Did you notice anything about what he said? Like, how he never answered the actual question? I do have to wonder about his exact reasons for dodging Richard Dawkins’ questions about the age of the Earth. It’s almost as if he’s embarrassed by his own beliefs, knowing how old-fashioned, provincial, and downright wrong they must sound.

Tip o’ the Mintie to Michael Rosch. Originally posted on the Bad Astronomy Blog.

Yay!

The man who ousted him is Thomas Ratliff, who is — gasp! — an actual educator who has vowed to try to remove the politicization of the board and also to actually – gasp again! — listen to educators when it comes to, y’know, educational topics. You may remember McLeroy is the goofball who infamously said, "Someone has to stand up to the experts!"

However, mitigating the good news somewhat are some things to consider:

1) McLeroy is still on the BoE for the next seven months before his term runs out. He can do a vast amount of damage to Texas schoolchildren’s education in that time.

2) Ratliff only won by a very narrow margin, meaning a whole lot of Texas citizens either didn’t know about McLeroy’s maniacal attempts at derailing the Lone Star State’s educational system, didn’t care, or actually supported him.

3) McLeroy and his crew of revisionist creationists have already done so much damage that it cannot be easily repaired. There is a cycle to the way standards and such are reviewed and updated in Texas, so it could be years before things are straightened out, if at all.

Still, this is good news, and so I won’t use the "Texas: Doomed" graphic. Instead, I’ll remind you not to rest:

Tip o’ the ten gallon hat to Robert Estes and the many others who emailed me about this. Originally posted on The Bad Astronomy Blog.

I’m excited to announce the release of my new book Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be (from Kids Can Press). Years in the making, this full-color, illustrated hardcover book based upon Junior Skeptic is available now!

• view the Skeptic.com listing >

(Also available from bricks & mortar booksellers throughout North America, and from Amazon.com)

The Project

Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be is a straight-ahead introduction to the fact of evolution, to its mechanisms, and to the misunderstandings that surround it. The book aims to explain how evolution works — and how we know for a fact that it happens. It is suitable for readers aged 8 – 13.

There are many fine kids books about evolution, but this one is distinguished by its skeptical pedigree. While laying out the evidence for evolution, this book also takes a critical look at common objections to evolutionary theory. Those pseudoscientific notions (“Isn’t there a dinosaur still alive in Africa someplace? Doesn’t that mean evolution didn’t happen?”) are major barriers to understanding for many people. Luckily, getting to the bottom of those sorts of questions is what skeptics do.

The writing is as clear as I can possibly make it — and then some. Nothing teaches you to strip out ambiguity and jargon like writing for kids. After seven years on Junior Skeptic, I’ve had a lot of practice distilling complex ideas for younger readers. All the same, working closely with award-winning editor Valerie Wyatt (veteran of over 100 children’s books) taught me more than a few tricks — and infused Evolution, I believe, with yet further clarity and depth.

It’s a valuable process, but round after round of edits and drafts and versions can leave your head spinning. Is it good? Is it clear and precise, or as colorless as a phone book? It’s hard to tell after a while.

That’s one reason I’m so pleased to hear positive initial reactions! Literary review Quill & Quire calls Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be,

A full-throated defense and explication of Darwin’s theory…kept light and accessible by Loxton’s sense of humour and breezy prose style.

Whew! That certainly is what I was hoping for!

This illustration (created by Daniel Loxton for Evolution) started out as a hand-sculpted, hand-painted physical model.

The Art

Evolution is packed with large, full-color illustrations: cartoons; diagrams; photographs; and, complex scenes featuring photorealistic computer generated creatures like ichthyosaurs and mammoths.

Some Skeptic readers don’t realize I illustrate my own articles. Perhaps surprisingly, in terms of raw hours, illustration and design (such as Skeptic magazine covers and Junior Skeptic layout) are still the largest part of my work in skepticism.

On Evolution, my hand touched virtually every illustration: sometimes metaphorically (as in the digital colors for cartoons) and sometimes much more literally than one might guess. For example, my hominid friend Lucy here started out as a hand-sculpted, hand-painted physical model — with individually hand-punched strands of genuine hair! (I’m not sure I would recommend that technique to anyone!)

But I couldn’t have done it alone. Many of the images in Evolution were created with the help of ace cartoonist and 3D-modeling guru Jim W. W. Smith (who works with me here in the Junior Skeptic studio). Jim was responsible for some of the funniest and cleverest flourishes — and also for a considerable subset of the hard work.

Support the Educational Work of the Skeptics Society

It’s a wonderful feeling to bring a project like this to fruition, because it has the potential (I believe) to do some good in the world. I’d like to thank the Skeptics Society for giving me the opportunity to develop projects of this kind — especially Skeptic co-publisher Pat Linse, this book’s Producer.

I’d also like to thank the many individual donors and subscribers who in turn support Junior Skeptic and the other educational outreach work of the Skeptics Society.

To lend your own support, please let your friends know they may purchase a copy of Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be at

www.skeptic.com/productlink/b136HB

Or, even better: the Skeptics Society will give a copy of the book as a thank you gift to any donor at the $100 level (or higher)! To learn more, visit

www.skeptic.com/donate

Transitional Fossils

This remains one of the most frustrating contentions (someone who is not charitable or afraid of being sued might say “lies”) of the creationists – that there are no transitional fossils. Meanwhile, there are countless beautiful transitional fossils telling a clear story of common descent. How can two sides have such a different opinion about what appears to be a factual claim – are there transitional fossils or not? Well, the fossils are there, and the scientific community is pretty solid on their interpretation. Creationists simply deny their existence as a naked assertion, or (the more industrious) trot out logical fallacies and their own personal ignorance of evolutionary theory in order to deny the transitional status of fossils.

What this latter strategy amounts to is pointing to legitimate scientific debate about how to assemble an evolutionary tree (what evolved from what and when) or cladogram from the fossil evidence. Reverse engineering hundreds of millions of years of the evolution of millions of species from the fossil record is challenging, and so there is constant debate about the details. Creationists make the mistake of confusing debate about these details with debate about the bigger picture – that the fossils show a picture of common descent.

But perhaps the most common creationist fallacy used to dismiss transitional fossils amounts to saying – “if humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes.” Casey Luskin from the DiscoTute, a particularly sloppy apologist for ID/creationism, makes this exact fallacy on a recent post from the Evolution News and Views propaganda blog.

Here’s the logical fallacy – it assumes evolution is like a ladder or chain – one species changes into another, and then another, in a direct sequence. But that has never been the scientific consensus on evolution. Rather, when speciation events occur, one species become two. These two branches can now go off in different directions. In many cases what we find are many such branching events within related groups of species. It may happen that one branch leads to significant morphological change – a new group. And then there will be many species within a morphological space between the original species and the one branch that lead to the new group.  Many or all of these species may be considered morphologically intermediate or transitional – but very few will be on the direct line that led from the original ancestor species to the new group.

Further, after a speciation event one species may remain relatively unchanged for millions of years, while the other branches further, perhaps adapting to a new environment. The relatively unchanged species may retain features that are considered primitive for the highly changed cousin branch for millions, even tens of millions of years. And so we still have amoeba, even though some distant cousin of the modern amoeba branched off and eventually led to people. But we expect that there are creatures (extinct and extant) that exist in the morphological space between amoeba and humans – and not surprisingly, there are.

This is an extreme example, so lets give some that are more pertinent. We hypothesize that birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs. This led to the prediction that we would find creatures that occupy the morphological space between birds and dinosaurs. And we have – starting with archaeopteryx, but exploding in recent years to a host of feathered dinosaurs, some flying, some not. Perhaps not a single one of the creatures discovered is an actual bird ancestor – it matters not. They are transitional. Further, as the fossil record of these creatures was scant it seemed that feathered dinosaurs were all from a later period than the earliest birds. But as we found more and more fossils, and the picture started to fill in, as predicted the time of the oldest feathered dinosaurs moved closer and closer toward the earliest birds, and now we have specimens that predate them – problem solved.

Luskin is now arguing that Tiktaalik – the fishapod that is a fish filling a morphological space when one branch of fish were evolving fins into feet and adapting to walking, is not transitional. It is a fabulous transitional species, from a time and place and with the features we would generally expect for such a specimen. But we are talking about evolutionary events that happened about 380 to 400 millions years ago, and while we have many specimens they represent a tiny fraction of what would be necessary to create something close to a complete picture or cladogram. And so scientists connect the dots as best they can, but understand that each new fossil discovery is likely to revise the cladogram. The big picture is clear – fish evolved into tetrapods around this time. The details are sketchy and subject to change with each new find.

So it is not surprising at all that recently, as presented in Nature, scientists discovered the tracks of an early tetrapod that dates about 10 million years before Tiktaalik. This only means that Tiktaalik was a cousin of the slightly older species that led to tetrapods – like a chimpanzees to humans. Imagine a hypothetical future scientist millions of years from now trying to piece together human evolution from the fossil evidence. Their only primate specimens are lemurs, monkeys, and Homo erectus. They hypothesize that Homo erectus is a primate, and therefore predict that they will find transitional species between monkeys and H. erectus, and they find the remains of a chimpanzee from today – a million years younger than their erectus specimen. This find would confirm the evolution of hominids from non-hominid primates, even though the chimp specimen comes from a time later than the hominid specimen – because it fills the morphological space between monkeys and hominids.

Luskin does not get this, writing:

The fossil tetrapod footprints indicate Tiktaalik came over 10 million years after the existence of the first known true tetrapod. Tiktaalik, of course, is not a tetrapod but a fish, and these footprints make it very difficult to presently argue that Tiktaalik is a transitional link between fish and tetrapods. It’s not a “snapshot of fish evolving into land animals,” because if this transition ever took place it seems to have occurred millions of years before Tiktaalik.

If tetrapods evolved from fish, why are there still fish?

PZ Myers goes into more detail about what these new tetrapod tracks mean for our cladogram of the evolution of tetrapods from fish. It does make changes, putting certain lines further into the past than previously believed. I fully expect that every new fossil find (until a much more thorough picture emerges) will modify this cladogram, and buffoons like Luskin will declare each time he notices that this must call evolution itself into question.

The Creationist Editorial

Local papers frequently publish editorials from local creationists, who demonstrate clearly the effect that anti-evolution efforts have had on the quality of science education in this country. Often they just regurgitate the creationist propaganda they have soaked up and pass them along as unsupported assertions. You might say that picking on such editorials is not fair because they do not reflect the best arguments of the creationists. The sad fact is that they do – the Luskins of the creationist movement use more sophistimacated words, but their arguments are the same. And, in any case, it is good to address popular public belief.

Oleson Joe Lyng wrote in the Mesquite Public News a representative editorial (yes, we can make the obvious joke that he forgot the “i” in the middle of his last name).He goes through a fairly standard list of false creationist claims, including that there are no transitional fossils. He wrote:

Sir Fred Hoyle, one of the world’s leading astronomers and mathematicians said before the British Academy of Science that the probability of life arising from chance were the same as the probability of throwing a six on dice 5 million consecutive times!

He starts with a bit of an argument from authority, but the assertion is simply wrong, and has long been refuted. No one believes that a modern cell arose directly by chance (a straw man). Living cells themselves evolved over millions of years. There was likely a period of chemical evolution, which requires only the existence of a molecule that can make a crude copy of itself. From that the various components of the cell could have slowly come together. We certainly have only scanty knowledge about how this process occurred – but it simply wrong that evolution requires the spontaneous assembly of something close to a modern living cell.

He continues (I am picking a few of his arguments – he strings many of them together):

The law of entropy in nature says that time itself causes degradation by natural processes.

Just put a new car in that junkyard and watch it rust and fall apart over the years.

Things in nature tend to deteriorate into chaos over time or become more disorganized than organized.

The old second law of thermodynamics gambit. Here’s a tip to future creationist editorial writers – before embarrassing yourself (it’s Luskin’s job to embarrass himself, but you don’t have to do it) by vomiting forth a fallacious argument that has been destroyed numerous times in public discourse, exercise your Google skilz and find out what the counter argument is. I have dealt with this one myself numerous times.

But quickly – I wonder how Mr. Lyng thinks an oak tree grows from an acorn. If nature only results in deterioration and chaos, that should be impossible. Oh yes, acorns are alive and can use energy to grow and organize matter into an oak tree. Right – and life, which can use energy to grow and organize, can also evolve.

It gets better:

God created everything, and when he created light he created it already present from far away stars so we could see them!

Is anything too hard for God?

Thank you, Mr. Lyng, for proving that creationism is not science. If God can do anything, and therefore all disconfirming evidence of creation can be dismissed by waving the magic wand of divine omnipotence, there is no way to scientifically test the assertions of creationists. They are not scientific hypotheses – and creationism is not science.

While Mr. Lyng is skeptical of evolution, his standards of evidence are somewhat more forgiving when it comes to the Bible:

They espouse the bible as being totally non-literal when in fact predictions about Jesus’ first coming to the earth were fulfilled literally.

For example, Jesus was supposed to be crucified between two thieves.

Jesus was to be buried in a rich man’s tomb.

Jesus also said that the temple would be destroyed in Jerusalem.

That happened in 70 A.D.

Essentially his argument is that a literal interpretation of the Bible proves a literal interpretation of the Bible. So he starts with a straw man – “they” (I think he means evolutionists) don’t necessarily claim that the Bible is “totally non-literal” – there are many books in the Bible, and some are more historical than others. But in any case, many biblical scholars maintain that the authors of the New Testament were aware of the predictions of the Old Testament at the time they were writing, and so used these details as literary devices to make the point that Jesus was fulfilling the messianic predictions of the Old Testament.

Answering a Commenter

By coincidence, a comment popped up on an old creationist blog entry from about a year ago. I might as well add them to the pot. Bostonbruins writes:

One day, when we die we’ll see who’s right, won’t we?
And, if the Creationists are right, then we’re happy in heaven, and if we’re wrong then who gives a crap anyways, right?
But, if the Evolutionists are wrong then it matters a whole lot… because you’ll be in hell. So I’m thinking it’s a far better bet to believe in Creation.

Most skeptical readers of this blog will immediately recognize this line of reasoning as Pascal’s wager – it’s such an old canard it has a name. But wait, Mr. bostonbruins, what about the other 180 odd religions of the world, many of which are mutually exclusive? What if they are right? And in any case, he is equating accepting the scientific consensus on evolution with atheism, which is incorrect, and also assuming that if there is a God he would mind terribly much if we spend our seven or eight decades in the flesh flexing that meat between our ears. What – you used logic and evidence to arrive at your own conclusions rather than believing uncritically the primitive words of my prophets, distorted by centuries of retelling and translation? Eternity in hell for you.

Next we get the false equivalence argument:

And, to whoever said that individuals who believe in Creation are ignorant… Creationists are definitely NOT ignorant. Neither creation or evolution can be proven. Don’t even bother trying to tell me that they can be, because you’re just straight up retarded if you try to say that. Both are theories, because science means you can create it over and over again. You CANNOT create evolution again. Neither can you create Creation. ‘Cause we’re not God. So it’s a matter of what you want to believe in.

Science is not about proof – its about logic and evidence. Evolutionary theory has explanatory power and (more importantly) is very successful at making predictions that are validated by later observations and research. Evolution is a successful scientific theory. Creation is not even a theory – it is faith.

And science does not require creating stuff over and over. Only some sciences deal with laboratory experiments. What about astronomy. I guess unless we can make our own suns we cannot scientifically investigate the nature of suns – what powers them, how they evolve over their lifetime, and what happens to them. As long as there is a way to test claims (like, say, comparing genetic sequences or digging up fossils) you can do science. You don’t need to cook up stuff in a lab.

And as further evidence that creationism is not science, bostonbruins then repeats the omnipotence fallacy – God is all powerful, so that magically explains all the problems with creationism that you might think of. So there.

Conclusion

Aah. I feel a little better now. At least until the next time a creationist looks at me cross-eyed.

The "PoTo" Artifact

Some readers may be familiar with the “Coso Artifact”, a 1920-era Champion spark plug found inside a chunk of rock. Young Earth Creationists have pointed to this as evidence against evolution. Skeptics, however, find no such proof in the artifact. When ferrous metals are buried in earth, they often rapidly form iron oxide concretions incorporating the surrounding sediment.

This is a chunk of pipe that my son found in Port Townsend, Washington last week. I presume it’s steel. Note how parts of it are completely eaten away, while other parts have ballooned to the point of filling the center of the pipe completely with just such a concretion.

Uber cool… it’s like our very own Coso Artifact. As it’s from Port Townsend, I’m calling it the “PoTo” Artifact.

A quickie visual inspection by me does not spot any obvious marine shells or fossils embedded within the concretion, as were said to be found in the Coso Artifact (the actual artifact is lost to time and its owner long dead). However, such items are certainly found in the much about Port Townsend, and I would have every expectation of finding them if a thorough examination were done under a microscope.

Strangely, the Creationist claim to the Coso Artifact as evidence against evolution is not what you’d expect. I figured the reason was that it proves mineral formations can form in only a few decades, thus everything we see on Earth is consistent with a young age. But no, that’s not what was said at all. The Institute for Creation Research’s Donald Chittick mischaracterized it as a geode, then went on to say that the Coso Artifact proves ancient civilizations had advanced technology, which is inconsistent with “evolution”.

Will someone please slap me on the forehead, and give me a list of how many things are wrong with that?

WATCH the video on abc.net.au

I think it is a well done show, fair and balanced, so to speak, but I do find the premise rather interesting in as much as they purport to be studying “us” like we’re some mysterious species recently discovered on a remote island. From the voice over: “What do they believe? And are they all the same?” Picture David Attenborough hanging from a cliff face, “and here, if you look closely, you’ll see amongst the vast forest of believers the rare spotted atheist, whose diet remains a mystery but whose mating habits produce far fewer offspring than believers, and so they nest precariously on face cliffs such as this one so as not to be devoured by their carnivorous neighbors…”

Here’s the show summary:

Compass talks to atheists of different stripes.Eminent philosopher John Gray; science writer and editor of Skeptic magazine Michael Shermer; historian and writer Inga Clendinnen and Australia’s best known atheist Phillip Adams, all explore the philosophical and practical consequences of being an atheist.

How does their atheism shape their attitudes to science and the big questions of our time such as war and global warming? Is conflict between atheists and believers inevitable and necessary? Or, is this debate generating more heat than light?

Genesis Revisited

I happened upon this delightful video based on the Coda entitled “Genesis Revisited,” from my book, Why Darwin Matters, which I explained in the book: “To convey the logical absurdity of trying to squeeze the round peg of science into the square hole of religion, I penned the following scientific revision of the Genesis creation story. It is not intended as a sacrilege of the poetic beauty of Genesis; rather, it is a mere extension of what the creationists have already done to Genesis in their insistence that it be read not as mythic saga but as scientific prose. If Genesis were written in the language of modern science, it would read something like this.”

The voice is in this video is a computer generated voice called “Daniel” from RealSpeak

Genesis Revisited: A Scientific Creation Story
by Michael Shermer

In the beginning — specifically on October 23, 4004 B.C., at noon — out of quantum foam fluctuation God created the Big Bang, followed by cosmological inflation and an expanding universe. And darkness was upon the face of the deep, so He commanded hydrogen atoms (which He created from Quarks) to fuse and become helium atoms and in the process release energy in the form of light. And the light maker he called the sun, and the process He called fusion. And He saw the light was good because now He could see what He was doing, so He created Earth. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said, Let there be lots of fusion light makers in the sky. Some of these fusion makers He grouped into collections He called galaxies, and these appeared to be millions and even billions of light years from Earth, which would mean that they were created before the first creation in 4004 B.C. This was confusing, so God created tired light, and the creation story was preserved. And created He many wondrous splendors such as Red Giants, White Dwarfs, Quasars, Pulsars, Supernova, Worm Holes, and even Black Holes out of which nothing can escape. But since God cannot be constrained by nothing, He created Hawking radiation through which information can escape from Black Holes. This made God even more tired than tired light, and the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the continents drift apart by plate tectonics. He decreed sea floor spreading would create zones of emergence, and He caused subduction zones to build mountains and cause earthquakes. In weak points in the crust God created volcanic islands, where the next day He would place organisms that were similar to but different from their relatives on the continents, so that still later created creatures called humans would mistake them for evolved descendants created by adaptive radiation. And the evening and the morning were the third day. And God saw that the land was barren, so He created animals bearing their own kind, declaring Thou shalt not evolve into new species, and thy equilibrium shall not be punctuated. And God placed into the rocks, fossils that appeared older than 4004 B.C. that were similar to but different from living creatures. And the sequence resembled descent with modification. And the evening and morning were the fourth day.

And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life, the fishes. And God created great whales whose skeletal structure and physiology were homologous with the land mammals he would create later that day. God then brought forth abundantly all creatures, great and small, declaring that microevolution was permitted, but not macroevolution. And God said, “Natura non facit saltum” — Nature shall not make leaps. And the evening and morning were the fifth day.

And God created the pongidids and hominids with 98 percent genetic similarity, naming two of them Adam and Eve. In the book in which God explained how He did all this, in one chapter He said he created Adam and Eve together out of the dust at the same time, but in another chapter He said He created Adam first, then later created Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. This caused confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt, so God created theologians to sort it out.

And in the ground placed He in abundance teeth, jaws, skulls, and pelvises of transitional fossils from pre-Adamite creatures. One chosen as his special creation He named Lucy, who could walk upright like a human but had a small brain like an ape. And God realized this too was confusing, so he created paleoanthropologists to figure it out.

Just as He was finishing up the loose ends of the creation God realized that Adam’s immediate descendants would not understand inflationary cosmology, global general relativity, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, biochemistry, paleontology, and evolutionary biology, so he created creation myths. But there were so many creation stories throughout the world God realized this too was confusing, so created He anthropologists and mythologists.

By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrunneth with skepticism, so God became angry, so angry that God lost His temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply themselves (but not in those words). But the humans took God literally and now there are six billion of them. And the evening and morning were the sixth day.

By now God was tired, so He proclaimed, “Thank me its Friday,” and He made the weekend.
It was a good idea.

Last night, April 28, 2009, I debated Hugh Ross and Fuz Rana from Reasons to Believe (RTB), an evangelical Christian organization whose mission it is to give people “reasons to believe” beyond the usual faith-based reasons. In this case, it is to scour the annals of scientific discovery in search of findings that seem to gel well with biblical passages; and even if they don’t seem to fit, these gentlemen are adroit at massaging both the research and the scriptures such that in the end they will fit come hell or high water.

I blogged about my previous debate with the RTB boys before, so I won’t repeat their arguments and my rebuttals here, but this was most definitely a larger venue and audience — the basketball arena at the University of Texas at Austin with over 3,000 in attendance — so I made sure that my presentation was especially poignant and lively (first and foremost, I believe, a public speaker must be interesting, have something to say, and say it in a manner that gets people to pay attention and remember). For example, I nailed Ross right off the bat on his claim that the RTB “day-age” model of creation is correct when he said that the use of the Hebrew word “yom” in Genesis means “epoch” (and therefore no matter what scientists discover about the age of the origins of life, the Earth, and the universe, they can say “see, our model predicted that correctly”).

No, sorry gentlemen, yom means “day,” as in, well, a day, a 24-hour day. Yom Kippur, for example, is the “Day of Atonement”. Yom Kippur is, in fact, the 10th and final day of the Ten Days of Repentance that begin with Rosh Hashanah. Yom Kippur does not mean the “Age of Atonement,” the “Epoch of Atonement,” the “Geological Age of Atonement,” or the “Cosmological Constant of Atonement.” As I pointed this out I could see Mssrs. Ross and Rana scrambling through their Bibles and other works of reference they had on the table with them, but they never did respond so I presume that they have conceded the point.

I also made the general point that their RTB creation models are based on postdictions, whereas science depends on prediction. That is, the RTB models start with what we already know about nature, then search for biblical passages to match them, then predict that we’ll find more of the same. This is exactly what the Nostradamians do, as when they “predicted” 9/11 … after it happened! Sorry gentlemen, that’s not a prediction; that’s a postdiction. For RTB to be science, they must make predictions about things we do not already know!

Ross claims that the Bible — and only the Bible — has a creation story to match that of modern cosmology; that is, the creation of the universe out of nothing, that the earth was without form and void, etc. That’s not true, and I provided several examples from the ancient Mesopotamians and the ancient Egyptians. But I also found this one that I added to the collection, from the Tao-te Ching 25, 6th century B.C.E.:

There was something undifferentiated
and yet complete,
which existed before heaven and earth.
Soundless and formless,
it depends on nothing and does not change.
It operates everywhere
and is free from danger.
It may be considered
the mother of the universe.
I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

At one point in my presentation I pointed out the supreme irony of an atheist having to explain to theists how to properly read the Bible. The book of Job, for example, is about suffering and the problem of evil and why bad things happen to good people. It is not a book of cosmology. Further, I noted that Bible scholars of all stripes (most of whom are deeply religious) agree that the Bible is an edited volume written by many authors over a long span of time. This helps explain why, for example, in one passage Noah is instructed to take two of every kind of animal on the Ark, and in another passage he is instructed to take 7 of each kind. One version has the flood lasting 40 days and 40 nights, another passage says 150 days. In one passage Noah sends out a raven to find land. In another passage he sends a dove. And on and on. By adopting the methods of Reasons to Believe, you are forced to dismiss all of this scholarship and miss the real meaning of the Bible. The Bible is about how people should get along with one another and about morality and ethics and meaning. By trying to make the Bible fit the current estimates of the Hubble constant (to pick just one among many examples), me thinks you are missing the point of the book, and thus (in your world view) you are missing God’s message.

Is that supreme irony, or what?

In a form of what I call “Literary Patternicity” (patternicity is the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise), in the following passage from the great poet John Donne, it would appear that he anticipated the discovery of the double helix as the basis of life and reproduction:

Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string;
So to intergraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one,
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.

Wow, incredible, how could John Donne have anticipated the discovery by Crick and Watson centuries later? But more importantly, my point in this exercise in literary patternicity is that you will miss the beauty and power of Donne’s poetry if you try to read into it modern scientific discoveries.

I closed with a set of challenges to Ross and Rana, asking them to tell us, from their scriptural readings, the answers to the following unknowns in science:

1. Did Neanderthals have symbolic language, and what caused their extinction?
2. Is RNA the precursor to DNA, and what came first, cells or self-replicating molecules?
3. Did eukaryotic cells come from prokaryotic cells?
4. When did ID/God intervene in the history of life — never, occasionally, always?
5. Why doesn’t God heal amputees?
6. If it turns out that your testable RTB models are refuted, will you give up your belief in Jesus as your savior?

Interestingly, although Ross said that if his RTB models were refuted he would give up his belief in both God and Jesus, there erupted in the audience a loud chorus of “no” voices, which made my point beautifully: this is not, never was, and never will be about science, because no scientific evidence would ever dissuade believers from their belief. Why? Because such beliefs are not based on science in the first place.

Q.E.D.

Unbeknownst to me, in attendance (among the 900+ students and teachers) was famed “expelled” creationist Caroline Crocker, featured in the Ben Stein film Expelled as having been, well, expelled for simply mentioning Intelligent Design in her college course on cell biology at George Mason University. (You can read about what really happened to Crocker here: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-04-23.html). I would like to comment on her review of my talk, which you can read in full here:

http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/2/2009/04/04/how_disappointing

Crocker says she was “disappointed” in my talk primarily because I discussed religion and especially because I used humor. In my experience, I find that humorlessness is a trait endemic to quacks and pseudoscientists, who take themselves and their unproven ideas far too seriously. Even so, my sequence of editorial cartoons about creationists, along with the string of images of the iconic Time-Life book foldout of the linear sequence of human evolution from apes to us, both serve a larger purpose, which I telegraphed for people like Crocker who missed the point nonetheless: the evolution-creation controversy remains a lively cultural debate that must be addressed (and thus, Caroline, this is why I discussed religion), and the “ladder of progress” lineal descent is wrong (and Steve Gould devoted his life to debunking it and promoting in its stead the “richly branching bush” of evolution) and has led to a standard myth promulgated by creationists along these lines: “If humans came from apes, why are there still apes around?” (I even had a cartoon of this exact question from the B.C. cartoonist Johnny Hart, who is a creationist—Answers-in-Genesis features him here: http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v19/i1/hart.asp). The answer is simple: we didn’t come from apes; apes and humans came from a common ancestor 6-7 million years ago.

Crocker also upbraids me for an oversimplified characterization of ID thusly (in a non-cartoon slide):

1. X looks designed
2. I can’t think how X was designed naturally
3. Therefore X was designed supernaturally. (God of the gaps.)

Well, Caroline, this may well be a characterization of how IDers argue, but it is true nevertheless. All of the arguments of IDers really do reduce to this simple syllogism, whether X represents the wing, the eye, DNA, or the bacterial flagellum. It all comes down to an argument from personal incredulity along these lines: “Because I, Caroline Crocker, cannot think of how the wing (or eye, DNA, or flagellum) could have evolved naturally, it must have been designed supernaturally.”

But I didn’t just end my discussion of ID with that single slide (although I could have and made the point in full), I devoted about a third of my slides to specific arguments made by William Dembski, Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson, and the other ID leading lights. I know because I’ve debated them all and so I just used a facsimile of their slides to illustrate what they argue, then I presented the rebuttals provided by scientists in this debate over the past decade, such that in the end there is nothing left of substance to ID (UCSD filmed my talk and I gave them my powerpoint slides to drop into the video for clear presentation, and they will have that up on their web page soon).

Crocker also whines: “Then Dr. Shermer came to the question that children always ask, ‘Well, if God made everything, who made God?’” Well, if it is such a childish question, it should be easy to answer, no? No. For IDers like Crocker, finding an unanswerable X is the end of the search. For scientists, X is just the beginning of the search. I made this point about dark energy and dark matter: these are just words—linguistic placeholders—until cosmologists figure out what they are and how they operate in the natural world. Analogously, saying that “an Intelligent Designer” did it is not an answer for a scientist; it is just a linguistic placeholder until a natural cause can be found.

I punctuated this point with “Shermer’s Last Law” (“any sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God”), as a rebuttal to William Dembski’s statement that IDers make no claims about who or what the designer is (to avoid using the “G” word), and that ID could even be an alien intelligence. My initial response to Dembski is “baloney” (well, that’s the nice word for what I would actually say in private). Dembski doesn’t think that ID is ET, and neither does anyone else, so why make the argument? The answer is the 1st amendment of the U.S. Constitution. But my actual answer is that the most we could ever hope to find in search of a top-down intelligent designer of life (who is not an actual omniscient, omnipotent deity) is an ET capable of genetic engineering, cellular construction, and the technological capability of creating life, which any ETI more advanced than us by, say, 500 to 5000 years (following Ray Kurzweil’s logic of the coming singularity) will surely be capable of doing.

Finally, I did not (or did not mean) to say that every last proponent of ID is a Christian (exceptions provided by Crocker include Ben Stein, Anthony Flew, David Berlinski, and Steve Fuller), only that most of them are, most notably ID’s founding fathers: William Dembski, Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson, and Phillip Johnson. But don’t take my word for it. Here are their own words:

“Thus, in its relation to Christianity, intelligent design should be viewed as a ground-clearing operation that gets rid of the intellectual rubbish that for generations has kept Christianity from receiving serious consideration.” —William Dembski, “Intelligent Design’s Contribution to the Debate over Evolution: A Reply to Henry Morris,” 2005

On February 6, 2000, Dembski told the National Religious Broadcasters at their annual conference in Anaheim, California: “Intelligent Design opens the whole possibility of us being created in the image of a benevolent God…. The job of apologetics is to clear the ground, to clear obstacles that prevent people from coming to the knowledge of Christ. … And if there’s anything that I think has blocked the growth of Christ as the free reign of the Spirit and people accepting the Scripture and Jesus Christ, it is the Darwinian naturalistic view.”
(Quoted in: Benen, Steve. 2000. “Science Test.” Church & State, July/August, online at http://www.au.org/churchstate/cs7002.htm.)

In a feature article in the Christian magazine Touchstone, Dembski was even more succinct: “Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.”
(Dembski, William. 1999. “Signs of Intelligence: A Primer on the discernment of Intelligent Design.” Touchstone, p. 84.)

“Christians in the twentieth century have been playing defense. They’ve been fighting a defensive war to defend what they have, to defend as much of it as they can. It never turns the tide. What we’re trying to do is something entirely different. We’re trying to go into enemy territory, their very center, and blow up the ammunition dump. What is their ammunition dump in this metaphor? It is their version of creation.”
(Phillip Johnson, quoted in Benen, Steve. 2000. “Science Test.” Church & State, July/August, online: http://www.au.org/churchstate/cs7002.htm>.)

Johnson was even blunter in 1996: “This isn’t really, and never has been, a debate about science…. It’s about religion and philosophy.”
(Quoted in Jay Grelen, Jay. 1996. “Witnesses for the Prosecution.” World, November 30, online at: http://www.worldmag.com/world/issue/11-30-96/national_2.asp.)

“Johnson calls his movement ‘The Wedge.’ The objective, he said, is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the non-existence of God. From there people are introduced to ‘the truth’ of the Bible and then ‘the question of sin’ and finally ‘introduced to Jesus.’”
—Description of Phillip Johnson’s Wedge Program, “Missionary Man.” Church & State magazine, 1999

Q.E.D. This is all about religion and thus should be handled on this level.

I would like to rebut a few of the things Dr. Wells said. But first, I think it’s important to understand who Dr. Wells is and what he’s about. Now, there’s no way to do this without the appearance of an ad hominem attack, so all I can do is state that I’ve got nothing negative to say about him personally (I don’t know him personally) and nothing I say about him or his background should be construed to say anything about the accuracy of his scientific claims. We’ll take those on separately, on their own merit. Dr. Wells, if you read this, I honestly do not intend to offend or insult you personally, as that serves no constructive purpose. But a discussion of certain elements of your background is essential for our readers to understand where you’re coming from.

Dr. Wells strikes me as a very odd choice for a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, which is dedicated to pretty hardcore Christian conservatism — whether they would admit that or not, it’s clearly what they’re about. For one thing, he did time in Leavenworth as a conscientious objector. A lot of people would shake his hand and congratulate him for that. I might well myself. But how many Discovery Institute supporters would?

For another, he’s a member of the Unification Church, a follower of Korean Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Moonies, as they are popularly known, believe that the Reverend himself is the second coming of Christ; and again, I wonder how many of the Discovery Institute supporters approve of this belief. The Moonies paid for Wells’ first Ph.D. at Yale, which is in religious studies. They then paid for his second Ph.D. at Berkeley, in molecular and cell biology; which was, in his words, “To prepare myself for battle.” By his own statement, he went for a Ph.D. in biology specifically to better prepare himself to argue against it for religious reasons. And make no mistake, he did go through all the motions; even publishing a few legitimate papers (as required) in the course of his Ph.D. He now cites this background to defend his credibility as a scientist, which was, of course, the real reason the Moonies sent him to get it.

Without question, to any reasonable observer, his version of “doing science” is specifically and exclusively in support of promoting a religious agenda.

Finally, and perhaps most bizarre, is the testimony he gave at the 2005 hearings at the Kansas Board of Education about replacing science education with Creation stories. When asked how old he thought the Earth was, Wells answered:

I think the earth is probably four-and-a-half billion or so years old. But I’ll tell you this, I used to– I would have said, a few years ago, I’m convinced it’s four-and-a-half billion years old. But the truth is I have not looked at the evidence. And I have become increasingly suspicious of the evidence that is presented to me and that’s why at this point I would say probably it’s four-and-a-half billion years old, but I haven’t looked at the evidence.

This is from a man who has devoted his whole professional life to proving a Biblical Young Earth story by claiming that evolution doesn’t happen, and thus we are left only with a magical divine Creation as the only option. And the Discovery Institute’s senior fellow “hasn’t looked at the evidence.”

My assessment of Dr. Wells is that he is disingenuous about the way he makes his point. Because the facts are that:

• He never says the Earth is young.
• He never says that a magical divine Creation is the only option.
• He never says the Bible is literally true.
• He simply says evolution is not supported by scientific evidence.

To any person of reasonable intelligence, the only reason anyone would devote their entire professional life to a church-funded battle to disprove evolution is to bolster the church’s claims that the Bible is literally true. I don’t know, but I would bet, that Wells would answer “Hey, those are your words, not mine; I’m only saying there’s scientific doubt over evolution.”

And that’s why I assess him as disingenuous. If he wants my respect (which I’m sure he doesn’t care about) he would be a stand-up guy and come straight out and admit his beliefs and his agenda. They are obvious anyway, so the only thing he gains by distancing himself from them is the appearance of intellectual dishonesty.

OK, so enough of my statements about Dr. Wells, his background, and why I think he brings an obvious agenda to the table. Let’s get to his radio interview.

Now, for the sake of brevity, I’m going to have to do extensive paraphrasing here. If anyone feels that my paraphrasing of Dr. Wells is inaccurate, I’ll happily update this post, so let me know.

CREATIONIST ARGUMENT: Evolution is just a theory, not a fact.

SKEPTOID: An attempt to discredit theories by suggesting that they are merely guesses or assumptions. The FACT of evolution is that species change over time, and the THEORY of evolution is our best explanation of how and why that happens. Fact and theory are different; you don’t graduate from one to the other.

DR. WELLS: “I don’t make this argument”, because it’s based on the assumption that species change over time, and this does not happen. We’ve never observed it. There are small changes within species, but one species has never evolved into another. Evolution is, in fact, merely a speculation.

Any professional biologist — and by that, I mean one who got his degree with the intention of actually learning something and becoming a contributor to the field — will be baffled by this claim. Many, many such cases have been directly observed. Someone in Dr. Wells’ position obviously has to have been exposed to this research, so you have to judge for yourself his honesty in answering this question. The literature is saturated with examples that are conclusively documented. In fact, you don’t even have to look any further than Talk Origins – the most obvious index of research that proves evolutionary theory – that Dr. Wells must be familiar with.

It’s very easy to make a blanket statement like “No species has ever evolved into another” when you’re on a friendly radio interview and there is no requirement to defend your statements (I know, because I enjoy the same freedom on my podcast; the difference is I report what the science supports). I would like to hear Dr. Wells discuss some of the specific examples with the researchers who were actually involved.

CREATIONIST ARGUMENT: Evolution is controversial; scientists disagree on its validity.

SKEPTOID: Creationists grossly mischaracterize the ongoing study over numerous minor points as disagreement over the validity of the theory as a whole. They love to publish lists of “scientists who disagree with evolution” — like their “Dissent from Darwin” list, 700 names out of 3.2 million Ph.D.s worldwide, or about 2 percent of 1 percent — and refer to this as widespread controversy.

DR. WELLS: Scientific consensus has often been wrong in history (cites a few Middle Ages examples). A growing number of scientists dispute common descent. Evidence is what counts; not popular opinion. “Darwinists” play word games: They get you to agree to evolution by describing micro-evolution, which nobody disagrees with; and then they twist the meaning to refer to macro-evolution, which does not happen.

Of course science has been wrong throughout history. He neglects to mention that its self-correcting nature is its greatest strength. Does he expect us to throw the scientific method out the window because people used to believe in necromancy? No? Then why bring this up? If we’re going to accept that the scientific method is the best way to learn things, then we need to go where it takes us. And all the evidence we have supports modern evolutionary synthesis. That’s the science, it’s not “popular opinion” as polls of the American public clearly show.

Micro-evolution and macro-evolution are terms that Young Earthers invented to explain examples of evolution that they’ve found otherwise incontrovertible. “Evolution does not take place.” “Here’s an example of evolution taking place.” “Oh, that’s just MICRO-evolution.” The only word game being played here is yours, Dr. Wells.

CREATIONIST ARGUMENT: Evolution is itself a religion.

SKEPTOID: I don’t recall seeing any references to divine superbeings in the evolutionary literature, and I’ve never met someone who considers himself a member of any Darwin Church.

DR. WELLS: “Darwinists” mistakenly call anyone with a scientific point that disputes the Official Consensus a “Creationist”. Darwin’s theory is actually a materialistic philosophy, and so is actually a denial of religion. Darwin’s original writings were a religious argument (or anti-religious, which is the same thing).

I’ve met extremely religious people to whom everything is black and white. You can’t walk down the street without it being, to them, either in praise of Jesus or an act of Satanism. To Dr. Wells, you can’t even practice scientific research without it being a religious act. Note that one of his favorite words is “Darwinist”, which he uses almost exclusively in place of “scientist” or “biologist”. If you’re not a Young Earther, you’re a “Darwinist”.

Dr. Wells is known as a “Moonie” because he worships Sun Myung Moon as the Messiah. By referring to biologists as “Darwinists”, Dr. Wells hopes to evoke the same worshipful relationship. A “Darwinist”, by all the rules of language, can only mean a person who worships Darwin. Young Earthers often imply, or even outright state, that biologists are a religious faithful who worship Darwin and consider his writings sacred.

Wells’ constant use of the Creationist-invented term “Darwinist” is highly deliberate. It’s not merely casual speech.

Calling a biologist a “Darwinist” is as absurd as calling an aerospace engineer a Wrightist. Sure, Darwin and the Wrights did some important early work in their scientific fields, and they deserve their due accolades; but I can’t think of any person knowledgeable in either field who believes that early work was infallible, inerrant, and sacred.

If Dr. Wells disagrees with any of this, then I challenge him to stop using the term. That’ll be the day. Poisoning the well through use of the term “Darwinism” is his favorite device, and one of his most effective weapons.

CREATIONIST ARGUMENT: Evolution has never been observed.

SKEPTOID: Evolution has indeed been exhaustively observed and documented. Open a textbook.

DR. WELLS: There is no evidence that any new species has ever appeared through natural processes.

If you believe that Noah’s flood created the Grand Canyon in just a few days 4,000 years ago, then it’s easy to accept that rabbit skeletons and Tyrannosaurus fossils are never found together because they were standing on opposite sides of the river at the time. [I guess... perhaps Dr. Wells would be good enough to enlighten us as to his own explanation for the geotemporal distribution of the fossil record, since no new species have appeared since Creation took place.]

CREATIONIST ARGUMENT: There is an absence of transitional fossils.

SKEPTOID: Examples of transitional fossils in the horse record given. Links given to numerous online sources of many hundreds of transitional fossils.

DR. WELLS: All these versions of fossils only prove that there were many types of animals. It does not prove that one changed into another — something we’ve never seen. (And by the way, nobody uses horses any more as examples of transitional fossils.)

If you have a different explanation for their geotemporal placement, I’m ready to hear it. When evidence is presented, it’s inadequate to simply say “No, I don’t believe it.” The scientific method provides a way to build a theory to explain the observation. So, develop and present your alternate theory.

Note: If you plan to say that the geotemporal placement is useless because all the rock strata on Earth were laid during the few days following Noah’s flood, fine, let me know and we’ll have some geologists on hand to hear your evidence of that. If you still “haven’t looked at the evidence” since Kansas 2005, that’s no problem, we’ll be happy to fill you in.

CREATIONIST ARGUMENT: It’s too unlikely that complex forms could evolve by chance.

SKEPTOID: Explained the basics of bottom-up design guided by selection: Improvement is not only likely, it’s virtually inevitable. Software simulations illustrate it well.

DR. WELLS: “Show me.” (Laughter.) “These are huge claims being made here, and I would like to see some evidence for it.” (And then the crown jewel:) “Who designed that software?” (Comedy rimshot sound effect.)

No, you wouldn’t like to see such evidence. Why do you even say that? YOU’VE BEEN SHOWN SUCH EVIDENCE A THOUSAND TIMES and you still deny that anyone has any. I’m not going to play your game and repeat it here for you, at the expense of hours of data collection and assimilation, which you would ignore the same as you’ve always ignored it. So you should react with eye rolling and condescending laughter, and say something like “Big surprise, he says he refuses to show me evidence — why do you think that is?”

The fact is I don’t really care what you think. Nobody interested in learning really cares. In fact, I don’t even join with those who blame the Young Earthers for the superstitious beliefs held by so many young students in the United States: I blame a failing science education system. So, while I certainly find the Discovery Institute’s efforts to replace science with superstition to be counterproductive, I don’t feel that a direct confrontation is the solution: There are a thousand other superstitions waiting to take its place. Better communication and dissemination of good information is the solution.

That’s why I produce Skeptoid and contribute to SkepticBlog. Entertain, enlighten, and educate.