Jim Gardner. 22nd June, 2009.
Jim Gardner is a guest poster on State of Protest. He also blogs at How good is that? and Unenslaved.
For the last year, I’ve done my best to only blog on subjects which I feel as if I have a sufficient grasp upon, so that I might argue my corner persuasively should the occasion arise. Every now and then I found it necessary to correct the occasional typo, or factual error by either editing the entry or posting an apology in the comments.
For a non-scientist, considering the occasionally complex subject matters I choose to cover, thankfully this was something I felt the need to do very rarely. I like to think I do a pretty good job of explaining how I have arrived at understanding, for example, Darwinian Natural Selection, to a small but growing audience of people interested in debating the facts.
Imagine my disappointment, then, at having realised within hours of posting “This is the level Answers In Genesis have stooped to,” that what at first appeared to be a photograph of the kind of road-side placard we’ve come to expect from the people who gave the world the Creation Science Museum, that in fact the sign was a Photoshop mock-up, intended presumably as a satirical swipe at their usual ludicrously ill-informed style (or lack thereof).
Having realised my mistake, I quickly posted a comment saying that I was working to establish who faked the image and why there was no indication that it was a fake on the front page of freethoughtpedia—the site I subsequently discovered had originally hosted the image, when it was posted (direct image link) to reddit.com, where I first came across it.
Before you could say, “always check your sources,” Andrew McKenzie, from AnswersInGenesis.org left a comment in which he attempted to distance his organisation from the sinister message of the faked advertisement, by using language which effectively agreed with it, without seeing the irony in this or in it being a satirical jibe at the very argument he then very lengthily put forward, without any sense of embarrassment.
Read Andrew McKenzie’s original comments here.
Stunned at his attempts to equate “Darwinists” (whatever they are) with Nazis and left with aching sides as he yet again trotted out the usual nonsense about Microevolution versus Macroevolution and so on, I felt that it would be appreciated both here and elsewhere, if rather than reiterating all of the answers to these tired empty assertions which creationists always completely ignore anyway, I simply provided two extracts from my book on this subject, and invited comment and criticism on that, as well as on Answers In Genesis’ no-doubt riveting reply.
I begin the chapter ‘Attacks on Science’ with a brief explanation of what creationists want the average Christian to think they stand for and believe in, followed by an explanation of why they don’t really believe what they publicly say and don’t think that way privately either.
Advocates of so-called Intelligent Design, the alternative theory on how life on Earth came into being, make exactly the same claims that creationists have made for hundreds of years, but dress them up in new language. In the relatively low income quarters of American society, where the free enterprise churches rely upon regular attendance to keep their ministers in the style to which they are accustomed, a poorly informed congregation forms a ready made audience for Intelligent Design. It offers teachers and parents in communities which have rarely seen anyone in their family go on to higher education, affordable learning materials and support; colourful and expensive books and media containing craftily worded articles which sound, look and behave like science education, while in actuality contain no evidence whatsoever for their extraordinary claim that an intelligent designer must have played some part in the creation of life on Earth, apart from “because is says so in the bible”—and since it is beyond questioning that the bible is the infallible, unalterable word of God, Darwinian evolution by natural selection must be bad science because it explains the whole process of life on Earth from the planet’s earliest days of rock eating bacteria, right up to the here and now and henceforth without once requiring supernatural intervention.
Creationists project so-called alternatives to the reality of Darwinian Natural Selection, upon the canvas of limitless imagination. The trouble with having no limits, is that you have no way of differentiating the facts from the fiction. Hence, I might suggest, why no-one outside of Evangelical Christianity has shown the slightest interest in baseless fantasies of Intelligent Design—which largely hinges upon the fallacy that adaptation by modification could only be proven if the fossil record contained evidence of one species intermediately becoming another—such as a half ape, half man or half whale, half hippo.
Even if a dearth of evidence had not been unearthed showing, for example, that whale fins are adapted from hippo ankles, that does not mean a supernatural explanation for life on Earth would be somehow more valid, simply because these transitions were missing from the fossil record. As it happens these transitional forms, which Darwin himself did indeed admit would be handy if they were ever found, have now been unearthed. Consequently, adaptation by natural selection has been corroborated in hundreds of thousands more taxonomic groupings than were known to have existed in Darwin’s day.
On top of the fossil record becoming more complete year on year, we now have the additional yet entirely independent information from DNA—and yet, in the creationist rhetoric there is no mention whatsoever of the ever unfolding evidence in favour of, not just evolution by Darwin’s standards, but by the information as revealed over the past 150 years of critical analysis which has been built up ever since. Each and every one of these studies having been devised with the in-build reliability of the scientific method, meaning that if any of the findings unearthed contradicted natural selection in even the slightest way it would be investigated, tested, verified and if found to be the case, ultimately ruled out as a theory of life on Earth. The reason that this has never happened is not because we have yet to find a way to induce supernatural intervention into logical hypothesis—it is because in even attempting to do so, we must first establish what God is and is not capable of doing.
The only way to establish these parameters, is to turn the question of who He is back upon those who still dogmatically believe He exists, despite the contradictory evidence. To which the answer always comes back the same. He is an externalisation of the ego into the care of an arbitrary set of ideals in which the believer happens to have an emotional and cultural investment. This is the true level of self-delusion we are up against with people who assume divine intervention is a better way of describing the appearance of complex, DNA based life. No matter how they dress up their attack on advocates of Darwinian Evolution in everything from Hollywood comedies to sinister circulars printed by scientific sounding institutions distributed in evangelical churches and faith based schools around the world, the simple fact is, first-cause special pleading doesn’t even answer its own questions, let alone legitimate problems which exist within genuine science.
Intelligent Design is a spearhead by creation “scientists,” like Michael Behe, who famously had his take on the theory, which he named Irreducible Complexity, thrown out of a Kansas court room. In May 2005 he and the Thomas More Law Centre defended, pro bono, a school board whose science education curriculum was hijacked by various church groups, who argued that children in the State should be told about both sides of the debate between evolutionists and creationists by giving equal time to both theories. Undeterred, that the Bush appointed ultra conservative judge, John Jones III, ruled that Irreducible Complexity has “no basis in fact,” Behe continues to argue that the central tenets of his claims are valid; that there are certain kinds of bacteria whose constituent parts do not exist in simpler forms of life and therefore could not have evolved from them. Even if this were true, which it isn’t, the further inference being made is that if these simple flagellum did not evolve into their current state, something or someone must have designed them that way as-is. The answer to the question of who exactly the designer in this case is shouldn’t take a genius to work out. However, in the nightmare scenario where this nonsense would actually be disseminated into the public school system, the identity of the designer is a matter of personal conscience and would be therefore left open to the parents to teach to the child as they see fit. This ambiguousness arrises from a 1997 Supreme Court ruling that public schools could not teach the biblical account of creation instead of evolution, because “doing so would violate the constitutional ban on establishment of an official religion.” Regardless of this, in all practical terms, the assumption that the Judaeo–Christian god Yahweh must be the designer ID refers to is implicit. If there is any doubt in this regard, it should be further noted that very little of the funding, legal representation or support for ID comes from outside the Christian evangelical movement which is largely an American phenomena—with few born-again evangelicals outside of the US giving Intelligent Design any credence whatsoever.
I await Andrew McKenzie and Answers In Genesis’ reply eagerly, but I’m prepared to take bets that their evidence won’t be so much based upon genetic sequences with unique function which they can prove could only have been designed, for example, but that it will likely take the form of yet more ad hominem personal attacks on individual scientists, who’ve been seduced by the (devil) illusion of beauty inherent to such a simple explanation to all life on Earth as that which is offered by Darwinian Natural Selection.
Having seen this kind of misdirection from answering the questions put to them many times before, I also present here a selection from my book on what is perhaps the creationist’s favourite target, the naturalist Ernst Haeckel—who is widely used by creationists as proof that there are, as they put it, “frauds in evolution,” who are (you can’t make this stuff up) protected from being exposed by an atheistic, materialist agenda, propagated by a conspiracy of an unseen, anti-American, un-Christian elite. If this sounds far fetched, perhaps first you might like to read Andrew McKenzie’s follow-up comments and gasp in horror as he equates Professor Dawkins with Hitler while asserting that “atheism [can not] account for objective morality.”
In 1874, Haeckel published drawings which he claimed to show stark similarities between early embryonic development in completely different species of animal. Later Haeckel was compelled to clarify that some of the drawings were projections and not based upon actual observations. However this and this alone is sighted to this day as proof that Darwin based his work upon fraudulent evidence. This popular myth, spread by the anti-evolution movement, completely fails to acknowledge that not only were both of Darwin’s works, The Descent of Man and On the Origin of Species, published before the works of Haeckel’s, but that both these books used only two embryonic drawings, neither of which were Haeckel’s.
Faced with this reality, the ever resourceful creationists have developed a second potentially far more damaging blind spot against Haeckel than this rather easily debunked falsehood. Despite Haeckel’s admittance that certain of his works were artistic interpretations, rather than direct observations, he was able to later prove that early stage embryonic development shared cross-species characteristics which not only agreed with the theory of natural selection, but added even greater verisimilitude to his own recapitulation theory, which proposed a link between development of form and evolutionary descent. Creationists make no mention of this in their many tirades against the fake embryo drawings, because they know it renders impotent their entirely fabricated case against him. Nor is there any concession in anti-Darwin / Haeckel literature, propagated by anti-evolutionists, that while Haeckel’s work was at first based upon a hunch, it nevertheless later transpired to be one which was strikingly accurate, proving that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” More than this, Haeckel’s theory did this without having to rely upon the fossil record alone to concur entirely with Darwinian natural selection. “The embryo,” Haeckel said, “is Ariadne’s thread,” when he discovered that in a stage of development known as Gastrulation, before Organogenesis occurs, forming the internal organs and later still the limbs and features of each distinct species, all life shares a similar transitory path. “Here,” at this early stage of zygote, Haeckel wrote, “is a recapitulation of the very first animal,” a hypothetical animal which he named Gastraeaden. His detractors howled with condemnation, calling the tree of life model which Haeckel’s built upwards from this simple early creature, a “most outrageous invention.” But unlike the amorphous tree of life which Darwin had used as a metaphor, Haeckel’s tree was the first scientific attempt at devising a taxonomy of every living thing on Earth which had so-far been discovered and studied.
Ever since then Precambrian proto-creatures have begun to emerge in the fossil record—showing the incredible accuracy with which Haeckel based his predictions about our oldest of ancestors. But still creation science continues to insist that Haeckel is a fraud awaiting exposition; that others of his hypothetical transitory creatures, such as pithecanthropus are deliberately being covered up by the scientific community, scared of what this might mean for evolutionary theory. This despite that there is yet one more nail in the coffin of the “God did it” hypothesis, which not only confirms the work of Darwin and Haeckel, solidifying their theories with modern super-computing and scanning electron microscopy—but that the DNA evidence within each and every living creature on Earth underscores the last 150 years of scientific endeavour and encases it in solid, unambiguous, cold, hard evidence.
Whether it be an antelope or a zebra, Mormon or Catholic, Sunni or Shia, bonobo or trilobite, by sequencing the genetic codes of all life on Earth, we can date the age of animals in the tree of life. Trichoplax, for example. Discovered in 1883 by the German zoologist Franz Eilhard Schulze, is a multi-cellular animal of around a millimetre in width, lacking in any organs or internal structure, containing about 98 million base pairs in their DNA. Of the 11,514 predicted protein coding genes in Trichoplax, almost 87% of them are identical to the genes found in all animals on Earth, humans included. Trichoplax’s ancestors diverged from the main evolutionary trunk over 1 billion years ago—perfectly corroborating Darwin’s assumption that there must have been abundant life in the Precambrian seas.
What’s more, Trichoplax is but one of a long list of animals in the phyla taxonomic grouping, each of which diversify into separate species. Thorny head Acanthocephala has around 750 species. Little ring Annelida is described in around 15,300 different species. Spiny skin Echinodermata found in over 13,000 extinct species and around 7000 still in existence. Thread like Nematoda has between 80,000 and 1 million distinct species—each of them descended from common ancestors exactly as described by Darwinian natural selection and not one of them lacking in any way shape or form, or in any way whatsoever wanting for divine intervention in explaining how each came to exist.
There are plants in the phyla taxonomic group too. Flower-horn Anthocerotophyta, Horn-shaped sporophytes. Liverworts and mosses, like Bryophyta and Marchantiophyta. There are Fungal divisions of the phyla, like Chytrids, Zygomycetes, Sac fungi and Basidium Mushrooms, each and every last one of those is described by decent with modification according to Darwinian principals of natural selection—and, as with all animal life on Earth—can be completely described without once requiring bronze-age creation myths to be shoe-horned into the story to completely reconstruction their biogenetic history.
Not content, however, with the evidence contained within the hundreds and thousands of other taxonomic groupings, each containing hundreds of thousands of species, the supposedly incomplete, yet in fact ever expanding fossil record continues to form the only basis of attack upon scientific rationalism from within creation so-called “science.”
Despite the Victorian-age origins of myths such as that of The Missing Link, and successive and complete explanations of why the discovery of such a link in the fossil record alone would not be proof of descent by modification, creationists continue to call for its discovery and continue to ignore the evidence which ultimately provides exactly what they ask for.
Ungulates like cows and pigs, for example, have an ankle bone remarkably similar to the fossilised remains of cetacean whales, found in the ancient oceans. Not proof alone of the common ancestry between sheep and llamas, until we look at the genetic evidence. When we do that, we see that cetacean whales and hippopotamuses are descended from a common ancestor that lived over 55 Million years ago.
And what does the creation “science” movement have to say about this?
“According to scripture the Earth didn’t exist 55 Million years ago and therefore the Precambrian explosion is proof that before sin there was no death and therefore nothing was dead to become a fossil in the first place.” – Kent Hovind, founder of Creation Science Evangelism Ministry, currently serving a ten-year prison sentence in a Federal Correctional Institution, after being convicted in 2006 on 58 counts of tax fraud.
