Ryan Gregory of the Genomicron blog has put together a quick, but excellent, list of predictions made by the theory of evolution that have later been confirmed. The list can be found at:
http://genomicron.blogspot.com/2009/09/does-evolutionary-biology-make.html
Even though I’m sure this is old and that most evolutionists in America have probably seen it already, it is new to me and I think its great!
“Evidence for Creation” is an easy target for a debunking article. Nevertheless, it is important to go through with reviewing this type of information because it can, and does, get repeated and used in other places. For instance, a comment was left by a high school teacher on the introduction to this series of blogs stating “I have students that use that site as a veritable atom bomb to ‘volutionary idiocy’, and it is enthralling to read a logical and scientific examination of their ‘fact’.” I had an email exchange with this commenter and discussed how often this sort of thing happens in our schools.
It is often the opinion of scientists that the creationists and intelligent design proponents should not be debated because by giving them the platform we are treating them as equals, when there is no real science in their ideas. While I agree with this sentiment, the internet makes me reconsider. I still don’t think that a “debate” is something that should be granted, but propaganda such as “Evidence for Creation” can be put up on the internet for all to see. Anyone without knowledge of the scientific process and unaware of the wealth of knowledge supporting the theory of evolution may come across articles like “Evidence for Creation” and unquestioningly accept its arguments as fact.
It is for this reason that I have taken the time to write my responses to the arguments proposed in “Evidence for Creation”. My hope is that, from time to time, someone my come across my blog before seeing the article and, perhaps, gain a new perspective on creationism, evolution, and science in general.
STATEMENT: “The human brain is the most complicated structure in the known universe.”
RESPONSE: This statement is rather dubious, and there are a number of problems with it:
1. Semantics: What is meant by “complicated”? What is meant by “structure”? This statement assumes we can compare the structural complexities of brains and anything else “in the known universe.” But how are we to compare the structural complexity of the human brain to the structural complexity of the earth, the galaxy, a black hole, dark matter, etc. Wouldn’t it be more prudent to to say it is the most complicated biological organ or even just the most complicated brain in the known universe? But then, that wouldn’t be accurate either, because…
2. Inaccuracy: …the human brain is NOT the most complicated structure in the known universe. “The dolphin brain is larger than a human brain and more complex in structure.” (see also here).
3. So what?: Even if it were true that the human brain is the most complicated structure in the known universe, so what? Just because the brain is complicated in structure doesn’t make it special. It just makes it complicated. At the very least, this complexity in no way infers that it is “created” by God.
STATEMENT: “It contains over 100 billion cells, each with over 50,000 neuron connections to other brain cells.”
RESPONSE: About half-right. The human brain does contain about 100 billion cells, but the only estimate I could find about neuron connections to other cells estimated the number to be about 7,000, not 50,000. Admittedly, I have not watched the PBS Video (”The Brain, Our Universe Within”) cited as the source for this statement, so it may be that there is conflicting data with regards to neuron connections.
STATEMENT: ”This structure receives over 100 million separate signals from the total human body every second.”
RESPONSE: I have been unable to verify this number in my research, but for the sake of response will assume it is true (as this number is irrelevant).
STATEMENT: ”If we learned something new every second of our lives, it would take three million years to exhaust the capacity of the human brain.”
RESPONSE: How do we know this? What is the math that gives us these numbers? Is the assumption that every new thing learned is stored in one brain cell, and that it would take three million years to store one thing in every one brain cell? (By my calculations, that would take three thousand years, not three million.) What are we defining as exhausting the capacity of the human brain? And why do we have to assume that we learn something new every second? We don’t. I’m certainly not learning anything new when I’m asleep. I know that this statement doesn’t make the claim that we do learn something every second, but why use a number that isn’t accurate to what actually happens?
This statement makes the assumption that the “capacity” of the human brain is entirely for learning. But much of the brain’s 100 billion neurons have nothing to do with learning, but have to do with regulatory functions (i.e. keeping respiratory and heart rates at proper levels), bodily functions (i.e. the manipulation of limbs), or other non-learning based functions. I get the feeling that this statement comes from the idea that we only use 10% of our brains (or some other arbitrarily low number). However, this assumption is highly inaccurate.
The final thing I will say about this statement is that the source cited for this information is a video by Moody Publishers titled “Wonders of God’s Creation”. The front page of Moody Publishers’ website states “Proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ and a Biblical Worldview” and Moody Publishers distributes Christian books and videos, “promoting inexpensive Christian books for Christians to grow and non-Christians to have a quick introduction to the gospel” (Moody Publishers’ “Our History” Page). Using this as a source is hardly the stuff of an unbiased, objective observer, thus making it unscientific and invalidating its use as “evidence.”
STATEMENT: ”In addition to conscious thought, people can actually reason, anticipate consequences, and devise plans - all without knowing they are doing so”
RESPONSE: All true, but how does this serve as “evidence for creation”?
CONCLUSION: “Evidence for Creation” is not making an argument at all in this entire section. It provides nothing to serve as “evidence” for a creation as described in the biblical record. Read the “argument” as a whole and see if you can find what is being argued or what evidence in presented:
“The human brain is the most complicated structure in the known universe. It contains over 100 billion cells, each with over 50,000 neuron connections to other brain cells. This structure receives over 100 million separate signals from the total human body every second. If we learned something new every second of our lives, it would take three million years to exhaust the capacity of the human brain. In addition to conscious thought, people can actually reason, anticipate consequences, and devise plans - all without knowing they are doing so.”
Even if everything in this argument were true, it makes no point; it would just be a list of facts. So what if the brain were “the most complicated structure in the known universe”? So what that it contains “100 billion cells, each with 50,000 neuron connections”? So what if it “receives over 100 million separate signals from the total human body every second”? So what that humans can “reason, anticipate consequences, and devise plans - all without knowing they are doing so”? What is the argument? How does this prove creation?!
The only thing that I can see as being an argument in here at all is the part about learning something new every second, taking three million years to exhaust the capacity of the human brain. But this is not an argument for creation. If anything, it is an argument that the brain doesn’t exist! I think it would go something like this: “How could we possibly learn something new every second? And how could we possibly live three million years to exhaust the capacity of the brain? Obviously, the brain must not exist.”
“Evidence for Creation” has ten arguments, this being the last; but it really only has nine.
STATEMENT: ”A living cell is so awesomely complex that its interdependent components stagger the imagination and defy evolutionary explanations.”
RESPONSE: The first thing to say about this statement is that it is a great example of the logical fallacy “Argument from Personal Incredulity.” While a living cell is awesomely complex, that complexity does not “stagger” my mind, nor most biologists. If it truly staggered the mind, we would not be able to comprehend its complexity in a meaningful way, or dissect and understand the many parts of its complexity. Just because it staggers your mind doesn’t make its complexity “created” by God.
The second thing is that the interdependent components do not defy evolutionary explanations. In fact, they ARE the evolutionary explanations. The complexity of a living cell developed over billions of years. Let’s not forget that it took approximately 3 billion years of evolution before there were even multi-cellular organisms. What do you think was happening in those 3 billion years? The answer is that what constituted life and eventually evolved into multicellular organisms was developing greater and greater complexity as time passed. If it were not for this complexity, multi-cellular life would never have developed.
This strikes me as being a very similar argument as the intelligent design argument of “Irreducible Complexity,” from which the name of this blog is derived (as an antonym of sorts). I will here only state that irreducible complexity is a very poor argument for intelligent design or creationism (one in the same, in my mind). For more information on irreducible complexity and why it is not a valid scientific theory, I suggest reading the About R.C. page of this blog, the Wikipedia page on irreducible complexity (particularly the Response of the Scientific Community section), or Ken Miller’s “The Flagellum Unspun: The Collapse of ‘Irreducible Complexity’”.
STATEMENT: “A minimal cell contains over 60,000 proteins of 100 different configurations.”
RESPONSE: This appears to be a true statement, though I was unable to conclusively verify it within a few minutes of searching through Google. Nevertheless, 60,000 proteins in 100 different configurations is not staggeringly complex and certainly does not “defy evolutionary explanations,” as noted above.
STATEMENT: “The chance of this assemblage occurring by chance is 1 in 10 4,478,296 .”
RESPONSE: At the time of this writing, that is the exact way it is written in the “Evidence for Creation” article on creationevidence.org. This was a simple copy and paste; the poor grammar and typos are not produced by me.
I will assume that 1 in 10 4,478,296 is actually 1 in 10^4,478,296 (one in ten to the power of four million four hundred and seventy-eight thousand two hundred and ninety-six), a truly impressive number.
I don’t know why I bothered to fix that typo or spell out the number so that people might understand what is actually being argued because the number, while truly impressive, is irrelevant. In fact, the entire statement is irrelevant because evolutionary theory does not state that this assemblage occurs “by chance.” Rather, “Chance certainly plays a large part in evolution, but this argument completely ignores the fundamental role of natural selection, and selection is the very opposite of chance. Chance, in the form of mutations, provides genetic variation, which is the raw material that natural selection has to work with. From there, natural selection sorts out certain variations. Those variations which give greater reproductive success to their possessors (and chance ensures that such beneficial mutations will be inevitable) are retained, and less successful variations are weeded out. When the environment changes, or when organisms move to a different environment, different variations are selected, leading eventually to different species. Harmful mutations usually die out quickly, so they don’t interfere with the process of beneficial mutations accumulating” (Mark Isaak, “Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution”).
CONCLUSION: This entire argument is based on a completely ignorant point of view. If evolutionary theory taught that the evolution of life happens by chance, then the creationists would have a very valid point. But it doesn’t, so they don’t. But the ignorance is spelled out in the first sentence of this argument: “staggers the mind.” It doesn’t stagger the mind. Life’s complexity is impressive, and the complexity is awesome; but we can wrap our heads around it, study it, learn life’s inner workings, and decipher exactly how it is that life, and all the organisms that represent it, exists, lives, survives, dies, genetically mutates, etc. and determine how we got here.
Robert Crowther has posted on EvolutionNews.org a very brief blog about intelligent design titled “By Chance or by Design?” that is the worst argument against evolution I’ve ever seen.
A little back story here. Intelligent design proponents argue that life could not have sprung into being “by chance.” As evidence of this, they often use an anecdote first proposed by Fred Hoyle that states:
A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing-747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there?
Completely missing the point of evolution, creationists and ID proponents use this as evidence that evolution could not have happened. In a sense, they are arguing that the complexity of life (the number of individual components to every living being) could not have assembled themselves by chance, but that they must have been guided by an intelligent designer.
They are, of course, way off the mark. The complexity of life is the direct result of natural selection, which has absolutely nothing to do with chance.
Back to Crowther. His blog is titled “By Chance or by Design?” and simply states “You decide.” There is then the following YouTube video showing many parts of a Honda Accord arranged in a sort of Rube Goldberg machine with the end result being a completely assembled Honda Accord.
My question to Mr. Crowther is this: How in ANY WAY does this show that life is the result of an intelligent designer? All this shows is that Honda has built a car with many different car parts, all of which were intelligently designed…BY HUMANS!
Nobody claims that cars or Boeing-747s come into being randomly by chance. Seriously, the level of ignorance here is incredible.
“A mere inference or theory must give way to a truth revealed; but a scientific truth must be maintained, however contradictory it may appear to the most cherished doctrines of religion.”
-Sir David Brewster, physicist noted for his experimental work in optics and polarized light (light in which all waves lie in the same plane.) He is known for Brewster’s Law, which relates the refractive index of a material to its polarizing angle (which is the incident angle at which reflected light becomes completely polarized). He patented the kaleidoscope in 1817.
I have decided to change things up a little bit with the Quote of the Day. From now on the quote will be from someone in science who was born, died, or did something awesome in science on this particular date.
Sir David Brewster was born on this day in 1781.
I love this quote because of it seems to be an explicit argument for evolution vs. religion, but it was spoken by Sir David Brewster three years before Darwin published his famous On the Origin of Species.
Dr. Steven Novella, neurologist at Yale and president of the New England Skeptical Society (and host of the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, blogger at Neurologica, blogger at Skepticblog, and blogger at The Rogue’s Gallery) has put together an excellent blog about the battle against creation science as a part of his multi-part blog on the Skeptical Battlegrounds. It is an excellent read that I highly recommend.
“I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are IMPOSSIBLE.”
-William James
Anything is possible in science, but the degree to which a hypothesis is accepted or denied is directly proportional to the amount of evidence in support of it or detracting from it, as well as to the amount of evidence supporting or detracting from an alternate hypothesis. Creation science and intelligent design are not impossible hypotheses, but the evidence supporting them is lacking, and the evidence supporting an alternate hypothesis (i.e. evolution) is overwhelming.
NOTE: Because of the nature of the argument presented in point #4, this blog will not examine the argument sentence by sentence, but will address the argument as the whole.
STATEMENT: “World population growth rate in recent times is about 2% per year. Practicable application of growth rate throughout human history would be about half that number. Wars, disease, famine, etc. have wiped out approximately one third of the population on average every 82 years. Starting with eight people, and applying these growth rates since the Flood of Noah’s day (about 4500 years ago) would give a total human population at just under six billion people. However, application on an evolutionary time scale runs into major difficulties. Starting with one “couple” just 41,000 years ago would give us a total population of 2 x 1089. The universe does not have space to hold so many bodies.”
RESPONSE: The basis for this argument is a work by Henry Morris called Scientific Creationism. It has several flaws in it, but I will deflect to Lenny Flank, Jr., author of Deception by Design: The Intelligent Design Movement in America, who states:
“Contrary to Morris’s fanciful assumptions, there is no reason to believe that the global human population has been increasing exponentially, and good reason to believe that it was in fact stabilized by environmental factors (just like the housefly population has been) throughout most of human history, right up until the agricultural and industrial revolutions which have allowed population growth rates to climb sharply. Morris’s population argument is nothing more than an exercise in story-telling, and in it we see the basis for the other stories told by the creationists–selecting a short term trend and then projecting and extrapolating it backwards until it reaches the desired result.” (Lenny Flank, Population Rates and the Age of the Earth)
Regarding the statement about evolution, I would like to know why we must assume that we are starting from one couple 41,000 years ago. Why? Evolution does not ask that we start from one couple, as evolution is a slow, progressive process. And no one thinks that the human species originated 41,000 years ago. Actually, it is believed to have been more like 200,000 years ago. So why these arbitrary numbers? While the math they present is accurate, the argument itself is based on the false premise that population growth occurs at a constant, exponential rate. As Flank says, “While Morris’s mathematics are impeccable, the reasoning behind his argument is shoddy at best.”
