Reducibly Complex

“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.

This is Part 10 of the ten part blog debunking the claims made on CreationEvidence.org’s “Evidence for Creation.” This blog examines point #10.

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.

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This is Part 9 of the ten part blog debunking the claims made on CreationEvidence.org’s “Evidence for Creation.” This blog examines point #9.

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.

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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.

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I wanted to clear something up before it becomes a potential issue:

I am an atheist. I am a skeptic. But I do NOT think that the two go hand in hand. I have a fair amount of this page dedicated to religion. While this site is a skepticism/science blog, it is my personal blog and atheism is a topic dear to me.

Skepticism and atheism are two different things. They are related in many ways, but they are not one in the same. Skepticism follows the principles of scientific inquiry, providing evidence for claims. Atheism is simply a lack of belief. If you are a religious person for purely personal reasons and make no claims of “proof” of your beliefs, I don’t have a problem with you. If, however, you say that you can prove that your god or belief exists, then I want you to present me with your supporting evidence. If you cannot or do not do so, then I have a problem with you.

We all have our sacred cows, myself included (which I will not go into for, as fits my statement above, personal reasons). I am a skeptic despite this.

This is Part 7 of the ten part blog debunking the claims made on CreationEvidence.org’s “Evidence for Creation.” This blog examines point #7.

STATEMENT: “Physicist Melvin Cook, found that helium-4 enters our atmosphere from solar wind and radioactive decay of uranium. At present rates our atmosphere would accumulate current helium-4 amounts in less than 10,000 years.”

RESPONSE: Admittedly, the scientific data regarding this argument is a bit complicated, but Dave E. Matson has written a paper titled “How Good Are Those Young-Earth Arguments?” and addresses the subject of atmospheric helium-4 amounts. Matson goes into great detail, and I shall summarize as best I can:

Helium-4 is the result of radioactive alpha decay. (definition: alpha decay occurs “because the nucleus [of an atom] has too many protons which cause excessive repulsion. In an attempt to reduce the repulsion, a Helium nucleus is emitted” (“Three Types of Radioactive Decay”, thinkquest.org).) Helium-4 is “produced” as it escapes from within the earth to the atmosphere. It is hypothesized that a small amount of helium-4 is lost as it is heated and escapes the atmosphere altogether. However, the “most probable mechanism for helium loss is photoionization of helium by the polar wind and its escape along open lines of the Earth’s magnetic field” (Matson). Polar wind accounts for an escape of helium-4 that is nearly identical to the estimated production. Similarly, helium-4 may escape from the atmosphere through a “direct interaction of the solar wind [...] during the short periods of lower magnetic-field intensity while the field is reversing. Sheldon and Kern (1972) estimated that 20 geomagnetic-field reversals over the past 3.5 million years would have assured a balance between helium production and loss” (Matson).

CONCLUSION: What’s missing from creationevidence.org’s argument (aka what is implied by their argument) is that if helium-4 is being produced at the rate that it is, the amount of helium-4 observed in the atmosphere indicates a young earth. As has been shown, however, there are several mechanisms that account for the loss of helium-4 in the atmosphere. “Thus,” Matson states, “the helium balance calculations provided by creationist Melvin Cook [...] cannot provide a reliable minimum estimate of the earth’s age. [The creationists' argument from helium-4 production] is a fatal oversimplification of a complex problem” (Matson).

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“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.

This is Part 6 of the ten part blog debunking the claims made on CreationEvidence.org’s “Evidence for Creation.” This blog examines point #6.

STATEMENT: ”Human Artifacts throughout the Geologic Column…Man-made artifacts - such as the hammer in Cretaceous rock, a human sandal print with trilobite in Cambrian rock, human footprints and a handprint in Cretaceous rock – point to the fact that all the supposed geologic periods actually occurred at the same time in the recent past.”

RESPONSE: The work cited for this claim is Carl Baugh’s Why Do Men Believe Evolution Against All Odds?. However, this claim has been disproved by scientists and, more importantly, criticized by creationists. Many creationists, including the creationist organization Answers in Genisis (AIG), have criticized Baugh, claiming that he has “muddied the water for many christian.” Don Batten, of Creation Ministries International wrote: “Some Christians will try to use Baugh’s ‘evidences’ in witnessing and get ’shot down’ by someone who is scientifically literate. The ones witnessed to will thereafter be wary of all creation evidences and even more inclined to dismiss Christians as nut cases not worth listening to.”

As to Baugh’s “artifacts,” his evidence is lacking. “In 1982-1984, several scientists, including J.R. Cole, L.R. Godfrey, R.J. Hastings, and S.D. Schafersman, examined Baugh’s purported ‘mantracks’ as well as others provided by creationists in the Glen Rose Formation. In the course of the examination ‘Baugh contradicted his own earlier reports of the locations of key discoveries’ and many of the supposed prints ‘lacked human characteristics.’ After a three year investigation of the tracks and Baugh’s specimens, the scientists concluded there was no evidence of any of Baugh’s claims or any ‘dinosaur-man tracks’” (quoted from Wikipedia page on Carl Baugh).

CONCLUSION: It is important to note that Carl Baugh is the founder of the Creation Evidence museum, the organization that has compiled this list of “evidences” for creation. Baugh’s own work has been scientifically debunked, and Baugh himself is considered to be a detriment to the creationist cause by his contemporaries. This fact alone should be enough to convince the masses not to believe in his argument for creation based on human artifacts found “throughout the geologic column.”

(Note: The geologic column in itself is a faulty argument. See Part 1 of this blog for more information.)

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(the views expressed by our sponsors are property of the individual sponsor alone, and do not reflect the opinion of ReduciblyComplex.com)

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(the views expressed by our sponsors are property of the individual sponsor alone, and do not reflect the opinion of ReduciblyComplex.com)