Reducibly Complex

This is Part 4 of the ten part blog debunking the claims made on CreationEvidence.org’s “Evidence for Creation.” This blog examines point #4.

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.”

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“Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.”

-Stephen Jay Gould

I have nothing to add; its fine enough as it is.

This is Part 1 of the ten part blog debunking the claims made on CreationEvidence.org’s “Evidence for Creation.” This blog examines point #1.

STATEMENT: “Evolutionists have constructed the Geologic Column in order to illustrate the supposed progression of “primitive” life forms to “more complex” systems we observe today.”

RESPONSE: This is true, although it should be clarified that Geologists created this. There is no such thing as an evolutionist; evolutionism implies that evolution is a scientific ideology (which it is not) instead of a scientific theory (which it is).

STATEMENT: “Yet, ’since only a small percentage of the earth’s surface obeys even a portion of the geologic column the claim of their having taken place to form a continuum of rock/life/time over the earth is therefore a fantastic and imaginative contrivance.’”

RESPONSE: This is a quote from John Woodmorappe, which is a “pen name of an author who has published several articles and books with the creation science groups Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research. His main works are Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study and the The Mythology of Modern Dating Methods. He has also written several articles in creationist journals” (quoted from the Wikipedia page on John Woodmorappe). In other words, the quote used as evidence is coming from a person with the biased opinion of the creation “scientists” rather than an objective observer. Thus, this quote has little, if any, strength. Also, the geologic column is not an absolute, as is noted below (see CONCLUSION).

STATEMENT: “‘[T]he lack of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to the scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled.’”

RESPONSE: This quote from botanist N. Heribert Nilsson is a great example of the logical fallacy “argument from authority.” Creationists make the mistake that since Nilsson was a scientist, he is an authority in his field. Nilsson was a geneticist and botanist…and a loon. His theories were quack, to say the least. Tom McIver wrote in Anti-Evolution: An Annotated Bibliography:

[Nilsson believed that] During these catastrophic periods, new organisms are created by “emication” — a drastic alteration or production of gametes. A few survive as totally new forms. Inspired by Oparin’s theory of spontaneous origin of life, Nilsson argues that these gametes, of entirely new organisms, could form spontaneously and polyphyletically, out of the mix of biocatalytic substances engendered during the catastrophic episodes. “During paleobiological times whole new worlds of biota have been repeatedly synthesized.” Nilsson declares that organisms such as orchids and elephants were “instantly created out of non-living material.”

Nilsson himself in this argument is guilty of confusing the currently unexplained with the unexplainable, which is itself another logical fallacy. Just because the “deficiencies are real,” (which they are not (see CONCLUSION)) does not mean that they “cannot be explained” or “will never be filled.”

STATEMENT: “This supposed column is actually saturated with ‘polystrate fossils’ (fossils extending from one geologic layer to another) that tie all the layers to one time-frame.”

RESPONSE: This statement is very misleading in that it attempts to say that fossils of a particular type can be found throughout the column. What is actually the case is that these fossils can be found in multiple parallel layers. This does NOT “tie all the layers to one time-frame” but ties some species to multiple time-frames, something completely different and logically feasible.

STATEMENT: “‘[T]o the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favor of special creation.’”

RESPONSE: This quote from E.J.H. Corner is commonly used by creationists as proof that even a botanist like Corner believes in a creation. However, this quote is taken out of context. The full quote is:

The theory of evolution is not merely the theory of the origin of species, but the only explanation of the fact that organisms can be classified into this hierarchy of natural affinity. Much evidence can be adduced in favour of the theory of evolution - from biology, bio-geography and palaeontology, but I still think that, to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favour of special creation. If, however, another explanation could be found for this hierarchy of classification, it would be the knell of the theory of evolution. Can you imagine how an orchid, a duckweed, and a palm have come from the same ancestry, and have we any evidence for this assumption? The evolutionist must be prepared with an answer, but I think that most would break down before an inquisition. Textbooks hoodwink. A series of more and more complicated plants is introduced - the alga, the fungus, the bryophyte, and so on, and examples are added eclectically in support of one or another theory - and that is held to be a presentation of evolution. If the world of plants consisted only of these few textbook types of standard botany, the idea of evolution might never have dawned, and the backgrounds of these textbooks are the temperate countries which, at best, are poor places to study world vegetation. The point, of course, is that there are thousands and thousands of living plants, predominantly tropical, which have never entered general botany, yet they are the bricks with which the taxonomist has built his temple of evolution, and where else have we to worship? (E.J.H. Corner 1961, from ‘Evolution’, p. 97, in “Contemporary Botanical Thought”, Anna M. Macleod and L. S. Cobley (editors), Oliver and Boyd, for the Botanical Society of Edinburgh)

E.J.H. Corner is not somebody that creationists should be quoting as believing in creation. Corner, among other achievements, was awarded the Darwin award in 1960 and the Linnaean Gold Medal in 1970 for his contributions to science. He was far from a creationist and certainly attested to the validity of evolution.

CONCLUSION: The geologic column is poor evidence against evolution because of one very simple fact: the geologic column is not an absolute, it is an abstract tool. It is a concept, not a physical thing. The column is simply an illustration of the earth’s strata in terms of a chronological order. We know this order exists, and this is what we mean when we refer to the geologic column. Different localities will display the chronological order of the strata to different degrees, sometimes not displaying a particular strata, sometimes displaying a particular one to an extended degree.

Also, the “lack of transitional series” is a bogus claim as well. Creationists will state that there is a lack of transitional fossils showing how one species could have evolved into another species. However, these transitional fossils are discovered all the time. When this happens, of course, the creationists will now claim that there is a lack of transitional fossils between the first species and the new discovered species, and between the new discovered species and the second species. Thus, two new gaps are created that now need their own set of transitional fossils. In this way, this argument is another logical fallacy; namely it is The Moving Goalpost fallacy. Basically, the criteria for proof (the goalpost) is set as needing a transitional fossil between two species. When that criteria is met, the goalpost is moved and now there is new criteria for proof. In this manner, there becomes no way to ever prove evolution.

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False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutory pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path toward errors is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.

–Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

Ironic that Darwin, of all people, should have stated this. We are now nearly 150 years on from the publication of Darwin’s theory of evolution in The Origin of Species. But despite this, the false views, supported only by false evidence, presented by proponents of Intelligent Design continue to do injury to science. However, the harm is great, as our young students continue to be caught in the middle where they suffer the consequences of religion…again. To starve them of the education that they and we are worthy of is a sin of the most unholy kind. I only hope that as time goes on the road to truth does, in fact, open up to the minds of all people.

Anyone who thinks that life could not have happened “by chance” is not educated on the fact that the evolutionary process that brought life to this planet and had that life eventually develop into the human species took a long long time. If that includes you, you need to get educated. This timeline lays out the process from start to current, detailing the billions of years that the process took.

A recent article on EvolutionNews.org (a very deceptive name considering that Evolution News is part of the anti-evolution Discovery Institute) claims that “We [the Discovery Institute] are NOT seeking to have intelligent design included in textbooks or in classroom instruction. We only want factual errors corrected and legitimate scientific weaknesses of neo-Darwinism presented.” Essentially, this statement sums up the newest version of the Intelligent Design movement; it is the “teach the controversy” statement. The argument is that we should be teaching kids the controversy that exists in the scientific community regarding evolution. In other words, lets teach kids evolutionary theory and how it works, but also teach them that some scientists disagree with evolutionary theory. Let’s teach kids the strengths and weaknesses of evolution and let them decide for themselves if it is valid or not.

Although it sounds reasonable to teach evolutionary biology in this way, there are problems with this approach. First and foremost, science is not democratic. You can teach the strengths and weaknesses of a particular theory, but “deciding” if it is valid or not is not how science works. The reason that the scientific community accepts evolution is not because they “decided” that it was valid, but because the theory stands up. The evidence for evolution is VERY strong; the weaknesses of evolution are few and far between. Evolution is supported by paleontology, biology, geology, genetics, and a host of other sciences. It is the mountain of evidence supporting evolution that validates its claims. In fact, if there were ever an opportunity for evolution to be knocked down, the biggest one would have been genetics. If genetics somehow showed that heredity is non-favorable (that is to say, did not support natural selection), then evolution would have been toast. This, however, did not happen. Genetics, in profound and enormous ways, confirmed at its discover and continues today to confirm evolution.

This approach of “lets teach kids the strengths and weaknesses” is code for what they call “teach the controversy.” In other words, lets teach kids that there is a controversy in the scientific community over whether or not evolution is valid. Then these informed students will be able to make up their own minds. The trouble with this, however, is that there is no controversy in the scientific community regarding the validity of evolutionary theory. To say to students that there is a controversy over whether or not evolution is real would be to flat out lie to them. There are mountains of evidence that support evolutionary theory, and there isn’t even a mole-hill of evidence that opposes it.

I am not going to dive much deeper into this topic because I feel that what I’ve already stated above is more than enough to show that anti-evolution is simply wrong; however, I will add just one more point. The article posits: “Darwinists are fond of trying to change the subject from teaching the case for and against Darwinian evolution, and make this a debate over whether or not to include intelligent design in the curriculum. That isn’t the issue.” That is the issue, though. In science, when a particular theory or paradigm is called into question, particularly one that is considered true by the scientific community, it is not simply enough to say that the theory is wrong; one must also posit a hypothesis as to WHY the theory is wrong. If we are simply saying that evolution is wrong, we must provide a reason as to why it is wrong and, from that reasoning, propose a new theory to be tested and scrutinized through the established scientific method by the scientific community. Through careful testing and unbiased examination of the results we may establish evidence for or against the new hypothesis. For this new hypothesis to truly be valid, particularly so much as to dismantle the existing theory (in this case, evolution), the evidence must be both valid and quantifiable to the degree of displacing doubt about the hypothesis’ validity while also creating doubt of the current hypothesis, theory, or paradigm. If we are to call into question the validity of evolution, what is to be the valid, quantifiable evidence that creates doubt of that validity? That is why intelligent design is included in the discussion.

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