Chromosome 2: A Response

In the last post, I discussed the fact that evolutionists appeal to human Chromosome 2--and its similarity to chimp Chromosomes 2a and 2b--as the 'smoking gun' of evolution, the proof that these two species shared a common ancestor. In this post, I want to lay out a response to this claim, one that involves examining the evidence more closely (not settling for a superficial conclusion). And in this regard, the 'smoking gun' analogy could not be more apt.

Let me explain. I don't really know the early history of the use of the phrase 'smoking gun.' I assume that there was a point at which it was used in a straightforward way, to mean a 'clearcut case,' an instance where one could easily arrive at the correct conclusion simply by glimpsing an evidential snapshot. The murder was committed by the guy standing over the body and holding the smoking gun.

But by now, the phrase is more often used to make just the opposite point. I wish I had a dollar for every detective story that turns upon the fact that the person caught holding the smoking gun is not, in fact, the one guilty of the murder. Erle Stanley Gardner was especially fond of this narrative device, and so at least every other Perry Mason drama involved Perry's eschewing the superficial evidence and digging deeply enough to discover what really happened.

Of course, Sherlock Holmes' famous dictum, "I never theorize before having all the facts," also applies here. Modern evolutionary theory is a conclusion that seems to accomodate any and all facts, even those that--to a more reasoned and skeptical observer--ought to undermine it (and thus to suggest more profitable research aimed at discovering the truth about life's history).

So, just to be clear, let's lay out a typical 'smoking gun' scenario...

An off-duty policeman is walking past the front of a house when he hears a scream, followed by a single gunshot. He rushes to the front door and bursts through to find a man holding a smoking gun and kneeling over the corpse of a woman with a single gunshot wound. The man protests that he is innocent and that he suprised and fired at another man (who, he claimed, was the actual murderer), but the conscientious policeman arrests him and hauls him off to pokey.

The detective for the defense (whether Perry Mason, Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, or any other crime investigator worthy of our respect) digs a bit deeper, and finds the following:

The policeman admits that he originally thought the scream he heard was that of a man, not a woman.

The bullet in the corpse does not match the ballistics of the smoking gun in the hand of the accused, and

The bullet that does match the smoking gun is lodged in the doorframe of the back door of the house, which was open when the policeman entered the front door.

The accused is released from jail, and his now-validated testimony is used to try to apprehend the actual murderer.

So how does this relate to human Chromosome 2 and its similarity to chimp Chromosomes 2a and 2b?

The common-ancestry scenario proposed by evolutionists depends upon ignoring the extreme improbability of several of its steps. I'll mention three of the most important.

First, although broken chromosomes can fuse, this particular fusion would have had to occur at the place where it is least expected. Broken chromosomes result in sticky ends, which can fuse to other sticky ends (of other broken chromosomes). But such broken chromosomes will almost never fuse with complete, intact chromosomes, and preventing such fusion is a main function of the telomeres. Had human Chromosome 2 evolved by natural processes from two intact chromosomes (in a being ancestral to chimps and humans), it would have been either through a fusion of two telomeres (acknowledged even by evolutionists as virtually impossible) or through fusion of a telomere with a sticky end of a chromosome broken very near the telomere. While not impossible, this latter scenario is extremely unlikely.

This first, unlikely step must not only have occurred, but it must (on an evolutionary view) have occurred not within one of the millions of somatic (body) cells but within the sperm or egg cell. (Eventually, of course, the evolutionary view has this rare event somehow occurring in both gametes--within a single individual--since this is the present-day condition. But evolutionists seem unconcerned by this amassing of improbabilities.) When the chromosome number of one gamete differs from that of the other, the most common results are a nonviable zygote, an embryo that lives, but with a significant deformity or disease, and a viable but infertile offspring. None of these scenarios produce the new, better-adapted species insisted upon by evolutionary theory.

Third, and assuming for the sake of argument that the first two extremely unlikely events took place, this change in the chromosome of a single individual would have had to have swept through the population (the hypothetical population of this ancestral form). Such a "selective sweep" is a favorite fiction of evolutionists, a fiction necessary to their larger project but one for which there is absolutely no evidence, and for which any argument is viciously circular. Generally, the referrent of this selective sweep claim is a single gene mutation, and applying it (in this case) to such a more significant event as a change in chromosome number ought to require (from the evolutionist) a greater level of evidential or logical support. No such support is offered, of course.

In our smoking-gun murder scenario, the problematic evidence came from the wrong scream, the wrong bullet in the body, and the right bullet in the wrong place. In our Chromosome 2 scenario, the problematic evidence includes (at a minimum) three extremely unlikely events--a fusion involving a telomere, its occurence and viability within a gamete, and its sweeping from this first individual through a significant part of a population. The common-ancestry explanation for the origin of human Chromosome 2--while superficially attractive--fails upon closer inspection. The truth about human origins lies elsewhere.

Chromosome 2: The Smoking Gun?

As I have shared in numerous posts, in my long career in biology I have found no evidential support for the theory of biological evolution. Anything but a superficial examination of the fossil record finds it completely at odds with what evolutionary theory requires. Living and extinct life forms remain in hierarchical groups separated by vast gaps missing from the record of life on Earth. What's more, the 'inconceivably vast' (Darwin's words) number of the species to which evolutionists appeal for bridging those gaps remain not only undiscovered and hypothetical but also non-sensical and absurd.

Evolutionary change is not found in the fossil record, but neither is it found in real life. Every generation of living things produces in the next generation the same species, and that's the way it is. Even those still committed today to some form of naturalistic explanation for the diversity of life--and to some form of common ancestry--are abandoning the neo-Darwinian view (natural selection wotking on genetic mutation to produce gradual change) as outdated, naive, and irrelevant to whatever the real story turns out to be.

The revolution in biochemistry has offered evidence of great similarities among all living things--in elemental make-up, in protein composition, in anatomical and morphological themes, and in genetic profiles. But again, a closer look at each of these levels yields the conclusion of unbridged hierarchies between the many different types of living things.

In the rapidly dwindling set of evidences appealed to by the person who would--in the face of so much contrary evidence--continue to argue for macroevolution and common descent, the last remaining bastion is the argument that specific similarities in the genetic make-up of humans and other primates necessitate an evolutionary explanation.

I have recently been asked by two different folks to address one such argument, one that has been called the 'smoking gun' (the proof) of human evolution. This argument involves the similarity between the chromosomes of humans and those of chimps (and bonobos) and specifically focuses on the human chromome 2. Let me lay out the evolutionist's case.

The chromosomes of humans and those of chimps are very similar. They can be matched up in a nearly one-to-one correspondence right across the board, except that where humans have 23 pairs of chromosome, chimps have 24. But wait! Human chromosome 2 has very similar counterparts in two much shorter chimp chromosomes, dubbed 2a and 2b. What's more, rather than the single centromere common to most other chromosomes, human chromosome 2 has two centromeres (one of which doesn't function as a normal centromere) and an internal telomere sequence (between the centromeres) that closely corresponds to the expected sequences from the chimp genetic material.

Volia! What need have we of further witnesses? Isn't this evidence as good as a smoking gun? Surely this fusion in the human line of two chromosomes observed in chimps proves that the two species shared a common ancestor (who exhibited the condition of today's chimp rather than that of humans).

In the next post, I'll offer a response.

Ancient Cuttlefish Ink

Follow this link to a summary of exciting recent research in which the ink of a 160-million-year-old fossil cephalapod was found to be intact. Here's the important bit:

The finding -- in an extremely rare case of being able to study organic material that is hundreds of millions of years old -- suggests that the ink-screen escape mechanism of cephalopods -- cuttlefish, squid and octopuses -- has not evolved since the Jurassic period, and that melanin could be preserved intact in the fossils of a range of organisms.

Of course, my take on this discovery is slightly different than that of most of the folks involved in it. I share their excitement at the truly astonishing half of this--it is wonderful that this pigment could be so well-preserved from so long ago as to be susceptible to analysis. This analysis has already led to valuable insights, and the success in this particular case offers hope that other compounds may be preserved and open to testing from organisms that have long ceased to walk the Earth (er, swim the planet's seas).

The other aspect of this is the recognition that this inky compound is identical to that of modern cuttlefish, that, as the study's coauthor John Simon has it,

It's close enough that I would argue that the pigmentation in this class of animals has not evolved in 160 million years. The whole machinery apparently has been locked in time and passed down through succeeding generations of cuttlefish. It's a very optimized system for this animal and has been optimized for a long time.

This seems to be an unexpected result to the evolutionists involved, but it is, frankly, completely in line with all other relevant evidence and thus no surprise to those who have not been misled to embrace evolutionism.

Truly, this system (not only the inky compound but the entire set of related anatomy, physiology, and behavior) is--and always has been--optimized. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that having such a system is--and always has been--a part of what it means to belong to this group of organisms. To put it in empirical terms, there is no evidence that there ever existed squids with partial ink-screen systems; nor is there any evidence that any cephalod species ever lost its ink-screen system. The really interesting question is this: why would any rational person expect to find any evolution in such a system (as the researchers quoted clearly did)? And the answer is that they have been indoctrinated with a world-view--evolutionism--that has no basis in evidence or reason.

Today's squid--just like the squid of Jurassic times--arose fully-formed, fully-adapted for its time on Earth and its role in the ecology of which it is--or was--a part. The default understanding (throughout human history, and certainly throughout Western history for which we have the record) of such adaptation is a teleological one, one of design. It is only within the last 160 years that it has become popular to deny design and purpose as the explanation for such optimization and adaptation. And the price for such denial is great: it involves both the need to ignore the actual evidence of the fossil record in favor of a mischaracterization thereof, and it involves ignoring the top-down approach to studying organisms that makes anatomy, physiology, taxonomy (and virtually every other discipline) reasonable.

Simply put, the only reason these researchers could be surprised that an optimized system is found both in ancient cephalapods and modern ones is because they have been taught to view science in a design- and purpose-less way (that is, through a neo-Darwinian lens) that flies in the face both of evidence and reason.

Houston RTB

I spent this past weekend in Houston, Texas. I was there as the guest of Larry Karasevich, president of the Houston chapter of Reasons To Believe. I took in an Astros game Friday eve (they beat the reigning world champion St. Louis Cards 5-4). On Saturday morning, I spoke to about 35 folks at the monthly meeting of RTB, taking them through all of the arguments and evidence offered in favor of macroevolution, showing them the fallacies of the arguments and abundance of contrary evidence. It was an ambitious task, but a sharp group (I'll share the audio here when I receive it). Saturday evening, I spoke about apologetics issues and tactics at a dinner meeting of some of the chapter leadership (and spouses) at The Black Labrador (an English pub, chosen to avoid the crowds at other Cinco de Mayo venues). Sunday morning, I preached--at the Fellowship of Champions--on the Resurrection and the role of evidence and reason in the Christian faith. After the service, I did a Q & A for a good number of folks who stayed. A whirlwind trip, but well worth my while.

Multiple Adams and Eves?

[I've posted below the response I gave to an email question about the claim--made by theistic evolutionists at the BioLogos site--that the human species did not begin as a single pair but as a population.]

Dear R______:

Your question was whether science had proved as impossible the claim--made by Christians, Jews, and Muslims--that mankind descended from two original humans, Adam and Eve. In particular, you implied that three methods of assessing genetic diversity (as related in a BioLogos post) prove that humans alive today exhibit too much genetic diversity to trace to a single couple.

First of all, let me point out that there is no question of 'proof' here, in either direction. Science doesn't work that way, though the BioLogos folks may not understand such issues. (I, too, am a biologist, and never during my scientific training did I receive any instruction in the philosophy of science, even a basic understanding of what science is, what it can and cannot do. I believe that my experience is the norm today, and so Venema and Falk can be excused for a naive understanding on this issue.)

On large issues in the historical sciences (such as this one), there will generally be a wealth of evidence available and a variety of methods for assessing this evidence. In addition, there will be a wealth of relevant evidence as yet undiscovered. On such questions, science uses abductive reasoning, arguing to the best explanation of all the relevant available evidence. Where that task is difficult--often because the available evidence leads to contradictory conclusions--the good scientist seeks more, better, and clearer evidence and/or methods. And in such cases (even more than usual), the good scientist remains humble, seeking truth rather than trying to prove a theory he holds a priori. When a scientist takes a strong position despite such contradictory evidence, that dogmatism is usually an indication that he lacks the objectivity that accompanies scientific discovery. This sort of dogmatism is apparent in Venema and Falk's article.

At present, there are two lines of evidence that rather clearly point to this... that all humans alive today can be traced to a single female ancestor (through their mitochondrial DNA) and that all males alive today can be traced to a single male ancestor (through the DNA in their y-chromosomes).

Venema and Falk highlight three methods (of analyzing the genetic diversity of living humans) that temper the conclusion of the two studies above.

What are we to make of this? Each of these sets of evidence and the methods used involve assumptions. And each of these assumptions is itself open to scrutiny, testable (to some degree), and (unfortunately) often held with a degree of unexamined faith by its proponents.

I could stop there, leaving it as an entirely open question as to whether the Bible is believable or reliable on this issue. But more needs to be argued on the side of an historical Adam and Eve.*

For one thing, it seems pretty clear that the assumptions associated with the BioLogos claims are less certain and less well-supported than those associated with the y-chromosome and mDNA evidence. As just one example, a study of the genetics of a population of mouflon sheep refutes some of the assumptions of Venema and Falk's methods (method 1 in particular, but all three generally). In this study, a single pair of sheep was introduced to Haute Island (in 1957), and the descendent population grew to 700 and has subsequently fluctuated between 250 and 700. Mathematical models use to predict the present population's heterozygosity (based on the known heterozygosity of the original pair) underestimated it by a factor of four. Had the models been used as in Venema and Falk's argument--to estimate the number of founding individuals by measuring the diversity of the present population--they would have grossly overestimated. That is, this test case shows that genetic diversity increases (at least in sheep, and over a mere 50 years) in ways currently not understood by the relevant experts. Venema and Falk may simply be unaware of such problems with the methods they espouse; nonetheless, their dogmatism is unwarranted.

Secondly, given the vehemence and certainty with which evolutionists claim the truth of their macro-theory, it is rather odd that when such tests finally became available, the evidence led to a conclusion so similar to the Bible's proclamation. Although theists might argue about the details (one pair or a few thousand), there is no one left still arguing for the competing view of human origins, the multi-regional hypothesis (which claimed that Asian, Caucasian, and African peoples descended from different hominid species in different parts of the world). What is agreed upon by nearly all today is that the genetic evidence shows that all humans alive today are descended from a very small population (which may have even been a single pair) living in or near eastern Africa some 40-60,000 years ago. The scientific evidence leaves Genesis 1 and 2 as viable portrayals of the true situation. And where apparently contradictory evidence exists, the assumptions associated with it turn out to be problematic.

There is no scientific evidence that can prove the Bible to be true and reliable about the descendence of humanity from a single pair. Nor is there any scientific evidence that disproves it. As a scientist, though, I have found overwhelming evidence for the truth and reliability of the Bible with many of its other claims, and that evidence has come both from science and history. More importantly, however, I know from personal experience the truth of its central claim, that the holy Creator of the universe so loved His creatures that He sent His eternal Son to make a way for me, a far-from-holy creature, to have a relationship wit Him. In your continued search for truth, I hope you will seek and find this most important truth.




* The humans to which the y-chromosome and mDNA evidence points would not be Adam and Eve but (more likely) Noah and Eve. Biblically, the bottleneck for males was more recent, since all the males on the ark were related to Noah, whereas the four females on the ark were from different families. Interestingly, this aligns with the genetic data as well. The date for mDNA 'Eve' is earlier than the date for y-chromosome 'Adam' (Noah).

Genetic Similarity

Today I want to point out another problem with the appeal to genetics as support for evolution. This part of the claim...

DNA profiles show evolutionary relationships among species.

involves circular reasoning. Genetic similarity is offered as proof for evolution, but only because the claimant assumes that any similarity must be due to evolution. This is, of course, fallacious.

The evidence, stated without bias, is that all living things share varying degrees of similarity, both in their biochemical composition and in their genetic make-up. The degree of similarity tends to increase within recognizable hierarchies, such that mammals are more similar to one another than any mammal is to birds, and primates are more similar to one another than any primate is to bats or whales. That this is true at the morphological level has been known for a long time. The ancient Greeks understood it (and, I dare say, so did most ancient peoples). It certainly was well-known prior to Darwin, as by his time comparative anatomy was a well-developed discipline.

As I shared in the last post, Darwinists expected this similarity NOT to be true at the molecular (biochemical level), and they were wrong. We now know that this hierarchy of similarity extends (generally) to the genetic level.

But again, this recognition utterly fails to distinguish among competing theories for the diversity of life. Specifically, the alternate view that has been held for the vast majority of the history of Western civilization--that there is a single Creator/Designer responsible for life--finds at least equal support from these findings from the latest genetic research. Indeed, the great similarity (on the levels of morphology and physiology, biochemistry, and genetics) between living things actually presents problems for Darwin's theory. This includes the highly-publicized finding that chimps and humans share 95% or more of the same genetic material.

You see, Darwin's theory was not an attempt to explain the similarities between living things. Rather, it was an attempt to explain the differences. Gradualistic evolution--with its vast number of hypothetical (and yet-undiscovered) transitional forms--was meant to explain how the differences (as between chimps and humans) came to be. And that explanation involved strictly material causes and effects. That is, if evolution is an accurate explanation for the diversity of life, we will discover differences (at some level, whether biochemical, genetic, embryological, or whatever) that represent sufficient causes for the morphological, physiological, and other obvious differences.

Instead, at each material level (first biochemistry, then genetics, now evo-devo) evolutionary scientists are surprised at how similar different organisms (like chimps and humans) are. In other words, we still cannot say--on strictly materialist terms--what accounts for the vast differences (especially on characteristics like intelligence, reasoning, imagination, and such) between us and chimps. The genetic evidence doesn't account for these differences--and so, far from supporting evolution (as is frequently claimed), that evidence further undermines naturalistic evolution as an adequate explanation.

To believe otherwise is simply to argue in a circle.



(This post first appeared here on 7 June 2008, but remains relevant today.)

As I've Been Saying...

Check out this column: Darwinism is dead by Paul Benedict.

Regular readers of this blog will recognize in this column some of what I've been saying for the last few years. The column is well worth reading in its entirety, but here's a summary statement:

Although they can rally against Creationism in one voice and riot against colleagues who advocate Intelligent Design with an outrage worthy of religionists, the weird little secret is that science knows Darwinism is dead.

This fact about scientific consensus leads (for those aware of it) to a real frustration with the educational systems that continue to teach as certain a theory that was largely rejected by the science community decades ago.

Apologetically, it highlights two ironies, 1) that a new generation of nasty young atheists are being emboldened in that atheism by writers like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett who remain blissfully unaware that the theory that supports their metaphysics is now recognized as naive and simplistic, and unsupported by all the available evidence, and 2) that numerous evangelical leaders are even now jumping on evolution's bandwagon at a time when it is no longer believed in by the critical members of this generation of scientists.

We live in interesting times.

The Peppered Moth Evidence

From the archives again, the post with which I followed up "Green Toothpicks" about 4 years ago...

[In the last post], I shared about an artificial (and rather poor) illustration of natural selection in action ("Green Toothpicks"). The most famous (and much-cited) example of natural selection in the wild is the changes in coloration of the Peppered Moth, changes that occurred as a result of industrialization in Great Britain. These changes were noticed throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, as Peppered Moth populations went from being mostly white (with a few melanistic individuals) to mostly dark (with a few light individuals). In the 1950's, Bernard Kettlewell, a British biologist and physician, began a series of experiments that led him to believe that this change could be explained as a result of natural selection. He concluded that the moths were eaten by birds (visually-oriented predators) as they rested on tree trunks during the day. Kettlewell reasoned that before industrialization, light-colored moths were more prevalent because they were better camouflaged on the light-colored (and lichen-covered) tree trunks. But with increasing pollution, tree trunks became darker (and lichens died), light-colored moths were less camouflaged than darker ones, and the phenotype of the population became predominantly that of the dark individuals. This elegant example from the wild remains to this day the classic textbook example of natural selection at work.

Subsequent research has cast a great deal of doubt on this entire scenario. It turns out that Peppered Moths don't normally rest on tree trunks but in the crown of the trees, that researchers (including Kettlewell) released moths by day (even though they are a nocturnal species), that many (not including Kettlewell) in fact pinned dead moths to trunks rather than use live ones in their capture-recapture experiments. In addition, neither the distribution of the various color morphs nor that of the lichens fit the patterns predicted by pollution rates, either during the industrialization or following emission controls (when white moths made a comeback in some regions). The problems unearthed have been so serious that what had been called "Darwin's missing evidence" has been deemed invalid even by evolutionary scientists. (For a summary of these problems, the reader is referred to chapter 7 of Jonathan Wells' Icons of Evolution.) Nonetheless, since evidence for the evolutionary paradigm is so scant, this invalidated tale is still a prominent feature in most modern textbooks (with no mention of its problems).

But again, suppose we ignore (for the sake of argument) the fact that subsequent research has shown that the Kettlewell scenario does not provide the evidence for which Darwinists hope. Let us be generous and grant that perhaps further research will discover a mechanism (consistent with natural selection) that explains the change in Peppered Moths. Then, as evidence for macroevolution, we have the same problem here as we had with the green toothpicks. We have--at the end of the experiment--merely a different frequency of the same phenotypes already present at the beginning. Phillip Johnson has stated the problem well (in Darwin on Trial)...

Why do other people, including experts whose intelligence and intellectual integrity I respect, think that evidence of local population fluctuations confirms the hypothesis that natural selection has the capacity to work engineering marvels, to construct wonders like the eye and the wing? Everyone who studies evolution knows that Kettlewell’s peppered moth experiment is the classic demonstration of the power of natural selection, and that Darwinists had to wait almost a century to see even this modest confirmation of their central doctrine. Everyone who studies the experiment knows that it has nothing to do with the origin of any species, or even any variety, because dark and white moths were present throughout the experiment. Only the ratios of one variety to the other changed. How could intelligent people have been so gullible as to imagine that the Kettlewell experiment in any way supported the ambitious claims of Darwinism?

At least two pitfalls (obstacles to objective truth) can be seen in the Peppered Moth story. First, moth researchers used invalid methods and jumped to wrong conclusions primarily because of an inordinant desire to provide evidence for a popular--but evidentially-impoverished--theory. Second, had their conclusions not been spurious, these same researchers (and their popularizers, including textbook editors still today) have been guilty of failing to see the scalar limitations of their results. Evidence of natural selection working at the level of a species quite simply is irrelevant as evidence for macroevolution.

As a scientist, I only hope that the Peppered Moth may serve as a reminder to avoid these pitfalls long after it has been finally discarded as a significant piece of evidence for Darwinian evolution.

Green Toothpicks

I'm pretty busy these days, catching eagles, writing reports, and doing quite a bit of teaching. So, with little time to blog, I've reached back into the archives for the following, originally posted 4 years ago today. It's called "Green Toothpicks."

I took an undergraduate biology class from Dr. "Mad Dog" Johnson, in which he tried to demonstrate natural selection in action. We went outside to a lush, uncut, well-fertilized portion of the campus lawn, where we strew a known number of toothpicks of different colors--red, yellow, blue, and green. We, the students, then acted as predators--the agents of natural selection--foraging through that patch of lawn, capturing as many toothpicks as we could find. As I recall, we found all of the yellow and red toothpicks, most of the blue ones, and almost none of the green, so well-camouflaged were they among the long blades of springtime grass. The lesson was that natural selection works just so on populations of living things.

There are at least a couple of serious problems with this experiment as an illustration of natural selection at work. If--as is claimed--natural selection acting on genetic variation is the mechanism by which evolutionary advance is made, what we demonstrated would seem to be just the opposite. Our toothpick population began with a much higher genetic diversity than it ended with. The population, which now consists almost entirely of green toothpicks, would seem to be much less able to adapt to a changing environment than when it contained the greater diversity of phenotypes. It has ever since seemed to me that we demonstrated that natural selection has a far greater capacity to tend toward extinction than to adaptation and advance.

Another problem with this illustration is just as important. Let us be unreasonably generous and grant that the resulting population of toothpicks is somehow better prepared to adapt to some future environmental change. That is, let us say--for the sake of argument--that what we witnessed was an instance of microevolution. Microevolution refers to the idea that species (and populations and such) are not static, but change over time in both their phenotype and genotype (their morphology and the genetic basis for their morphology, respectively). That microevolution occurs is a well-accepted, non-controversial idea. Let us say that the population of green toothpicks is a good example of something having undergone microevolution. The claim of neo-Darwinism is that it is this same mechanism--natural selection acting upon genetic variation (mutation)--that accounts for macroevolution. In other words, the diversity of all life is explainable by this sort of natural selection acting over vast time scales.

In the specific case of the toothpick illustration, we are to believe that if we waited long enough (as the toothpicks bred generation after generation) and continued preying on those toothpicks most easily spotted, eventually those toothpicks would give rise to species of dental floss, of toothbrushes, and even, eventually, of electric toothbrushes, all without the input of any sort of intelligence or designer.

That there have existed--over the course of Earth's history--different life forms is readily acknowledged. Macroevolutionary theory, as an explanation for how that record came to be, has yet to be substantiated by any evidence. Rare cases of microevolution have been documented, and then we are asked to make the unreasonable and unsupported extrapolation that such minor changes can be invoked to explain all of the advancing complexity witnessed in the fossil record. For me, Professor Johnson's toothpick demonstration has always served as a reminder of the absurdity of the grander claims of evolutionists.

Laryngeal Nerve in Giraffes

In the past couple of weeks, I received two requests to address Richard Dawkins' claim that the recurrent laryngeal nerve in the modern giraffe provides proof of evolution. To hear and see this claim, go to this YouTube video. The heart of Dawkins' argument is that the unnecessary length of the giraffe's recurrent laryngeal nerve is an example of an imperfection that is the sort of historical accident that one would expect if there is no intelligent Designer. Here's my response...

Since I don't know you, I can't simply respond to Dawkins' claim without first making sure that you understand the larger picture, which is the bankruptcy of Dawkins' overall view, neo-Darwinian evolution (NDE).

Twenty years from now, no one will seriously be defending the form of evolution in which Dawkins believes. His critics, whether theists or fellow-evolutionists, rightly accuse him of living still in the 19th century. Stephen Jay Gould (the leading paleontologist of the last several decades) said that "neo-Darwinism, as a theoretical paradigm, is effectively dead." Geneticist James Shapiro (like Gould, committed to some form of evolution) last year told a packed auditorium in Chicago that "Richard Dawkins is a man who lives in fantasy."

And the reason Dawkins' pet theory is dead is because there is no evidence supporting it. The fossil record was contrary to Darwin's theory when he proposed it, and years of looking for his predicted transitional intermediates have only made the situation worse (for evolution). The apparent heirarchical look of living things remains intact, despite efforts to turn it into a continuous tree. Every life form that has ever lived appeared in the fossil record fully formed, fully functional, and fully adapted to its time on earth and its role in the ecology into which it was created. Every life form has remained unchanged throughout its tenure in earth's history. The only ancestors of Dawkins' modern giraffe for which there is any evidence are modern parent giraffes.

The only other evidential argument for evolution--similarity among living things--suffers from a number of problems. For one thing, similarity among living things is equally well (or better) explained by the view that there is a single Creator (one who repeatedly uses efficient designs rather than make each living thing according to entirely new plans and with entirely different materials). Thus the evolutionist argument is viciously circular: its starting point--that similarity only arises from common ancestry--is the claim that is at issue, and cannot be assumed in order to prove itself.

There are numerous other modern discoveries that make evolution surpassingly implausible, but which are completely ignored by Dawkins. These include the discovery that the universe did indeed have a recent beginning (13.7 b.y., whereas Darwinism assumed an eternal universe, such that natural selection had a nearly infinite amount of time at its disposal), the vast complexity of even the simplest living cell (greatly increasing the gap between non-living chemistry and first life), the information content of DNA, the fine-tuning of the universe for life on this one planet, etc, etc.

It is therefore in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence that Dawkins offers the 'proof' of evolution in the form of the laryngeal nerve of the giraffe. Really?! Really?!?

This is an example of a class of arguments for evolution that involve identifying seemingly 'bad,' imperfect, or suboptimal designs. This line of reasoning is unconvincing--or even downright refuted--for several reasons.

1) It assumes a God-like understanding of the anatomy in question, an understanding that neither Dawkins nor anyone else possesses. Further research is likely to discover good reasons that the nerve in question does not take a more direct route between the brain and the larynx.

2) In all of the more well-known examples, this form of argumentation has indeed been seen to involve ignorance. For a long time, it was the inverted retina (in the human eye) that was lauded by evolutionists as poorly designed, until further research discovered the elegance of it. ("Oops, let's not use that example any more! Let's try the length of the giraffe's laryngeal nerve.")

3) There will never be empirical proof that such a design does not serve an elegant (albeit yet undiscovered) purpose. That is, this argument can never be more than a "seems-to-me" sort of argument. Good science is generally thought to be more rigorous and empirical than this.

4) Even if it could be proved that such a thing constituted a bad design, it is a non-sequitur to conclude that there was no design involved. There was a period during which the Ford Pinto had a rear-end fuel tank problem, which led to numerous explosions, lawsuits, and recalls. But no one concluded as a result that the Pinto arose naturally. The premise of poor design does not yield the conclusion of no design.

[As an aside, it is the obviously fallacious reasoning so frequently employed by Dawkins (as in this case) that causes even atheist philosophers to be embarrassed by him, his books, and his public appearances.]

5) At the outset, Dawkins begins with an statement that is oxymoronic. He says that evolution "would expect" or "would predict" such an arrangement. This involves a problematic mixing of tenses. Now if evolutionists had at a certain time predicted the discovery of such an arrangement, and that prediction was subsequently borne out, then there might be some scientific validity to such a claim. But that, of course, is not what happened. No, however Dawkins may try to spin it, he is not here documenting the predictive success of his theory but rather claiming after the fact (of discovery) that it was the sort of thing that evolution... what? "could have predicted?" "should have predicted?" "might have, but just never got around to predicting?" I trust you see the problem.

6) Again assuming for the sake of argument that the laryngeal nerve in the giraffe is either a poor design or even undesigned, the argument for evolution (and against a Creator) depends upon our believing that there is NO design in the universe. That is, if Dawkins is right, then not only the giraffe's laryngeal nerve but the giraffe, and not only that but all living things, life itself, Earth, the solar system, the universe, everything is undesigned. Indeed, on Dawkins' worldview, even the Ford Pinto was not truly designed because the engineers working on it were merely carrying out the completely deterministic programming of their evolutionarily-derived brains. And it is at this point that Dawkins' beliefs require far more faith than the contrary belief--the default belief of nearly everyone throughout Western history--that things appear so exquisitely designed because they are in fact designed. It is at this point that Dawkins' worldview is most readily seen as that of the Fool of Psalm 14:1.

I know that Dawkins' 'arguments' can seem well-packaged and present a superficial challenge when first encountered. But neither this nor any other of his alledged evidences for evolution can withstand even a little bit of serious scrutiny.

Evolutionism vs Creationism

Here's another vimeo of the Redux session I sat in on a few weeks back. I received a number of good questions that day, including

How would you respond to the debate between evolutionism and creationism?

The Debate Between Creationism and Evolution from :redux on Vimeo.

The Argument from Similarity

I frequently get asked about the argument for evolution from the similarities observed in the genetic makeup of living things. Recently, the specific question was what to make of Richard Dawkins' claim that the heirarchies of similarities in the genetic record of living things provide 'undeniable proof of evolution.' Below, in part, is my answer.

The heirarchy of similarity among living things is a neutral fact and not in any way supportive of evolution or common ancestry. The understanding that Darwin sought to replace was a view known as typology. Typology said that the heirarchies of similarities we see among living things (extant and extinct) are grounded in necessity. Bats and rodents (on one level) share a suite of (mammalian) characteristics that sets them apart from all birds. On another level, bats share a smaller suite of characteristics that sets them apart from rodents. And these distinctions are adaptive and holistic. What we expect to see when we look at each part of a bat (and not just anatomically but also physiologically, behaviorally, and such) is that each contributes to bat-hood, that the membranous wings, the echolocation ability, the reproductive strategy, and such are all part and parcel of what it means to be a bat. The creature is well-designed for its role and niche. Moreover (on this view--which still remains the most reasonable view), the reason we don't see creatures that are half bat and half rodent (Darwin's predicted but yet undiscovered transitional forms) is because such a creature is non-functional and nonsensical.

This typological (and design-oriented) view did (and does) a very good job of accounting for the various levels (heirarchies) of similarity among living things. Before Darwin, biologists recognized that all living things were made of the same elements. In fact, Scripture clealy claims this, indicating that humans (in Gen. 2:7) and other animals (in Gen. 2:19) are alike made of "the dust of the Earth." This would simply be the best way of conveying to the ancient Hebrew mind that the physical components (the elements) of which all living things are made are the same elements as are found in the abiotic portions of the Earth. So the discovery (since Darwin's time) of the further similarities among living things at the level of proteins and (more basically) DNA does not in any way distinguish between the competing alternatives of theistic design (typology) and naturalistic evolution. In this regard, it is (at best) disingenuous of modern evolutionists to appeal to similarities among living things as evidence for their view. And this is especially true since what evolution was meant to explain--but has singularly failed to explain--was not the similarities but the differences.

We now know, for example, that there is more similarity in the DNA of humans and chimps than even evolutionists expected. What does this tell us? It tells us that relatively minor differences in DNA do not explain why chimpanzees are (like every other species of life on Earth) naked animals surviving from day to day in loose extended family groups while humans are civilized, uber-intelligent animals able to exploit every aspect of the Earth and to explore even the distant reaches of the universe. In fact, these deep DNA similarities should lead us to recognize that no strictly materialist explanation will ever satisfactorally account for the vast differences between chimps and humans, that there is something non-material going on here, and that scientific naturalism is false.

But perhaps I should be more to the point. Richard Dawkins finds in the DNA heirarchies common ancestry and evolution. But he finds these things not in the fact of the heirarchies but in the interpretive assumptions that he brings to them. In this way, his argument is (as all arguments from similarity are) circular. He begins by (wrongly) assuming that any similarities can be construed as evidence for common ancestry, and then when he perceives similarities, he's proved his assumptions. This, as any logician could tell you, is a fallacious way of reasoning. Simply put, taken at face value (that is, without beginning with biased assumptions), the discovery that living things exhibit a heirarchy of DNA similarities is just as (or more) amenable to a common-design inference as to a common-ancestry conclusion.

This was (inadvertently) illustrated many years ago by evolutionist Tim Berry. Frustrated by creationists' inability to understand evolution's dogma of "descent with modification," he asked his readers to picture a series of Corvettes. We see that the '56 Corvette is slightly different than the '55, and that the '57 is slightly modified from the '56, and so on. Unfortunately (for him and other evolutionists) the illustration shows just the opposite of what he wanted it to show, because we all know that each of those Corvettes was separately designed and manufactured, that the differences between them did not arise through their passing on, one to the other, slight variations.

All arguments from similarity are fallacious because they involve arguing in a vicious circle. And yet, this is really all that can be offered as support for evolution, whether of the atheistic form of Richard Dawkins or the theistic version of Francis Collins and others,

The Conservative Nature of Natural Selection

In the class on the History and Philosophy of Atheism I'm taking this semester at Kilns College, I had the opportunity last night to guest-lecture on naturalism and evolution. I mentioned that we now know--150 years after Darwin--that the mechanism of natural selection that he endowed with incredible creative potential instead acts only in conservative and degenerative ways. Time, however, prevented me from sharing one of my favorite illustrations of this, the "green toothpick" illustration. So I'll share it here.

I took an undergraduate biology class from Dr. M.D. "Mad Dog" Johnson, in which he tried to demonstrate natural selection in action. We went outside to a lush, uncut, well-fertilized portion of the campus lawn, where we scattered a known number of toothpicks of different colors--red, yellow, blue, and green. We, the students, then acted as predators--the agents of natural selection--foraging through that patch of lawn capturing as many toothpicks as we could find. As I recall, we found all of the yellow and red toothpicks, most of the blue ones, and almost none of the green, so well-camouflaged were they among the long blades of grass. The lesson was that natural selection works just so on populations of living things.

There are at least a couple of serious problems with this experiment as an illustration of natural selection at work. If--as is claimed--natural selection acting on genetic variation is the mechanism by which evolutionary advance is made, what we demonstrated would seem to be just the opposite. Our toothpick population began with a much higher genetic diversity than it had by the end. The population, which now consists almost entirely of green toothpicks, would seem to be much less able to adapt to a changing environment than when it contained the greater diversity of phenotypes. It has ever since seemed to me that we demonstrated that natural selection has a far greater capacity to tend toward extinction than to adaptation and advance.

Another problem with this illustration is just as important. Let us be unreasonably generous and grant that the resulting population of toothpicks is somehow better prepared to adapt to some future environmental change. That is, let us say--for the sake of argument--that what we witnessed was an instance of microevolution. Microevolution refers to the idea that species (and populations and such) are not static, but change over time in both their phenotype and genotype (their form and the genetic basis for that form, respectively).

That microevolution occurs is a well-accepted, non-controversial idea. But granting that the population of green toothpicks is a good example of something having undergone microevolution provides no support for the claim of neo-Darwinism, which is that this same mechanism--natural selection acting upon genetic variation (mutation)--can account for macroevolution. In other words, the diversity of all life is explainable by this sort of natural selection acting over vast time scales. In the specific case of the toothpick illustration, we are to believe that if we waited long enough (as the toothpicks bred generation after generation), continued natural selection (predation on those toothpicks most easily spotted) would eventually cause those toothpicks to give rise to species of dental floss, of toothbrushes, and even, eventually, of electric toothbrushes, all without the input of any sort of intelligence or designer.

The fossil record shows that there have existed--over the course of Earth's history--different life forms. But macroevolutionary theory, as an explanation for how that record came to be, has yet to be substantiated by any evidence. Rare cases of microevolution have been documented, and then we are asked to make the unreasonable and unsupported extrapolation that such minor changes can be invoked to explain all of the advancing complexity witnessed in the fossil record. For me, Professor Johnson's toothpick demonstration has always served as a reminder of the absurdity of the grander claims of evolutionists.



(A version of this post originally appeared on 26 Feb 2007.)

Transitional Forms

Not infrequently I come across the question, “What about the evidence for transitional forms? Hasn’t science proved that transitional forms exist, thereby validating Darwinian evolution?”

I understand why people might believe this to be the case. The claim that science has found transitional intermediates in the fossil record is taught in schools and universities throughout the land, and is made frequently and loudly by scientists and by the media, seemingly with the authority of evidence behind them.

But this claim has no basis in evidence, but instead is made solely because it is a fundamental and necessary prediction of Darwinian evolution.

To understand the issue, let’s take a big-picture, historical look at it. The real conflict is between two explanations for the diversity of life on Earth. The Darwinian view (or its modern synthesis, generally known as neo-Darwinism) is one. The other—the one held by all the biologists, anatomists, physiologists, and paleontologists of Darwin’s day, and the one Darwin intended to replace—I’ll call typology. Typology sought to explain—and did a very good job of explaining—the two most important characteristics of living things, which are their similarities and their differences. Biologists long knew that all life shared certain similarities, and that different groups of living things shared even more similarities with one another than with species outside their group. The typological explanation for the similarities among living things was (and is) that all things were created—and designed to fulfill their role—by the same Creator.*

But groups of living things exhibit stark differences as well. Indeed, the life forms (extant and extinct) identified by Darwin’s time fell rather neatly into groupings—“types”—that were separated, in many cases by rather large gaps. Thus, mammals all share characteristics that set them apart from birds or reptiles, and bats all share characteristics that set them apart from rodents. Typology said (and says) that gaps exist because the hypothetical things in-between (the half-reptile, half bird or the half-rodent, half bat) are nonsensical and non-functional.

Darwin, on the other hand, postulated that those gaps have been populated throughout life’s history by other living things—transitional intermediates. And on his view, there would have to have been not just one or two such forms bridging the apparent gaps, but that

the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great.

He knew that no such transitional forms were known at that time, but then paleontology was a relatively young discipline in Darwin’s day. He wrote that the fossil record was

the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory [and the reason] all the most eminent paleontologists… and all our greatest geologists… have unanimously, often vehemently, maintained the immutability of species.

So a prediction central to the verification of his theory was that further fossil digging would uncover a great many of these “inconceivably great” number of transitional forms.

For the ensuing 150 years, the history of paleontology has been primarily a search to find these forms predicted by Darwin, the evidence that would validate his theory. What has been the result? Scientists have uncovered hundreds of millions of new fossil forms. Unfortunately (for Darwin’s theory), they have invariably fallen into one of two categories—they have either fit into a type already known to science, or they have represented yet a new type, one not transitional to known types, but rather requiring yet another exceedingly vast number of transitional forms to link that type to other known ones.

Contrary to the educational and media misrepresentation, here’s the true situation as described by arguably the preeminent paleontologist of our generation. Harvard’s late Stephen Jay Gould called

the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record… the trade secret of paleontology.

His colleague, Niles Eldredge, concurred:

We paleontologists have said that the history of life supports [the story of gradual adaptive change], all the while really knowing that it does not.

Stephen Stanley, commenting on research from Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin—where a continuous record of deposits covering millions of years led paleontologists to expect evidence for transitional forms—wrote that

the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another.

So the central evidentially-based prediction made by Darwin has roundly failed. That it continues to be claimed today that science has documented transitional forms has nothing to do with evidence and everything to do with the centrality of these forms to the theory. It’s really nothing more than a group wish-fulfillment exercise on the part of those who want Darwinism to be true.


* I’ll discuss in one of the next posts why typology still does a better job than neo-Darwinism of explaining the similarities among living things.

Birth of Biology

This post is a reprint (mostly) of one I published back in July. I offer it again so soon because I had a chance to teach this material in a class last night.

Looking for something to do to? I suggest sitting down with a copy of Giuseppe Sermonti's Why is a Fly Not a Horse? It was originally written in Italian, and its title, Dimenticare Darwin, means "Forget Darwin." A geneticist, Sermonti writes interestingly and persuasively about the need to dump Darwinism as completely out of touch with reality and with the latest findings of science. The rest of my post today comes from reading Chapter 1, "Achilles Inspires Redi."*

For many, modern biology had its start when Francesco Redi--in 1688--disproved the notion that the origin of maggots in meat was due to spontaneous generation. He showed experimentally that maggots came to be in meat only when flies were allowed to lay their eggs in it, and generalized his conclusions to all living things--"all life comes from the egg."

But the idea of spontaneous generation did not go away, and has had to be refuted over and over again. Louis Pasteur extended Redi's principle to include the very smallest microbes (which others of his day excluded from Redi's principle), demonstrating that adequate sterilization could prevent the origin of any life. According to Sermonti,

Biology has advanced in status with every new confutation of the spontaneous generation thesis.

Despite, however, the conclusive experimental evidence (of Redi with worms, of Lazzaro Spallanzani with protozoans, of Pasteur with bacteria), belief in spontaneous generation remains a necessary part of Darwinian (and neo-Darwinian) evolutionary theory. Sermonti again...

Darwin, though a great admirer of Pasteur, regretted that the Frenchman had denied spontaneous generation. "If it could be demonstrated," he was to write to Haeckel in 1873, "this would be very important to us."

This led, of course, to the field of origin-of-life studies, of efforts to produce living things in laboratory test tubes, of the zealous teaching of perceived successes (the Miller-Urey experiments) and relative silence about the overarching failures. To this day, however, the spontaneous generation of living things from non-living chemicals remains a necessary corollary of neo-Darwinian evolution, though all of the evidene would lead to an opposite conclusion. Sermonti:

There will be only one way to refute spontaneous generation. That is to take note of the astronomic complexity of the simplest organisms, and to show that the minimum conceivable life form calls for structures so elaborate that no fortuitous accident can bring them all together. But we had to wait until the second half of the twentieth century for the proof.

* The title of this chapter of Sermonti is interesting. What apparently inspired Redi to conduct his experiments was a passage from Homer's Iliad in which Achilles recognizes that maggots arise in a corpse only if flies are allowed access to that corpse. In other words, Homer understood what medieval and renaissance folks did not, and neo-Darwinists do not, that spontaneous generation is not an accurate understanding of the origin of living things.

Darwin's Proof

I'm reading Darwin's Proof, subtitled The Triumph of Religion over Science. It's by Cornelius G. Hunter, molecular biophysicist and science historian. Like me, he has a biologist's--an insider's, if you will--understanding of how meagre is the evidence in favor of neo-Darwinian evolution. And his contribution (in this and two other books) is to show how the vast majority of arguments offered in support of evolution are not scientific ones but religious ones, ones that presuppose a caricature of God that is little like the biblical portrayal.

I long ago came to see the modern acceptance of Darwinism as the real-life equivalent of the people in Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." I cannot remember whether I came to that realization independently, or whether I once heard an evolution skeptic draw the comparison. But now I've come across it again in Hunter's book (which I haven't read before), and so thought it worthwhile to share his version of the analogy.

The story is about an emperor who is fooled into wearing no clothes and the mob mentality that overtakes his subjects as they too are led to go along with the charade. All the people in the kingdom are told that the emperor has beautiful new clothes, and the emperor is convinced as well. When the people see the smiling emperor with no clothes, no one wants to point out the obvious.

More accurately, the people are told that only sophisticated people can appreciate the splendour of the new clothes, and so each of the onlooking mob dares not say that he sees nothing for fear of being labelled a rustic. Hunter continues...

When I first read the story, I was unimpressed. What was the point? The story certainly had no bearing on the real events of the world. Such an obviously false and absurd charade could never actually take place, and if it did, large numbers of people would never go along with it.

But now I appreciate Andersen's tale. It is indeed possible for people to go along with bizarre explanations. The problems with evolution are evident in nature itself. Biology is full of amazing designs whose evolution would apparently constitute nothing less than a miracle.

Yes, indeed. And those who look closely at the evidence will conclude--unless that have lost all use of a healthy 'baloney detector'--that the emperor is stark naked.

How Science Works

I've read the same illegitimate argument twice in the last week, so it's probably worth bolgging about it, exposing its problems. The conclusion that we are to draw at the end of this argument is, "Rest assured, if evolution were wrong, so many scientists wouldn't hold to it." (I blogged about a similar, but slightly different, argument a few weeks ago in this post.) The following passage comes from the bestseller The Language of God, by Francis S. Collins, who was the head of the Human Genome Project.

One of the most cherished hopes of a scientist is to make an observation that shakes up a field of research. Scientists have a streak of closeted anarchism, hoping that someday they will turn up some unexpected fact that will force a disruption of the framework of the day. That's what Nobel Prizes are given for. In that regard, any assumption that a conspiracy could exist among scientists to keep a widely current theory alive when it actually contains serious flaws is completely antithetical to the restless mind-set of the profession.

The main problem with this line of reasoning is simply that it's not true. That's not the way science works. But let me pause here to make a point, one that comes up over and over again. Collins is here pontificating on an area outside of his training and expertise (which is why his reasoning goes so far astray). Collins is a biochemist, geneticist, and medical doctor. The issues involved in his claim here--the process of discovery and how scientists behave--are the subjects not of biochemistry and genetics but of philosophy of science, history of science, and sociology of science. And the experts in these fields would sharply disagree with the fairy-tale scenario at the heart of Collins' argument.

The essential book on this topic is by Thomas Kuhn, and is titled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. His theses are well-regarded among historians and philosophers of science, and his book is considered one of the 100 most influential books of the 20th century. And apropos to Collins' claim, Kuhn's main theses are these... That most of scientific endeavor is what he terms normal science, which is merely the further extension of an existing paradigm (such as Newtonian physics or neo-Darwinian evolution), and that paradigm shifts (or scientific revolutions) occur only with a great deal of hesitation and angst among a community of scientists most of whom can never accept a different paradigm than the one in which they were raised. In other words, the overwhelming majority of scientific research is done in an effort to bolster a currently-held view, no matter how wrong later scientists will come to consider it.

In direct contradiction to what Collins claims, Kuhn writes the following (and where Kuhn mentions 'paradigm,' think of neo-Darwinian evolution, which is the paradigm in biology today),

Mopping-up operations are what engage most scientists throughout their careers. They constitute what I am here calling normal science. Closely examined, whether historically or in the contemporary laboratory, that enterprise seems an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies. No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena [say, irreducible complexity]; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all. Nor do scientists normally aim to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented by others. Instead, normal-scientific research is directed to the articulation of those phenomena and theories that the paradigm already supplies.

Kuhn would probably have answered Collins that one need not appeal to 'conspiracy' to challenge neo-Darwinism. Rather, the paradigm of neo-Darwinism was so fundamentally a part of the education and training of today's biologists, that they cannot even see or think clearly about any evidence that would call that paradigm into question. Kuhn avoids using the word 'indoctrination,' but his descriptions of the normal training of scientists makes it clear that the result is the same.

The study of paradigms [again, think 'evolution']... is what mainly prepares the student for membership in the particular scientific community [biology] with which he will later practice. Because he there joins men who learned the bases of their field from the same concrete models, his subsequent practice will seldom evoke overt disagreement over fundamentals. Men whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice. That commitment and the apparent consensus it produces are prerequisites for normal science, i.e., for the genesis and continuation of a particular research tradition.

Collins might be excused for his general lack of understanding of these things, since he is not a philosopher or historian of science. (Though, by the same token, he ought to be admonished for making such confident claims in fields in which he betrays himself as grossly undereducated.) But glaring counterexamples should cause him to question his claim, and only a few pages later he discusses one such example (without, apparently, recognizing that it refutes his earlier statement).

Einstein's famous equations clearly led to the revolutionary notion that the universe is expanding and that it had a beginning. But this conclusion was at odds with the paradigm of his day, which held that the universe is eternal and static. Far from recognizing this as his chance for greatness as an innovator, Einstein succumbed to the herd mentality and introduced (without any other justification) a fudge factor into his equations that neatly avoided these clear conclusions. Even Einstein could not trust his own reasoning and equations, but made them subservient to the 'inflexible box,' the scientific (and metaphysical) paradigm he had been taught.

The bottom line is that consensus among biologists is a bad argument for the truth of neo-Darwinism. It is fallacious (it's an example of the ad populum fallacy); and Collins' version of it is dead wrong. Questioning the paradigm that one has been taught is extremely difficult for scientists. To the biologist today, "evolution is fact" is merely a way of saying that all they have ever been taught leads them to see the world through evolutionary lenses, and that they are simply unable to recognize--much less deal seriously with--evidence that would call that paradigm into question.

Similarities Among Living Things

(This is part 7 in a series of posts critiquing Dinesh D'Souza's reasons for accepting evolution.)

Many modern evolutionists claim that similarities among living things are evidence that the macroevolutionary tale is true. Darwin himself didn't emphasize this fact about living things. He knew that his opponents--those who understood all living things as the result of a creative process--knew about, acknowledged, and could account for such similarities as well (or better) than he could. So, as I stated in the last post, his theory was not an attempt to explain the similarities among living things but rather an attempt to explain (away) the differences.

Unfortunately, modern evolutionists are not as able to think clearly about such issues, and so they appeal to similarities--whether anatomical, biochemical, or genetic--as evidence in favor of their theory and against the idea that life was designed. In a rather famous example of such clouded thinking, evolutionist Tim Berra asks us to think of the similarities among living things as analogous to the similarity among Corvettes...

If you compare a 1953 and a 1954 Corvette, side by side, then a 1954 and a 1955 model, and so on, the descent with modification is overwhelmingly obvious. This is what [paleontologists] do with fossils, and the evidence is so solid and comprehensive that it cannot be denied by reasonable people.

Of course, reasonable people recognize that Corvettes are designed and manufactured by intelligent beings, and are not the product of naturalistic evolution. Far from supporting the theory in which Berra believes, his analogy nicely highlights the point of this post... that the existence of similarities among living things does not effectively differentiate between the theory that all life is connected by evolution and the idea that living things are all the product of a single intelligent Creator.

Simply put, the Christians who birthed modern science were well aware of the similarities among living things, and this similarity fits perfectly with the Judeo-Christian understanding that God created all living things. It is disingenuous for evolutionists to claim that their theory predicts such similarities and opposing theories do not. At the biochemical level (where this similarity argument is most commonly made today), the Bible has all along declared that all living things are made of the same 'stuff' (Gen. 2:7 and 19).

And so, we have critically examined--and dismissed as fallacious, false, and/or invalid--each of the four reasons given by Dinesh D'Souza for his acceptance of evolution.* To repeat, D'Souza himself denies the naturalistic component of modern evolutionary thought. But my point has been to demonstrate that he offered not a single compelling reason to accept macroevolution at all (even in a theistic sense). But now that you know that his thinking on this one issue is jaded and inferior, let me say once again that on the whole What's So Great About Christianity is a book well worth reading. In order to make up for slamming him on this particular (evolution) chapter, I'll try to remember to give some of his other chapters a positive plug from time to time.


* There's a seemingly stronger sort of argument offered by evolutionists, one that D'Souza didn't make. It represents a special case of the argument from similarity. For these evolutionists, it is the presence of the same non-functional ("junk") DNA in, say, chimps and humans that provides the ultimate proof that evolution is true. The Darwinist who commented on my blog the other day offered endogenous retroviruses (one form of "junk" DNA) as just such a proof. So in a coming post, I'll explain why such evidence is not a problem for a design or creationist view of the origin and diversity of life on Earth.

Explaining the Differences

(This is part 6 in a series evaluating Dinesh D'Souza's reasons for accepting evolution.)

In his otherwise excellent book, What's So Great About Christianity, Dinesh D'Souza seemingly takes off his thinking cap in the chapter about evolution. We have already dismissed (as both fallacious and false) two of his four reasons for accepting the evolutionary myth of our day. The other two reasons he offers (his reasons #3 and #4) are found in this paragraph...

The great strength of evolution as a scientific theory is that it makes sense of two huge facts about life. On the one hand, all living things from trees to cats to humans are formed from the same genetic material. Beyond this, it is evident that many groups of organisms show similar characteristics. So there is a unity to life. At the same time, living creatures exhibit incredible diversity. There are literally millions of living species with widely varying characteristics. Evolution accounts both for the similarities and the differences. It accounts for common characteristics by positing that the creatures possessing them descended from the same ancestor. It explains the differences by suggesting that creatures evolved new traits over a long period of time under the pressures of survival.

My first reaction to reading this paragraph was "Hello? Is that supposed to be an argument?" D'Souza notes two things about life on Earth; it is both diverse and yet similar. It so happens that people throughout history have noted these same two things, so Darwin broke no new ground there. It would be a poor theory about life's diversity that did not attempt to account for these two hallmarks of living things, but what we need from such a scientific theory is supporting evidence, verified predictions, coherence with the available record. But what's more bothersome is that D'Souza gives no indication that he understands the issues at all. He does not (except in the hand-waving sort of way typical of the evolutionists he is here parroting) make any attempt to support the claim that evolution accounts for these things.

In the next post, let me deal with the similarity or unity issue. This is the one that seems to impress many folks today. For this post, let me focus on the fact that life is diverse. And let me break it down very basically...

Let us say, for the sake of simplicity, that there are only two scientific explanations on the table. One is evolution, the idea that all life evolved from a single common ancestor through a gradual, unbroken chain of normal reproduction. On this view, the mechanisms invoked are random genetic mutation and natural selection. The other theory is that the same transcendent, personal Being who created the universe also created life, both first life and subsequent versions.

Now, in exactly what way does the fact of there being a great diversity of life somehow argue in favor of the former and against the latter? I'm not seeing it at all. And if there's something here that I am missing, D'Souza was remiss in not making it clear. It seems, on the face of it, that an appeal to the great diversity of life provides absolutely no positive support for evolutionary theory and quite a bit of refutation of it. That life is diverse was known long before Darwin came along, and offers no refutation of the default view that diverse life forms are not linked by evolution but were created as diverse life forms.

If there were, in fact, evidence that life has bridged the great gaps between diverse forms, than we might take such a claim seriously. But the very diversity that impresses D'Souza in favor of evolution was seen by Darwin as a real and valid objection to his theory, and he hoped that further paleontological work would demonstrate a continuum bridging the diverse groups. It has not, of course.

Let me put it another way. Darwin's theory was never (contrary to D'Souza) about explaining the similarities between living things (we'll reiterate that in the next post). It was an attempt to explain the differences. And while it is true that modern evolutionists claim that their theory accounts for the differences, the fact remains that the hoped-for evidence is entirely missing. Evolution as an explanation for the differences among living things remains nothing but a story, much like the expensive new clothes bought by the emperor in Hans Christian Anderson's short story.

Regarding evolution's success at such an explanation, all D'Souza offers is this...

It explains differences by suggesting that creatures evolved new traits over a long period of time under the pressures of survival.

He's close to the truth here. Evolutionary theory merely suggests, but offers no supporting evidence for that suggestion. It appeals to long periods of time (as though the seemingly impossible becomes plausible by such an appeal to time). But whereas Darwin assumed that his theory had infinite time in which to work its hidden marvels, today's evolutionists naively ignore the findings of modern cosmology, which show that the universe is instead quite finite. And then, the "pressures of survival" (natural selection) can now be seen as a force that keeps living things from changing, and not one that magically helps them to produce new traits.

The failure of evolution to account for the differences between living organisms is exemplified by the gap between chimpanzees and humans. The genomes of these two creatures are far more similar than evolutionists hoped or feared, and yet that similarity utterly fails to explain why humans are on a completely different level (consciously, intellectually, technologically, spiritually, with regard to moral awareness) than this species with such a similar genetic make-up. And on this issue, the default (and competing) scientific theory remains viable, unrefuted by the evidence. That theory claims (and has always claimed) that humans and chimps were created as different species, and that no purely materialist differences will be sufficient to account for their significant differences.

We have now seen through three of D'Souza's four reasons for accepting evolution. Last, we'll tackle the similarity among living things...

Another Darwinbot

Once again, while blogging about the inadequacies of evolutionary theory, I received a comment from a Darwinbot. Go here to read what a Darwinbot is and what my own rules are for dealing with a Darwinbot infection on my blog. (In this case, the Darwinbot was both anonymous and a steamroller, and so I was forced to excise his comment. I will, however, quote portions of it here to give you the flavor.)

The comments were not (as we would like to see in response to our own argumentation) arguments supported by evidence or deductive premises. Here's an example...

Evolution is a scientific fact, not a "belief."

This is Darwinbot argumentation of the finest order. Indeed, I 'd be a rich biologist if I received a nickel for every time someone uttered this vacuous phrase in the belief that it has some meaning and validity. How about this comment?

Virtually 100% of biologists love evolutionary biology.

This is modeled on the debating method known colloquially as "Is not!" The trick is to deny another's claim, loudly and repeatedly, and hope that the tone and repetition might fool someone into not noticing that you have no evidence to support that denial. In this case, a single biologist who denies evolution would invalidate the 100% claim, and so the "virtually" is necessary since any number of such counterexamples could be named. Regarding my own views, the Darwinbot wrote,

If you're really a biologist you're a disgrace to your profession.

Thankfully, this is the closest my anonymous commentor came to digressing to mere name-calling. But actually, upon all accounts, I have done nothing to disgrace my profession. My biological services are in reasonably high demand, and I continue to make a decent living providing biological research. Moreover, I am considered an expert in (fairly narrow) areas of my chosen disciplines and have traveled throughout North, Central, and South America presenting the results of my research. In part, this is because, as I have argued elsewhere (go here and here), macroevolutionary theory is entirely irrelevant to conducting biological research.

Here's more of the powerful argument left by the visiting Darwinbot...

If evolution is false, how do you explain the diversity of life? Do you invoke God's magic to explain life? Do you think magic is scientific?

It's difficult to follow the misunderstandings twisted together in this series of three questions. The questioner seems to think that the first two involve the same issue, when they are in fact quite different. The neo-Darwinian theory represented an attempt to explain the one--the diversity of life--but made no claims about the other--life itself. Nonetheless, Darwin himself recognized that if God was necessary to explain the latter, then his theory (for explaining the former) was completely unnecessary and useless. Given the findings of modern science (about the finitude of the universe, the complexity of the simplest living cell, the lack of a prebiotic soup, and such) the origin of the first life does indeed seem to require God (that is, fiat miracle) to satisfactorily explain it. (Indeed, the modern intelligent design movement began--in 1966, at Wistar--when mathematicians and probability theorists attempted to apprise Darwinists of the fatal problems their theory faced--and faces--from such modern research findings.)

There are and always have been perfectly good explanations for the diversity of life. The one that gave rise to modern science is the one that I believe best fits all of the facts. That is, of course, that the transcendent, eternal Creator attested to by astronomy, cosmology, physics, and such and revealed in the Bible purposed to make the Earth a fit place for life and then filled the land and seas of this planet with a rich diversity of life that He created.

As for my Darwinbot's conflating "magic" with "miracle," this merely demonstrates how shallow is his understanding of theology and of the rich philosophical debate (over the centuries) about miracles. For now, let me merely say three things: 1) the actual physical evidence about the history of life on Earth fits better any theory that involves some degree of fiat miracle than it does any naturalistic and gradualistic evolutionary theory, 2) defining science (as to exclude appeals to miracle) is not the task of scientists but of philosophers of science, and 3) philosophers of science agree that no such criterion can be successfully defended.

In his defense, the anonymous commentor did raise one legitimate piece of evidence contrary to my claims. He asked how I would explain the presence of endogenous retroviruses in identical places in the human and chimpanzee genomes. As this has to do with the two reasons (given by Dinesh D'Souza for accepting evolution) with which I have yet to deal, I'll save my response to the ER evidence until I have laid that groundwork.