Feedback for May 2001

An overly literal interpretation of general relativity (GR) creates the notion that the universe began as a tiny point that "exploded" into the Big Bang. But that is only because GR is a classically limited theory. Quantized to include gravity and the known particle forces, the new theory could easily reveal that the tiny point is just an illusion, or just a step in a longer process. String theory (or "superstring" theory) may well do exactly that.

The talkorigins archive has no official position on these notions. We are content to observe that there has been no global flood, and leave speculations about local floods mostly alone. As individuals, we have diverse views.

In my personal opinion, the science demonstrating that a Black Sea flood occurred is highly reliable. The connection with Noah's flood is farfetched, and has not been persuasive.

Glenn Morton has written some articles for our archive on geology, and on his own site he has a refutation of this notion. Glenn has his own ideas about Noah's flood, which (my view again) are even more absurd than those of Ryan! (Sorry, Glenn.)

My view is that Noah's flood is a plain retelling of the flood story from the Epic of Gilgamesh, which you also note. A possible historical antecedent for Utnapishtim's flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh is a major river flood; but this has little to do with the reasons or form of the various derived stories, including the Epic of Gilgamesh itself. The flood story of Gilgamesh (in which the Noah-figure is actually Utnapishtim), whatever its historical antecedents (if any), is a fairly blatant moral fable of gods and men; Gilgamesh is a great king who goes in search of eternal life, and one of the people he seeks out is Utnapishtim, who was the survivor of the great flood and had been granted eternal life. (Note that Gilgamesh himself was born long after the flood.)

The Hebrew retelling as Noah's flood in Genesis is fairly obviously recasting of the story to convey the Hebrew religious faith of monotheism. None of these various related flood tales are given as history, and looking for local or global floods is interesting, but missing the point of the stories.

Those who like stories should note that the Epic of Gilgamesh is well suited to novelisation, and a number of modern authors have done so. Here are just two of them. Robert Silverbeg wrote Gilgamesh the King, and Stephan Grundy wrote Gilgamesh.

See this page for more links on the Epic of Gilgamesh, and read this essay on Storytelling, the Meaning of Life, and The Epic of Gilgamesh.

We have now answered all questions anyone could ever have on creationism and evolution. People are obviously carefully reading the information supplied and not wasting our time by asking old questions, or raising issues already adequately addressed in the archive.

Our main Archaeopteryx FAQ, All About Archaeopteryx , is much more detailed, and it does discuss Protoavis.

Here is a direct link to the paragraph on Protoavis.

What it means to be transitional is explained in the FAQ you were reading originally, and in the main FAQ. From the main FAQ:

This is why Archae is a true transitional species, because it shares some characters which are diagnostic of one group whilst still retaining characters diagnostic of its ancestral group.

... a classic example of a transitional form - in evolutionary terms, a form which exhibits characters shared with one group and only that group, whilst also exhibiting other characters shared with another group and only with that group (e.g. Kitcher 1982), in other words a morphological intermediate.

Protoavis, however, is a questionable example. It might be ancestral to modern birds, but it is is far more like its dinosaur ancestors than any modern bird, and is thus another piece of evidence for the evolution of birds from dinosaurs. However, the finds are very badly damaged, making detailed interpretation difficult.

Some other links:

• Sankar Chatterjee, the finder of Protoavis, describes the evolution of birds. This discussion shows that both Protoavis and Archaeopteryx are transitional forms, and neither is a modern bird.
• A page on the fossil record of birds at UC Berkeley, showing some of the questions surrounding Protoavis.
• An excellent introductory site, including some much more recent fossil finds, on the question Did Birds Evolve from the Dinosaurs?

The "traditional method" of carbon dating is to concentrate the carbon in a sample, convert it to a gas, and then measure the residual radioactivity of the gas. Even though this is done in a specially shielded chamber, some small amount of background radiation will interfere with the counts. Due to this "noise," even a completely "dead" sample will yield a computed age around 20,000 to 30,000 years (give or take, depending on several factors). That is essentially the limit of the "traditional" assessment technique. For this reason, a result in the 30,000-year range by the "traditional" method is understood to mean "an indeterminately old age."

An age around 30,000 years (on a much older object) by the "traditional" carbon dating method is neither a refutation of carbon dating nor a rejection of the old-Earth timescale. Anyone trying to use it is such is either deliberately being dishonest, or else is so ill-acquainted with the procedure that they have no business criticizing it.

You must remember that creationism, not evolution, is anti-religion. All religions are welcome to study evolution. I personally know Christian, Jewish, Mormon, Moslem, and Buddhist evolutionists. Creationism, on the other hand, opposes all religions but one and requires a narrow interpretation of that one (albeit not always the same one, depending on the variety of creationism). Members of groups such as the ICR dedicate their whole existence to proving God does not exist, at least not the God I understand. Your question would better be directed to them.

You are free to believe whatever religion you want. I might disagree, but I won't try to stop you, especially if it helps make you a better person. You are not free, however, to force your religious beliefs on others. If a religion tells you, say, that all swans are green, and you choose to believe it, then I may look at you funny, but I'll let you be. When you start insisting that others must learn that all swans are green, then I will argue. Your religion applies only to you and to others who choose to accept the same religion. It does not apply to me, to swans, to biology in general, or to anything else in the world.

Evolutionists obtain their morality from society, just as you do. Evolution only describes what is, not what should be. Besides, "survival of the fittest" is a very poor description of evolution, and it would require a gross MISunderstanding of evolution to use it to justify all the anti-social behaviors creationists accuse us of.

I suggest the following revision:

Genetic changes do not anticipate a species' needs, and those changes may be unrelated to selection pressures on the species. Nevertheless, evolution is not fundamentally a random process.

There are no "staff members" -- just independent volunteers. Your quotes are from different people, and different people have different opinions.

Furthermore, I wouldn't see any inconsistencies even if they had been said by one person. I agree that every individual should find their own moral and social path through life, and I see no problem with people using the bible as an ethical guide (well, at least with some parts). However, that does not mean that I think the bible is a literally accurate science textbook, and I do take issue with people who are so ignorant that they think it can be used in such a way.

In other words, I can applaud when someone says, "Love your neighbor", and call them an idiot when the same person says the world is only 6000 years old. There's nothing inconsistent in that.

Hayes, J.P. and M.E. Richmond. 1993. Clinal variation and morphology of woodrats of the eastern United States. Journal of Mammalogy 74: 204-216.

Gunduz I, Lopez-Fuster MJ, Ventura J, Searle JB. 2001. Clinal analysis of a chromosomal hybrid zone in the house mouse. Genet Res Feb;77(1):41-51

Houlden BA, Costello BH, Sharkey D, Fowler EV, Melzer A, Ellis W, Carrick F, Baverstock PR, Elphinstone MS. 1999. Phylogeographic differentiation in the mitochondrial control region in the koala, Phascolarctos cinereus. (Goldfuss 1817). Mol Ecol Jun;8(6):999-1011

Ravosa MJ. 1998. Cranial allometry and geographic variation in slow lorises (Nycticebus). Am J Primatol;45(3):225-43

But suppose they were. Would this mean that God made moths able to adapt to there (sic) surroundings, not evolution? Not at all - it would only mean that this piece of research didn't show that evolution was the cause of the change.

As it happens, we know that there was a DNA mutation because it has been seen repeatedly - don't forget that we have much better information about DNA these days than fifty years ago.

Finally, note that even if every example of evolution were shown to be wrong, this would not prove anything about God's activity (nor does establishing evolution prove anything about God's lack of activity, but that's another matter). At best it undercuts the argument of evolutionary theory, but it proves nothing. We might all be the result of intelligent alien intervention, although that poses the question of the origins of aliens.

Instead it is an opportunity to make clear the nature of science to those who are willing to listen.

Unfortunately, there is an incorrect link in our main browsing index. Due to problems moving to a new server, it is taking time to fix these glitches.

Thanks for the error report. Normally, you can report such problems with mail to , but that also seems not to be working last time I tried it.

Evolution's primary lesson is that things will change, unless something stops them from doing so, in generation to generation. The number of possible working hemoglobin molecules is very large, so as long as each one does much the same job, simple random change will cause their hemoglobin and ours to diverge at a more or less regular rate.

What causes things not to change includes natural selection. If a lungfish has some feature that makes it fit for its environment, then selection will tend to prevent that from undergoing the usual random change that occurs to all living things. Other things that may prevent change, in my opinion, resolve to selection or something like it, but that is a matter of debate.

Changes in amino acids mean that the genetic structure has changed. According to the Central Dogma of molecular genetics, information is passed from genes to proteins but not vice versa.

In general, though, most of your questions suggest a woeful ignorance of basic biology. For instance, you are hung up on human details: you ask which came first, the penis or the vagina. The answer, of course, is neither. Most animals that reproduce sexually do not have either of those structures; others have both. Single-celled organisms that reproduce sexually may just have a single gene difference.

Other questions just reveal creationist misconceptions, such as "land-based creature suddenly sprouting lungs". They didn't.

The diversity of life is not an accident either. It is a natural consequence of processes observed and studied by biologists.

See also two FAQs on Evolution and Chance.

As a biologist, you should be in a good position to critique some of our Biology and Evolutionary Theory archive, which includes such hits as "Introduction to Evolutionary Biology", "The Modern Synthesis of Genetics and Evolution", and even "The Evolution of Color Vision". Did you read any of them? Do you have a biology based criticism? Or are you just too impressed by your own hocus-pocus about random chance? And what about "29 Evidences for Macroevolution"?

And as for the age of the Earth, all of the arguments you cited are easy to refute, and some are already refuted in this archive: "Meteorite Dust and the Age of the Earth", "Creation Science and the Earth's Magnetic Field", and "The Recession of the Moon and the Age of the Earth-Moon System" all refute your evidence for a young Earth. As for the "salt in the oceans" argument, it never was much of an "argument". But still, you can read Glenn Morton's refutation of that one too.

Science points resoundingly towards an "old" Earth, and biology points resoundingly towards "evolution". If you think otherwise, then use your education in biology to take on the biology in this archive and show that it is wrong. Isn't that supposed to be "easy"?

The first thing that should be obvious is that equilibrium & isolation are necessary criteria. The 2nd law does not apply to any system which does not meet the specified criteria. The surface region of the earth is approximately in equilibrium; if you average a year's worth of solar input against a years worth of earth's thermal output, they are pretty much equal to each other. But that is not necessarily true over shorter time periods, making it questionable whether or not the earth surface region is in equlibrium. However, the existence of solar input clearly violates the necessity for isolation, and that means the 2nd law cannot be applied as stated to the earth surface region. The same statements hold true, as generalities, specifically for the biosphere.

Biological evolution is a process that deals only with living things. If you consider the aggregate of all living things as a system, it should be at once obvious that the living system is neither isolated, nor in equilibrium (in the context of life, "equilibrium" = "dead"). The living system is in fact held in a state far removed from equilibrium by the chemical & physical processes that keep living things alive. Since the system of life, which encompasses "evolution", does not meet the necessary criteria established for application of the 2nd law, then it hardly makes sense to even talk about the 2nd law being "violated". How can you violate a law that doesn't even apply?

Also see the Thermodynamics, Evolution and Creationism articles. But this is a site that emphasizes "evolution" vs "creation", so there are comparisons between the two. For myself, I point out that creationists regularly abuse & misunderstand science in general, and thermodynamics is no exception. The most common fallacy is to equate "disorder" and "entropy" as if they were strictly synonymous, ignore the basic criteria that are a part of the 2nd law, and then complain about how evolution, by requiring "disorder" ("entropy") to decrease violates the 2nd law. But the whole argument is just a sham.

The deal about "entropy" and "energy" is that "energy" is required to do "work" (push a chemical reaction along or move something, etc.). Entropy tells you how much "useful energy" is available to do work. If you can't pump any new energy in (isolation), then you eventually use up the useful energy you have, can't do any more work, and you're done. The increase in entropy required by the 2nd law reflects that process of using energy. But living systems suck up energy like sponges, as photosynthesis or as eating food. As the system of life uses up energy getting the work of living done, it takes in new energy to keep the work of living going. Living things could live forever, if they could keep that process going forever. Evolution is just one of the things that living systems do; it takes energy, but there's plenty to go around. So there is no fundamental reason for suspecting that evolution somehow violates any law of thermodynamics.

Another creationist tactic is to argue that the absence of some plan or program to convert energy requires evolution to violate the 2nd law. But that's a "bait & switch" trick, because the absence or presence of such things is outside the vision of the 2nd law, and constitute an entirely separate argument of their own. Of course, the essential statement is also false, since there are indeed "programs" in place to convert energy (that's what photosynthesis is).

The evidence in favor of an "old" Earth is scientifically overwhelming. The arguments put forth for a "young" Earth are generally very bad, and sometimes downright dishonest. Many of these points are covered in our "Age of the Earth" collection.

Evolution is a scientific theory about the natural course of change on Earth, including organic and natural change in life. As you say, not all things can be explained scientifically, a fact that we are all well aware of over here in Talk.Origins land. But some things are explained scientifically, and the age of the Earth is one of them. So are the natural changes that add up to "evolution". But that scientific theory has not a thing to say about salvation or the relationship between man & God. Don't make the mistake of thinking that it does.

Nobody knows how life arose, either. However, we know from a variety of experiments and observations that complex molecules form in lots of different situations. A couple of the most popular hypotheses for how those molecules got complex enough to reproduce are the RNA world and submarine hydrothermal reactions. There are numerous other hypotheses as well.

It is not surprising that life is not coming from non-life now because the environment now is horrendous in the extreme for developing proto-life. First, there's lots of oxygen, which tends to damage large organic molecules. Second, there's lots of life here already, and much of that life is quite adept at making a meal out of anything that can't protect itself.

If life from non-life could only be made under restrictive conditions (and how could one ever show that that was the only way?), that would merely show that those conditions once existed. It would say nothing about where those conditions came from.

The sickle-cell anemia example is not presented as a classic "beneficial" mutation, but as a demonstration that what is beneficial depends strongly on the environment. For an example of an unambiguously beneficial mutation in humans, see our Are Mutations Harmful FAQ. This link takes you straight to the appendix about a mutation which conveys resistence to atherosclerosis, with no apparent associated disadvantages. The FAQ also gives a few other examples, one more in humans, and others in other species.

On the Moon receding from the Earth, we explain the actual facts of the matter in our FAQ on The Recession of the Moon and the Age of the Earth-Moon System . Briefly, your facts about recession are simply incorrect.

As for hearts, one can find almost every variation from simple to complex within living organisms. Crocodilians for example have a heart somewhat intermediate between the three chambered 'reptilian' heart and a four chambered avian one. Also the hearts of advanced vertebrates, like mammals and birds, grows from a simple one to a more complex one during embryological development and somehow the embryos usually manage to survive the process.

See Heart Development for more information on the embryological development of the human heart. Also see Human Heart Development and Heart and Fetal Circulation.

These and other non-problems with evolution could be avoided if those wishing to criticize the theory would take the time to get a little basic education in the comparative anatomy and embryology of vertebrates. However understanding the science of living things is not the priority for most of these individuals. Rather their concerns are theological and therefore the facts of biology are of little relevance to them.

As for your "special document", given the poor track record of anti-evolutionist claims, we won't lose sleep wondering what it might contain.

That FAQ does make clear that theory and fact do not have the same definition. Evolution is both fact (data) and theory (explanation for the data).

I think you are a disgrace to your church, by the way, and that you demonstrate that any reading of the bible you may have done has not done you any good.

Isaiah 40:22 (NIV): He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in

Note that in both cases the word used is quite clearly "circle". A circle is two dimensional (i.e., it's "flat"). A sphere, on the other hand, is three dimensional. Now I think it is a matter of some importance to note that God certainly knows the difference betwixt one and the other, and certainly knew which word to use, assuming of course that these are God's words. History does not show us an individual who looked at these words and exclaimed "Lo! For the world is truly a sphere!" (or some such). But history does record that ancient Greek astronomers paying close attention to shadows on the earth, deduced from simple observation & logic that it was round (and they also figured out how big it was). They didn't have the Bible, and didn't need it. Nobody ever thought of that passage as a "prediction" that the earth was round ("spherical") until after it had already been figured out by poor Godless tinkerers. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. But you treat the contents of this passage as if it were something that humans either did not or could not know without the Bible, and that's wrong on both counts.

Job 26:7 (KJV): He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.

Job 26:7 (NIV): He spreads out the northern [skies] over empty space; he suspends the earth over nothing.

Once again the presumption is that the words carry a message that could not be known to the mere humans of the day. But those same ancient Greek astronomers had already noticed that the moon floats freely in space. They had already constructed a model of the solar system with the sun and planets moving freely in space around an earth suspended in space. It was a crude mathematical model by today's standards. But, it shows that this great mystery of the Bible is another one that had in fact been figured out before, by people who had no knowledge of the Bible.

Leviticus 17:11 (KJV): For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.

Leviticus 17:11 (NIV): For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one's life.

Do you really think that people who already had a few thousand years of experience at fighting wars, needed the Bible to tell them that they needed blood to live? Of course not; they already knew from experience that "blood was life", they just didn't know why.

Jeremiah 33:22 (KJV): As the host of heaven cannot be numbered, neither the sand of the sea measured: so will I multiply the seed of David my servant, and the Levites that minister unto me.

Jeremiah 33:22 (NIV): I will make the descendents of David my servant and the Levites who minister before me as countless as the stars of the sky and as measureless as the sand on the seashore.

Well, in this case, God would appear to be wrong. Or perhaps the Bible's human authors were expressing their awe at the large numbers involved. Indeed, they may have believed that the beaches & heavens were infinite, but they were wrong. The stars are not "countless", in fact there are probably no more than 10²⁵ stars in the universe. That's a lot, but it's not "countless". Likewise, the number of grains of sand on the beaches of the world surely does not exceed 10³⁰, which would be their number if the entire earth were made of sand grains.

Ecclesiastes 1:6 (KJV): The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.

Ecclesiastes 1:6 (NIV): The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course.

By the time the Bible was written, the peoples living around the Medeterranean Sea had quite a bit of experience navigating along its coasts, as well as along the Atlantic coast of Africa and perhaps Europe. Likewise were sailors experienced with the confines of the Persian Gulf & Red Sea. If you want to know about winds, just ask a sailor. Those people knew the wind patterns backwards & forwards, and knew how they changed with seasons. There's nothing here that wasn't already known well before the bible appeared.

The Bible has enough virtue in it, without the need to add virtues that it does not have. Contrary to your last paragraph, and your obvious sentiment, everything you have described here was well known to the people of the world, and well within their experience, well before the words of the Bible ever appeared in written form. Maybe even before they appeared in voice. Perhaps your desire to convert the nonbeliever would be better served if you concentrated on the Bibles spiritual & redemptive value, and set aside the desire to make claims for the Bible that it does not need.

Since the 1920's it has been understood that quantum mechanics is the proper theory for understanding the universe on scales of the very small. It eventually became obvious to cosmologists that some combination of general relativity & quantum mechanics is necessary to describe the universe properly when it was very young, and very small. Such a theory could provide clues as to the environment that preceded the Big Bang, clues about where the Big Bang came from. The top pick for such a theory today is string theory (or superstring theory), which uses physics cast in the mathematics of a space with 10 or 11 dimensions. That theory give rise to a "pre Big Bang" scenario, or rather to several possible pre Big Bang scenarios. So modern cosmology has plenty of room, or so it seems, for an infinite universe, and a pre Big Bang universe.

There is more than one Big Bang model. They all share a "bang" in common, but differ in how they treat the universe after the "Bang". There are "standard" models, with "cold" dark matter or "hot" dark matter, and there are also "inflationary" models for each kind of dark matter. There are models that replace "inflation" with a variable speed of light, and there are models that include a kind of energy called "quintessence". At the moment the inflationary models are most popular, and seem most likely to be right. But Big Bang cosmology remains a matter of active scientific study, and one should not get too close to one or another model quite yet I think. And string theory will have a lot to say about such things, but maybe not for a few more years.

• Cosmology Tutorial by UCLA Prof. Ed Wright
• Introduction to Cosmology from the MAP mission
• The official String Theory Web Site

We're interested in biological or organic evolution here. There's no noticeable change in position on this over the past century, AFAICT.

As the author of the PE FAQ, the criticism here was of interest to me.

The sentence specified as having too many "may"s in it occurs as follows:

The fossil record is incomplete. This incompleteness has many contributing factors. Geological processes may cause to confusion or error, as sedimentary deposition rates may vary, erosion may erase some strata, compression may turn possible fossils into unrecognizable junk, and various other means by which the local fossil record can be turned into the equivalent of a partially burned book, which is then unbound, pages perhaps shuffled, and from which a few pages are retrieved.

Other than a gratuitous "to" that should be removed, I don't see the problem in using "may" as I have in the above sentence. Geological processes have contributed to confusion concerning the import of fossil evidence. It is a fact that not all sedimentary strata were deposited at the same rate. It is a fact that some, but not all, strata have been eroded. It is a fact that compression has altered some, but not all, fossils in a way that reduces their informative value to paleontologists.

The use of the "damaged book" analogy may be arguable. I don't think that it materially "weakens my position". The explication of PE stands on its merits or demerits, not on whether the accompanying prose illustrations meet some aesthetic criterion.

While there may be no shame in saying that we are not sure or that we do not know something, there is also the point that when it comes to PE, we do know certain things. We know that modern tetrapod species predominantly speciate via allopatric speciation of peripheral isolates. We know that migration of a species into a new habitat can occur with extreme rapidity (using a geological timescale). We know that when looking at the fossil record that we must take into account these biological processes as well as the geological processes already cited. We know that fossil evidence exists which supports PE interpretations. (See pp. 98-108 of Eldredge and Gould's original essay for two examples.)

Science is often a process of finding mechanisms for patterns. One might say that this is just making "an explanation to justify an existing belief", as any theory of gravity must explain the behavior of objects in Earth's gravitational field if we are to accept it as a possible mechanism. But saying that we "explain to justify an existing belief" appears to simply be a rhetorical ploy to avoid dealing with the evidence and the arguments, and instead denigrate what cannot otherwise be efficiently criticized on evidential grounds. The fact of the matter is that biologists do accept PE as "making sense", and that physicists do accept the "Big Bang" hypothesis as "making sense". Perhaps it isn't the biologists and the physicists who are mistaken when it comes to evaluating these concepts.

Wesley