Over at the Ethics class blog, I have just posted two long entries on evolution and creation
Why Origins Views Matter
A Scriptural analysis of the Theory of Evolution
Enjoy. =)
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33 comments:
I wish I knew more about how Young Earth Creationists react to contrary information that they come across in the media. The newspaper might say, “The last time this South American volcano erupted before yesterday was 9,370 years ago,” or, “The newly-discovered fossil was dated to 28 million years ago.” Practically every issue of Scientific American has articles that are contrary to Young Earth Creationism. National Geographic frequently runs articles that are contrary as well. Do Y.E.C.s get angry over this sort of thing? Do they laugh it off? Are they sad that the media employs such foolish people?
I know Hank Hanegraaff takes the view that macroevolution does not happen, but I have not heard him say in so many words that he is a Young Earther. I tend to think he is an Old Earth Creationist based on something he did a few months ago on his radio program. He played a tape of Bill Maher putting down Bible believers for thinking the earth is young, and then he (Hanegraaff) commented approximately this way: “Bill Maher thinks we are silly enough to believe the Earth is only a few thousand years old.” That won’t be a verbatim quote, but it is pretty close to what he said. Has anybody out there heard Hank elucidate his position on age more clearly?
I have been corresponding via email with a Mormon Young Earth Creationist on and off for months. When I brought up evidence for a universe billions of years old, he responded by writing what he called a ‘parable’ involving the various ages of the items within a house. For instance, the wallboard might be 10 years old, and the nails might be 12 years old. The point of his parable was that it is meaningless to ask questions about how old things are. His parable struck me as nothing more than an evasion of my questions about the ages of things. He has also brought up the Mormon doctrine of pre-existence, but I haven’t been able to pin him down on whether the pre-existence was human souls and nothing but human souls, or whether it somehow included basalt, varves, fossils, cosmic microwave background radiation, and so forth. I cannot get a straight answer from him on this.
I was a Young Earth Creationist as an adolescent. By my mid teens I had learned enough evidence against Y.E.C. that I realized I had to decide between these three views:
* God could not figure out how to explain origins to a pre-scientific society, so He basically fibbed by writing the Genesis account. (“Dumbed down” is a phrase that you might wish to substitute for “fibbed.”) He expected believers living in later times to be sensible enough to figure that out.
* God created things just as Genesis said He did, but He or Satan or the both of them cooperating with one another subsequently planted false evidence to make it look like Old Earth Evolution is how it happened. This was some sort of test to see whether people would stay true to the Biblical account even when there was contrary evidence.
* The Biblical God is the best idea of Creation that a pre-scientific society could come up with, but we now know that the writers of the Bible were writing what amounts to fiction.
I tend to look at evidence for a very old earth as being the byproduct of a system of beliefs and analysis that has itself evolved over time to produce those sorts of answers. I consider myself very much a layman on such matters, although with more understanding of these issues than most laymen. My perception is that the data which would mitigate against an old earth is usually either ignored or disparaged and that other data is interpreted through a heavy filter of expectations and assumptions about the way things have been according to this theory. When the astronomers were constructing their mind-bogglingly complex orbital descriptions for the planets in order to satisfy the expectation that the Earth is the center of our system, they were doing much the same thing as modern old-earth experts in my opinion. So that's how I tend to view it.
As my notes on the other site should show, I'm certainly unwilling to accept the idea that God was merely telling Genesis to a group of buffoons who couldn't understand anything more complex than this. If Genesis cannot be trusted, I always feel compelled to ask at what point we can trust the Bible and also what else in the Bible cannot be trusted. This becomes especially pressing since Jesus Himself put so much weight on the reliability of Genesis.
I too am an interested layman when it comes to science.
I was able to hear part of the tape Dr. James Dobson played on ‘Focus on the Family’ this morning, of William Provine and Phillip Johnson answering audience questions from their different points of view on evolution vs. creationism. Can anyone link to a web page with a transcript of that?
A well-known creationist site is at http://www.answersingenesis.org/
Its evolution counterpart is at http://www.talkorigins.org/
I have not come across Jerry Coyne’s book ‘Why Evolution Is True,’ but I did read a review of it in the May-June 2009 ‘American Scientist’ (not to be confused with ‘Scientific American’). The review is more than a page in length. I will quote a few bits of it here, set off with plus signs.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The opportunity to communicate the excitement of modern evolutionary biology and to expose the vapid and depressingly anti-intellectual character of creationism is almost irresistible… even though we have learned that individuals committed to literal interpretations of religious texts will not be swayed by evidence… The intelligent-design agenda is based in part on the yearning for a simpler world of absolute certainties… We have uncovered many of the transitional forms that evolutionary logic predicted. What is surprising is not that the predicted transitional forms exist, but that through a combination of skill, effort and luck we have recovered them. [For example] Tiktaalik roseae (which embodies the transition from lobe-finned fish to land-dwelling tetrapods 375 million years ago)… Coyne also describes features whose presence is difficult to account for: an atavistic tail on a human infant, vestigial hindquarters on snakes and whales, human nerves that travel from the brain to the larynx via the aorta. Creationists dismiss these anomalies as the work of an inscrutable designer. But, more rationally, we can subsume all such features within a single, testable and coherent framework: descent with modification… Accepting the reality of evolution does not lead to a life of animalistic abandon, as the religious right would have it.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I am trying to imagine a Young Earth Creationist reading the book review I am quoting from, and then saying, “Old Earth Evolution is a fiction, and as such it has no predictive power. So we know that Tiktaalik roseae is NOT in fact a transitional species. Just by looking at a photo of it [See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiktaalik_roseae], I can tell that it is not transitional because ________. And whatever it was, it did not live 375 million years ago. I expect its age to measure out somewhere in the 3,000 – 7,000 year range if it were analyzed by the correct sort of laboratory apparatus, for which the design would be as follows: ____________.”
How would the Bible-believing Young Earth Creationist fill in the two blanks above? I am not asking for a PhD dissertation. Just a sketchy, hand-waving answer would be illuminating, since right now I have no idea how the second blank, especially, would be filled in by such a person.
Andrew Tallman wrote:
"Implications of theistic evolution for our concept of God. …
~God is vicious, creating a carnage-infested world on purpose. Is that really God’s best?”
If you are not planning on sitting down to eat a meal soon, take a look at this photo of heartworms that have infested a dog’s heart:
http://www.dierenartsenvechtenvenen.nl/foto's/heartworm.jpg
Can a Bible believer bring himself to pray the following prayer, or as an alternative to that, tell me why it would not be a suitable thing to pray?
”Lord God, You are the Intelligent Designer. I imagine that You originally designed heartworms to feast on plant material, or maybe on fungus. When Adam and Eve disobeyed You, You could have changed the environment in such a way that only humans would suffer. It would not be a violation of logic for You to have done so. But You deliberately chose to change many of the behaviors of organisms, including the heartworm. You redesigned it specifically for it to make its living by parasitizing dogs. I know that dogs are not guilty of Original Sin, Lord. And I know that if a human deliberately infested a dog with heartworms, our court system could find that human guilty of animal cruelty and could arrange punishment for the human. But the Bible says that Your ways are not man’s ways. In some way that we do not understand, Intelligent Designer, Your decision to redesign heartworms was not only good, but the very best thing that You could have done. Your Word says we are to praise You in all things—no exceptions. So I give You praise, Intelligent Designer God, for what You did in redesigning heartworms in the way that You saw fit to do. I have no expectation that praying for You to return the heartworms to their original plant-based diet would induce You to do such a thing, and I humbly accept that. Amen.”
The real question is not so much whether bad things happen to animals who are undeserving of it due to their lack of moral culpability. The real question is whether a process like that would be God's best method for producing dogs and people in the very first place. And, if so, why would He not reveal that in His own account of how He made everything?
And to take your point, when we look at heartworms, what we all think is, "That's a horrible, tragic thing." This immediately raises the question, "Why would I have evolved a brain which would be so horrified by something so common and normal?" The Christian answer is that we are surrounded by a world which we all know is not the way it's supposed to be. And those reminders point us toward a God who promises to redeem this awful place.
The existence of the heartworm is not the most signifanct thing to me. The universal revulsion at heartworms is far more instructive.
As for a design process, I know only ever so little about the technical elements of such things. But I would love to see the organic material (if there is any in the sample) tested for the presence of C14. Its lack would prove nothing because it could either be far too old (as evolutionists affirm) or it could be the product of a very different set of atmospheric conditions (far less than the current C14, for instance and then subsequent decay from that lower point). But if C14 shows up, then the thing must be less than 50,000 years old. Now, if it's actually 3,000, it may test as if it's 30,000. But if C14 is present at all, that would invalidate clamis of 350 million years. Again, forgive me being fairly ignorant of all dating issues. I'm assuming the thing in question has organic components which could be tested for C14.
As for the explanative power of evolutionary theory and the existence of fossils which could be interpreted as transitionary, there's a misunderstanding here. It's not that no transitionary fossils exist (although I think there are far less than evolutionists claim), but that whatever number there are is far too few to carry the weight of claiming that all the lifeforms on the planet arose this way.
Besides, things that seem transitional at the level of the body become totally impossible transitional forms at the level of molecular biology.
But when it comes to predictive capacity, the real question for evolutionists is not whether it predicts what fossils we will find (it's been terribly bad at predicting this nevertheless), but whether it predicts anything at all about future developments of structures. A good evolutionist will tell you that you can't know what structures will develop until after the environment has developed them, but he will also say that all structures which develop were the best ones favored by the environment. This circular escape from making any predictions about developing species is the basic flaw in claiming evolution is a predictive theory. By the way, I don't think Creation can predict like this either. That's why neither one qualifies as empirical science.
Now one thing which it would seem evolution would have to predict is the massive ongoing onset of new species outpacing the destruction of species (because if you're not making more than you're losing, at some point you would have had to be the other way around). Instead what we see is the massive ending of species and the development of none at all or very few anyhow. That fits a creation and fall perspective perfectly, but not a gradually evolving one at all.
Since you're so interested in asking questions, Lee, I have one for you. What prediction that can be falsified by evidence we are likely to discover in our lifetimes do you think evolution makes?
A true scientific theory should easily list such predictions.
I will use “you” to refer to Andrew Tallman for as long as nobody else is posting in this thread. My Internet access is limited to whichever workdays (Monday – Thursday) I choose to stay after-hours at work, so thanks in advance for your patience. There are a number of points in your posts above that I plan to address.
You went several notches beyond “hand-waving” in your answer on dating dead organisms. I appreciate you taking the time to do that. Are you visualizing a process that was universal in its effects on carbon 14 abundance some thousands of years ago? In other words, would the anomaly (if you will let me use that word) have taken place even in stars and nebulae and other planets and their atmospheres? Or are you visualizing a process that was specific to Earth’s atmosphere? (When I say “anomaly” I am referring to your idea that carbon 14 abundance could have been doing something in the past that mainstream science is not aware of. Or to put it another way, the idea that long-term steady-state production of carbon 14 is not a valid assumption.)
It would be helpful to me if you could give “yes” or “no” answers to the following questions.
1. Do you consider meteorology to be an empirical science? Is it based on a predictive theory?
2. Does every being who has a soul also have empathy for suffering in other beings? Or at least the capacity for empathy?
3. Does every being who lacks a soul also lack empathy?
4. Do you accept that microevolution happens? If your answer is “yes,” then do you think that it is only the young age of Earth (a few thousand years) that has kept microevolution from racking up changes that can properly be called macroevolution?
Also I am not sure how you meant the word “prediction” when you asked me, “What prediction that can be falsified by evidence we are likely to discover in our lifetimes do you think evolution makes?”
Are you using it in a sense where I would be allowed to answer, “I think that in the next 50 years somebody digging in a Cretaceous deposit is going to uncover a fossilized orange-bellied dragonfly, which will be recognized as transitional between the well-known yellow-bellied dragonfly and the well-known red-bellied dragonfly”?
Or are you expecting me to answer more like, “I think that in the next 50 years a scorpion will undergo a macro-mutation and sprout four pairs of wings, such that it will be able to leap over tall buildings”?
Obviously those are fanciful examples of answers I could give, but they should serve to indicate the sort of clarification I am looking for you on how you are using “prediction” in your question.
Until next week.
The issues with C-14 are a few.
1. Though I admit it's a theory fraught with difficulty, I still tend to accept the water vapor canopy theory of the pre-flood environment of the Earth. If true, this would have shielded radiation so that both the atmosphere and (consequently) the organic material would have contained none of it. When the flood occurred (2400 BC or so), everything would have fossilized quickly during that event. Therefore, the vast majority of fossils would show none of it now, since they were buried before they could have lived in an atmosphere where they could have acquired any.
2. But even fossils formed after the flood would also probably show no presence of it because it would only have started forming in the atmosphere post-flood, and anything which died would have had a much lower percentage of it to start and it would have decayed from there. This would give inflated ages based on C14 compared to today's concentrations.
3. I'm under the impression that the theory of C14 decay requires an equilibrium having been achieved in the production of it and the decay/seepage of it out of the atmosphere. This equilibrium is supposed to take roughly 50,000 years to occur. No problem on evolutionary theory, obviously. But what it also means is that an Earth less than 50,000 years old should show an increasing concentration of C14 in the upper atmosphere. I believe this to be verified in subsequent samples.
Dating methods in general don't impress me much because I believe them to be based on a variety of assumptions about both the age of the Earth and the equilibrium levels, etc. I'm much less knowledgable about other ones than C14.
One of the real problems for claims of massive age for fossils (dinosaurs, e.g.) is the presence of undecayed hemoglobin components and blood vessels and soft tissue in them, which seem incompatible with the millions of years claimed. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaur.html
Your questions:
1. Meteorology is an observational science. Does it make predictions which can be falsified? Does it make predictions which can be used by us? I don't know. To the degree that it does, it is more in the center of empirical science.
2. I'm not clear how to answer this question because I'm not clear what you're asking. I don't believe that dogs, for instance, have a God-component. Some would call that a soul, others woudl call that a spirit. Dogs can probably experience empathy. Some humans cannot. So I'm not clear what the thrust of this question is.
3. Empathy is emotional imagination. Dogs clearly have imagination, and probably emotional imagination. I don't know if this helps. I suppose what you're looking for from me is some clear test that could be used to prove which beings have souls and which beings do not, then to see whether only humans satisfy this test or whether chimps or dolphins might also. As far as I know, there is no such test available. What would I say about arthropodic aliens who could discuss Shakespeare with us? I don't know. I doubt they exist. It's not at all clear to me that the "image of God" can be measured in this way, although I am committed to believing that, whatever it is, it does not exist in non-human animals on this planet.
4. Microevolution: actual mutations producing beneficial improvements within kinds of beings and then selected for by their environments? No. Although i'm open to the possibility, and I would still think that irreducible complexity issues would frustrate the development of one kind of thing into another. A couple hundred dog varieties, no problem. Dogs becoming cats, big problem. Microevolution as environments actually reducing genetic variety by killing off less successful variations? Yes. That's how "super-resistant" bacteria are formed. Not by mutation creating something new, but by destruction eliminating lots of the existing alternatives.
Successive killing of the shortest 90% of human offspring would certainly produce taller people. But they'd never be 40 feet tall. On the other hand, reptiles selected the same way for size might over time (and given time to grow and the right sort of environmental factors, especially) might become exceedingly large (like dinosaurs).
I apologize, Lee. At this point, I'm probably just rambling about a bunch of different things. But I'm trying to paint as much of a picture of Y-E Creationism as possible in a blog. Sorry for the lack of structure/clarity, if there is any. =(
On predictions, the second sort would be great. That's clearly an extreme (and impossible) prediction, but the basic problem is still there. Evolution says explicitly that you can't know until after it happens which adaptations will be selected for and against by the environment. All such selections will always prove that the environment picked the right stuff. But this seems to, by definition, mean that no possible observational data could ever falsify the theory.
At the other end of the size spectrum, Michael Behe showed that the prediction that things are fairly simple at the molecular level turns out to be exactly backward. They're actually more complex than at the body level. Okay, so evolutionists then work hard to explain how that is perfectly compatible with the theory. What possible new data would make evolutionists forsake their theory, and at what point does evolution just look too difficult to maintain? I believe it's there already for sure. And certainly close enough to not think of it as "the backbone of modern science." But ardent evolutionists never seem to even be willing in theory to allow this. At least when Darwin was writing, his ignorance of molecular biology, genetics, and the fossil record afford him latitude to believe what he believed. In the intervening years, the bulk of the data seems to go against him, yet evolutionists seem more certain than ever. That's why I ask the question. Even the article I linked above talks about allowing for the soft tissue discovery within the evolutionary time scale. So, if every possible discovery can be accommodated by the theory, what actual content does it have?
Thanks for the additional informative posts. I can see myself coming back to this thread to post bits and pieces of thoughts several more times as the weeks go by, given the amount of stuff going on in here!
To go back to my very first words above regarding how Young Earth Creationists (which I will shorten to Y.E.C.) feel about contrary information out there in public, I will mention that I talked to some friends who told me they visited Kartchner Caverns in southern Arizona this summer. Just out of general interest about that site, I took a look at a website. The site claims that some of the speleothems in that cavern have been growing for 50,000 years. I know that you are not impressed by dating techniques, but if anybody feels like reading a brief item on dating speliothems, here is a website on that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-thorium_dating
Do (or should?) Christians challenge park rangers about dates older than 10,000 years? I drove to the Berlin, Nevada Ichthyosaur discovery site a couple years ago. I was the only person there at the time, so I got a one-on-one lecture from the ranger who works there. I asked him if he gets many objections from visitors over the 225 million year dating of the fossils, and he said he really doesn’t. By the way, I remember that your show faded in and out on the car radio on that trip when I was south of Gabbs, Nevada. The other station I could sort of get in that desert region was coming out of Window Rock.
My thoughts on your ideas about carbon dating were that the most obvious ways for that anomaly to come about would be:
Less nitrogen in the atmosphere
Lower cosmic ray flux
Smaller cross section for the nuclear reaction.
The first of those (nitrogen) could possibly be tested by taking ice core samples in the polar regions. The last (cross section) would require special pleading if it were said to happen just within our solar system. Claiming it to be universal would probably imply effects that would show up when astronomers measure the spectra of objects that are a few thousand light years away. But I see you favor the lower flux idea, which I suppose would be local to Earth’s atmosphere in the canopy scenario.
Be that as it may, the hope of accurately dating with carbon seems forlorn because “once buried safely in the sediments, the hard parts of fossils become infiltrated or replaced by dissolved minerals. What remains is a cast of a living creature that becomes compressed into rock by the pressure of sediments piling up on top.” So says Jerry Coyne in his book ‘Why Evolution Is True,’ which I bought at Barnes & Noble. I am sure a creationist organization could take a fossil specimen to a lab and pay for an analysis using the carbon dating technique, and I would be interested to hear the results, but if in fact Y.E.C.s and Old Earth Evolutionists (which I will shorten to O.E.E.) agree that the replacement of the bone material by surrounding inorganic material happens, then I suppose neither side would feel much motivation to pay for that particular type of analysis.
Now in saying that, I am ignoring the Schweitzer T. rex discovery that you linked to. I remember that when I first heard about it, I thought it had to be an April fools joke. Do you know if any DNA sequencing was ever done on it? In an interview, she herself says, “Having reviewed a great deal of data from many different disciplines, I see no reason at all to doubt the general scientific consensus that the Earth is about five or six billion years old.” That quote of her comes from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3411/01-ask.html
My default position is that the soft material was a contaminant, but with enough peer-reviewed agreement that it really does come straight from dinosaur tissues, I could be persuaded otherwise. I hope to hear more about this in the future.
[I ran into the post-length limit, so I have split off the rest of what I had to say today into this extra post.]
On July 21 you wrote: “When the astronomers were constructing their mind-bogglingly complex orbital descriptions for the planets in order to satisfy the expectation that the Earth is the center of our system, they were doing much the same thing as modern old-earth experts in my opinion.”
Author Jerry Coyne’s point of view is EXACTLY the opposite. He has taken examples from nature and shown how O.E.E. can explain them in reasonably straightforward fashion, and then he asks the question: How could intelligent design or special creation possibly explain that?
I will predict that if you should ever read Coyne’s book, you will remain a Y.E.C. when you are done. But what if the experience inspired you to write a book of your own, showing that each of Coyne’s examples can easily be explained in Y.E.C. terms? I can’t think of many book projects from within the Bible-believing community that would be more important than that sort. I would certainly read it!
On August 3 Andrew Tallman wrote: “On predictions, the second sort would be great.”
My father had enough insider’s knowledge of aviation to shake his head when the news reported said that the crash of an airplane near the airport was preceded by the engine stalling. Far more likely what happened was that a knowledgeable witness told the reporter that “the airplane stalled” and meant that the wing stalled. That is, the angle of attack of the wing became too high and the wing lost lift, while the engine continued merrily running. In a similar way, I can imagine a professional biologist shaking his head over my amateur efforts to satisfy your request for a prediction of forthcoming events in biology over the next several decades. Author Jerry Coyne compares your request to someone saying, “Show me how the Grand Canyon is changing over my lifetime.” In fact, on page 17 Coyne writes, “I don’t mean Darwinism can predict how things will evolve in the future. Rather, it predicts what we should find in living or ancient species when we study them.” So he seems to be conceding your point about the theory of evolution not being a science if one’s definition of science eliminates theories that don’t try to extrapolate into the future. But if one’s definition of science is broader, it can include theories which retrodict what field researchers are going to (or NOT going to) find when they get around to digging further in this or that deposit, or when they get around to sequencing genes from this or that heretofore unsequenced organism. I will list some of those retrodictions in future posts.
That said, I would feel like a party pooper if I completely evaded your challenge to make predictions of what will happen over a human lifetime. So I will go out on a limb (“Fools rush in where wise men…”) and make some predictions.
Radiation of organisms that are adapting from fairly recent colonization of oceanic islands (“recent” to be understood in Old Earth terms) will create visible changes. See ongoing research by Peter and Rosemary Grants on Galapagos finches as an example of what I am talking about. Here is a link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beak_of_the_Finch:_A_Story_Of_Evolution_In_Our_Time
A very careful study of the fraction of horse-donkey matings that result in the live birth of a mule will show that in fifty years will show that the fraction is decreasing. For instance, if so many observations were made that we can say the fraction is 0.00211 in the year 2009, it might be down to 0.00209 in 2059. (I am doubtful such a study would be funded because it would cost a good bit of money to carry out with the necessary care for detail, for a payoff out in the fourth or fifth decimal place.)
[I am splitting today's too-long post into two. See below.]
[Continuing from today's prior post.]
The chlorination of municipal water has been going on for what—a couple of centuries? It seems to me that this human engineering practice is putting pressure on microbes to evolve resistance to chlorination, and careful studies might find instances of such a thing.
If you look at Google Earth images, you will see a lot of artificial ponds that I believe are part of sewage treatment facilities. The aeration and sand filtering at such facilities is providing a new niche. I think it is sufficiently rich in possibilities for microbes that we can expect speciation. One could take water samples at decade intervals and look for new species. The practical problem with this is that the sewage plant is far from being a closed system, so how would the researcher know whether the new species formed on site, or was a previously undiscovered species that washed into the sewage plant from some source upstream?
I have on my shelf a book by Tim Berra, a professor of zoology. It says, “Evolutionary theory predicts that in the absence of that strong selective force (malaria), the frequency of Hb^S I the American black population should decline. This is precisely what is happing; the frequency of sickle cell trait in the American black population is about 8 percent today… Creationism offers no such tools for the analysis of reality.” So I predict that if very careful numerical data is generated today and again a lifetime from now, there will be a slight decrease in that percentage.
I have heard that the honeybee population in North America was dropping. I suspect that some environmental change is responsible. But that is a selection pressure that should favor some sort of mutation that counters the environmental problem, such that in a human lifetime there may well be a reversal of the current trend.
New examples of host switch in the insect/plant interaction will be observed.
Global warming (if it truly is a trend—perhaps you believe it is not) would be an environmental shift that puts selection pressure on flowering plants to flower earlier in the spring.
The three-drug cocktail for treating HIV in humans will be ineffective.
There will be new instances of retroviral insertion into the human genome that are not there in 2009.
Human brains will be 0.002% bigger in 50 years than they are now. I base this on Coyne’s remark that “brain size in the human lineage increased on average about 0.001 percent per generation.” But imagine the practical problem of measuring this. Even if you weigh only the brains of 50-year-old Asian males who died from natural causes, the error caused by differences in how much blood got left in this brain vs. that brain would swamp such a small change in brain size, not to mention the decision as to where to amputate the brain stem.
By the way, Jerry Coyne references a book called ‘Natural Selection in the Wild’ by biologist John Endler. I don’t have that book, but Coyne says it “documents over 150 cases of observed evolution.”
Pardon my typing goof-ups in my previous couple of posts (“news reported” instead of “news reporter,” etc.).
Years ago Bob Larson’s ‘Talk Back’ program was on Christian radio in Arizona, and I listened to quite a few hours of that program. He said that evolution was “a lie straight from the pit of hell.” I have come to expect that point of view on Christian broadcasts. The late D. James Kennedy certainly stressed that accepting the plausibility of OEE is an anti-Christian thing to do.
I was momentarily surprised on Saturday to hear an advertisement for ‘National Geographic,’ a publication that is certainly OEE-friendly. I infer from that advertisement that the owners of KPXQ are not staunchly YEC. Is this a matter for prayer among Christians? Both sides cannot be right. Are you within your rights as a Bible believer to pray that God will begin to speak correction in a clear voice to those Christians who are wrong on this issue?
The Flood came up as one of the topics on the radio program yesterday. Bible believers who say that hydraulic sorting explains the fossil record should seemingly believe that a yearling brontosaurus’s remains should be found in the same layer as an adult wooly mammoth’s remains. And unhatched brontosaurus eggs should be in some other stratum. Do you know of any paleontological finds that support this retrodiction of YEC?
Some YECs (though not you) say that there is no fossil evidence for any transitional species whatsoever. But here is a link to a website that has something to say about both of those issues:
http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/fossil_series.html
In a prior post where I predicted the action of evolution in a human lifetime, I should have mentioned polyploidy. I will venture a guess that we will see further examples of that happening. Here is a quick overview:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyploidy
Andrew Tallman wrote:
1. Meteorology is an observational science. Does it make predictions which can be falsified? Does it make predictions which can be used by us? I don't know. To the degree that it does, it is more in the center of empirical science.
I may not have read this anywhere, but I have a suspicion that if one kept numerical statistics on various parameters involving the biosphere, one would see behavior that is characteristic of what mathematicians call ‘chaos.’ Long-term predictions about a chaotic system are hard to make, if by ‘prediction’ we mean estimating closely the values that the parameters will take on specific dates in the far future. That is the case in meteorology. There are some fluid dynamics equations at the core of that science, but due to the complexity of real-world weather and also due to the fact that real-time data is only gathered at a few discrete places, predictions tend to be good only when they stay within a time frame of four or five days.
In some sense that I certainly cannot formulate very sharply at the moment, I imagine evolution is chaotic, and thus that at best we can make only short-term predictions based on extrapolating current trends. That is what I was doing when I predicted an increase in human brain size.
But even if evolution is in some sense chaotic, it should still have enough constraints to keep there from being fossilized mammals in a stratum where we find the very earliest fish fossils. So retrodicting what will be waiting there for us to find as we continue to dig away at the ground for fossils ought to be possible in some broad sort of way.
The evolution of stars can be modeled pretty well by astrophysicists. Astronomers don’t live long enough to confirm the models by following any one particular star through a long sequence of its own evolution, of course, but they can observe large numbers of stars and they find a good fit with what is expected from the models of the astrophysicists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_evolution
Do Young Earthers imagine that our own Solar System’s star was formed in one literal day, but that all the other billions of stars in the universe have formed from the collapse of gas and dust over an extended period of time? Why wouldn’t the Creator form the other stars all ready-made to shine in just the first day of creation?
I have read that some medieval Christians believed the Moon was as smooth as a ball bearing, because it had not been touched by sinful creatures and thus maintained the perfection of God’s creation of it. The mottling they could see on the moon was thought to be from Earth’s atmosphere, or even some sort of reflection or Earth off the face of the moon.
Does the roughness of the Solar System’s moons dishearten Bible believers? It is pretty clear that bodies such as Mimas have a history of being battered by large objects.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimas_(moon)
What sort of formation history do Young Earthers see when they look at Mimas?
Andrew Tallman wrote:
“Michael Behe showed that the prediction that things are fairly simple at the molecular level turns out to be exactly backward.”
A few years back I bought a book titled ‘Evolution Vs. Creationism.’ It spends a few pages on Behe’s ideas. Just as a sampling, I will quote part of what that book says:
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Behe’s view is that for a structure like the bacterial flagellum, consisting of over 50 proteins and enzymes, it is extraordinarily unlikely that so many elements—by chance—could be assembled one by one, and even more unlikely that there would be a selective advantage to each addition… Critics have noted that Behe presents an incomplete picture of how natural selection operates: it is not the case that components of a complex structure must be added one after another, piece by piece, like stringing beads… A great deal of borrowing and swapping of bits and pieces takes place… Somewhat fewer than half of the proteins found in the bacterial flagellum are the same as or very similar to those found among other bacteria in a structure called the type-III secretory apparatus, which performs some of the functions of a flagellum… There is another way in which natural selection can be more flexible than Behe appears to allow: “Irreducibly complex” structures may indeed have been assembled piece by piece, but the pathway of assembly may not be obvious because of a process evolutionary biologists have called “scaffolding.”… Some scientists have described Behe’s approach as an “argument from ignorance.” … This is reminiscent of the “God of the gaps” argument.
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In the same book it says, “Some ID supporters such as Michael Behe have gone so far as to accept common ancestry of humans and apes.”
Meteorites tend to be dark, and Antarctica tends to be white. That is a good combination for humans being able to find meteorites. A famous one is catalogued as ALH 84001. It is thought to have originated on Mars. A link, with a quote from it following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALH84001
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The theory holds that it was shocked and broken by one or more meteorite impacts on the surface of Mars some 3.9 to 4.0 billion years ago, but remained on the planet. It was later blasted off from the surface in a separate impact about 15 million years ago and impacted Earth roughly 13,000 years ago. These dates were established by a variety of radiometric dating techniques, including samarium-neodymium (Sm-Nd), rubidium-strontium (Rb-Sr), potassium-argon (K-Ar), and carbon-14.
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Do Young Earthers accept the place of origin of this meteorite? And if so, do they believe that some process on Mars, or maybe in interplanetary space, played havoc with the dating techniques used on it?
Andrew wrote:
“I still tend to accept the water vapor canopy theory of the pre-flood environment of the Earth. If true, this would have shielded radiation so that both the atmosphere and (consequently) the organic material would have contained none of it. When the flood occurred (2400 BC or so)…”
I should have thought about tree rings.
Last week I was at Costco and I bought Richard Dawkins’ latest book, ‘The Greatest Show on Earth.’ Chapter 4 deals with methods of dating objects that we find. Dendrochronology is the dating of tree rings. Dawkins says, “We don’t have an unbroken chain, and dendrochronology in practice takes us back only about 11,500 years.”
He says that carbon dating of tree rings has been done. “We have an accurate calibration of the fluctuating supply of carbon-14 in the atmosphere and can take this into account to refine our dating calculations. Remember that, over roughly the same age range as is covered by carbon dating, we have an alternative method of dating wood—dendrochronology—which is completely accurate to the nearest year. By looking at the carbon-dated ages of wood samples whose age is independently known from tree-ring dating, we can calibrate the fluctuating errors in carbon-dating. Then we can use these calibration measurements when we go back to organic samples for which we don’t have tree-ring data.”
In the canopy theory, there should be a drastic deviation of carbon-14 concentrations from the exponential decay when one plots a graph of the concentration vs. the date figured from the tree rings. In particular, it should drop to zero prior to 2400 BC. Surely I would have read about it if carbon-dating of tree rings indicated such a thing. Dawkins implies there are some minor deviations from the perfect exponential decay curve that one would get from tree rings if the rate of formation of carbon-14 in the atmosphere is perfectly steady, but he is being very dishonest with the reader if in fact carbon-dating of tree rings shows the sort of curve that would result from the canopy process.
Andrew wrote: “Microevolution: actual mutations producing beneficial improvements within kinds of beings and then selected for by their environments? No.”
In the Dawkins book that I quoted from October 14, the author spends pp. 116-131 describing an experiment begun years ago by a team headed by Richard Lenski. In brief, they cloned E. coli bacteria and placed them in twelve flasks. Since then they have been providing a mix of nutrients to the twelve lines of descendants to the original bacteria, keeping flasks separated from one another. One of the lines underwent a sudden population boom because it became able to make use of citrate as a nutrient. Samples were taken at time intervals from the twelve lines and frozen. When a sample taken from the citrate-using line prior to the sudden population explosion was thawed out and given flasks of its own, some of those flasks repeated the population boom.
The interpretation of the experiment is that two mutations, call them A and B, were needed in the original E. coli bacteria clones in order for the bacteria to be able to use citrate as a food. The eleven lines that didn’t ever make use of citrate might well have undergone mutation A or mutation B, but not both. The sample taken and frozen just before the population boom had one of the mutations, either A or B, but not both. When that sample was thawed, its descendants only needed to undergo the other mutation, not both mutations, for them to be able to use citrate.
Dawkins writes, “Not only does it show evolution in action, not only does it show new information entering genomes… not only does it demonstrate the power of natural selection to put together combinations of genes that, by the naïve calculations so beloved by creationists, should be tantamount to impossible; it also undermines their central dogma of ‘irreducible complexity.’”
Andrew wrote: “Dating methods in general don't impress me much because I believe them to be based on a variety of assumptions about both the age of the Earth and the equilibrium levels, etc.”
Poage 102 in the Dawkins book I have been quoting from has a table listing ten “radioactive clocks” in order of half life, with the oldest being rubidium-87 (half life 49 billion years).
On page 107 he says of the Young Earthers, “You have to make mutually adjusted special pleading claims for each one of the clocks separately. At present, the applicable isotopes all agree with each other in placing the origin of the Earth at between four and five billion years ago… The history-deniers would have to fiddle the half-lives of all the isotopes in their separate proportions, so that they all end up agreeing that the Earth began 6,000 years ago. Now that’s what I call special pleading! And I haven’t even mentioned various other dating methods which also produce the same result, for instance fission track dating. Bear in mind the huge differences in timescales of the different clocks, and think of the amount of contrived and complicated fiddling with the laws of physics that would be needed in order to make all the clocks agree with each other, across orders of magnitude, that the Earth is 6,000 years old and not 4.6 billion!… There is one more type of evolutionary clock, the molecular clock.”
Lee wrote: “Does every being who has a soul also have empathy for suffering in other beings? Or at least the capacity for empathy?”
Andrew wrote: “I don't believe that dogs, for instance, have a God-component. Some would call that a soul, others would call that a spirit. Dogs can probably experience empathy. Some humans cannot. So I'm not clear what the thrust of this question is.”
There is a condition called anencephaly where a human is born without much or any of the brain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anencephaly
I would guess that somebody like Hank Hanegraaff would say that such a baby does have a soul, and the soul goes on to Heaven. It lives in Heaven with the personality it would have had if the brain had developed normally, and as if the offspring had been influenced in the usual ways by its parents, siblings, friends etc. that it would have been if it had been born more normal.
But for however long it lives on Earth with that condition, it does not have empathy, or any other sort of thoughts. So we have an individual that a Christian would say fits the following:
1. Has a soul? Yes.
2. Has empathy? No.
There have been studies done on nonhuman primates that show that they have a sense of fairness. “Three grapes for you. One grape for YOU. Three grapes for you. One grape for YOU…” A sense of fairness may not quite be the same as empathy, but it is probably a necessary precondition for a mind to have empathy. A mother chimp can be observed tending for an injured offspring as best it can, and seems to show sorrow if the offspring dies from its injuries. There is a certain amount of that sort of empathy in elephants, too. So the Christian might answer as follows when the subject is chimps or elephants:
1. Has a soul? No.
2. Has empathy? Maybe not as much as a normal human, but some.
Andrew wrote: “This immediately raises the question, ‘Why would I have evolved a brain which would be so horrified by something so common and normal?’”
But if you concur that a soulless nonhuman animal has some of the horror, and in some (fortunately rare) cases a soul-filled human does NOT have any sense of that horror, it seems odd to me to say that the horror comes from God, rather than being a product of the evolution of the larger-brained mammals.
Andrew wrote: “It's not that no transitionary fossils exist (although I think there are far less than evolutionists claim), but that whatever number there are is far too few to carry the weight of claiming that all the lifeforms on the planet arose this way.”
In chapter 10 of his latest book, Richard Dawkins sets aside fossil evidence and asks what we can deduce from comparing organisms that are alive right now.
Here I mention some of his examples.
Bats (which are mammals) have a skeleton with bones that are in one-to-one correspondence with human bones. The bones that support the bat’s wings are elongated versions of human finger bones. Or to put it in a less anthropocentric way, the finger bones of humans are shorted versions of bat finger bones. (More accurately, both modern bats and modern humans have finger bones that are distorted versions of the bones that would have been in the fingers of some ancient common ancestor.) The same twenty-eight bones found in the human skull can be labeled with the same names across all mammals.
Horses bear their weight on what amounts to their middle two fingers and middle two toes. Horse evolution has suppressed the genes that would build the other three toes in the leg of a developing horse fetus, but horses are sometimes born with those toes visible on the legs, above the toes.
Dophins are mammals and had ancestors that spent a lot of time on land. Fish move their tails from side to side, but “the dolphin betrays its mammal history by beating its tail up and down. The side-to-side wave traveling down the ancestral fish backbone has been inherited by lizards and snakes, which may almost be said to swim on land… But in mammals the spine bends up and down, not side to side… Maybe there was an intermediate stage, which hardly bent its spine at all, in either directions, like a frog.”
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Andrew wrote: “Dogs becoming cats, big problem.”
A certain line of dogs becoming something that looks and acts like a tree-dwelling cat, I’d say yes. Able to cross-breed with a descendant of today’s cats? No! Biologists know of numerous cases of convergent evolution of body plans because of similar niches being available on different continents, but when such similar-looking creatures are artificially brought together by humans, mating between them is not possible. Dogs that are unusually good at climbing trees—and I have seen a few of those on the “Funniest Videos” type of TV program—could plausibly evolve into something that specializes in treetops in a few million years, separating themselves from the breeding pool of the rest of the descendants of today’s dogs that don’t utilize trees. But I would have zero expectation that such a tree-specializing descendant of today’s dogs would be able to mate with a descendant of today’s cats.
Andrew wrote: “Dating methods in general don't impress me much because I believe them to be based on a variety of assumptions about both the age of the Earth and the equilibrium levels, etc.”
The November 2009 ‘Astronomy’ magazine has a photograph of two galaxies colliding. The caption says the collision started about 500 million years ago. There is a Nobel Prize waiting for anybody who can write a paper in a refereed science journal explaining how this type of thing is consistent with Young Earthism.
Here is a link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antennae_Galaxies
It says something good about modern Christianity that I am allowed to post so many contrary things at the KPXQ website. I can’t imagine a Muslim website allowing this. I worry that Europe is headed for another Dark Age as the Muslim population increases there.
In “Alice’s Restaurant” Arlo Guthrie says, “I’ve been singing this song for twenty minutes. I could go another twenty.” That’s kind of how I feel. I will do my best to hit all the remaining points I have in the back of my mind in another half dozen posts.
I know I haven't been responding to your points very much, but I did want to say that your observation about the freedom to disagree is very meaningful to me. It's a core belief of mine to allow (and even encourage) dissent and disagreement, especially when given in a charitable way.
I'm not quite clear about the question on the colliding galaxies. Is it a matter of how something that seems to have happened so long ago can be reconciled with a young earth (in which case it's like any other starlight and distance example) or is it about the colliding galaxies phenomenon itself? 'Cuz I could use a Nobel prize. =)
Andrew wrote: “Is it a matter of how something that seems to have happened so long ago can be reconciled with a young earth (in which case it's like any other starlight and distance example) or is it about the colliding galaxies phenomenon itself?”
That the galaxies are 45 million light years away brings up the starlight/distance issue that you have thought about, where you would maybe like to suggest that the light speed c was greater in the past. But if the interaction time of the galaxies is 500 million years (or 600 million per the Wikipedia website), then the degree of gravitational scrambling that has gone on in the interaction would be an additional factor that your Young Earth theory would also need to account for, and might require fiddling with other things than just the value of c.
Andrew wrote: “Successive killing of the shortest 90% of human offspring would certainly produce taller people. But they'd never be 40 feet tall.”
I would agree that a 40 foot descendant of today’s humans would not be able to breed with today’s humans, i.e. a sperm sample frozen in 2009 and applied to a 40-foot female at some date in the distant future would not produce offspring. But could we, by selective breeding starting with today’s humans, gradually develop a 40-foot creature? I don’t think it is necessarily impossible. If there is a genetic pathway to such a descendant, it would no doubt have lots of counterintuitive steps. For instance, we might start by selecting the type of dwarves who have normal trunk length, but short limbs. This could be valuable to a creature that makes its living primarily in the water, and it seems to me that a 40-foot organism is better suited to floating in water than striding around on a pair of legs. The whale is (according to evolutionary theory) the descendant of a mammal that lived partly on land. Whales have vestigial legs, and some whales are born with the small legs protruding from their body. Whales can be 100 feet long, while their land-dwelling ancestors would have been far smaller.
Andrew wrote:
“And to take your point, when we look at heartworms, what we all think is, "That's a horrible, tragic thing." This immediately raises the question, "Why would I have evolved a brain which would be so horrified by something so common and normal?" The Christian answer is that we are surrounded by a world which we all know is not the way it's supposed to be. And those reminders point us toward a God who promises to redeem this awful place.
The existence of the heartworm is not the most signifanct thing to me. The universal revulsion at heartworms is far more instructive.”
Kenneth Daniels was an evangelical Christian missionary. He no longer is able to be a Believer.
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/ken_daniels/why.html#Naturalism
Roughly halfway down his long web page he imagines a discussion between a naturalist (N) and a Supernaturalist (S) on the origin of morality. When I read that, I heard your voice when S was talking. :-}
Lee wrote: “Has anybody out there heard Hank elucidate his position on age more clearly?”
The Ken Daniels link I provided January 14 gives a list of Old Earth Creationists. Daniels puts Hank Hanegraaff on that list. He also puts Lee Strobel on that list.
I have a dim recollection from maybe two years ago of hearing just a few minutes of you interviewing Lee Strobel. It sounded like he was on the phone with you, rather than in the studio. As I recall it, you asked him about Young Earthism, and he answered, “There is a lot of evidence for a Young Earth, and there is a lot of evidence for an Old Earth.” He didn’t seem to commit to one side or the other. Does anybody know if he has committed in print to one side?
I still want to comment on the issue of the number of species as a function of time, and hope to do so within a week and wrap this thing up.
Andrew wrote: “Instead what we see is the massive ending of species and the development of none at all or very few anyhow. That fits a creation and fall perspective perfectly, but not a gradually evolving one at all.”
Certainly some large, splashy animals are endangered, or already extinct. In some cases, ecologists blame the burgeoning human population for this. Keep in mind that most species now alive are microbes. I do not know of any mention in the literature that the number of species of microbes is decreasing.
It seems to me that the OEE expectation for number of species alive versus time would go something like this: Low number early on in the history of living things on Earth. (Realistically, if we had a time machine or a time periscope to use, we could not expect biologists to all agree on exactly when some replicating thing in the water was doing enough things to count as being alive, and therefore being the first species on Earth.) Number of species increases. When some evolutionary breakthrough is achieved (clumping of single cells into a colony; true multicellularity; engulfing of competitors, i.e. using other living things as food; good sensory organs; brain; bony skeleton; movement onto dry land), the rate of species number growth should pick up. Massive extinctions, of which there seems to have been at least five, would rapidly push the number of species back down to a lower level.
I read somewhere that it is believed that more than 99% of the species that ever lived are now extinct. If Creationists agree with this, it ought to cause some head scratching over the idea that the Creator is an Intelligent Designer who could foresee problems and presumably design a robustness into His original species plans.
As for a “fall” that includes a global flood, see this link:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html
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