Frequently Encountered Criticisms in Evolution vs. Creationism: Revised
and Expanded
Compiled by Mark I. Vuletic
[HTML coding removed & paragraphs reformatted by Karl Schneider]
Last updated November 19, 1997.
New Scientist's "Planet Science" Site of the Day, 7 April 1996
This list is designed to serve as an elementary introduction to some of
the assertions creationists make against what they call "evolution."
Please note that, as far as some creationists are concerned, "evolution"
includes much more than just evolutionary biology - creationist
criticisms extend to much of geology, paleontology, physics, cosmology,
astronomy, and numerous other scientific disciplines, as well. This list
is not nearly as complete or rigorous as it could be, but I hope it will
be sufficient to show people examining the issue for the first time that
creationism is groundless, and that it will also serve as a useful
reference for more experienced participants.
For more rigorous refutations of creationist arguments and assertions,
consult the talk.origins archive and the references at the end of this
list. It goes without saying that I encourage all readers to look into
the subject on their own and to double-check everything I have written.
If you have a question that is not answered by this list, please submit
it, or look for it in talk.origins via the talk.origins index or the
talk.origins search engine.
I would like to express heartfelt appreciation to the many people who
have written letters of thanks, encouragement, and advice, and to those
who have given me pointers to new information or personal research. In
particular, I would like to thank William B. Provine, Anthonie Muller,
Nigel Arnot, John Davison, Chris Stassen, and Larry Taylor for their
input. I would also like to thank Brett Vickers and the many affiliates
of talk.origins for permitting me to link extensively to their archive
from this list.
Note on Exponential Notation: In this document, numbers of the form "n x
10 to the kth power" (that's n followed by k zeros) will be represented
as "n E(k)." For instance, "6.5 x 10 to the 24th power" will be written
as "6.5 E(24)." I have adopted this convention because some browsers are
unable to display superscripts.
Index
Cosmology, Astronomy, Planetary Geology
1.1: The sun contains most of the mass, but only 2% of the angular
momentum of the solar system. If the solar system had condensed from a
gas cloud, most of its angular momentum would be in the sun.
1.2: Most sets of fundamental constants would lead to a universe in
which life could not form. It would appear that the fundamental
constants in our universe have been fine-tuned by an entity that wished
to create man.
1.3: At the present rate of influx of meteoritic dust from space, the
earth and moon after 5 billion years should each be covered with a
meteoritic dust layer more than 180 feet thick.
1.4: The lst law of thermodynamics states that the energy in the
universe is constant. The Big Bang theory states that the universe came
out of nothing, so it violates this thermodynamic law.
1.5: The 2nd law of thermodynamics states that disorder in the universe
always increases. This means that the universe could not have started in
an ordered state unless it was "wound up" by a Creator.
1.6: The rotation of the Earth has been slowing at a rate of 30 seconds
per century. If the Earth were billions of years old, the rotation rate
at the outset would have been so great that the planet could not have
held together, much less support life.
1.7: Quantum mechanics proves the existence of a creator, since there
must have been some entity external to the universe to observe it and
thus collapse it into a determinate state.
Terrestrial Geology, Radioisotope Dating
2.1: Many test using 14C give dates that are obviously wrong or conflict
with dates given by other radioisotope tests. For instance, a living
mollusk was once shown by 14C dating to be dead for 3,000 years.
2.2: The ages of rocks are determined by the kinds of fossils they
contain, but the dating of the fossils depends upon evolutionary
assumptions. The use of the old age of rocks to support evolution is
thus a circular argument.
2.3: The rate of decay in the geomagnetic field sets an outside limit of
10,000 years for the age of the earth.
2.4: If the earth were as old as geologists say, uranium decay would
have put into the atmosphere more helium than we currently find there.
2.5: Lord Kelvin deduced in 1862 that the absolute age of the earth was
no more than 400 million years old - too little time for evolution to
have generated all of the life we see on earth today.
2.6: There are places where "older" rock strata lie above "younger" rock
strata.
2.7: Radiometric dating is extremely inaccurate, as is shown by the fact
that such experiments frequently have error factors of a few million
years.
2.8: Many radiometric dating tests have yielded false results.
Evolutionists discard all those that are inconsistent with their prior
assumptions and keep those that "verify" their theory.
2.9: Radiometric dating reports the earth to be old only because the
cataclysmic action of Noah's Flood changed the radioisotope
concentrations in the young earth.
2.10: Noah's flood was caused by the condensing of a vapor canopy that
contained the waters of the flood. Prior to the flood, the vapor canopy
also extended people's lifespans to the huge ages listed in Genesis,
because it blocked out harmful UV rays.
2.11: Niagara Falls is moving upstream at a known rate each year. Its
current location allows only about 5,000 years since the time it started
eroding.
Origin of Life
3.1: The law of biogenesis states that life comes only from previous
life. Therefore prebiotic synthesis - which states that life first
developed from nonliving molecules - contradicts a major law of science.
3.2: Amino acids in living organisms are all left-handed, but in nature,
equal amounts of left-handed and right-handed amino acids form, so one
would expect them to occur in equal proportions in living organisms if
abiogenesis were true.
3.3: Nucleic acids cannot replicate without the help of proteins.
Proteins, however, cannot form unless specified by nucleic a cid
sequences. Thus, genetic systems could not have started naturally.
3.4: There are n! ways of an enzyme or DNA strand of n parts forming
prebiotically. Since the smallest proteins have at least 100 amino
acids, the chance of forming a particular enzyme prebiotically is at
most 1/100!, which is small enough to be disregarded.
3.5: Even though the Earth is an open system and the sun is bombarding
it with energy, life still could not arise without supernatural
interference. Order in an open system increases only when there is a
complex system like a body, a host of enzymes, or a supernatural
influence to catalyze the reactions. Analogously, the sun can shine for
eternity on a junkyard and never cause the parts to come together to
build a pickup truck.
Biological Evolution, Mutations, Speciation
4.1: Chromosome numbers cannot change without producing very harmful
effects.
4.2: The perfection of the structures of the various life forms on earth
clearly reveal themselves as the work of an intelligent designer.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the unbelievably complex human eye.
4.3: Evolutionists cannot tell us exactly how most organisms arose. For
instance, no one can explain what series of mutations could have given
caterpillars the ability to metamorphose into butterflies.
4.4: The genetic variation in populations that allows them to adapt to
environmental change through microevolution (as revealed in industrial
melanism and bacterial antibiotic resistance) was deliberately put in
place by the creator.
4.5: Homologous features do not prove any ancestral relationship between
organisms, because all classifications above the species level are
man-made and arbitrary.
4.6: Industrial melanism does not demonstrate evolution at all because
no speciation occurs.
4.7: Mutations are universally deleterious, and thus cannot be a driving
factor in evolution.
4.8: The rate of mutation is so small that it could never serve as a
source of variation.
4.9: Macroevolution remains unproved because no one has observed it. In
fact, macroevolution is in principle unobservable, so evolution must be
unscientific.
4.10: No one has ever seen one species arise from another.
4.11: If evolution were true, then fish would have evolved into
amphibians and land animals more than once.
4.12: Sexual reproduction could not have come about through evolution.
4.13: There is no evidence for the rapid development of new species.
4.14: Natural selection is tautological: the fittest survive, and those
who survive are the fittest.
4.15: There are numerous "irreducibly complex" structures and processes
in organisms, especially at the biochemical level. Such structures and
processes could not have developed in a stepwise fashion.
Paleontology, Fossils, Transitional Forms
5.1: The feather impressions in fossils of Archaeopteryx are forgeries.
5.2: Archaeopteryx is not a transitional form but a full-fledged bird.
Any reptilian characteristics it displays are mirrored in modern birds
such as the hoatzin.
5.3: Protoavis precedes Archaeopteryx in the fossil record, so
Archaeopteryx cannot possibly be a transitional form.
5.4: The Cambrian explosion is a sure sign of the activity of the
Creator, suddenly creating a multitude of complex forms out of nothing.
There are no fossils before the explosion.
5.5: All of the explanations of gaps in the fossil record, such as the
invocation of punctuated equilibrium and the low probability of
fossilization, render the evolutionary prediction of transitional forms
unfalsifiable.
5.6: Fossils are the remains of the living organisms that perished in
Noah's Flood.
5.7: In their search for transitional forms, the evolutionary community
has been taken in by outright fraud, as in the case of Piltdown Man,
which was accepted as a valid specimen for 40 years, and by unfounded
speculation, as in the construction of Nebraska Man from what later
turned out to be a pig tooth. This shows how unobjective evolutionists
are.
5.8: There are no adequate transitional forms between fish and
amphibians.
5.9: There are no adequate transitional forms between reptiles and
mammals.
5.10: There are no adequate transitional forms between early hominids
and Homo sapiens.
Philosophy of Science, Educational Issues
6.1: It is likely that many structures in the universe were created with
the mere appearance of old age.
6.2: Evolution teaches that there are no such things as souls, that the
Bible is fraudulent, and that God does not exist.
6.3: Great scientists such as Newton and Kepler believed in a literal
Genesis.
6.4: Evolutionists are trying to take over the school system and force
their beliefs upon the students.
6.5: Natural processes cannot be the cause of qualities seen in humans
like love. For instance, the cause of love must be something loving.
6.6: There are many theories of evolution, each of which "conclusively
disproves" the other.
6.7: Evolution is unfalsifiable, and thus unscientific.
6.8: Electrons are materially inconceivable, but physicists largely
accept them as real entities. So what is to keep one from accepting the
reality of an inconceivable Creator?
6.9: The exclusive teaching of evolution in the science classroom
violates the teaching of multiculturalism, because many different
cultures have creation myths which contradict evolution.
6.10: Evolution predicts that natural law should be constantly evolving,
as opposed to the creation model, which states that law should stay
fixed.
6.11: Nothing can be proven, particularly events in the past. Therefore,
creationism must be just as reasonable as evolution.
6.12: There is nothing wrong with invoking supernatural explanation.
6.13: There are many unanswered questions in science, such as the
details of the origin of the universe and of prebiotic synthesis. Thus
we require a supernatural God for explanation.
6.14: Evolution is just a theory.
6.15: Evolution and creationism are the only two possible models of
origins. There are many serious problems with evolution, so creationism
is the correct model by default.
6.16: Evolution is the basis for Naziism and laissez-faire capitalism.
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Main Text
The creationist claims are immediately followed by evolutionist
responses.
Cosmology, Astronomy, Planetary Geology
1.1: The sun contains most of the mass, but only
2% of the angular momentum of the solar system. If the solar system had
condensed from a gas cloud, most of its angular momentum would be in the
sun.
The sun transferred most of its momentum to the planets via a process
known as "magnetic braking." In the early stages of the solar system,
the magnetic field of the sun dragged ionized atoms in the solar nebula
with it, thereby transferring energy that accelerated the atoms but
slowed the sun's rotation. (Wagner, 1991, 436)
1.2: Most sets of fundamental constants would lead to a universe in
which life could not form. It would appear that the fundamental
constants in our universe have been fine-tuned by an entity that wished
to create man.
In the first place, even if it were certain that the universe were
fine-tuned by an intelligent entity, it would not follow that the entity
who performed the fine-tuning had any special interest in humans. Given
that the few types of universes that allow for human life to form are
apparently also the only types of universes in which stars, planets, and
tarantulas may form, an entity that fine-tuned the universe could have
done so for the express purpose of producing one of those other
objects/creatures. Alternately, such an entity could just be a deistic
creator - it (or they) could have set up a universe such as this one
without knowing (or perhaps even caring) what the exact result would be
(this would just be an intelligence-driven world-ensemble scenario).
However, independent of these considerations, standard cosmology
indicates that the conventional laws of physics did not hold in the
first 1 E(-43) seconds of the universe (Halliday & Resnick, 1988,
1142), so, absent an adequate theory of quantum gravity, it is extremely
difficult, if not impossible, to draw conclusions about what processes
generated the fundamental constants we observe in our universe
(Fritzsch, 1984, 224-225). For all we know at this stage, a purely
natural process could have guaranteed that the constants we observe are
the only ones any universe could have; making probability assessments
about the likelihood of a universe such as ours existing presupposes
that all imaginable universes are (more or less) equiprobable - an
assumption which outruns cosmological knowledge. Stephen Hawking, for
instance, claims on the basis of a speculative theory of qauntum
gravity, that the universe is finite, yet unbounded. That is to say,
Hawking holds that the conditions of the universe are such that
"...[t]here would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke
down and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God
or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time...The
universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything
outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would
just BE" (Hawking, 1988,136). On such a scenario, the retrodicted
probability of our exact universe existing, with all of its fundamental
constants at their specific settings, would be 1.
There is also speculation about the possibility of new universes with
different sets of cosmological properties springing into existence (in
dimensions isolated from ours) from (1) black holes or "Big Crunch"
singularities formed in (or by) other universes (Gribbin, 1993,
243-254), (2) from a primordial space-time "foam" (Dickson, 1997), or
(3) directly out of nothing. The existence of a process that
generates world ensembles with varying fundamental constants could make
the production of a universe such as ours inevitable, depending upon the
range of variation of constants in the generation process, and the
number of universes produced.
Finally, note that creationist speculations about the alleged
"fine-tuning" of the cosmological constants have no bearing whatsoever
on cosmological, chemical, and biological evolution. Many people
(scientists no less than anyone else) believe that a creator made this
universe with all of its laws and processes - evolutionary processes
included - in order to create life, possibly even to create humanity. Of
course, given the setting of the fundamental constants, a creator would
still have to interfere with the evolutionary process many times to
deliberately and specifically create humans, unless the universe is
deterministic and the creator set the initial state of the universe
exactly. But for an allegedly omnipotent creator, such control is
certainly possible.
1.3: "...at the present rate of influx of meteoritic dust from space,
the earth and moon after 5 billion years should each be covered with a
meteoritic dust layer more than 180 feet thick.
This calculation is based on a long outdated, speculative estimate by
Hans Pettersson (1960). The ICR seems unaware of data since derived from
space technology that reveals a much lower rate of dust influx - a rate
that causes the creationist argument to collapse." (Ecker, 1990, 183)
1.4: The lst law of thermodynamics states that the energy in the
universe is constant. The Big Bang theory states that the universe came
out of nothing, so it violates this thermodynamic law.
As we now know, quantum vacuum fluctuations allow for the appearance of
matter from nothing without violating the 1st law of thermodynamics.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle allows particles to spontaneously
appear out of nothing for a period of time inversely related to their
masses, without violating the conservation of energy. A predicted effect
of such vacuum fluctuations, named the Casimir-Polder force, has now
been detected (Crabb, 1994, 102). The predicted effect of vacuum
fluctuations upon the energy levels of atoms - an effect called Lamb
shift - has likewise been detected and measured to five significant
figures in hydrogen (Barrow, 1983, 65-66). The existence of vacuum
fluctuations has led to speculation that the universe itself may have
originated in such a fluctuation, and undergone a rapid inflationary
period. It has been proposed that the positive and negative energy in
the universe just balance each other such that the universe's net energy
is zero (Ecker, 1990, 203). In such a case the appearance of the
universe out of nothing via a quantum vacuum fluctuation would not
violate conservation of energy. Consult my companion document Creation
ex nihilo - Without God for more information.
One might further notice that if anything contradicts the 1st law of
thermodynamics, it is creationism, which states that the universe was
brought into existence out of nothing by supernatural processes -
"supernatural" meaning (in this case) "in violation of natural law."
Creationists hold a double-standard, claiming that evolution would be
invalid if it violated natural law (which it does not), while at the
same time claiming that creationism would not be invalid if it violated
natural law (which it does). Nor would creationism better "explain" any
violations of natural law at the origin of the universe than naturalism
- even if we were hypothetically to concede that the universe did come
into existence through a process that violates natural law, "God did it"
is no more informative an explanation than "it just happened." The
creationist claim is that the universe came into existence through
processes that are no longer in effect, yet were guided by an
intelligent power. How is this superior to a naturalist claim that the
universe came into existence through processes that are no longer in
effect, yet were not guided by an intelligent power? Once one allows for
processes that have nothing to do with the universe as we know it, then
anything goes. To say that it is alright to have different laws "before"
the origin of the universe if you are a supernaturalist, but not alright
if you are a naturalist (as if the conditions at the beginning of the
universe were not different than they are now), is definitely to hold a
double-standard.
1.5: The 2nd law of thermodynamics states that disorder in the universe
always increases. This means that the universe could not have started in
an ordered state unless it was "wound up" by a Creator.
The laws of physics are void before the first 1 E(-43) seconds of the
universe, so there is no reason to suspect that the universe could not
have "wound itself up" without the aid of a creator. Moreover, "[t]o
talk about causation or creation implicitly assumes there was a time
before the big bang singularity. We have known for twenty-five years
that Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts that time must
have had a beginning in a singularity fifteen billion years
ago"(Hawking, 1993, 46). There was no "before" in which a creator could
have started the universe.
It makes no sense to retort that the creator exists outside of time,
because, by definition, there can be no displacement or action unless
there is time - thus, the creator could never start creating. Finally,
if order can never arise spontaneously, where did this well-ordered
creator come from? If the creator "always was" ordered, what is to keep
the initial state of the universe from "always having been" ordered?
On a related note, some creationists take the 2nd law of thermodynamics
as precluding the generation of "ordered" galaxies from a "disordered
explosion" (i.e. the Big Bang). However, systems like galaxies formed as
a means of dissipating gravitational energy, thereby increasing
universal entropy. The formation of a tight arrangement of matter is not
necessarily a shift from high entropy to low.
1.6: The rotation of the Earth has been slowing at
a rate of 30 seconds per century. If the Earth were billions of years old,
the rotation rate at the outset would have been so great that the planet
could not have held together, much less support life.
Chris Stassen writes in response:
Whoever wrote this has the slowing rate very much wrong. The currently
measured rate is about 0.00002 seconds per day per year. (That is, today
the Earth completed its rotation about 0.00002 seconds slower than it
did on this same day last year.)
If you multiply 2 E(-5) seconds (per day) times 4 E(8) years
(approximately the Devonian period), you get about 2.2 hours. The result
would be about (365 * 24 / 21.8 ~= 400) days per year (since the length
of the year hasn't changed). Devonian corals show about 400 daily growth
layers per year (judged counting the daily layers in groups marked by
larger fluctuations caused by seasonal change). In fact, this evidence
is an excellent independent confirmation of the great antiquity of the
Earth, and the accuracy of isotopic dating methods.
Note that these long extrapolations are necessarily somewhat rough, and
get much less accurate with increasing time (particularly back to near
the origin of the Earth). There are still arguments over the forces
which dominate the slowing, and how much stronger or weaker they would
have been when integrating backwards in time. (Stassen, 1997)
Mr. Stassen also recommends as resources Thwaites, Awbrey, 1982; Cazenave,
1982; Bursa, 1982; and Mignard, 1982.
1.7: Quantum mechanics proves the existence of a creator, since there
must have been some entity external to the universe to observe it and
thus collapse it into a determinate state.
According to some interpretations of quantum mechanics, the wave
function of a system will not collapse into a determinate state unless
it is measured. However, when a measuring device is used to measure a
system, the measuring device itself becomes entangled in the system's
superposition. The only way out of this, say the creationists, is to
posit a God who somehow stands outside of the universe and can measure
it (thereby bringing it into a determinate state), without himself
becoming entangled with the wave function of the universe. The problem
with such an argument is that it takes for granted a specific
interpretation of quantum mechanics when in fact it is a very
contentious issue exactly what the correct interpretation is - some
formulations of quantum mechanics do away with collapses altogether
(e.g. pilot wave theories, "bare" theory, consistent histories), so
there would be nothing for an "outside" observer to do. And even if we
knew that there were collapses, some formulations of quantum mechanics
dictate that interaction with a device of sufficient size is enough to
cause a collapse (e.g. GRW) - there need be no "intelligent"
observation. Finally, of the interpretations that do give special status
to intelligent observers (such as Wigner's interpretation), the bulk
presume that, at the very least humans have that status. Given this
proliferation of interpretations of quantum mechanics, it is an
outrageous move to seize upon an interpretation that posits some
mysterious action of God as the reason why the universe appears to be in
a determinate state, and declare it to be proof of the existence of God.
See Albert, 1992, for a survey of quantum mechanical theories.
Terrestrial Geology, Radioisotope Dating
2.1: Many tests using 14C give dates that are obviously wrong or
conflict with dates given by other radioisotope tests. For instance, a
living mollusk was once shown by 14C dating to be dead for 3,000 years.
The limit on accurate 14C dating is around 50,000 years, owing to the
short half-life (5,730 years) of 14C. "Creationists attempt to
discredit 14C dating by applying it to fossils older than 50,000 years,
or in other inappropriate ways, and then showing that it yields
obviously wrong dates" (Berra, 1990, 38).
The fictitious mollusk ages are described fully in Keith, 1963. The
error arises because of the unusual environment in which the mollusk
lives, and does not apply to organisms in normal environments.
Furthermore, even for the mollusks, the maximum error is a few thousand
years. Since the experimental limit on 14C is 50,000 years, the error at
its worst still does not leave room for a young earth.
2.2: The ages of rocks are determined by the kinds of fossils they
contain, but the dating of the fossils depends on evolutionary
assumptions. The use of the old age of rocks to support evolution is
thus a circular argument.
The absolute age of rocks is accurately determined by the use of
radioisotope dating. It is true that the relative ages of strata were
determined prior to radiometric dating, partially by fossil content, but
radiometric dating has shown these relative dates to be correct. The
absolute dating by radioisotopes have yielded the long time span
necessary for evolution. (Brush, 1983, 64)
2.3: The rate of decay in the geomagnetic field sets an outside limit of
10,000 years for the age of the earth.
"...only the dipole-field strength has been 'decaying' for a century and
a half... the strength of the nondipole field (about 15 percent of the
total field) has increased over the same time span, so that the total
field has remained almost constant. [Creationist physicist] Barnes'
assumption of a steady decrease in the field's strength throughout
history is also irreconcilable, of course, with the paleomagnetic
evidence of fluctuations and reversals [in the geomagnetic
field]"(Ecker, 1990, 105). Evidence of the reversals have been found in
the magnetic orientation of rock on the sea floor.
2.4: If the earth were as old as geologists say, uranium decay would
have put more helium into the atmosphere than we currently find there.
The extra helium, like normal helium and hydrogen, is terribly light and
escapes the earth's atmosphere into space. Thus, helium quantities in
the earth give no evidence at all for the age of the earth, and we must
look elsewhere - to sediment deposition rates or radiometric dating, for
instance - to establish this age (Berra, 1990, 127).
2.5: Lord Kelvin deduced in 1862 that the absolute age of the earth was
no more than 400 million years old - too little time for evolution to
have generated all of the life we see on earth today.
Lord Kelvin attempted to figure out the age of the earth by using
Fourier's theory of heat conduction. In order to use the theory,
however, he had to make four assumptions: "first, the [earth] must be a
solid...; second, it must have constant thermal conductivity and heat
capacity throughout; third, it must have been initially all at the same
high temperature, surrounded by an infinite space at a lower
temperature; fourth, no heat is generated or destroyed anywhere in the
system"(Brush, 1983, 56). As it turns out, all four assumptions were
mistaken - the earth has a liquid core, the thermal conductivity and
heat capacity of the earth's interior are different than that of the
crust, it is possible that the earth was formed by the aggregation of
cold particles, and radioactive elements in the earth produc e
substantial heat (Brush, 1983, 58-59). Thus, Kelvin's results were
entirely false, and one must look to more reliable tests - such as
radioisotope dating - to determine the age of the earth.
2.6: There are places where "older" rock strata lie above "younger" rock
strata.
Normal geological processes thrust older layers on top of younger layers
in certain regions. These processes leave discernible effects which
geologists can detect. Creationists seek to repudiate overthrusting by
hiding the evidence for it from their audiences (Eldredge, 1982,
105-108).
2.7: Radiometric dating is extremely inaccurate, as is shown by the fact
that such experiments frequently have error factors of a few million
years.
"A few million years sounds like a huge error, but a couple of million
years one way or the other is a small error compared with the huge age
calculated. Saying '380 million years plus or minus two million' is like
thinking back to April from December and saying you can't remember
whether something happened on the 19th, 20th, or 21st" (Eldredge, 1982,
103). Note that even with an error factor of a few million years,
radioisotopes consistently show that the earth is billions of years
older than the young-earth creationists assert.
2.8: Many radiometric dating tests have yielded false results.
Evolutionists discard all those that are inconsistent with their prior
assumptions and keep those that "verify" their theory.
There have been thousands of dating tests performed by independent
laboratories with a wide variety of radioisotopes. Virtually all of the
results correlate with evolutionary expectations. The few anomalies in
radiometric dating disappear when the samples are reanalyzed (Eldredge,
1982, 103).
2.9: Radiometric dating reports the earth to be old only because the
cataclysmic action of Noah's Flood changed the radioisotope
concentrations in the young earth.
If a worldwide cataclysmic flood had changed the radioisotope
concentrations in terrestrial rock, one would expect radiometric dating
to yield a completely haphazard distribution of ages as one tested rock
strata progressively deeper in the earth. However, in actuality, lower
strata consistently date older than higher strata (except where
overthrust has occurred). A second line of evidence against creationist
speculation about the Flood's action on radioisotopes comes from the
dating of meteorites and moonrock. Unless the waters of the Flood
somehow engulfed the entire solar system, meteorites and moonrock would
surely have been untouched by the Flood, so their radioisotope
concentrations could not have been affected by this alleged catastrophe,
even if the Flood had actually occurred. Yet moonrock and many
meteorites yield radiometric dates of around 4.5 billion years. So
independent of the fact that there is no evidence for a worldwide
Biblical Flood, and much evidence against such an event, the creationist
claim that radioisotope concentrations were distorted by the Flood has
been falsified.
2.10: Noah's flood was caused by the condensing of a vapor canopy that
contained the waters of the flood. Prior to the flood, the vapor canopy
also extended people's lifespans to the huge ages listed in Genesis,
because it blocked out harmful UV rays.
Consult my companion work Letter to a Korean Missionary for a response
to these claims.
2.11: Niagara Falls is moving upstream at a known rate each year. Its
current location allows only about 5,000 years since the time it started
eroding.
This criticism is quite puzzling even if the figures it gives are
correct, since it is consistent with the earth being infinitely old.
Unless creationists have some kind of proof demonstrating that the Earth
must be younger than Niagara Falls, this criticism does not amount to
much at all.
Origin of Life
3.1: The law of biogenesis states that life comes only from previous
life. Therefore prebiotic synthesis - which states that life first
developed from nonliving molecules - contradicts a major law of science.
Creationists represent biogenesis as a rigid law with universal scope,
when, in reality, it is merely a guideline that amounts to saying that
spontaneous generation (the assembly of fully formed organisms out of
inanimate material in short periods of time by purely natural processes)
does not occur. The slow, stepwise process of prebiotic synthesis and
the all-at-once process of spontaneous generation are not comparable.
The creationist claim that the "law" of biogenesis precludes prebiotic
synthesis is analogous to the obviously false assertion that quantum
mechanics and the theory of relativity are invalid because they
"violate" Newton's physical laws.
3.2: Amino acids in living organisms are all left-handed, but in nature,
equal amounts of left-handed and right-handed amino acids form, so one
would expect them to occur in equal proportions in living organisms if
abiogenesis were true.
Ian Stewart claims that the violation of mirror symmetry by the weak
nuclear force can account for the specific handedness of amino acids. He
writes:
One remarkable consequence of [the violation of mirror symmetry by the
weak force] is the fact that the energy levels of molecules and that of
their mirror images are not exactly equal. The effect is extremely
small: the difference in energy levels between one particular amino acid
and its mirror image is roughly one part in 1 E(17). This may seem very
tiny, but...symmetry breaking requires only a very tiny disturbance. In
general, lower-energy forms of molecules should be favored in nature.
For this amino acid, it can be calculated that with 98% probability the
lower energy form will become dominant within a period of about a
hundred thousand years. And indeed, the version of this amino acid which
is found in living organisms is the lower-energy one. (Stewart, 1995,
90)
3.3: Nucleic acids cannot replicate without the help of proteins.
Proteins, however, cannot form unless specified by nucleic acid
sequences. Thus, genetic systems could not have started naturally.
RNA sequences are capable of forming and replicating without the
assistance of proteins. These RNA sequences may also catalyze protein
formation. As Martin Olomucki notes:
There is nothing to contradict the notion that the primordial RNAs may
have promoted the polymerization of...the amino acids...nucleic acids
may, by a reaction similar to the one leading to RNA polymerization,
have been able to facilitate the polymerization of amino acids by
supplying a suitable catalytic center and sacrificing one phosphodiester
bond to permit the formation of a peptide bond (Olomucki, 1993, 74-75).
3.4: There are n! (n-factorial: n x n-1 x n-2 x...x 1) ways of an enzyme
or DNA strand of n parts forming prebiotically. Since the smallest
proteins have at least 100 amino acids, the chance of forming a
particular enzyme prebiotically is at most 1/100!, which is small enough
to be disregarded.
The two main flaws with this argument are that (1) enzymes of many
different configurations can have identical or very similar effects (we
do not need to form any particular enzyme), and that (2) enzymes in
prebiotic situations are not the product of haphazard collisions of
compounds, but are gradually built up over time by selective forces, and
sometimes created in the first place by nonrandom processes (Fox, 1988).
These two points demonstrate that the chance of forming a useful enzyme
is certainly not n!.
3.5: Even though the Earth is an open system and the sun is bombarding
it with energy, life still could not arise without supernatural
interference. Order in an open system increases only when there is a
complex system like a body, a host of enzymes, or a supernatural
influence to catalyze the reactions. Analogously, the sun can shine for
eternity on a junkyard and never cause the parts to come together to
build a pickup truck).
Chemicals and biomolecules function much differently in the presence of
energy than do pieces of scrap metal in a junkyard. Many atoms and
molecules spontaneously and non-randomly join together to form larger
molecules, especially in the presence of added energy. At high
temperatures, mixtures of amino acid monomers spontaneously polymerize
and form primitive cell-like structures called protocells, the
microfossil remains of which may have been found in Precambrian rock
(Fox, 1989).
Many important biochemicals including amino acids and nucleotides have
been produced in experiments and found on meteoritic material.
Spectroscopic data even reveals the existence of organic molecules in
interstellar gas clouds; concerning these chemicals, Martin Olomucki
notes that
...in many of the organic interstellar molecules we find compounds which
are precursors of biological molecules: hydrogen cyanide, which can
generate amino acids and nucleic bases; formaldehyde, the precursor of
sugars; cyanoacetylene, an important condensation agent, etc. These
molecules are able to form even under extreme conditions of temperature
and high concentration of interstellar media. Apparently ubiquitous in
the Universe, they must certainly have existed on the surface of the
primitive Earth, as well as on other planets: traces of amino acids,
which are already more complex chemicals, have been identified in lunar
dust and meteorites. (Olomucki, 1993,47; see also Miller, 1992, 17-20).
Research has yielded a host of autocatalytic molecules, some of which
present characteristics like imperfect replication (no one wants perfect
replication from reproducing molecules - otherwise diversity could not
be generated) and even recombination (Rebek, 1994).
The 2nd law of thermodynamics is thus shown by experiment to be no
barrier to the natural emergence of complex structures from simple ones.
It should be noted that, in the first place, the 2nd law of
thermodynamics says nothing about open systems requiring catalysis by an
already complex system to become complex themselves - this is a
concoction of the creationists misleadingly presented by them as an
original part of the real scientific law.
Biological Evolution, Mutations, Speciation
4.1: Chromosome numbers cannot change without producing very harmful
effects.
Although changes in chromosome numbers can produce harmful effects, they
do not universally do so. As William Klug and Michael Cummings write,
While the chromosome number is commonly regarded as invariant for a
given species, the arrangement of chromosomal material is often
polymorphic through chromosomal inversions and translocations. These
chromosomal aberrations usually have little direct effect on the
phenotype because gene content is rearranged but not altered." (Klug,
Cummings, 1983, 528)
4.2: The perfection of the structures of the various life forms on earth
clearly reveal themselves as the work of an intelligent designer.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the unbelievably complex human eye.
The human eye is actually quite flawed. The photoreceptors in the eye
are upside down, with their blood vessels and neurons in front,
effectively causing deficiencies in human vision, including a "blind
spot" caused by the hole where the neurons exit the eye. The squid's
eye, on the other hand, has none of these problems. Are we to believe
that a designer whose "crowning creation" was man made such an
incredible error in the construction of the human eye, and not in that
of the squid? (Diamond, 1985)
Imperfect engineering is apparent in far more than the human eye.
Useless and inefficient structures abound in the natural world -
flightless birds with hollow bones, as if adapted for flight; blind
animals with useless lenses and retinas; the clumsy "thumb" of the giant
Panda; introns; the vestigial pelvis of pythons and whales (Futuyama,
1983, 198-200). If these structures did not arise through evolution,
they could only have been the work of a deranged or clumsy creator.
But could any complex structure - even an imperfect one - arise through
evolution? Certainly no one has documented the gradual development of
the eye or the feather, but we can look to the gradations in the present
world for clues. In fact, nature displays progressions of simple to
complex visual structures (Ecker, 1990, 65-66), and a scale-to-feather
progression (McGowan, 1984, 116-121), such that one can see how the
gradual development of complex structures could be possible. Ian Stewart
notes that a computer simulation by biologists Dan Nilsson and Susanne
Pelger has bolstered the case for the natural evolution of the eye by
small steps:
[Nilsson and Pelger's 1994 computer analysis] starts with a mathematical
model of a flat region of cells, and permits various types of
"mutation." Some cells may become more sensitive to light, for example,
and the shape of cells may bend. The mathematical model is set up as a
computer program that makes tiny random changes of this kind, calculates
how good the resulting structure is at detecting light and resolving the
patterns it "sees," and selects any change that improves these
abilities. During a simulation that corresponds to a period of about
four hundred years - the blink of an eye, in evolutionary terms - the
region of cells folds itself up into a deep, spherical cavity with a
tiny irislike opening, and, most dramatically, a lens. Moreover, like
the lenses of our own eyes, it is a lens whose refractive index - the
amount by which it bends light - varies from place to place. In fact,
the pattern of variation of refractive index that is produced in the
computer simulation is very like our own. So here mathematics shows that
eyes definitely can evolve gradually and naturally, offering increased
survival value at every stage. More than that: Nilsson and Pelger's work
demonstrates that given certain key biological faculties (such as
cellular receptivity to light, and cellular mobility), structures
remarkable similar to eyes will form - all in line with Darwin's
principle of natural selection (Stewart, 1995, 22).
Richard Dawkins adds that Nilsson and Pelger used conservative
assumptions about the amount of variability in populations and the
heritability of new traits when setting up their simulation (Dawkins,
1996, 165). Nevertheless, the simulation showed that "it would take only
about 364,000 generations to evolve a good fish eye with a
lens"(Dawkins, 1996, 166), where 364,000 generations translates to less
than half a million years in time (Dawkins, 1996, 166) - a geological
instant which would be difficult to detect in the fossil record.
4.3: Evolutionists cannot tell us exactly how most organisms/structures
arose. For instance, no one can explain what series of mutations could
have given caterpillars the ability to metamorphose into butterflies.
Certainly no one knows all of the tiniest details of evolutionary
history (exactly which genes mutated at exactly what times to cause
morphological change). But the validity of the general process of
evolution is established well enough to assure one that every organism
has gained its qualities through evolution as long as a general account
can be made of how those qualities arose, even if the minutiae are
unknown.
This response may not be satisfying to creationists at first, but one
might ask such a creationist whether she can describe the exact spatial
location of every footstep of Jesus as he presumably carried his cross
at Calvary? Of course, no one can. Can we conclude (on these grounds
alone) that the story of Jesus's crucifixion is false? Obviously not. We
do not need to know the exact stepwise details of a process to know that
the process is valid.
Evolutionists can account for many, many structures with considerable
ease, as long as they are not held to the unreasonable criterion of
absolutely exact knowledge. As Douglas J. Futuyama writes, "[o]ne of the
most amazing aspects of evolution is how easy it is to account for major
transformations through rather simple changes in developmental
processes. Most of the differences among different kinds of mammals are
quite simply accounted for by changes in the relative rates of growth of
different parts of the body. Speed up the elongation of fingers to get a
bat wing; slow down the development of teeth or legs to reduce or
eliminate them in whales; slow down the growth of the lateral toes and
increase that of the middle one to get a horse's hoof" (Futuyama, 1982,
63-64).
The evolution of butterfly metamorphosis specifically is not very well
understood, but this is hardly damning evidence against evolution. Since
evolution accounts so well for other processes and structures,
creationists would have to show that butterfly metamorphosis is
evolutionarily impossible, and this they cannot do. Even creationists
admit that the metamorphosis of the butterfly is a natural process, not
requiring the direct intervention of God to work. If, as creationists
generally assume, evolution would have to first produce a halfway
metamorphosis before it can produce a full metamorphosis, then evolution
is in trouble. However, evolution does not need to produce a halfway
metamorphosis. All it has to do is produce a slightly less sophisticated
metamorphosis and gradually move on to more complex ones. If the
creationist admits that a metamorphosis to x is a natural process, why
not a metamorphosis to something slightly less x-like? (Domning, 1994,
11)
4.4: The genetic variation in populations that allows them to adapt to
environmental change through microevolution (as revealed in industrial
melanism and bacterial antibiotic resistance) was deliberately put in
place by the creator.
This creationist assertion contradicts the story of Noah's Flood, which
creationists also hold to. Presumably, only a single male and female of
all the "kinds" on earth (except for the birds and the "cud-chewing"
kinds) were taken into Noah's boat, and the rest perished. Given that
each organism has at most two alleles for each gene locus, that would
yield a maximum total of four alleles per gene locus per kind. We know
for certain that there are far more than four alleles per locus for many
loci in modern populations. These extra alleles must have emerged
through mutation, as they could not have been set in place in a
Genesis-style creation. An example of allele number that directly
contradicts Genesis 1 and 2, is locus HLA-DRB1 - one gene in the human
leukocyte antigen (HLA) complex - which has 59 alleles (Ayala, et al.,
1993, 78). If all humans descended from Adam and Eve, and no new alleles
ever arose though mutation, the current human population would have at
most only 4 alleles at this locus (two from Adam, two from Eve).
Experimentation with bacteria has also shown that antibiotic resistance
can and does arise from beneficial mutation, rather than being already
present in the bacteria. "For example, Joshua Lederberg did an
experiment in which he grew thousands of colonies of genetically
identical bacteria from a single bacterial cell that was unable to
survive in the presence of streptomycin. He divided each colony of cells
in two, and grew one half with and one half without streptomycin. A few
of the colonies survived on streptomycin, because they carried new
mutations for streptomycin resistance" (Futuyama, 1982, 137). Since the
bacterium from which the resistant colonies evolved was not itself
streptomycin resistant, Lederberg's experiment proves that resistance is
generated by a mutation, and is not a quality that needs to be present
in bacteria from the start.
4.5: Homologous features do not prove any ancestral relationships
between organisms, because all classifications above the species level
are man-made and arbitrary.
Where taxa with fine differences are concerned, the classification of a
species may be a bit contrived (as is the case with transitional forms),
but there are clear major differences between most taxa from genus to
kingdom level. Still, the homologies persist throughout all taxa, so
either they were made by a deceitful creator, or else they constitute
real evidence that all taxa share ancestry. Classification may be a
human endeavor, but the similarities and differences between various
organisms because of their degree of relatedeness constitute a reality
independent of however we choose to make our classification system.
(Ruse, 1982, 309-310).
4.6: Industrial melanism does not demonstrate evolution at all because
no speciation occurs.
Industrial melanism was never intended as an example of speciation, but
rather as an example of changes in gene frequency through natural
selection. However, changes in gene frequency do constitute evolution,
albeit not macroevolution. Textbooks are not fraudulent in claiming that
industrial melanism, antibiotic resistance, and pesticide tolerance are
examples of evolution.
4.7: Mutations are universally deleterious, and thus cannot be a driving
factor in evolution.
This statement is completely wrong. Some mutations have been shown to be
incredibly beneficial. For instance, as George Bakken reports:
Microorganisms have acquired new enzymes that allow them to metabolize
toxic industrial wastes never occurring in nature (e.g. chlorinated and
flourinated hydrocarbons), and are an increasingly important method of
pollution control (Ghosal et al., Science 228: 135-142, 1985). Susumi
Ohno (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 81:2421-2425, 1984) found that one such new
enzyme, nylon linear oligomer hydrolase, resulted from a frame-shift
mutation. Frame-shift mutations scramble the entire structure of a
protein, and so the enzyme is a random construct! As would be expected,
this new enzyme is imperfect and has only 1% the efficiency of typical
enzymes, but the important thing is that it works (Bakken, n.d.).
Another example comes from researchers working with the nematode
Caenorhabditis elegans, who have identified "four genes that, when
mutatated, can make these worms use energy more efficiently, feed and
swim at a slower pace - and live many times their normal life-span. Some
of the experimental nematodes lived for almost 2 months, far longer than
their expected 9 days" (Pennisi, 1996, 949; see also Lakowski, 1996,
1010-1013).
Yet another recent example, pertaining to humans:
Population geneticist Stephen O'Brien of the National Cancer Institute,
his NCI colleagues Michael Dean and Mary Carrington, and their
collaborators provide strong confirmatory evidence that people who have
two mutant copies of the gene for CCRS (also known as CKRS), the
chemokine receptor that HIV uses when it initially infects infects white
cells, are highly resistant to HIV infection. Another, entirely new,
finding is that people who get infected with HIV, but have one mutant
copy of the CCRS gene, progress to AIDS more slowly than do people
without the mutation. (Cohen, 1996, 1797)
Even some of the most seemingly deleterious mutations can have great
adaptive value in certain environments. For instance, mutations that
cause stunted wing growth in Drosophila increase the fly's ability to
survive on islands where high winds are present (Ruse, 1982, 92). This
demonstrates a critical point, and explains why decades of irradiating
Drosophila in the laboratory produced only less fit mutants: in a
population's normal environment, all possible beneficial mutations will
have long since spread through its gene pool. Thereafter, in the same
environment, virtually all mutations must be deleterious, because the
population is already extremely well adapted to its environment (Moore,
1983, 11-13). Mutations are almost universally deleterious in a
population's normal environment. But the same mutations that are
deleterious in the "normal" environment may be beneficial on the
geographical fringes of a population, or in the event of a massive
environmental change throughout the entire geographical range of the
population.
Even certain classes of macromutations can have adaptive value. Richard
Dawkins presents an example with snake vertebrae:
The number of vertebrae in different species of snakes varies from about
200 to 350. Since all snakes are cousins of each other, and since
vertebrae cannot come in halves or quarters, this must mean that, from
time to time, a snake is born with at least one more, or one fewer,
vertebra than its parents. These mutations deserve to be called
macro-mutations, and they have evidently been incorporated in evolution
because all these snakes exist. (Dawkins, 1996, 103)
4.8: The rate of mutation is so small that it could never serve as a
source of variation. The typical rate of mutation is "one mutation per
locus per 1 E(5) to 1 E(6) gametes" (Campbell, 1990, 445).
Obviously, the rate of mutation alone is not sufficient to convert a
population. However, selective forces and genetic drift cause any
beneficial mutation to spread quickly through a population. Moreover, if
a mutant allele is only detrimental in homozygous form, it will take
many generations to eliminate it from the gene pool, even if the
homozygous form is lethal (Ruse, 1982, 79-84). This fact and
heterozygote fitness (cases in which the heterozygote has an advantage
that neither homozygote has - a case example is the sickle-cell allele,
which protects against malaria in heterozygous form), which may perhaps
be the norm, help to keep populations supplied with a reservoir of
mutant genes, some of which will have an advantage over the "normal"
alleles in the event of environmental change. Populations do not have to
wait around for lucky mutations after environmental change - the mutants
are already in the gene pool.
4.9: Macroevolution remains unproved because no one has observed it. In
fact, macroevolution is in principle unobservable, so evolution must be
unscientific.
Although information in experimental science is gained through
observation, the observation of a great amount of indirect evidence of a
process makes as good a scientific case as the direct observation of a
process. As Michael Ruse says, "[t]he evidence that I have a heart is
all indirect, neither I nor anyone else has ever seen it, but does
anyone really believe that it is not a fact that I have a heart? Of
course it is a fact..." (Ruse, 1982, 58). In the same way, there is so
much indirect evidence for macroevolution that it can safely be
considered a fact without direct observation of the process occurring in
our time.
4.10: No one has ever seen one species arise from another.
In 1964, Dr. D.J. Reish removed 5 or 6 polychaetes (Nereis acuminata)
from Los Angeles/Long Beach harbor, and grew his sample to a size of
thousands. In 1986, four pairs from this group were brought to Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institution; the population at Woods Hole thus had
gone through two bottlenecks, which are supposed to help drive evolution
through genetic drift. In 1977-1978, two new cultures of N. acuminata
were gathered from nearby Long Beach and Newport Beach, and grown under
the same conditions as the Woods Hole sample. The three populations were
later crossed, and it was found that the only crosses that would not
produce viable offspring were the crosses involving Woods Hole and the
two new cultures. This signifies nothing less than speciation, and all
in the laboratory - all observed directly (Weinberg et al., 1992).
4.11: If evolution were true, then fish would have evolved into
amphibians and land animals more than once.
Fish are, in fact, continuing to evolve. One should not, however,
properly expect them to evolve fully into amphibians again, because the
niche they would be exploiting is already occupied by the first
amphibian lineage. D.H. Patent explains:
Many animals of today appear to be in transition between life in the
water and life on land. These organisms can survive at least for limited
periods of time in either environment. But we cannot say what the future
holds for them. We do not know if they are "on the way" to a terrestrial
existence. The chances are, in fact, that they are not really evolving
away from an acquatic existence. A species cannot take over a niche that
is already occupied by another unless it is in some way better adapted
to that niche. Since present land animals have been evolving for
millions of years, they have become about as well adapted to land living
as possible; a newcomer which is trying to "fit in" is not likely to
displace them."(Patent, 1977, 58-59)
4.12: Sexual reproduction could not have come about through evolution.
Howard Hershey has the following to say about the evolution of sex (he
warns that he is stating all of this from memory, but believes it is a
simple task to check his statements in any genetics or developmental
biology textbook):
Recombination (a key element of meiosis that differs from mitosis
significantly enough to warrant new activities) also occurs in bacteria
(which don't have sex as we eucaryotes know it). The bacterial enzymes
involved are called the RecA, RecB enzymes. These are enzymes that are
also involved in DNA repair. he RecA enzyme in particular is involved in
repair of UV damage. Almost any molecular biology or genetics book will
talk about the Rec system. Recombination in eucaryotes is very similar
but the enzymes are not as well studied. But topoisomerases (enzymes
that break and reseal DNA) are clearly involved and these enzymes have a
long evolutionary history.
But the key thing to remember is that sex (in the biological sense) is
simply the passage from the diploid (2N) state to the haploid (1N) state
and back again by fusion. Undoubtedly what these creationists mean is
"How can we create two sexes that are so different from one another?" An
interesting question when posed by a three-year old but one that ignores
the fact that some creatures have an even more dramatic differentiation
between the sexes than humans do and some have much less.
The passage of the sexual cycle does NOT require two highly
differentiated sexes producing specialized gamete cells. Yeast, for
example, are sexual animals just as much as humans and it is hard to
distinguish haploid cells from diploid and the difference between the
mating types (when the haploid gametic cells are visually
indistinguishable from each other they are called mating types; when one
is differentiated to hold most of the cytoplasm it is an egg and the
other less endowed cell is a sperm with males being sperm carriers and
females being egg carriers). There [are] all kinds of variations in
nature between the yeast and mammals (although fish carry sexual
dimorphism to an extreme unseen in mammals).
Even within humans, sex is not a case of being different from the moment
of conception. The early human embryo (XY male or XX female) is sexually
dimorphic (has both embryonic male and female parts). Normally a single
gene (on the Y) sets in motion a cascade of events that leads to the
emphasis of the male internal parts (Wolfian ducts) and degeneration of
the female parts (Mullerian tract). Absent that gene, the male parts
degenerate and a female develops. Most of what we call male and female
traits are purely hormonally caused and depending on the hormonal
environment you can get interesting events. I have a lovely picture of a
busty young woman who is XY (she has a defect that makes her cells
unable to respond to androgens). Internally, she is sterile because the
genes that determine the degradation of the Mullerian tract are
different. She also has no pubic hair (because that requires a cellular
response to androgens). There are also XX individuals with various
levels of penis and (empty) scrotum formation because of in utero
exposure to androgens (the mothers had a tumor or took certain steroidal
drugs). The external genitalia equivalents are very simple scrotum =
labia and penis = clitoris. There are all kinds of intermediate
situations since this is a question of different differentiation of
organs rather than de novo creation of different organs. All this (and
much more) can be found in most textbooks of development or genetics.
But, amazingly, most creationists seem completely ignorant of these
basic facts and somehow think that male and female were created
separately. (Hershey, 1996)
4.13: There is no evidence for the rapid development of new species in
nature.
3,500 years ago, a small lake was separated from Lake Victoria by a
sandbar. There are now five species endemic to the new lake; they have
evolved from the original species in a geological instant (McGowan,
1984, 29). A population of Nereis acuminata that was isolated in 1964
was no longer able to interbreed with its ancestors by 1992 (Weinberg et
al., 1992). New species certainly can emerge quickly.
4.14: Natural selection is tautological: the fittest survive, and those
who survive are the fittest.
"Survival of the fittest" is certainly a tautology, but natural
selection is not mere "survival of the fittest." One can predict in
advance what characteristics will be beneficial for an organism living
in certain environments (Kitcher, 1982). For instance, it is quite
apparent before selection occurs that the melanic peppered moth will
have better chances of survival than its mottled grey counterpart when
they compete in polluted areas, where the white lichens normally on the
trees have been killed, leaving a black bark surface. This is readily
apparent, but not tautological. Mere survival does not define fitness -
alleles that increase in frequency in a population do not necessarily do
so because they confer greater fitness upon their hosts; some alleles
increase in frequency because of genetic drift and bottleneck effects.
Organisms that outlive their peers due to sheer luck and happenstance
are not automatically fitter, even though they are the survivors.
Michael Ruse lists three testable assumptions to which every Darwinian
must commit: (1) that there is a struggle for reproduction, (2) that
success in the struggle depends upon the characteristics of organisms
(rather than being random), and (3) that selection will favor the same
characteristics under the same circumstances (Ruse, 1982, 140).
4.15: There are numerous "irreducibly complex" structures and processes
in organisms, especially at the biochemical level. Such structures and
processes could not have developed in a stepwise fashion.
See Behe's Empty Box for an extensive list of links promoting and
critiquing this claim.
Paleontology, Fossils, Transitional Forms
5.1: The feather impressions in fossils of Archaeopteryx are forgeries.
Modern feathers were pressed into a thin layer of artificial cement to
give the impression that a dinosaur fossil had feathers.
After astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle made these accusations, a team of
scientists applied a battery of tests to the holotype of Archaeopteryx
lithographica to prove the authenticity of its feather impressions
(Charig et al., 1986). They found absolutely no evidence of artificial
cement on the fossils. One test involved the comparison of hairline
cracks running through the impressions on both the slab and counterslab;
the negative of a photograph of the counterslab superimposed on a
photograph of the slab revealed a perfect correlation between the
hairline cracks. The comparison "shows that the block was cracked
through vertically before it was split horizontally into two slabs, thus
indicating the unquestionable absence of any added cement layer on
either surface" (Charig et al.,1986, 624). Detailed examination of the
feather impressions through scanning electron microscopy revealed "a
degree of minute detail that we believe would be impossible to carve,
even today, and a total absence of any chisel marks"(Charig et al.,
1986, 624).
It is worth noting that Hoyle claimed that the fossil was actually that
of a reptile with fake feather impressions around it (Charig et al.,
1986, 623), underscoring just how reptilian Archaeopteryx is, in
contrast to the creationist assertion that Archaeopteryx is "just a
bird." With the feather impressions proven authentic, one of
Archaeopteryx's prime avian qualities is also reaffirmed, so the fossil
remains solidly established as a transitional form.
5.2: Archaeopteryx is not a transitional form but a full-fledged bird.
Any reptilian characteristics it displays are mirrored in modern birds
such as the hoatzin.
Archaeopteryx lithographica is indeed a transitional form. It has been
classified as a bird almost arbitrarily because it has feathers, not
because it is "truly" a bird. The avian features Archaeopteryx
possesses are
a wishbone
feathers
a bony sternum in one of the latest specimens (Svitil, 1994).
Archaeopteryx has many more reptilian characteristics, such as
a pubic peduncle
a long, bony tail
no pygostyle
three well-developed fingers (with the same number of bones as in most
dinosaurs)
three well-developed metacarpal bones
unfused metacarpal bones
separate metatarsal bones
no hypotarsus
abdominal ribs (list from McGowan, 1984, 117).
Archaeopteryx has many more reptilian characteristics than the hoatzin.
Even Fred Hoyle, who erroneously claimed that Archaeopteryx was a
forgery, claimed that it was a reptilian fossil with fake feather
impressions. But the objection by analogy to the hoatzin is entirely off
track anyways. Archaeopteryx is not a transitional form merely because
of its remarkable blend of reptilian and avian characteristics -
Archaeopteryx also existed at the same time as the theropod reptiles and
resembled them very highly (Futuyama, 1982, 188). Given its temporal and
physical correlations to reptiles, plus its less numerous - yet distinct
- avian qualities, Archaeopteryx lithographica stands immune to any
creationist attack.
5.3: Protoavis precedes Archaeopteryx in the fossil record, so
Archaeopteryx cannot possibly be a transitional form.
This creationist challenge falsely presupposes that only one lineage of
reptiles evolved into birds or bird-like reptiles, when, in fact, there
is more than one such lineage. Given this fact, Archaeopteryx will
continue to demonstrate how the alleged "boundary" between reptiles and
birds can be bridged, even if Protoavis turns out to be an earlier avian
life form than Archaeopteryx (which is not yet certain). The validity of
Protoavis is simply irrelevant to the validity of Archaeopteryx as a
transitional form. (Wheeler, 1993)
5.4: The Cambrian explosion is a sure sign of the activity of the
Creator, suddenly creating a multitude of complex forms out of nothing.
There are no fossils before the explosion.
There are plenty of fossils of organisms that lived in the Precambrian,
such as jellyfish, coelenterates, annelids, and even cyanobacteria that
date back as far as 3.4 billion years (McGowan, 1984, 103). The Cambrian
period marks the advent of shelled organisms like trilobites and
brachiopods. The ancestors of the organisms appearing in the Cambrian
explosion were soft-bodied and did not leave fossils as easily as the
shelled Cambrian organisms. Precambrian rocks are also subjected to a
disproportionately large amount of deformation, which destroys fossils.
It is for these reasons, not creation, that the fossil record seems to
display a sudden "explosion" of shelled organisms at the base of the
Cambrian. Moreover, the "explosion" took around 15 million years, so it
is not quite the instantaneous event creationists would expect, and is
definitely inconsistent with young-earth creationism (Ecker,
1990,46-48), since young-earth creationists hold that the earth is no
more than several thousand years old - far less than the time involved
in the Cambrian explosion.
5.5: All of the explanations of gaps in the fossil record, such as the
invocation of punctuated equilibrium and the low probability of
fossilization, render the evolutionary prediction of transitional forms
unfalsifiable.
Punctuated equilibrium and the low probability of fossilization are both
scientific explanations for the scarcity of transitional forms, and are
not characterized by the contrived nature so evident in the
creationist's use of the "appearance of age" and "test of faith" ploys.
The evolutionist's explanations for gaps in the fossil record are
derived from experimental data and an understanding of natural
processes, and must be reasonable to become accepted by the scientific
community. The fact that there is much debate about punctuated
equilibrium clearly shows that the scientific community is not
desperately clutching at straws. Note also that all evolutionists still
predict the existence of at least some transitional forms, as opposed to
the creationist's predictions of none. If we still did not know of any
transitional forms today, after more than a century of paleontological
research, the idea of transitional forms would be adequately falsified.
But given the numerous transitional forms that have indeed been found,
all falsifiable forms of creationism find themselves falsified.
5.6: Fossils are the remains of the living organisms that perished in
Noah's Flood. The fossil record thus lends no testimony to evolution or
an old earth.
R.J. Schadewald lists six arguments that cast great doubt upon the
validity of the flood:
the Karoo Formation contains the remains of some 800 billion
vertebrate animals. If one conservatively estimates that the
Karoo Formation contains a mere 1% of all of the vertebrate
fossils on earth, this means that before the flood the earth
would have held 2100 vertebrates of varying sizes per acre. If
marine fossils comprise 0.1% of the volume of sedimentary rock,
this means that before the Flood these organisms would have
covered the earth to a depth of at least 1.5 feet. The varves of
the Green River formation would, by the standard interpretation,
take 20 million years to form. For the varves to have been
formed during the Flood by shallow flows of mud-laden water (as
the creationists conjecture), would have necessitated a sequence
of 40 million flows covering tens of thousands of square miles
every two-thirds of a second. Noah, his wife, his three sons,
and their wives - being the only human occupants on the Ark
(Genesis 6:18, 7:13) - must have carried all of the diseases
specific to man in their bodies, were the disease organisms to
survive the Flood. Given that only two of most of the animals of
each kind were on board, some of the specific disease organisms
known today would have been wiped out by the eventual immunity
of the two. Hydraulic sorting during the Flood would have caused
large trilobites to have always been found in lower strata than
small trilobites, because of hydrodynamic drag properties. This
is not what is actually found. Victim habitat and mobility
arguments are similarly shown to be wrong by the fact that
fossils of flowering plants - despite their relative immobility
and their existence at all elevations - never appear before the
Cretaceous era. There are overturned strata, explainable by
conventional geology, but impossible to explain by the working
of the Flood. How could the Flood cause upside down raindrop
craters and brachiopod burrows? (Schadewald, 1983, 448-453)
5.7: In their search for transitional forms, the evolutionary community
has been taken in by outright fraud, as in the case of Piltdown Man,
which was accepted as a valid specimen for 40 years, and by unfounded
speculation, as in the construction of Nebraska Man from what later
turned out to be a pig tooth. This shows how unobjective evolutionists
are.
Regarding Piltdown Man, W.L. Strauss reports: "It may be wondered why 40
years elapsed before the hoax was discovered. Two factors enter here:
first, there was no reason at all to suspect the perpetration of a
fraud, at least, not until fluorine analysis indicated the relative
recency of the specimens, thus making the association of a human cranium
and an anthropoid-ape jaw, either anatomically or geologically, hardly
credible; and, second, methods for conclusively determining whether the
specimens were actual fossils or faked ones short of their wholesale
destruction, were developed only in recent years" (Strauss, 1954, 580).
There is no gap in the charts of human ancestry were Piltdown Man used
to be. Numerous australopithecine finds have firmly established
Australopithecus where the single Piltdown specimen once stood.
The creationists, too, have had their share of frauds, and have foisted
them upon the public with apparently deceitful intentions. A good
example are the Paluxy River tracks - a smattering of presumably human
footprints among dinosaur tracks, intended to prove that man and
dinosaurs were contemporaneous. All of the "human tracks," displayed in
deliberately poor quality photographs by creationists (to make it more
difficult to tell what the tracks really are), can be shown to be one of
three things:
parts of dinosaur tracks
erosion holes
contemporary human carvings (Scott, n.d.).
The Paluxy "man-tracks" have been denounced even by some creationists,
but continue to be exhibited in creationist literature.
The "construction" of Nebraska Man may be conceded as a serious mistake
on the part of a single, overzealous scientist. Countless other hominid
fossils, however, have stood the test of time, and supply ample evidence
for human evolution. And at least no evolutionist today cites Nebraska
Man as evidence for evolution, unlike the creationists, who continue to
cite the "Paluxy footprints" long after their real nature has been
exposed. One might also note that the creationists, too, have fallen
prey to wild speculation in the reconstruction of hominids. For
instance,
[Reverend Carl] Baugh and his associates appeared on an area television
station's evening news claiming that a Cretaceous fossil tooth found at
Dinosaur Valley State Park was human and thus invalidated the standard
geological column. They later recanted when microscopic examination
demonstrated that the item in question was a fossil fish tooth...(Eve,
1991, 129) [emphasis added]
5.8: There are no adequate transitional forms between fish and
amphibians.
The crossopterygian fish Eusthenopteron is linked to the early amphibian
Icthyostega by a number of characteristics:
same pattern of skull bones as Icthyostega
internal nostrils (found only in land animals and sarcopterygians
- a greater taxonomic group encompassing lungfish and crossopterygians)
teeth like amphibians
a two-part cranium (icthyostegids are the only other vertebrates that
have this characteristic)
same vertebral structure (list from McGowan, 1984, 152-153)
Moreover, studies of the skeletal characteristics of Acanthostega, the
most primitive tetrapod known (at 360 million years of age) reveal that
"tetrapod anatomy evolved while our ancestors lived exclusively
underwater - and it evolved for life underwater. The first vertebrate
that walked onto land didn't crawl on fish fins; it had evolved
well-tuned legs millions of years beforehand" (Zimmer, 1995, 120).
Acanthostega has arms "poorly designed for support" (Zimmer, 1995, p.
124) yet functional enough in water, allowing the creature to pull
itself along the bottom of plant-rich coastal lagoons, and also making
the creature superior at ambushing prey compared to fish, which must
remain afloat by keeping their fins "in constant motion, kicking up
easily detected waves" (Zimmer, 1995, 126). Additionally, Acanthostega,
despite being a tetrapod, has a hearing system more similar to fish than
to land-going creatures, and breathed like a fish (Zimmer, 1995, 125).
Paleontologists have also "found fragments from five more tetrapods, all
of which were roughly contemporaries of Acanthostega and some of which
were more advanced and thus closer to a terrestrial life" (Zimmer, 1995,
126).
5.9: There are no adequate transitional forms between reptiles and
mammals.
Two genera (Probelesodon and Massetognathus) of the cynodonts, a small
subdivision of the synapsids, display characteristics of both reptiles
and mammals, as well as qualities that are ambiguous. The reptilian
features are:
lower jaw comprises several bones
jaw joint formed between articular and quadrate bones
small cranium
ribs in neck region
number of bones in fingers and toes exceeds 2,3,3,3.
The mammalian features are:
teeth specialized for different functions
lower jaw with prominent coronoid process
double condyle at back of skull for neck articulation
axis with odontoid process
ilium slopes forward
The ambiguous characteristics are:
cheek teeth have simple cusps
jaw joint formed between hollow in the lower jaw and flat surface in
the skull
prominent ribs confined to chest region, but there are short ribs in
front of the pelvis
legs not splayed, but not vertically beneath body either (list from
McGowan, 1984, 138).
Probainognathus, another genus of the cynodonts, has both reptilian and
mammalian jaw joints, and shows the first step in the change of the
reptilian jaw joints into the mammalian ear ossicles. This does away
with the creationist charge that a reptile-mammal transitional form
could not have chewed its food while its jaw was being unhinged and
repositioned for hearing (McGowan,1984, 139). Also, Probainognathus
would have had no trouble hearing during rearticulation, as reptiles
exploit the transmission of sound from the ground through their jawbones
(Kitcher, 1982, 111).
5.10: There are no adequate transitional forms between early hominids
and Homo sapiens.
I defer this criticism to Jim Foley's definitive Fossil Hominids FAQ.
Philosophy of Science, Educational Issues
6.1: It is likely that many structures in the universe were created with
the appearance of old age. This is in accordance with the way God
created things in Genesis - even man was created in adult form, so why
not the rest of the universe?
The first notable appeal to "appearance of age" was made in the
Victorian era by Philip Gosse in his bookOmphalos. But, as John Barrow
and Joseph Silk report, "Not surprisingly, even the Victorians were not
eager to embrace Gosse's idea of a Creator who performed such sleight of
hand" (Barrow, 1993, 4). The morality of a creator who makes the world
appear old in every respect, yet expects us to believe that it is
actually young, is uncomfortably suspect.
Moreover, if one regards as plausible the notion that everything was
made with the mere appearance of age, there is little to stop one from
accepting that everything - the Bible included, of course - was brought
into existence only a few hundred years ago by Satan, or even that the
universe came into existence a few hours ago complete with us and our
memories (Abell, 1983, 34). Old-earth creationist Hugh Ross concurs with
this analysis:
Taken to its logical conclusion, the appearance-of-age hypothesis would
imply that we cannot establish the actuality of our own or others' past
existence. We could have been created just a few hours ago with the
Creator implanting scars, memory, progeny, photographs, material
possessions, liver spots, and hardening of the arteries to make us
appear and feel older than we really are. Also, if God built into the
universe natural testimony of events which never took place, how can we
claim the Bible is free of written testimony of events which never took
place? (Ross, 1994, 40)
Creationists would no doubt be dismayed to have such scenarios on equal
standing with their Biblical account of creation. However, since there
is no way to test the world for appearance of age, and the idea has no
explanatory power, real scientists rightfully pay little attention to
it. (Abell, 1983, 34).
Creationists might object that the actuality of the old age of the
universe is as unfalsifiable as the "appearance of age" concept, on the
ground that a reliance upon empirical data is as much a matter of taste
as a reliance upon the authority of a book. However, science is by
definition based in empiricism, and a simple application of Occam's
razor eliminates the unnecessary ontological load of "appearance of
age."
6.2: Evolution teaches that there are no such things as souls, that the
Bible is fraudulent, and that God does not exist.
These charges, even if they were true, have nothing to do with the
scientific validity of evolution. Such accusations reveal the true
religious motivations of the creationists, and their eagerness to
confuse scientific issues by the inappropriate discussion of metaphysics
when a religious audience is around.
In any case, however, the charges are false. Science, by definition, is
unable to reveal anything about the supernatural. While the historical
sciences do contradict a naively literal interpretation of Genesis, it
is ridiculous to assert that this makes them anti-Bible, anti-religion,
or anti-Christianity. Carl Sagan reports that
"Modern Roman Catholicism has no quarrel with the Big Bang, with a
Universe 15 billion years or so old, with the first living things
arising from prebiological molecules, or with humans evolving from
apelike ancestors - although it has special opinions on "ensoulment."
Most mainstream Protestant and Jewish faiths take the same sturdy
position." (Sagan, 1995, 278)
Pope John Paul II's Message to Pontifical Academy of Sciences, October
22, 1996, supports Sagan's claim.
Chris McGowan emphasizes that "The majority of Christians regard the
book of Genesis as a collection of parables which illustrate the point
that there is a God, a God who has dominion over the world... The issue
is not one between Christians and evolutionists, but between a
vociferous Christian minority - the creationists - and evolutionists"
(McGowan, 1984, 1-2). Exemplifying this, in McLean v Arkansas,
"officials of the United Methodist, Episcopal, Roman Catholic, African
Methodist Episcopal, and Presbyterian Churches, the American Jewish
Congress, and many other clergy and religious groups" (Bakken, n.d.)
opposed the "balanced treatment" law that would have given creationism
equal time with evolution in Arkansas science classes. Clearly evolution
is quite compatible with many religions, Christian and otherwise. Given
the evidence for evolution and certain biblical peculiarities -
particularly the incompatibility of the two Genesis accounts - there is
good reason to believe that Genesis 1 and 2 are allegories rather than
factual accounts, and that God is an irresponsible or wicked deceiver if
one of the two stories is a factual account. This makes any evolutionist
- even an atheistic one - a more righteous upholder of God than the
creationists.
6.3: Great scientists such as Newton and Kepler believed in a literal
Genesis.
Newton died in 1727 - 132 years before Darwin published his On the
Origin of Species, and 17 years before Lamarck was even born. Kepler
died 12 years before the birth of Newton. Clearly, Kepler and Newton had
no exposure to a solid theory of evolution. It is wrong - but typical -
for the creationists to judge modern scientists on the basis of the
incomplete knowledge of those long deceased.
6.4: Evolutionists are trying to take over the school system and force
their beliefs upon the students.
"There is no law that mandates the teaching of evolution, and there
should not be, yet it is practically universally taught in universities
and colleges around the world. The theory of evolution is what is taught
because it is what best explains the data in a rational manner." (Berra,
1990, 139-140) Creationists, however, have visibly used legal channels
to try to force their beliefs into the school system. Two of many
examples are:
The Tennessee Anti-Evolution Act (1925): this Act made it
unlawful to teach in public school "any theory that denies the
story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and
to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of
animals" (Zetterberg, 1983, 386). It was repealed in 1967. The
Tennessee Creationism Act (1973): this Act prohibited biology
textbooks from representing evolution as "scientific fact" as
opposed to "theory," and demanded that all textbooks that do
discuss evolution give equal emphasis to other "theories"
including the Genesis account. It was declared unconstitutional
in 1975. (Zetterberg, 1983, 387)
6.5: Natural processes cannot be the cause of qualities seen in humans
like love. For instance, the cause of love must be something loving.
If it were a rule that the cause of x must be x-like, that would imply
that manure, one cause of the growth of "tasty and nutritious" rhubarb,
must itself be tasty and nutritious (Ruse, 1982, 305). Michael Shermer
asks "If [the cause of x must be x-like], should not nature then have a
natural cause, not a supernatural cause?!" (Shermer, n.d., 4)
Furthermore, there is every reason to believe that even our most sacred,
poetized behavioral qualities can be reduced to natural processes. For
instance, researchers have demonstrated a strong connection between
natural amphetamines and the emotion of love (Toufexis, 1993, 50).
6.6: There are many theories of evolution, each of which "conclusively
disproves" the other.
Ernst Mayr lists the five major elements of Darwinian theory as:
the notion that organisms are transformed over time
the common descent of all organisms
the multiplication of species through speciation
gradual as opposed to saltationary change of populations
natural selection as the driving force behind change (Mayr,
1991, 36-37).
All evolutionary theorists - whether gradualists, punctuationalists, or
whatever - understand and accept (1), (2), and (3). There is indeed
disagreement about (4) and (5), but all sides recognize that there is
conclusive evidence for (1), (2), and (3) no matter what tempo or
mechanism of evolution one supports. As it turns out, article (2) is the
central issue in the creationism vs. evolution debate, so the debate
over (4) and (5) does not help the creationists at all, and is not a
sign of weakness in evolutionary theory.
If a multiplicity of mechanistic theories poses a problem for a greater
theoretical framework, then the creationists are in worse trouble than
the evolutionists, as there are more creationist theories than
evolutionary theories. To name a few, there are:
"day/age creationists" such as the Jehovah's Witnesses, who believe
each "day" in Genesis 1 represents an indefinite span of time
(WatchTower, 1985, 26-27)
"gap theorists" as found in the Worldwide Church of God, who believe
that there were two creations-the first involving all extinct life
found in the fossil record, and the second involving all life still
around today (Edwords, 1983, 304)
"progressive creationists" who believe in "a series of numerous
separate creations, each interrupted by a gap in the fossil record"
(Edwords, 1983, 305)
"Special Creationists" who hold that all life was created in six
24-hour periods around 6,000 years ago, and that the Noachian Flood
is responsible for everything from the fossil record to radiometric
dates.
And these are only a sample of the Christian "theories" of creation -
there are other religions with other creation theories.
6.7: Evolution is unfalsifiable, and thus unscientific.
A haphazard chronological distribution of fossils of varying complexity
in the fossil record, or a non-DNA based genetic code for advanced
organisms, are just two examples of findings that could falsify
evolution. Creationism, on the other hand is completely unfalsifiable by
practicing creationists, as they assume from the beginning that their
interpretation of the Bible is completely factual, and readily twist
around in the most absurd fashion any evidence that contradicts their
hypothesis. Their stance is not surprising, however, seeing that those
unhindered by a belief in Biblical infallibility find countless
disproofs of creationism. In short, then, creationism in any falsifiable
form has already been falsified, so the creationists choose to keep it
in an unfalsifiable, unscientific form by adding shoddy theological
articles to their premises.
6.8: Electrons are materially inconceivable, but physicists largely
accept them as real entities. So what is to keep one from accepting the
reality of an inconceivable Creator?
Though "materially inconceivable", electrons have specific qualities
from which one can predict their existence and behavior. A creator, on
the other hand, can act as arbitrarily as it wants, so it cannot be
understood even in the mathematically rigorous manner of the electron.
This makes hypotheses involving electrons falsifiable, but hypotheses
involving a mysterious "Creator" unfalsifiable and therefore
unscientific.
6.9: The exclusive teaching of evolution in the science classroom
violates the teaching of multiculturalism, because many different
cultures have creation myths which contradict evolution.
The teaching of mutliculturalism is fulfilled in humanities and social
science classes, in which creation myths can be taught as the
cultural/historical elements they are. Myths of any sort do not belong
in the science classroom, where only science is to be taught.
Creationists, of course, are not really interested in multiculturalism,
anyways - they do not push for equal time for all creation myths, but
only for their own Biblical myth. Neither do they attempt to advance
multiculturalism in their own Christian schools by giving equal time to
the myths of other religions.
6.10: Evolution predicts that natural law should be constantly evolving,
as opposed to the creation model, which states that law should stay
fixed.
This is entirely untrue. Evolution is a theory that itself fits only
into a framework of fixed natural law. Creationists, of course,
contradict themselves when they make this claim, since they are willing
to distort the natural rates of processes like radioactivity and
sedimentation to save their young-earth concept (Ruse, 1982, 305).
6.11: Nothing can be proven, particularly events in the past. Therefore,
creationism must be just as reasonable as evolution.
Although absolute proof of just about anything is impossible, there are
certainly things that are more reasonable and better supported than
others. For instance, given that there is no absolute proof that you
will fall if you jump off a cliff (who knows when the force of gravity
might reverse itself for reasons unknown to mere mortals?), is it
reasonable to jump? Past events are no less susceptible to support than
anything else - if someone claimed that one thousand years ago people
who jumped off cliffs never fell, would it be reasonable to believe him?
It is possible, of course, that gravity did not function 1,000 years
ago, and that all of our records to the contrary are just a fraud
designed by a malicious creator, but how plausible does this sound? By
no means does the impossibility of absolute proof of evolution or
creationism make the two equal in plausibility. The indirect evidence
for an evolutionary past far outweighs in its plausibility the
creationists' collection of arbitrary assumptions.
6.12: There is nothing wrong with invoking supernatural explanations.
In Methodological Naturalism and the Supernatural, I argue that it is in
principle possible for certain supernatural explanations to be
consistent with the scientific enterprise. However, it is worth noting
that this is emphatically not to say that the supernatural explanations
creationists tend to offer are good ones, or that they are even
necessarily consistent with the scientific enterprise - appealing to
divine agency simply to square one's theory with contradictory data, as
the creationists do, is not legitimate scientific use of the
supernatural - if a creationist advances supernatural explanations just
to patch up holes in her "theory" of creation, an evolutionist could
equally easily advance supernatural explanations for evolution (i.e.
"in the past, all mutations were beneficial, but the laws that made this
so are no longer in effect"). Both types of appeals would ultimately end
up halting the scientific enterprise.
6.13: There are many unanswered questions in science, such as the
details of the origin of the universe and of prebiotic synthesis. Thus
we require a supernatural God for explanation.
This argument is entirely antithetical to the nature of science. Just
because a question is currently unanswered does not mean that it cannot
be answered, and that we should shrug our shoulders and embrace the
supernatural on faith. History has shown us time and time again that
science eventually finds solutions to its problems. If we concoct a
supernatural explanation every time we run into a problem, science, and
probably civilization, will be completely corrupted. In any case, if we
were to accept the supernatural, then anything would be tenable - we
would not be forced to accept a particular creation theory. In the realm
of the supernatural, there is as much reason to believe in
creator-pixies, or in a universe that supernaturally came into existence
all on its own, as there is to believe in any Genesis-style creation.
6.14: Evolution is just a theory.
The colloquial use of the word "theory" corresponds more or less to the
scientific word "hypothesis." A hypothesis is a proposition or
explanation that is not at all certain, and demands evidence prior to
acceptance. In scientific circles, the word "theory" is much more than a
hypothesis. "A scientific theory is the endpoint of the scientific
method, often the foundation of an entire field of knowledge..." (Berra,
1990, 4). Calling evolution "just a theory" is an attempt to discredit
the obvious by confusing colloquial and scientific terminology.
Evolution is a theory in the same sense as Copernican theory (the theory
that the earth goes around the sun), the theory of gravity,
electromagnetic theory, quantum theory, and the theory of relativity.
One cannot say of evolution that it is just a theory any more than one
can say it of these other theories.
6.15: Evolution and creationism are the only two possible models of
origins. There are many serious problems with evolution, so creationism
is the correct model by default.
Certainly evolution is either true or false, and creationism is likewise
either true or false, but it does not follow from these two premises
that "either evolution is true or creationism is true." There are, in
fact, always an infinite number of "models" that can account for any
scientific data.
Examples of alternatives to both creationism and evolution include:
Illusory scenarios: The notion that you are the only person in this
apparent world that really exists, and that the rest of the "reality"
you perceive is really just an illusion generated by you (solipsism), a
higher power (Cartesian "evil genius" scenarios), or some complicated
machine your real brain is directly wired into ("brain-in-the-vat"
scenarios). Under such scenarios, your experiences are like what they
would be like if you had been attached to some sophisticated virtual
reality machine since birth - they seem to correspond to a real world,
but do not really correspond to the real world. Such scenarios are
consistent with all of the empirical "facts" you encounter in the world.
These scenarios are unscientific, but if we allow unscientific proposals
like creationism, there should be no reason to withhold these equally
bizzare illusory scenarios.
Wait-and-see proposals: Michael Denton believes that neither creationism
nor evolutionary biology can account for the data we currently possess
about organisms and their history. Denton believes that science must
wait for some entirely new theory to be developed, which may be as
revolutionary to biology as quantum mechanics was to physics (Denton,
1985).
Richard Swinburne, one of the top Christian apologists in the world,
believes that "[a]lthough there is much uncertainty about the exact
stages and mechanisms involved, the fact of evolution is
evident"(Swinburne, 1986, 1). Swinburne believes that evolution accounts
for everything except for the human soul, which was created by God a few
thousand years ago. Pope John Paul II, in his Message to Pontifical
Academy of Sciences, October 22, 1996, seems to agree with Swinburne's
assessment.
John Davison has developed a theory he believes serves as an alternative
to both Darwinian evolution and creationism, which he calls the
semi-miotic hypothesis.
Clearly, one must not make a choice between evolution and creationism -
there are many proposals that serve as an alternative to both.
Also, even if creationism and evolution were the only two alternatives,
it is not sound scientific practice to rely upon fault-finding as a
means of advancing one's own hypothesis. The creationists point to many
alleged problems with evolution, but even if these problems were real
(most of them, as I have already shown, are not), that would not be
sufficient to prove creationism true - creationism has its own
difficulties, so unless the creationists can amass as much positive
evidence for their proposal as evolutionists have for theirs,
creationism will remain less plausible.
The creationists rely upon rhetoric and obscurantism so much because
they can never come up with good evidence for creationism - so far, not
one of the few creationist research papers ever submitted to a
scientific journal has merited publishing. Note that creationists have,
incidentally, submitted very few papers to scientific journals in the
first place, so there is absolutely no evidence that their papers are
rejected for discriminatory reasons.
6.16: Evolution is the basis for Naziism and laissez-faire capitalism.
Carl Sagan gets it right when he says:
...the Darwinian insight can be turned upside down and grotesquely
misused: Voracious robber barons may explain their cutthroat practices
by an appeal to Social Darwinism; Nazis and other racists may call on
"survival of the fittest" to justify genocide. But Darwin did not make
John D. Rockefeller or Adolf Hitler. Greed, the Industrial Revolution,
the free enterprise system, and corruption of government by the monied
are adequate to explain nineteenth-century capitalism. Ethnocentrism,
xenophobia, social hierarchies, the long history of anti-Semitism in
Germany, the Versailles Treaty, German child-rearing practices,
inflation, and the Depression seem adequate to explain Hitler's rise to
power. Very likely these or similar events would have transpired with or
without Darwin. And modern Darwinism makes it abundantly clear that many
less ruthless traits, some not always admired by robber barns and
Fuhrers - altruism, general intelligence, compassion - may be the key to
survival. (Sagan, 1995, 260).
It is surprising how often creationists mention the Holocaust in
connection with evolution, as if somehow the latter caused the former.
Few evolutionists have not heard at one time or another the nonsensical
claim that "the Holocaust was a logical consequence of evolution." In
actuality, the deep historical connection between Christendom and
anti-Semitism contributed more to the Holocaust than creationists allege
evolution did (which is not, of course, to say that Christianity is
solely or even primarily responsible for the Holocaust - as Sagan
indicates above, the Holocaust was the product of a multitude of causes
working together):
"For century after century, the Christian church had designated the
people to be despised: religious believers called Jews, the
"Christ-killers," the "enemies of God." All the religious massacres [of
Jews] of 900 years - by Crusaders pursuing infidels, by inquisitors
hunting backsliders, by superstitious mobs fearing tales of
child-sacrificing, host-nailing, and well-poisoning - branded Jews as
accursed. When popes ordered Jews to wear badges and live in ghettos -
or when they were expelled entirely - it told the populace that these
pariahs were unfit to live among decent folk. Passion plays depicting
Jews as cruel mockers of Christ, and cathedral paintings of the evil
non-Christians, fanned hatred of those the church called "the perfidious
Jews."
Thus, when Adolf Hitler needed a scapegoat group to rally the
discontented majority to his cause and catapult himself to power,
natural victims clearly marked by the church were at his disposal. The
Christian public, not only in Germany, but also throughout Europe, was
predisposed to receive the Nazi message of hatred." (Haught, 1990,
157-158)
"The Holocaust was, of course, the bitter fruit of long centuries of
Christian teaching about the Jewish people." (Dr. Franklin Little,
chairman of the Department of Religion at Temple University, as quoted
in Haught, 1990, 158)
"[The Holocaust] could not have been done had not the name of God been
used for centuries to preach hatred of the Other, the Jews." (A.M.
Rosenthal, editor of the New York Times, as quoted in Haught, 1990, 158)
"[The Nazis] are inconceivable apart from this Christian tradition
[namely, the tradition of hostility to the Jews]. Hitler's pogrom, for
all its distinctiveness, is the zenith of a long Christian heritage of
teaching and practice against Jews." (Clark Williamson, theologian of
Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, as quoted in Haught, 1990,
159)
"[The Nazis] did not invent a new villain...They took over the
2,000-year-old Christian tradition of the Jew as villain...The roots of
the death camps must be sought in the mythic structure of Christianity."
(Richard Reubenstein, theologian, as quoted in Haught, 1990, 160)
"Everything Hitler did to the Jews, all the horrible, unspeakable
misdeeds, had already been done to the smitten people before by the
Christian churches...The isolation of Jews into ghetto camps, the
wearing of the yellow spot, the burning of Jewish books, and finally the
burning of the people - Hitler learned it all from the church. However,
the church burned Jewish women and children alive, while Hitler granted
them a quicker death, choking them first with gas." (Dagobert Runes,
historian, as quoted in Haught, 1990, 163).
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