It is good at answering misassumptions, but the trouble is that the
creationists will either refuse to read it or if they do read it they
will ignore it. Look at Mostafa, for example. He used that completely
false assumption and logical failure that if humans evolved from monkeys
then why are there still monkeys. I explicitly showed where that went
wrong. I explained that, we did not evolve from monkeys and that no
evolutionary biologist in the world claims that we did, but I also
explained that the question was like asking if we descended from our
cousins then why do we still have cousins. One would think that most
people would understand that we did not descend from our own cousins,
but even if we did then there would still be the logical absurdity of
saying, as the article puts it, if children descended from adults then
why are there still adults. I explained all of that and what do I get?
Mostafa is right back saying that evolutionists say that humans
descended from monkeys so why are there still monkeys. As for brain
evolution, the fossil record clearly shows a progression in the increase
of human brain size over time. That is, the brain size increased
steadily right up until the neolithic period. Ever since that time our
brain size has been decreasing. I read an article by a
paleoanthropologist in Discover magazine that offers an explanation for
that. He said that apparently once the human qualities of brains
developed it was a great survival trait. That is, pre-neolithic humans
survived by their wits and the smartest ones with the biggest brains
were the ones who lived to reproduce. Along with that survival advantage
other survival advantages associated with the big brains developed. That
is, we developed a social support system that along with the technology
to implement it allowed individuals with not quite the biggest brains
and not quite the biggest smarts to survive to reproduce. So according
to this paleoanthropologist modern humans are not quite as smart as our
neolithic ancestors. He made reference to some movie in which a time
traveler goes to the future to find that society is being run by a bunch
of idiots. He said that the movie actually came true thousands of years
ago. We are living in the idiocracy. At least in comparison to neolithic
humans we are.
---
Carl Sagan
??? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. ???
??? Carl Sagan
On 6/9/2019 11:28 AM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
An excellent approach to answering some basic miss assumptions. But
therein lies the problem. Not with what the paper lays out, but
rather, with those who oppose it. The good news is that here before
us is an example of Evolution at work.
Tracing our recorded Human history, we can clearly identify the
evolution from Superstition and fear of the Unknown, to a more
developed brain that sees the unknown as a challenge to be explored
and solved. In a broad sense this transition can be included as
Evolutionary.
This simple, unnoticed transition has brought us from the caves and
clustered huts, into this amazing world where Humans hold the power to
protect or destroy our existence.
Creationists often use the example of humans and monkeys coexisting as
proof that we did not evolve from Apes. But what Creationists
overlook are the changes going on right under their noses. Because
the Human body has remained fairly similar for thousands of years,
Creationists fail to look beyond the skin and see the changes that are
going on, and have been going on within the Human brain. Humans
today, even Creationists, have brains that function far differently
than the brain of early Man.
Just the development of language and then the development of written
language made a vast evolutionary change. And coupled with this
ability to record himself, Man also learned to harness Fire, and to
direct Water into irregation channels, and from there to an
understanding that Man could control Life around Him. This knowledge
gave Man a decided advantage over all other Life.
That is Evolution at work.
One day, if we survive, Man will come closer to understanding how Life
began, and where the Universe came from. And when finally Man comes
to the point in His evolution where He discovers that God's throne is
empty, and the only God was Man's early attempt to understand His
World, the Creationists will have evolved into extinction.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/8/19, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
https://nlsbard.loc.gov/
??Answers to Creationist Nonsense
Opponents of evolution want to make a place for creationism by tearing
down real science, but their arguments don't hold up
By John Rennie on July 1, 2002
15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense
Credit: Alison Seiffer
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In Brief
Despite definitive legal cases that have established the
unconstitutionality of teaching intelligent design or creationist
ideology in science class, the theory of evolution remains consistently
under attack.
Creationist arguments are notoriously errant or based on a
misunderstanding of evolutionary science and evidence.
Hundreds of studies verify the facts of evolution, at both the
microevolutionary and macroevolutionary scale???from the origin of new
traits and new species to the underpinnings of the complexity we see in
life and the statistical probability of such complexity arising.
When Charles Darwin introduced the theory of evolution through natural
selection 158 years ago, the scientists of the day argued over it
fiercely, but the massing evidence from paleontology, genetics, zoology,
molecular biology and other fields gradually established evolution's
truth beyond reasonable doubt. Today that battle has been won
everywhere???except in the public imagination. Embarrassingly, in the 21st
century, in the most scientifically advanced nation the world has ever
known, creationists can still persuade politicians, judges and ordinary
citizens that evolution is a flawed, poorly supported fantasy. They
lobby for creationist ideas such as ???intelligent design??? to be taught as
alternatives to evolution in science classrooms. When this article first
went to press in 2002, the Ohio Board of Education was debating whether
to mandate such a change. Prominent antievolutionists of the day, such
as Philip E. Johnson, a law professor at the University of California,
Berkeley, and author of Darwin on Trial, admitted that they intended for
intelligent-design theory to serve as a ???wedge??? for reopening science
classrooms to discussions of God.
The good news is that in 2005 the landmark legal case Kitzmiller v.
Dover in Harrisburg, Pa., set binding precedent that the teaching of
intelligent design in U.S. public schools is unconstitutional because
the idea is fundamentally religious, not scientific. The bad news is
that in response, creationists have reinvented their movement and
pressed on. When they lost the ability to claim that creationist ideas
are valid science, they switched to arguing that they were only
supporting ???academic freedom.??? Worse, to further obscure the religious
roots of their resistance, they now push for ???critical analysis??? of
climate change, cloning research and other scientific endeavors that
they paint as culturally oppressive.
Consequently, besieged teachers and others are still likely to find
themselves on the spot to defend evolution and refute creationism, by
whatever name. Creationists' arguments are typically specious and based
on misunderstandings of (or outright lies about) evolution.
Nevertheless, even if their objections are flimsy, the number and
diversity of the objections can put even well-informed people at a
disadvantage. The following list recaps and rebuts some of the most
common ???scientific??? arguments raised against evolution. It also directs
readers to further sources for information and explains why creation
science has no place in the classroom. These answers by themselves
probably will not change the minds of those set against evolution. But
they may help inform those who are genuinely open to argument, and they
can aid anyone who wants to engage constructively in this important
struggle for the scientific integrity of our civilization.
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1. Evolution is only a theory. It is not a fact or a scientific law.
Creationism Vs. Evolution
Read more from this special report:
Creationism Vs. Evolution
Many people learned in elementary school that a theory falls in the
middle of a hierarchy of certainty???above a mere hypothesis but below a
law. Scientists do not use the terms that way, however. According to the
National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a scientific theory is ???a
well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that
can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.??? No
amount of validation changes a theory into a law, which is a descriptive
generalization about nature. So when scientists talk about the theory of
evolution???or the atomic theory or the theory of relativity, for that
matter???they are not expressing reservations about its truth.
In addition to the theory of evolution, meaning the idea of descent with
modification, one may also speak of the fact of evolution. The NAS
defines a fact as ???an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and
for all practical purposes is accepted as ???true.?????? The fossil record
and
abundant other evidence testify that organisms have evolved through
time. Although no one observed those transformations, the indirect
evidence is clear, unambiguous and compelling.
All sciences frequently rely on indirect evidence. Physicists cannot see
subatomic particles directly, for instance, so they verify their
existence by watching for telltale tracks that the particles leave in
cloud chambers. The absence of direct observation does not make
physicists' conclusions less certain.
2. Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are
those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest.
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???Survival of the fittest??? is a conversational way to describe natural
selection, but a more technical description speaks of differential rates
of survival and reproduction. That is, rather than labeling species as
more or less fit, one can describe how many offspring they are likely to
leave under given circumstances. Drop a fast-breeding pair of
small-beaked finches and a slower-breeding pair of large-beaked finches
onto an island full of food seeds. Within a few generations the fast
breeders may control more of the food resources. Yet if large beaks more
easily crush seeds, the advantage may tip to the slow breeders. In
pioneering studies of finches on the Galpagos Islands, Peter Grant and
Rosemary Grant of Princeton University observed these kinds of
population shifts in the wild.
The key is that adaptive fitness can be defined without reference to
survival: large beaks are better adapted for crushing seeds,
irrespective of whether that trait has survival value under the
circumstances.
3. Evolution is unscientific because it is not testable or falsifiable.
It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be
re-created.
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This blanket dismissal of evolution ignores important distinctions that
divide the field into at least two broad areas: microevolution and
macroevolution. Microevolution looks at changes within species over
time???changes that may be preludes to speciation, the origin of new
species. Macroevolution studies how taxonomic groups above the level of
species change. Its evidence draws frequently from the fossil record and
DNA comparisons to reconstruct how various organisms may be related.
These days even most creationists acknowledge that microevolution has
been upheld by tests in the laboratory (as in studies of cells, plants
and fruit flies) and in the field (as in the Grants' studies of evolving
beak shapes among Galpagos finches). Natural selection and other
mechanisms???such as chromosomal changes, symbiosis and hybridization???can
drive profound changes in populations over time.
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The historical nature of macroevolutionary study involves inference from
fossils and DNA rather than direct observation. Yet in the historical
sciences (which include astronomy, geology and archaeology, as well as
evolutionary biology), hypotheses can still be tested by checking
whether they accord with physical evidence and whether they lead to
verifiable predictions about future discoveries. For instance, evolution
implies that between the earliest known ancestors of humans (roughly
five million years old) and the appearance of anatomically modern humans
(about 200,000 years ago), one should find a succession of hominin
creatures with features progressively less apelike and more modern,
which is indeed what the fossil record shows. But one should not???and
does not???find modern human fossils embedded in strata from the Jurassic
period (65 million years ago). Evolutionary biology routinely makes
predictions far more refined and precise than this, and researchers test
them constantly.
Evolution could be disproved in other ways, too. If we could document
the spontaneous generation of just one complex life-form from inanimate
matter, then at least a few creatures seen in the fossil record might
have originated this way. If superintelligent aliens appeared and
claimed credit for creating life on Earth (or even particular species),
the purely evolutionary explanation would be cast in doubt. But no one
has yet produced such evidence.
It should be noted that the idea of falsifiability as the defining
characteristic of science originated with philosopher Karl Popper in the
1930s. More recent elaborations on his thinking have expanded the
narrowest interpretation of his principle precisely because it would
eliminate too many branches of clearly scientific endeavor.
4. Increasingly, scientists doubt the truth of evolution.
No evidence suggests that evolution is losing adherents. Pick up any
issue of a peer-reviewed biological journal, and you will find articles
that support and extend evolutionary studies or that embrace evolution
as a fundamental concept.
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Conversely, serious scientific publications disputing evolution are all
but nonexistent. In the mid-1990s George W. Gilchrist, then at the
University of Washington, surveyed thousands of journals in the primary
literature, seeking articles on intelligent design or creation science.
Among those hundreds of thousands of scientific reports, he found none.
Surveys done independently by Barbara Forrest of Southeastern Louisiana
University and Lawrence M. Krauss, now at Arizona State University, were
similarly fruitless.
Creationists retort that a closed-minded scientific community rejects
their evidence. Yet according to the editors of Nature, Science and
other leading journals, few antievolution manuscripts are even
submitted. Some antievolution authors have published papers in serious
journals. Those papers, however, rarely attack evolution directly or
advance creationist arguments; at best, they identify certain
evolutionary problems as unsolved and difficult (which no one disputes).
In short, creationists are not giving the scientific world good reason
to take them seriously.
5. The disagreements among even evolutionary biologists show how little
solid science supports evolution.
Evolutionary biologists passionately debate diverse topics: how
speciation happens, the rates of evolutionary change, the ancestral
relationships of birds and dinosaurs, whether Neandertals were a species
apart from modern humans, and much more. These disputes are like those
found in all other branches of science. Acceptance of evolution as a
factual occurrence and a guiding principle is nonetheless universal in
biology.
Unfortunately, dishonest creationists have shown a willingness to take
scientists' comments out of context to exaggerate and distort the
disagreements. Anyone acquainted with the works of paleontologist
Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University knows that in addition to
co-authoring the punctuated-equilibrium model, Gould was one of the most
eloquent defenders and articulators of evolution. (Punctuated
equilibrium explains patterns in the fossil record by suggesting that
most evolutionary changes occur within geologically brief
intervals???which may nonetheless amount to hundreds of generations.) Yet
creationists delight in dissecting out phrases from Gould's voluminous
prose to make him sound as though he had doubted evolution, and they
present punctuated equilibrium as though it allows new species to
materialize overnight or birds to be born from reptile eggs.
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When confronted with a quotation from a scientific authority that seems
to question evolution, insist on seeing the statement in context. Almost
invariably, the attack on evolution will prove illusory.
6. If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?
This surprisingly common argument reflects several levels of ignorance
about evolution. The first mistake is that evolution does not teach that
humans descended from monkeys; it states that both have a common ancestor.
The deeper error is that this objection is tantamount to asking, ???If
children descended from adults, why are there still adults???? New species
evolve by splintering off from established ones, when populations of
organisms become isolated from the main branch of their family and
acquire sufficient differences to remain forever distinct. The parent
species may survive indefinitely thereafter, or it may become extinct.
7. Evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on Earth.
The origin of life remains very much a mystery, but biochemists have
learned about how primitive nucleic acids, amino acids and other
building blocks of life could have formed and organized themselves into
self-replicating, self-sustaining units, laying the foundation for
cellular biochemistry. Astrochemical analyses hint that quantities of
these compounds might have originated in space and fallen to Earth in
comets, a scenario that may solve the problem of how those constituents
arose under the conditions that prevailed when our planet was young.
Creationists sometimes try to invalidate all of evolution by pointing to
science's current inability to explain the origin of life. But even if
life on Earth turned out to have a nonevolutionary origin (for instance,
if aliens introduced the first cells billions of years ago), evolution
since then would be robustly confirmed by countless microevolutionary
and macroevolutionary studies.
8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a
protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance.
Chance plays a part in evolution (for example, in the random mutations
that can give rise to new traits), but evolution does not depend on
chance to create organisms, proteins or other entities. Quite the
opposite: natural selection, the principal known mechanism of evolution,
harnesses nonrandom change by preserving ???desirable??? (adaptive) features
and eliminating ???undesirable??? (nonadaptive) ones. As long as the forces
of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one
direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times.
As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence ???TOBEORNOTTOBE.??? A
million hypothetical monkeys, each typing out one phrase a second on a
keyboard, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 2613
sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison, then at
Glendale College, wrote a computer program that generated phrases
randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that
happened to be correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more
like Hamlet's). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just
336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could
reconstruct Shakespeare's entire play in just four and a half days.
9. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that systems must become more
disordered over time. Living cells therefore could not have evolved from
inanimate chemicals, and multicellular life could not have evolved from
protozoa.
This argument derives from a misunderstanding of the Second Law. If it
were valid, mineral crystals and snowflakes would also be impossible,
because they, too, are complex structures that form spontaneously from
disordered parts.
The Second Law actually states that the total entropy of a closed system
(one that no energy or matter leaves or enters) cannot decrease. Entropy
is a physical concept often casually described as disorder, but it
differs significantly from the conversational use of the word.
More important, however, the Second Law permits parts of a system to
decrease in entropy as long as other parts experience an offsetting
increase. Thus, our planet as a whole can grow more complex because the
sun pours heat and light onto it, and the greater entropy associated
with the sun's nuclear fusion more than rebalances the scales. Simple
organisms can fuel their rise toward complexity by consuming other forms
of life and nonliving materials.
10. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only
eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features.
On the contrary, biology has catalogued many traits produced by point
mutations (changes at precise positions in an organism's DNA)???bacterial
resistance to antibiotics, for example.
Mutations that arise in the homeobox (Hox) family of
development-regulating genes in animals can also have complex effects.
Hox genes direct where legs, wings, antennae and body segments should
grow. In fruit flies, for instance, the mutation called Antennapedia
causes legs to sprout where antennae should grow. These abnormal limbs
are not functional, but their existence demonstrates that genetic
mistakes can produce complex structures, which natural selection can
then test for possible uses.
Moreover, molecular biology has discovered mechanisms for genetic change
that go beyond point mutations, and these expand the ways in which new
traits can appear. Functional modules within genes can be spliced
together in novel ways. Whole genes can be accidentally duplicated in an
organism's DNA, and the duplicates are free to mutate into genes for
new, complex features. Comparisons of the DNA from a wide variety of
organisms indicate that this is how the globin family of blood proteins
evolved over millions of years.
11. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot
explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life.
Evolutionary biologists have written extensively about how natural
selection could produce new species. For instance, in the model called
allopatry, developed by Ernst Mayr of Harvard University, if a
population of organisms were isolated from the rest of its species by
geographical boundaries, it might be subjected to different selective
pressures. Changes would accumulate in the isolated population. If those
changes became so significant that the splinter group could not or
routinely would not breed with the original stock, then the splinter
group would be reproductively isolated and on its way toward becoming a
new species.
Natural selection is the best studied of the evolutionary mechanisms,
but biologists are open to other possibilities as well. Biologists are
constantly assessing the potential of unusual genetic mechanisms for
causing speciation or for producing complex features in organisms. Lynn
Margulis of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and others have
persuasively argued that some cellular organelles, such as the
energy-generating mitochondria, evolved through the symbiotic merger of
ancient organisms. Thus, science welcomes the possibility of evolution
resulting from forces beyond natural selection. Yet those forces must be
natural; they cannot be attributed to the actions of mysterious creative
intelligences whose existence, in scientific terms, is unproved.
12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve.
Speciation is probably fairly rare and in many cases might take
centuries. Furthermore, recognizing a new species during a formative
stage can be difficult because biologists sometimes disagree about how
best to define a species. The most widely used definition, Mayr's
Biological Species Concept, recognizes a species as a distinct community
of reproductively isolated populations???sets of organisms that normally
do not or cannot breed outside their community. In practice, this
standard can be difficult to apply to organisms isolated by distance or
terrain or to plants (and, of course, fossils do not breed). Biologists
therefore usually use organisms' physical and behavioral traits as clues
to their species membership.
Nevertheless, the scientific literature does contain reports of apparent
speciation events in plants, insects and worms. In most of these
experiments, researchers subjected organisms to various types of
selection???for anatomical differences, mating behaviors, habitat
preferences and other traits???and found that they had created populations
of organisms that did not breed with outsiders. For example, William R.
Rice of the University of New Mexico and George W. Salt of the
University of California, Davis, demonstrated that if they sorted a
group of fruit flies by their preference for certain environments and
bred those flies separately over 35 generations, the resulting flies
would refuse to breed with those from a very different environment.
13. Evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils???creatures
that are half reptile and half bird, for instance.
Actually, paleontologists know of many detailed examples of fossils
intermediate in form between various taxonomic groups. One of the most
famous fossils of all time is Archaeopteryx, which combines feathers and
skeletal structures peculiar to birds with features of dinosaurs. A
flock's worth of other feathered fossil species, some more avian and
some less, has also been found. A sequence of fossils spans the
evolution of modern horses from the tiny Eohippus. An amazing fossil
creature from 375 million years ago named Tiktaalik embodies the
predicted and long-sought transition of certain fishes to life on land.
Whales had four-legged ancestors that walked on land, and creatures
known as Ambulocetus and Rodhocetus helped to make that transition.
Fossil seashells trace the evolution of various mollusks through
millions of years. Perhaps 20 or more hominins (not all of them our
ancestors) fill the gap between Lucy the australopithecine and modern
humans.
Creationists, though, dismiss these fossil studies. They argue that
Archaeopteryx is not a missing link between reptiles and birds???it is
just an extinct bird with reptilian features. They want evolutionists to
produce a weird, chimeric monster that cannot be classified as belonging
to any known group. Even if a creationist does accept a fossil as
transitional between two species, he or she may then insist on seeing
other fossils intermediate between it and the first two. These
frustrating requests can proceed ad infinitum and place an unreasonable
burden on the always incomplete fossil record.
Nevertheless, evolutionists can cite further supportive evidence from
molecular biology. All organisms share most of the same genes, but as
evolution predicts, the structures of these genes and their products
diverge among species, in keeping with their evolutionary relationships.
Geneticists speak of the ???molecular clock??? that records the passage of
time. These molecular data also show how various organisms are
transitional within evolution.
14. Living things have fantastically intricate features???at the
anatomical, cellular and molecular levels???that could not function if
they were any less complex or sophisticated. The only prudent conclusion
is that they are the products of intelligent design, not evolution.
This ???argument from design??? is the backbone of most recent attacks on
evolution, but it is also one of the oldest. In 1802 theologian William
Paley wrote that if one finds a pocket watch in a field, the most
reasonable conclusion is that someone dropped it, not that natural
forces created it there. By analogy, Paley argued, the complex
structures of living things must be the handiwork of direct, divine
invention. Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species as an answer to Paley:
he explained how natural forces of selection, acting on inherited
features, could gradually shape the evolution of ornate organic structures.
Generations of creationists have tried to counter Darwin by citing the
example of the eye as a structure that could not have evolved. The eye's
ability to provide vision depends on the perfect arrangement of its
parts, these critics say. Natural selection could thus never favor the
transitional forms needed during the eye's evolution???what good is half
an eye? Anticipating this criticism, Darwin suggested that even
???incomplete??? eyes might confer benefits (such as helping creatures
orient toward light) and thereby survive for further evolutionary
refinement. Biology has vindicated Darwin: researchers have identified
primitive eyes and light-sensing organs throughout the animal kingdom
and have even tracked the evolutionary history of eyes through
comparative genetics. (It now appears that in various families of
organisms, eyes have evolved independently.)
Today's intelligent-design advocates are more sophisticated than their
predecessors, but their arguments and goals are not fundamentally
different. They criticize evolution by trying to demonstrate that it
could not account for life as we know it and then insist that the only
tenable alternative is that life was designed by an unidentified
intelligence.
15. Recent discoveries prove that even at the microscopic level, life
has a quality of complexity that could not have come about through
evolution.
???Irreducible complexity??? is the battle cry of Michael J. Behe of Lehigh
University, author of Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to
Evolution. As a household example of irreducible complexity, Behe
chooses the mousetrap???a machine that could not function if any of its
pieces were missing and whose pieces have no value except as parts of
the whole. What is true of the mousetrap, he says, is even truer of the
bacterial flagellum, a whiplike cellular organelle used for propulsion
that operates like an outboard motor. The proteins that make up a
flagellum are uncannily arranged into motor components, a universal
joint and other structures like those that a human engineer might
specify. The possibility that this intricate array could have arisen
through evolutionary modification is virtually nil, Behe argues, and
that bespeaks intelligent design. He makes similar points about the
blood's clotting mechanism and other molecular systems.
Yet evolutionary biologists have answers to these objections. First,
there exist flagellae with forms simpler than the one that Behe cites,
so it is not necessary for all those components to be present for a
flagellum to work. The sophisticated components of this flagellum all
have precedents elsewhere in nature, as described by Kenneth R. Miller
of Brown University and others. In fact, the entire flagellum assembly
is extremely similar to an organelle that Yersinia pestis, the bubonic
plague bacterium, uses to inject toxins into cells.
The key is that the flagellum's component structures, which Behe
suggests have no value apart from their role in propulsion, can serve
multiple functions that would have helped favor their evolution. The
final evolution of the flagellum might then have involved only the novel
recombination of sophisticated parts that initially evolved for other
purposes. Similarly, the blood-clotting system seems to involve the
modification and elaboration of proteins that were originally used in
digestion, according to studies by Russell F. Doolittle of the
University of California, San Diego. So some of the complexity that Behe
calls proof of intelligent design is not irreducible at all.
Complexity of a different kind??????specified complexity??????is the
cornerstone
of the intelligent-design arguments of author William A. Dembski in his
books The Design Inference and No Free Lunch. Essentially his argument
is that living things are complex in a way that undirected, random
processes could never produce. The only logical conclusion, Dembski
asserts, in an echo of Paley 200 years ago, is that some superhuman
intelligence created and shaped life.
Dembski's argument contains several holes. It is wrong to insinuate that
the field of explanations consists only of random processes or designing
intelligences. Researchers into nonlinear systems and cellular automata
at the Santa Fe Institute and elsewhere have demonstrated that simple,
undirected processes can yield extraordinarily complex patterns. Some of
the complexity seen in organisms may therefore emerge through natural
phenomena that we as yet barely understand. But that is far different
from saying that the complexity could not have arisen naturally.
Misleading Semantics of Creationism
Only methodological naturalism can determine how all life came to be
???Creation science??? is a contradiction in terms. A central tenet of
modern science is methodological naturalism???it seeks to explain the
universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms.
Thus, physics describes the atomic nucleus with specific concepts
governing matter and energy, and it tests those descriptions
experimentally. Physicists introduce new particles, such as quarks, to
flesh out their theories only when data show that the previous
descriptions cannot adequately explain observed phenomena. The new
particles do not have arbitrary properties, moreover???their definitions
are tightly constrained, because the new particles must fit within the
existing framework of physics.
In contrast, intelligent-design theorists invoke shadowy entities that
conveniently have whatever unconstrained abilities are needed to solve
the mystery at hand. Rather than expanding scientific inquiry, such
answers shut it down. (How does one disprove the existence of omnipotent
intelligences?)
Intelligent design offers few answers. For instance, when and how did a
designing intelligence intervene in life's history? By creating the
first DNA? The first cell? The first human? Was every species designed,
or just a few early ones? Proponents of intelligent-design theory
frequently decline to be pinned down on these points. They do not even
make real attempts to reconcile their disparate ideas about intelligent
design. Instead they pursue argument by exclusion???that is, they belittle
evolutionary explanations as far-fetched or incomplete and then imply
that only design-based alternatives remain.
Logically, this is misleading: even if one naturalistic explanation is
flawed, it does not mean that all are. Moreover, it does not make one
intelligent-design theory more reasonable than another. Listeners are
essentially left to fill in the blanks for themselves, and some will
undoubtedly do so by substituting their religious beliefs for scientific
ideas.
Time and again, science has shown that methodological naturalism can
push back ignorance, finding increasingly detailed and informative
answers to mysteries that once seemed impenetrable: the nature of light,
the causes of disease, how the brain works. Evolution is doing the same
with the riddle of how the living world took shape. Creationism, by any
name, adds nothing of intellectual value to the effort. ???J.R.
Other Resources for Defending Evolution
How to Debate a Creationist: 25 Creationists' Arguments and 25
Evolutionists' Answers. Michael Shermer. Skeptics Society, 1997. This
well-researched refutation of creationist claims deals in more depth
with many of the same scientific arguments raised here, as well as other
philosophical problems.
Skeptic magazine routinely covers creation/evolution debates and is a
solid, thoughtful source on the subject: www.skeptic.com
Defending Evolution in the Classroom: A Guide to the Creation/Evolution
Controversy. Brian J. Alters and Sandra M. Alters. Jones and Bartlett
Publishers, 2001. This up-to-date overview of the creation/evolution
controversy explores the issues clearly and readably, with a full
appreciation of the cultural and religious influences that create
resistance to teaching evolution. It, too, uses a question-and-answer
format that should be particularly valuable for teachers.
Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences.
Second edition. National Academy Press, 1999. This concise booklet has
the backing of the country's top scientific authorities. Although its
goal of making a clear, brief statement necessarily limits the detail
with which it can pursue its arguments, the publication serves as handy
proof that the scientific establishment unwaveringly supports evolution.
It is also available via www.nap.edu/catalog
The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism. Niles Eldredge.
W. H. Freeman and Company, 2000. The author, a leading contributor to
evolution theory and a curator at the American Museum of Natural History
in New York City, offers a scathing critique of evolution's opponents.
Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics. Edited by Robert T.
Pennock. Bradford Books/MIT Press, 2001. For anyone who wishes to
understand the ???intelligent design??? controversy in detail, this book is
a terrific one-volume summary of the scientific, philosophical and
theological issues. Philip E. Johnson, Michael J. Behe and William A.
Dembski make the case for intelligent design in their chapters and are
rebutted by evolutionists, including Pennock, Stephen Jay Gould and
Richard Dawkins.
Talk. Origins archive (www.talkorigins.org). This wonderfully thorough
online resource compiles useful essays and commentaries that have
appeared in Usenet discussions about creationism and evolution. It
offers detailed discussions (some of which may be too sophisticated for
casual readers) and bibliographies relating to virtually any objection
to evolution that creationists might raise.
National Center for Science Education Web site (www.ncseweb.org). The
center is the only national organization that specializes in defending
the teaching of evolution against creationist attacks. Offering
resources for combating misinformation and monitoring antievolution
legislation, it is ideal for staying current with the ongoing public
debate.
PBS Web site for evolution (www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution). Produced as a
companion to the seven-part television series Evolution, this site is an
enjoyable guide to evolutionary science. It features multimedia tools
for teaching evolution. The accompanying book, Evolution, by Carl Zimmer
(HarperCollins, 2001), is also useful for explaining evolution to doubters.
This article was originally published with the title "15 Answers to
Creationist Nonsense" in Scientific American 287, 1, (July 2002)
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0702-78
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