Evolution of creationism: Pseudoscience doesn't stand up to natural selection

Daytona Beach News-Journal ^ | 29 November 2004 | Editorial (unsigned)

[PatrickHenry]

In a poll released last week, two-thirds of Americans said they wanted to see creationism taught to public-school science pupils alongside evolution. Thirty-seven percent said they wanted to see creationism taught instead of evolution.

So why shouldn't majority rule? That's democracy, right?

Wrong. Science isn't a matter of votes -- or beliefs. It's a system of verifiable facts, an approach that must be preserved and fought for if American pupils are going to get the kind of education they need to complete in an increasingly global techno-economy.

Unfortunately, the debate over evolution and creationism is back, with a spiffy new look and a mass of plausible-sounding talking points, traveling under the seemingly secular name of "intelligent design."

This "theory" doesn't spend much time pondering which intelligence did the designing. Instead, it backwards-engineers its way into a complicated rationale, capitalizing on a few biological oddities to "prove" life could not have evolved by natural selection.

On the strength of this redesigned premise -- what Wired Magazine dubbed "creationism in a lab coat" -- school districts across the country are being bombarded by activists seeking to have their version given equal footing with established evolutionary theory in biology textbooks. School boards in Ohio, Georgia and most recently Dover, Pa., have all succumbed.

There's no problem with letting pupils know that debate exists over the origin of man, along with other animal and plant life. But peddling junk science in the name of "furthering the discussion" won't help their search for knowledge. Instead, pupils should be given a framework for understanding the gaps in evidence and credibility between the two camps.

A lot of the confusion springs from use of the word "theory" itself. Used in science, it signifies a maxim that is believed to be true, but has not been directly observed. Since evolution takes place over millions of years, it would be inaccurate to say that man has directly observed it -- but it is reasonable to say that evolution is thoroughly supported by a vast weight of scientific evidence and research.

That's not to say it's irrefutable. Some day, scientists may find enough evidence to mount a credible challenge to evolutionary theory -- in fact, some of Charles Darwin's original suppositions have been successfully challenged.

But that day has not come. As a theory, intelligent design is not ready to steal, or even share, the spotlight, and it's unfair to burden children with pseudoscience to further an agenda that is more political than academic.

[Asfarastheeastisfromthewest...]

See my post 741. I suppose that if one was to take the words intelligent and design in their broader scope, a belief in life on earth being the result of aliens seeding the planting billions of years ago could also be included. If the common understanding of 'ID' also includes that, it is news to me and obviously my comments about 'in the beginning everything was perfect' don't apply. As for John Calvert, I have no insight into his personal beliefs.

[Oztrich Boy]

I'll stipulate your hypothetical, and claim that given a computer, Francis Bacon could have figured out in large part how it works, by suitable empirical tests. - Right Wing Professor

Francis Bacon couldn't have done squat. For example, he had no electricity - r9etb

I understood you were using a synechoche of "given the use of a computer"

(Why are Biblical Literalists so darn literal?)

[NJ_gent]

"In my experiment, the flies are contained in a large tank. The tank has plenty of water, air, food and whatever else is needed to make a wonderful fruitfly habitat."

You don't want a wonderful fruitfly habitat; you want one that encourages the traits you want and discourages (through natural selection) the traits you do not want. That environment must shift gradually over time to continue favoring those with the particular traits which will lead toward different creatures that become successively less like fruitflies and more like the creature you want. In all actuality, with something so limited, you'd more likely end up with something like an amphibian. I suppose if land-dwelling predators were gradually introduced, natural selection would ensure that those staying the longest in the water survived, which eventually could lead more toward fish-like or whale-like creatures. All this is incredibly simplistic. There's not just one particular trait you'd have to encourage - you'd have to encourage the right traits at the right times while discouraging the wrong traits and the right times.

"For example, food at the surface of the water would kill off the fruitflies who were stupid enough to land on the water. If the food were just below the surface, then fruitflies who could dunk their little fruit fly heads in the water and eat would have the advanatage."

Something tells me your fruitfly experiment would end with extinction of the little beasties. Mother nature doesn't target one trait in very specific ways. In fact, she generally targets a vast array with varying degrees of importance attached.

"Theoretically, after thousands of generations of fruit files, and if evolution of species is true, then eventually the fittest fruit flies will have evolved to be able to swim to the bottom of the tank and get the food."

In a perfectly-designed experiment? Possibly - though they'd be nothing like fruitflies any longer. Setting up something like this, including a huge team of top-of-the-line professionals, massively complex computer simulations to predict proper environmental conditions for optimal speed of evolution, round-the-clock monitoring and care for the environment, etc, then letting it run for the hundreds of years it'd likely require would probably cost in the tens of billions, if not the tens of trillions. Why hasn't someone designed an experiment like this? Because no one's offering a multi-trillion dollar contract to do so.

[Oztrich Boy]

Depends on what you mean by impacted. In terms of sheer numbers of people, the winner has to be Buddha

Numbers alone don't give the full picture

Buddha: mostly harmless

[Killing Time]

Are you going to reply to my #295?

[r9etb]

No I think that scientists on this thread are arguing that ideas such as intervention by an intelligent designer are not science, not that they couldn't possibly have occurred.

I don't agree. The theory of evolution is based on the explicit assumtion that intelligent intervention (a term I think works better than "design") did not occur. The present controversy is centered on suggestions that intelligent intervention may have occurred, and the "scientists" are fighting hard against it. They won't even consider it unless somebody else provides them evidence of intelligent -- which says they've already decided for themselves that there is no intelligent intervention.

Furthermore, I think many are waiting to see evidence that an intelligent intervention did in fact occur during the process of devolpment from single-celled organisms to modern life. If such evidence is given, it will be considered.

This is a good example of what I'm talking about. If you carefully consider the statement, you'll see that you have in fact a priori assumed that intelligent intervention did not occur, ever, not even once. Where is the positive evidence to back up that assumption?

On the flip side, we know for an absolute fact (i.e., we have abundant positive evidence) that intelligent intervention is responsible for many of the characteristics of the plant and animal life we commonly see around us. Thus, the idea of intelligent intervention is clearly not absurd -- it is in fact eminently believable, because it is commonly practiced.

Yet despite the clear positive evidence, and the basic reasonableness of the possibility of at least occasional intelligent intervention, we see the scientists fighting tooth and nail against the idea.

This raises an obvious question: given the positive evidence for design in common plant and animal life, is it valid to call your a priori assumption truly scientific, or is it more accurate to call it a materialist bias?

My goal on this thread is not to undertake the fool's errand of trying to disprove evolution; but rather to uncover the assumptions that underlie the "science" of evolution. As Einstein pointed out in defense of Relativity, real learning comes when one can identify, understand, and if necessary correct underlying assumptions. That exercise is equally necessary in this discussion.

[Woahhs]

All that you are claiming is they both can't exist in parallel. Dance around the point all you want, but your 'test' is a sham.

[Right Wing Professor]

Francis Bacon couldn't have done squat. For example, he had no electricity -- not to mention no idea even what electricity is. As such, there's no way he'd have been able to see the computer do much more than sit there. He'd have found himself staring at an odd set of objects, perhaps connected together by the odd flexible doohickeys. He'd have noted that they were covered by strange materials the likes of which he had never seen. He had no way of knowing that pushing the buttons with oddly-placed letters caused things to happen on the softish flat, dark-colored thing, and so on.... He may very well have dismissed it as some sort of odd religious artifact. It would have been highly unlikely indeed that he'd have been able to discern that this hunk of stuff would do math, help him write, and give him light to read by at night.

Then if you're not going to let poor old Francis plug in the computer, it's not a good analogy, because we can read the genetic code, and we do know how it translates into proteins. We may not have all the finer details of interference, suppression, promotion, etc., down yet, but we have a complete chemical structure, and most of the important details of how it operates.

Given that algebraicists are still hard at work, I'd say that there's still plenty of algebra left to be invented. Certainly the depths of algebra have not been fully plumbed, and that is obviously even more true for mathematics in general. I don't see what that has to do with a discussion of evidence for design, however.

You're asserting there may be stuff in there we don't understand. I agree. But the set of things we don't understand about the genetic code is circumscribed by mathematical restrictions on what could be in there. Yes, algebraicists are hard at work, but, for example, we have a complete catalog of all groups, and we can prove it is complete.

On a more mundane level; we have at least fifty genomes sequenced, and we know that genes within those genomes were not chosen from some menu of possible building blocks according to function, as one would expect if they were designed, but are related by small integer numbers of changes to functionally equivalent or functionally similar genes in organisms which for independent reasons were thought to be close evolutionary relatives. In other words, the pattern of changes between the molecular structure of the genomes of organisms closely agrees with what was predicted from evolutionary theory, before we had significant amounts of genetic information available. Among the thousands of genes in higher organisms, I know of no single example of a gene that confounds evolutionary predictions - that is clearly, in a statistically significant way, closer in sequence to an evolutionarily more distant organism than it is to a closer organism. Of the tens of thousand of genes in whales, all without exception are closer in structure to the genes of hoofed mammals than to the genes of fish. So your putative designer never, ever, not once chose a fish gene to fulfill a function in an animal in an ecologically similar niche, preferring to adapt a land animal gene instead.

It makes no sense. And I'm sorry, I think we have more than enough information to say that that's not how an intelligent being would go about designing the biosphere.

And it's even more difficult to change the software without causing some other, unexpected behavior. Why? Because the subtleties of the design are lost on me.

Or, more often, it's just crappy design in the first place.

I sense we've hit an impasse here. By all means follow up, but I'm not sure I will. And thank you for a civil and stimulating discussion, something that's rare on a crevo thread.

[r9etb]

I understood you were using a synechoche of "given the use of a computer"

Well, yes. But to place Francis Bacon into a computer-ready society would be to invalidate the fundamental requirements of the thought experiment.

RWP had previously referred to "contemporary rational processes," the scope of which includes all conditions necessary for a computer to operate. That includes things like electricity, without which none of the rest of a computer could possibly have made sense to him.

[NJ_gent]

"Actually it's that we _can_ breed significant changes (even as far as speciation), but that there are limits."

The limits are only there (according to the ToE) because we make limited use of genetic variation (and actually nullify it to an extent), make almost no use of genetic mutation, make very limited use of natural selection, and have very little time with which to do all this. Of course there are limits, we're not doing 1% of what nature's doing to force adaptation.

"Exactly true. Evolution _requires_ a lot of proof which we don't have. Saying that because we can't gather the necessary proof, we don't need to is rediculous."

The ToE, like the theory of the Big Bang, and other such theories which can't ever be completely 'proven', can most certainly be tested. The ToE relies on certain principles and makes certain predictions about what we should and should not find in the fossil record. When something unexpected comes up (invariably the case when you have an imperfect theory based on imperfect knowledge), the ToE must either be able to adapt to it, or it must be scrapped. Thus far, nothing has struck a fatal blow to the ToE, though there certainly remain questions it must eventually answer. It's not that we don't need proof - it's that proof (the kind you're probably looking for) doesn't come around witin the limited lifetime of a human being. It can, however, be disproven as a plausible explanation for how things got from point A to point B. Knock out one of the major pillars of the ToE or bring irrefutable evidence of something that contradicts the ToE and you'll find that the ToE zealots trying to dance around your evidence are dancing all by themselves while the respectable scientific community searchs for a better theory to explain things.

"The same is true for evolution. It accomodates fast changes, slow changes, changes which increase complexity, changes which reduce complexity, changes which help, changes which harm. It's impossible to come up with a scenario that would truly falsify evolution, because no matter what you come up with, evolutionists will say, "that's shows how amazing evolution is"."

Not true at all. I'll give you a perfect example - show me a fruitfly which, within a generation or two, becomes a whale. That right there would completely contract the ToE. The ToE would say that's impossible. While that example is extreme, less extreme examples could have the same affect. Just find something that is impossible under the ToE and present evidence for it. If it's something the ToE is unable to explain, then all but the craziest zealot supporters of evolution theory will start looking for a theory that can explain it.

"Here's what Darwin said: "With species in a state of nature, it can hardly be maintained that the law [of compensation] is of universal application." The law of compensation is the observed fact that breeding holds limits. Darwin argued that a "state of nature" could break the law of compensation that breeders have been unable to cross."

Of course - you're comparing a heat lamp to the sun. As I stated before, with our limited time and limited application of the driving forces behind evolution, it's no wonder that there are limits to what we've accomplished. Nature has total control over the environment and has millions upon millions of years to sit back and let evolution do its thing. If and when man has total control over the environment and a few million years to sit back, he'll be able to 'breed' new species all he likes. Of course, one of those species will probably kill man, but we've never played it safe through our short history.

"Also remember that Darwin allowed for an initial species, or even _several_ initial species to be present for which natural selection to work on. If several, while not several thousand, or several million?"

Of course he allowed for initial species - he had no explaination for how they'd have sprouted from nothingness. We now have part of that puzzle. The conditions of early Earth lent themselves to causing the spontaneous formation of certain amino acids and carbon compounds. We've recreated this in a lab, and it's been observed. To the best of my knowledge, we've not yet seen the next step, which would involve something we would consider 'alive' forming from the compounds present. That being said, the building blocks for life as we know it pretty much will form on their own under the right conditions.

"As mentioned by many others, the origin of life is not of particular concern to evolution,"

I would disagree, as I think evolution should begin to start looking at things the moment the first 'living' organism comes into being. Certainly, even if the earliest lifeforms made no use of nucleic acids, there must have been some method of replication, as well as a method of passing information (something analogous to genetic material) from one generation to the next. Evolution shouldn't require specific compounds for the transfer of such information (DNA, RNA, etc), so it should function even at the most basic levels of life.

"the only disagreement appears to be of the question "are there limits to change?""

That's not the case at all. While it seems that many are willing to accept that at least some changes do occur over time, some are content to believe that everything that's alive today was always alive, which would include man running around being chased by dinosaurs (which is funny). Some think the whole fossil record is a forgery. Must be interesting to live life under such paranoia. Some think the fossil record was planted by God to fool the silly scientists who think they're so smart. That's a rather dim view of one's creator - a sadistic being that grants intellect to its creations just so it can mess with them. There remain a whole range of views, and I just hope we keep the crazier ones out of the classroom. That being said, I should hope that no students are being taught that the ToE is an unquestionable fact, or a law of nature. That's simply wrong, by any scientifically accepted standard.

[NJ_gent]

"And another thing....where can I find fossil beds forming now?"

Tar pits, lake beds, caves, and any other place where bone materials can be protected from weathering and decay. Sit back for a few million years and you'll have lots of fossils to play with.

[Michael_Michaelangelo]

Sure! You asked: So you honestly believe that there is a group of disinterested scientists working in the biological sciences who, quite without any ideological motivation, have honestly formulated a whole new theory of the origin of species?

I think most scientists have an open mind with regard to the origin of species. Things change all the time. There are mechanisms at work we still don't fully understand. For example, even Cell Theory has been revised recently: http://aob.oupjournals.org/cgi/reprint/94/1/9

Check out iscid.org, arn.org, discovery.org, etc. for scientists that are looking into various possibilities as to how the species we see today came about.

[Fester Chugabrew]

#780. Good post.

[r9etb]

Then if you're not going to let poor old Francis plug in the computer, it's not a good analogy,

Remember: we got onto this topic by considering whether and how we might detect "design," with an emphasis on understanding the design. As such it's a good analogy only if we place it in the context of Bacon's "contemporary rational processes," and not ours. And Bacon's world did not include the technological infrastructure required to operate a computer.

because we can read the genetic code, and we do know how it translates into proteins. We may not have all the finer details of interference, suppression, promotion, etc., down yet, but we have a complete chemical structure, and most of the important details of how it operates.

None of which would have been possible without a set of "contemporary rational processes" that provided the technology necessary to obtain that information.

But the set of things we don't understand about the genetic code is circumscribed by mathematical restrictions on what could be in there.

If you've been following the stories on this, you'll have noticed that the size of the "circumscribed area" is continually growing. (And of course we can't focus our attention on DNA alone, because it does nothing unless operated on by the "mechanical infrastructure" of the surrounding cell.

On a more mundane level; we have at least fifty genomes sequenced, and we know that genes within those genomes were not chosen from some menu of possible building blocks according to function, as one would expect if they were designed,

Again -- all you're really saying here is that you wouldn't have done it that way. It's still not a valid argument against design.

I know of no single example of a gene that confounds evolutionary predictions - that is clearly, in a statistically significant way, closer in sequence to an evolutionarily more distant organism than it is to a closer organism.

So what? Why would a smart designer do everything from scratch every time? Once again, this is not an argument against design -- in fact, it appears to be you saying that this is how you might design something.

So your putative designer never, ever, not once chose a fish gene to fulfill a function in an animal in an ecologically similar niche, preferring to adapt a land animal gene instead.

Completely false (not to mention silly.) On the water side: Whale shark/Krill-eating Whale. Great White Shark/Killer Whale. Fish-eating Predator Fish/Dolphins. Starfish/Sea Otter. And on the land side, I suppose you're going to claim that fish didn't come before, and evolve into, land animals?

It makes no sense. And I'm sorry, I think we have more than enough information to say that that's not how an intelligent being would go about designing the biosphere.

And yet, you're making this statement based on arguments from how you would design something. So you freely admit the efficacy of design as an explanation, but are (once again) rejecting design because it's not how you would have done it.

But once again: we already know for a fact that intelligent design occurs, because HUMANS DO IT!

I sense we've hit an impasse here. By all means follow up, but I'm not sure I will. And thank you for a civil and stimulating discussion, something that's rare on a crevo thread.

Thanks. I think it's civil and stimulating because neither of us is trying to ram our point of view down the other's throat. My interest is in looking at underlying assumptions, and you've responded in kind.

[stremba]

I agree with you. Scientists do assume that intelligent intervention has never occurred. This is a result of Occam's Razor, however, and not any anti-materialistic bias. Occam's Razor states that if two explanations are equally good at explaining known observations, the simpler one should be accepted. The two explanations here are that all of the variety of life arose from natural processes OR that all of the variety of life arose from natural processes in addition to one or more intelligent interventions. If there's no data to show that interventions occurred, then, by Occam's Razor, it makes sense for scientists to assume that it didn't. If there were to be found observational data that showed that intelligent interventions were necessary, then honest scientists would have to accept this idea. (I am not saying that all of them would, just that if they are practicing science appropriately, they would.) It remains to ID proponents to show evidence that intelligent interventions must have occurred, rather than just arguing that the idea is not absurd. Good scientists are willing to overturn established theories. The burden of proof is on those who wish to overturn them, however.

[stremba]

In billions of years, there have been a large number of experiments. It is improbable that I'll win the Powerball with one ticket, but if I buy 67 million tickets, it's almost certain that I will win.

[johnnyb_61820]

"That's not the case at all. While it seems that many are willing to accept that at least some changes do occur over time, some are content to believe that everything that's alive today was always alive"

And some evolutionists think we are a breeding experiment by an alien race. I just prefer to leave the crazies out of the discussion.

[stremba]

My point was that, scientifically, Last Thursdayism or Native American creationism or Islamic creationism, are just as useful as ID (or creationism). They make no predictions and have no explanatory power and hence are useless scientifically, as is any idea that references a supernatural power. If you want to argue that there is was a non-supernatural intelligence that interferred with the development of life, then fine, let's see the positive evidence of this. Until such evidence is shown that cannot be explained without reference to such an intelligence, then such intelligence will be assumed not to exist by science. Outside of science, of course, people are free to believe and schools are free to teach anything they choose.

[Right Wing Professor]

Completely false (not to mention silly.) On the water side: Whale shark/Krill-eating Whale. Great White Shark/Killer Whale. Fish-eating Predator Fish/Dolphins. Starfish/Sea Otter. And on the land side, I suppose you're going to claim that fish didn't come before, and evolve into, land animals?

The examples you cite are morphologically or functionally, but not genetically similar. Which is exactly my point; if they do the same things, why aren't they made of the same stuff? You get parallel evolution of morphology; you don't get parallel evolution of genes. And yes, ancient fish (not modern bony fish) evolved into land animals; but the differences accumulated between fish and mammals are now huge, much larger than those between land animals and humans. Given any gene in a teleost fish, you can identify it as a fish gene and not a mammal gene from its sequence; it looks like other fish genes of the same type, not like mammal genes. The differences between fish and whales are typically 5 - 10 times as large as the difference between hoofed animals and whales.

[bondserv]

So, Judeo-Christian values were created in America and can exist nowhere else on the planet?

Are you sure you haven't a trace of Pride* there?

(* J-C Deadly Sin #1)

I am proud of our Founding Fathers boldness in establishing American values. I am proud in the American soldiers who have fought for American values.

I am proud that millions of Americans chose to stand up against the Un-American values of Gay-Marriage and Liberal Judges who support killing innocent children in the same way Scott Peterson did.

I am proud that a President firmly grounded in American values is leading one branch of our government. And the other two branches are being lead by the Party most aligned with American values.

I humble myself before the bold and courageous men and women serving in Iraq. They are the true leaders of spreading American values by putting their lives on the line.