programs do not necessarily require programmers. Selection processes analogous to natural selection of living organisms can give rise to working computer programs which no-one really understands. Some of the best examples of this are in development of field-programmable gate arrays (a bit like programmable hardware). The circuits work, but use principles totally unlike those adopted by human programmers, and no-one fully understands how they work. See Adrian Thompson's home page at the University of Sussex, and a New Scientist article on the subject (both offsite).

Species are not simply alike: they are alike in a very regular way, called a nested hierarchy. This is what allows us to say, for example, that a whale is unambiguously a mammal, and not a fish. Molecular evidence confirms this nested hierarchy, which is characteristic of cummulative inherited change. By way of contrast, computers and calculators are designed objects, and they do not have this pattern. Advances which make calculators better get reused in computers, and vica versa, which means that there is no clear cut basis for classifying computing devices into a hierarachy. This is a major difference betwwen designed objects and evolved objects.

Mutations are sometimes bad, often neutral, and occassionally beneficial. See the Are Mutations Harmful FAQ.

I do wonder, however, why you think it is "obvious" that you must be a creationist if you are a Christian. Believing in the Christian God and accepting that evolution best explains Earth's biodiversity are not mutually exclusive positions. See the God and Evolution FAQ.

Or perhaps I am just misunderstanding what you mean by "creationist." If by that you mean that God had a hand in the origins of life and the universe, that position is not incompatible with science in general or evolution in particular.

That sums up the problem right there. No matter how strong the evidence, no matter how logical the arguments, no matter how sound the conclusions, you will not even consider them.

Dr. Phillip E. Johnson believes that Darwinian natural selection has only been shown to produce minor changes in traits of organisms. This part he has no problem with, but he asserts that the larger claims for natural selection's role in common ancestry will soon be set aside. See this page for an in-depth review of Johnson's "Darwin On Trial".

Dr. William A. Dembski certainly does not say that evolutionary theory is outlandish. Dembski, too, accepts that natural selection can do some things in the history of life. But Dembski claims that some events cannot possibly be the result of the operation of natural selection. See this page for links to both Dembski's essays and to commentary upon those essays.

Wesley

You say "ALL of the fossils found to date are conveniently completely formed or parts of completely formed animals or plants." You called it a "damning fact" against evolution. Do you think that evolution requires that fossils should be found of incompletely formed creatures (whatever those might be)? That is not the case. Evolution is driven by species being well-adapted to their environments. Evolution does not predict the existence of "incompletely formed" animals.

Your claim that mutations must produce "microscopic, random cellular changes that would produce grotesque, asymmetrical life forms that would dominate the fossil record" is simply erroneous, uninformed and completely baseless. Your use of the word "entropy" here is also completely misapplied. Despite your wishes, the origin of life is indeed a scientifically answerable question. In your last paragraph you say "this has nothing to do with religion", but the last sentence betrays your real purpose.

The definition of macroevolution, derived from Filipchenko via Dobzhansky, is the correct definition, as far as it goes. However, many authors, particularly those who think, as many do, that the processes occurring above the species level cannot be just the effect of or the same as those occuring below the species level, are not actually referring to processes when they use the term "macroevolution". Instead, they are referring to patterns of evolution, whether they are aware of it or not.

To discern a pattern at macroevolutionary scales, you need to have several (minimally three but many more in practice) taxa to compare. There is no pattern for one or two species. Since the evolution of one new species from another one is the minimum of macroevolution, when people talk about "major transformations" or "large scale evolution", they must be meaning the patterns of evolution.

So, both are correct, if that distinction is borne in mind. The least macroevolution is a single speciation event. Major transformations are patterns of many speciation events, and are by definition macroevolutionary, but that isn't all that is macroevolutionary.

This point pops up a lot, so I must amend the FAQ sometime to make it clearer. Thanks for your feedback.

Even if we go further and add multiple trials (as you requested), I don't see that it makes a significant difference. If we generously assume that you'll shuffle cards about a million times in your lifetime, the odds of you getting any particular sequence in your lifetime fall, but only to about 10-62. That's still a trillion times less likely than Borel's 10-50 threshold. This doesn't mean that it's not possible for you to shuffle a deck of cards; it means that it's a practical impossibility for you to predict the exact ordering in advance of any deck that you shuffle in your lifetime.

Similarly, the odds discussed by the creationists (in the feedback entries to which you refer) are not the odds of any life evolving, but instead the odds of exactly the same result that we've had -- which means that their argument involves that exact fallacy. It is also true, as you point out, that creationists' anti-abiogenesis calculations lean on a large number of questionable assumptions, and that there are huge uncertainties in the field that render such calculations useless. But regardless of that, they need to get their basic mathematics straight.

1. Dinosaurs lived throughout most of the Mezozoic Era, a span of roughly 185 million years. In contrast, hominids have been around for only 5 million years or so.
2. The grouping "dinosaur" comprises many more species than the grouping "hominid." It's like comparing the population of the United States, a country, to the population of Toronto, a city.
3. Many dinosaurs were larger in size than we are. We're pretty large as terrestrial organisms go; our imagination tends to be captured by the few things larger than we are. The public pays attention to dinosaurs.
4. The large size of many dinosaurs and numerous bony parts makes them good candidates for fossilization and discovery. Smaller animals are less easily fossilized and are more difficult to discover once fossilized.
5. Even "complete" fossils are rarely 100% complete. "Sue," perhaps the best-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex fossil ever discovered, is only about 90% complete. Paleontologists are quite skilled and experienced at filling in the gaps; they have to be.
6. Dinosaurs roamed over much of the earth, and can be found in great number in easily accessible places, such as Utah, where exposed rocky terrain and modern transportation and communications infrastructure make them relatively easy to search for, discover, and extract. Fossil hominids are found almost exclusively in certain regions of Africa, where the terrain is at times not as hospitable to fossil discovery and where a fully modernized infrastructure is often lacking.

You must ask yourself why God would have made a world "instantly old". He certainly would not have had to. Taking your line of thought further... this leads to conclusions that God has deliberately intended to deceive the world into thinking the world is billions of years old. These immense ages are exactly what's needed for evolution to take place, hence God's deliberate deception of creating an instantly old universe also aids in the widespread acceptance of evolution.

One thing is definately for sure: The world was never, in its entire history, submerged in a global flood. This cannot be refuted.

So, the best I can do is list some texts that may help you.

First, the history of opposition to Darwinism:

Bowler, P. J. (1983). The eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian evolution theories in the decades around 1900. Baltimore and London, John Hopkins University Press.

Then a text that opposes Darwinism in favor of an alternative approach to biology:

Webster, G. and B. C. Goodwin (1996). Form and transformation : generative and relational principles in biology. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York, N.Y., Cambridge University Press.

Next, one of the standard textbooks in the field.

Futuyma, D. J. (1998). Evolutionary biology. Sunderland, Mass., Sinauer Associates.

and then a book that summarises experimental work done on natural selection:

Bell, G. (1996). Selection: The mechanism of evolution. New York, Chapman & Hall.

and finally, a discussion about alternative ways to think about evolution, taking development (growth of organisms) as the central theme.

Schlichting, C. D. and M. Pigliucci (1998). Phenotypic evolution: A reaction norm rerspective. Sunderland, MA, Sinauer Associates.

It's hard to be more specific than this unless you can refine your queries. Science is a massive enterprise, and simple summaries are hard to find.

I rather doubt that there is much personal animosity towards anti-evolutionists here. Quite a bit of scorn and well-deserved contempt for the low tactics and arguments made by anti-evolutionists may well be evident. I don't happen to see that as a minus.

I also don't think James gets around enough if he thinks anti-evolutionists do not get hostile. Let's have a look... Go to Altavista, click on "Advanced Text Search", and then enter the following search criteria: evolutionist near (deluded or stupid or ignorant or evil or lying or misquoting or lies or misquote or bad or mistaken or censor or censorship or discrimination or discriminate or Satan or Satanist). I got 85 hits back from that. What do we see when we look inside some of these?

Thus evolution is one of the many cults of Satan built upon faith.

- Evolution: The Truth?

Thus Lucifer became the first evolutionist, and this great lie by which he deceived himself became the basis of his later deception of Eve and then of the founders of all the varied pantheistic religions of the world, as well as modern evolutionism and New-Age philosophies.

- Days of Praise: Daily Bible Readings and Devotional Commentaries: November 1992

Now I read what evolution is, in another way so that you can see that it is infidelity. Then, if you find yourself an evolutionist, you know at once that you are an infidel: "The hypothesis of evolution aims at answering a number of questions respecting the beginning, or genesis, of things."

[...]

Are you a creationist now, or are you an evolutionist? Will you go out of this house with an evil heart, or with a new heart, created by the word of God, which has in it creative energy to produce a new heart?

- Creation or Evolution, Which?

How about a charge about deliberate deception?

In other words, even though the circular reasoning processes which evolutionists have relied upon leaves much to be desired from the intellectual standpoint, they never felt compelled to justify their position because to many gullible people were willing to accept what they said on face value.

[...]

But then that is exactly what evolutionists have been doing since Darwin first proposed his theory. They conveniently overlook facts which they themselves have observed, when those facts interfere with their naturalistic explanations. The evolutionist's prejudice against God is stronger then their desire to find the truth.

[...]

The evolutionist however will either deny the very facts which his own investigation has uncovered, or he will misrepresent them. As such, he will continue moving backward in time until he has abandoned all pretext of scientific inquiry.

[...]

However, since most evolutionists don't like either bad dreams or evangelical theologians they simply ignore the facts we have just examined. Rather than acknowledge their error, they willingly go back down the mountain of ignorance into the valley of the absurd. They have chosen instead to walk along the path of the preposterous where they are joined by their hiking companions, Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man.

- Evolution: Guilty As Charged - Chapter 5

All the talk about "pre-biotic soup," mutations, natural selection and "missing links" is nothing more than a deceptive attempt to explain away God!

- The Wrath of God

That is to say it's been validated in the sense that you do need a creator after all, but even more, what's been validated is the biblical view that it's a major part of the human project to get rid of the creator; because their deeds were evil, they did not want to honor god as God, and so instead they imagined various forms of idolatry and nature worship of which Darwinian evolution is just the most prevalent modern form. So, at this point, you say that not only has it been revealed that science points to the reality of a creator after all, but the enormously bad and self-deceptive thinking of the Darwinian evolutionist is something straight out of Romans 1.

- Communiqué Interview: Phillip E. Johnson

In a feeble attempt to explain this mystery, modern evolutionists, like their predecessors also rely upon their active imaginations.

- Chapter II: I'd Rather Not Talk About It

The Evolutionist has a trail of deceit, tampered evidence and faulty conclusions to which they have bound into a volume of Holy writ.

- http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Meadows/5466/man.htm

I think James may be getting the idea by now.

Anti-evolutionists have been caught using deception and rhetoric in order to advance their sectarian viewpoints and get non-science taught in science classrooms. That does not cause me to hold them in greater esteem.

Wesley