Posted on 10/07/2001 2:22:11 AM PDT by dbbeebs
pr99 9/17/2001 - Press Release: Creationists Wrong Again
CREATIONISTS WRONG AGAIN
Once again, the creationists have blundered when it comes to science, this time presenting misinformation about the universality of the genetic code.
The latest creationist attack on the public understanding of science comes in connection with a new 8-hour PBS series that will greatly expand the public’s understanding of a fundamental scientific theory, evolution. Two years in the making, Evolution, produced by WGBH-Boston and Clear Blue Sky Productions, will be shown nationwide on the PBS network on four consecutive nights beginning September 24, for two hours each evening.
“Although virtually every reputable scientist in the world agrees that evolution is good science,” said Eugenie C. Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, “some people still refuse to accept it, mainly because they regard it as incompatible with their religious beliefs. So it is no surprise that there is a creationist backlash against the PBS series.”
The first example of bad science came from the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, the creationist arm of the Discovery Institute, a policy organization based in Seattle, Washington. On September 10, the CRSC distributed their PBS Press Release #1, quoting two of their Discovery Institute Senior Fellows, biochemist Michael Behe and biologist Jonathan Wells.
Behe stated that, "The supposed 'fact' of the universal genetic code is based on outdated science that has been invalidated by more recent research.”
Added Wells, "Back in the early 1970s, evolutionary biologists did think that a given piece of DNA specified the same protein subunit in every living thing, and that the genetic code was thus universal. This was unlikely to have happened by chance, so it was interpreted as evidence that every organism had inherited its genetic code from a single common ancestor. In 1979, however, exceptions to the code were found in mitochondria, the tiny energy factories inside cells. Biologists subsequently found exceptions in bacteria and in the nuclei of algae and single-celled animals. It is now clear that the genetic code is not the same in all living things, and that it does not provide 'powerful evidence' that all living things 'evolved on a single tree of life.'"
Reports of the demise of this particular piece of evidence for evolution, however, are premature. James Hanken, Professor of Zoology and Curator in Herpetology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, told NCSE that the claims of Behe and Wells that the genetic code does not provide evidence for the tree of life were “so bizarre as to be almost beyond belief,” and added that they “fly in the face of well established and accepted facts."
The reason? As explained by Dr. Norman Pace, Professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado and member of the National Academy of Sciences:
A few of the 64 code-words can occur as slight variants in a very few organisms. Those exceptions, however, are known to have derived from organisms that had the standard code. Thus, the code is historically universal. Even in those organisms with the occasional exceptional code-word, the rest of the code is the same as in all other organisms. More important, even, is the fact that the complex machine that interprets the code and carries out protein synthesis, the ribosome, is fundamentally the same in all life forms. The common heritage of all life on Earth is proven beyond doubt [emphasis added].As if the CRSC’s misinformation were not enough, the Florence, Kentucky young-earth creationist organization, Answers in Genesis, promises to post daily responses to each program on their web site. The responses will be written by AIG staffer Jonathan Sarfati, who in his book Refuting Evolution claims that there is strong scientific evidence for Noah’s Ark and that geological evidence indicates that the earth is only a few thousand years old.
Dan
Dan
Someday I'm going to have to find out exactly where you are, and see if we know any of the same people. radio astronomy is a pretty small field. It's a great business, and I'd love to get back in it someday....I can't say that I miss those late nights in the control room though!
"...I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. The fact that many false religions have spread over large portions of the earth like wild-fire had some weight on me. Beautiful as is the morality of the New Testament, it can hardly be denied that its perfection depends in part on the interpretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories.
But I was very unwilling to give up my belief; -- I feel sure of this for I can well remember often and often inventing day-dreams of old letters between distinguished Romans and manuscripts being discovered at Pompeji or elsewhere which confirmed in the most striking manner all that was written in the Gospels. But I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlasting punished.
And this is a damnable doctrine"
Darwin on the origin of life:
Everyone who believes, as I do, that all the corporeal and mental organs (excepting those which are neither advantegous or disadvantegous to the posessor) of all beings have been developed through natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, together with use or habit, will admit that these organs have formed so that their possessors may compete succesfully with other beings, and thus increase in number.
Why not do some research before you start name-calling?
Sorry to hear that. Scientists are filling in the framework of evolutionary theory by disproving elements that may not fit in, and adding elements that fill in the existing gaps. The depth in which we are adding to scientific knowledge is increasing very quickly. It is likely to be increasingly difficult to cut down the base of the framework as more evidence is added around it due to the increase in scientific knowledge. I don't believe we will see a grand paradigm shift comparable to a shifting to a Big Bang theory or comparable to the shift to evolutionary theory for quite some time, if at all. There is so much there to cut through--and it all builds from one unified framework. It is something that has a lot going for it evidentially and experimentally.
Looks clear to me.
In the interest of equal time, from the Discovery Institutes reply to the series:
GETTING THE FACTS STRAIGHT
[snip]
B. Whale Evolution
The scene shifts to whales gliding effortlessly beneath the waves, and the nar-rator tells us that their origin “was a mystery.” According to University of Michi-gan paleontologist Philip D. Gingerich, “whales are so different from every other kind of mammal that we can’t easily relate them to anything else, and so they’re off by themselves as a branch of mammal evolution.”
As air-breathers, mammals live mostly on land; but whales and dolphins are mammals that live in water. “But we know that mammals evolved on land,” Shu-bin says, “so it’s a real puzzle how whales originally evolved. By understanding how that happens, we’ll begin to understand how these big jumps—these big transformations—happen generally.”
Gingerich explains how he discovered—and identified—the fossilized bones of a whale-like creature in Pakistan. His search for what scientists call “transi-tional forms” between land animals and whales later took him to the Sahara Desert, which used to be covered by water. There he discovered numerous fossils of a previously discovered extinct whale, Basilosaurus. But Gingerich, unlike those who had gone before him, found tiny leg bones with the fossils—thereby showing that Basilosaurus was a whale with legs.
The narrator explains that the land-dwelling ancestors of modern whales might have found food and safety in the water of an ancient sea: “Over millions of years, front legs became fins, rear legs disappeared, bodies lost fur and took on their familiar streamlined shape.” The list of transitional forms between ancient land animals and modern whales, we are told, has grown, proving that “the evidence for evolution is all around us, if we choose to look for it.”
Ignoring the fact that the transitional series isn’t as neat as it is portrayed here, there are at least two problems with interpreting these fossils as evidence for Dar-winian evolution. First, it is impossible to determine whether one fossilized spe-cies is ancestral to another. According to Henry Gee, chief science writer for Nature, “the intervals of time that separate fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.” The fossils examined in this episode are separated by millions of years and thou-sands of generations. But it’s hard enough to determine who our own great-great-great grandparents are, even though they are of the same species, the time span is measured in hundreds of years, and we have written records to help us. We can only assume that these intermediate fossil forms were connected by a chain of ancestry and descent. Second, mere similarity does not demonstrate an ancestor-descendant relation-ship. Many of the striking similarities we see today among various organisms were well know to Darwin’s predecessors, who attributed them to a common designer. Ford automobiles show a series of transitional forms between the Model T and current models, but all of them were designed and created by intelligent agents. It would make no sense to say that Ford automobiles evolved in a Darwin-ian fashion unless we could show that a natural mechanism produced them, with-out any help from human designers. Similarly, before we can call transitional forms between ancient land mammals and modern whales evidence for Darwinian evolution, we must show that a natural mechanism produced them—or at least was capable of producing them.1
And that mechanism has to be demonstrated with more plausibility—not to mention evidence—than we see here. To claim merely that “front legs became fins, rear legs disappeared, bodies lost fur and took on their familiar streamlined shape” is not good enough. We have no evidence from modern animals that front legs can become fins, or that a body can assume a radically different shape— much less that a land animal can make the numerous physiological changes it would need for life in the water. Fossils of extinct animals do not necessarily show us descent from a common ancestor, nor do they show us that the change was due to Darwinian natural selection acting on random variations.
The scene changes to an aquarium, where we are told that “bones aren’t the only evidence for whale evolution. Their ancestry is also visible in the way they move.” The fact that marine mammals propel themselves through the water with up-and-down movements instead of the side-to-side movements characteristic of fish is supposed to indicate their descent from land mammals. But perhaps this is just a common feature of mammals, like air breathing or bearing live young. How does the fact that marine mammals move like other mammals provide evidence for Darwinian evolution?
Neil Shubin returns to conclude the story of whale evolution. “In one sense, evolution didn’t invent anything new with whales,” he says, “it was just tinkering with land mammals. It’s using the old to make the new, and we call that tinker-ing.”
Sort of like what people do with automobiles?
C. Moving onto the Land
Land animals came before whales, but fish came before land animals. So the great transformation that produced land animals preceded the one that produced whales. “It was the moment when fish crawled out of the water.”
“The first creatures to leave the water really started something,” the narrator explains. “Their ancestors eventually evolved into today’s reptiles, birds, and mammals. And these creatures’ common origins are still visible in their bodies. Just like us, they all have bodies with four limbs—they’re all tetrapods.”
Neil Shubin jumps in again: “What that means is that all these different crea-tures are descended from a common ancestor which had something very similar, or akin, to limbs.”
“Just what was that common ancestor,” the narrator asks, “and how did it leave the water 370 million years ago?” Shubin and his colleagues find fossils in Penn-sylvania suggesting that early tetrapods lived in streams, while Cambridge Uni-versity paleontologist Jenny Clack finds fossils in Greenland suggesting that fish evolved limbs before they left the water.2
Shubin points to the fossil fish fin and human arm skeleton that we saw at the beginning of the episode, and he notes the similarity in the arrangements of their bones. According to the narrator: “With the basic pattern in place, the fin-to-limb transition was merely a series of small changes occurring over millions of years.” And a cartoon animation shows us how easy this might have been. But a cartoon animation, no matter how plausible, does not show how real animals in real time could have been transformed from fish into land animals.
Shubin continues: “There’s really no goal to evolution. Evolution wasn’t try-ing to make limbs; it wasn’t trying to push our distant ancestors out of the water. What was happening was a series of experiments.” And the narrator concludes: “Fish experimented with all sorts of survival strategies. . . . The first tetrapods possibly found another way to survive”—by getting out of the water.
So fish “experimented” with survival “strategies” that included growing legs. But clever human biologists have been experimenting with fish for years, and they have not come up with a strategy to make fish grow even the beginnings of legs. What sense does it make to say that fish “experimented” with growing legs?
The truth is that scientists don’t know how the first legs—or the first tetrapods, or the first air-breathers, or the first whales—originated. The fossils tell us that aquatic animals preceded land animals, and that land animals preceded whales. On the question of what caused these great transformations, however, the fossils are silent.
But without knowing what caused these great transformations, how can Shu-bin say with such confidence that evolution had no goal? How does he know?
-------------------
Notes
1. Not surprisingly, the actual story of whale-like fossils is not as neat as the one told here. There are long-standing disputes over the identity of the land ancestor, the geological position of various fossils, and whether these were the ancestors of modern whales. Modern molecular studies have added to the controversy. For a short survey of some of the disputes, see Ashby L. Camp, “The Overselling of Whale Evolution,”
available at:
http://www.trueorigins.org/whales.htm#top.
See also:
http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/10_10_98/Fob3.htm
For more on how modern molecular studies have added to the controversy, see Trisha Gura, “Bones, molecules . . . or both?” Nature 406 (2000), 230-233; Maureen A. O’Leary, “Parsimony Analysis of Total Evidence from Extinct and Extant Taxa and the Cetacean-Artiodactyl Question (Mammalia, Ungulata),” Cladistics 15 (1999), 315- 330. See also:
http://www.findarticles.com/m1200/19_156/57828404/p1/article.jhtml
On the impossibility of inferring ancestor-descendant relationships from fossils see Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time (New York: The Free Press, 1999). Some passages from Gee’s book that deal with human evolution are cited below in the note on human origins.
On the fact that mere similarity is insufficient to establish Darwinian descent with modification, see Jonathan Wells and Paul Nelson, “Homology: A Concept in Crisis,” available at:
http://www.arn.org/docs/odesign/od182/hobi182.htm
2. For the standard story, see:
http://beta.tolweb.org/tree/eukaryotes/animals/chordata/terrestrial_vertebrates.html
Of course, the true story is more complicated than the one presented in this episode;
see Michel Laurin, Marc Girondot and Armand de Ricqlès, “Early tetrapod evolution,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 15 (2000), 118-123.
The “tinkering” metaphor comes from François Jacob, “Evolution and Tinkering,” Science 196 (1977), 1161-1166.
According to Jacob, an engineer works according to a preconceived plan, uses prepared materials and special machines, and produces things that are as nearly perfect as possible. Evolution, on the other hand, has no plan, works with whatever is at hand, and produces things that are imperfect. But a tinkerer still works according to a plan, though it may be a short-range plan (i.e., to make something useful); and the history of technology is filled with examples of engineered products that were notably imperfect. Most importantly, the sort of creative capacity attributed to natural selection by the tinkering metaphor has never been observed in nature" [snip]
Cordially,
Fundamentalists are nuts.
Not only that, but it would appear some of them can't tell the difference between a "6" and a "9".
I do not dispute this at all. What I do dispute is that science happens by spontaneous, incoherent, random occurence possible only because of infinite time, which of course enables anything to happen. :~)
Our scientific knowledge, in my opinion, is merely the discovery of our Creators methods. I don't need convincing of scientific knowledge. God himself says that the discovery of His creation will give evidence of Him.
And I really like your screen name. Wish more people would.
You'll never be able to convince me that a Creator does not exist. It's an issue that goes far beyond intellectual understanding. In fact, the relationship of creation and Creator was designed by God to require more than intellectual knowledge. We all have to have faith in something. Whether willing to admit it or not, whether willing to go deep enough into our understanding or not, we all have to face the issue of faith sooner or later. It's just a matter of what we choose to have faith in. It's that choice that gives us free will.
For me, I've found my peace and purpose, and amazingly, I still consider myself to be a reasonably intelligent person capable of rational thought!!!!!!!!!!
Did you not read the article I cited? Please do, and sit back & think about your "impossible odds" argument. Examine its premises in the light of the critique I linked to, and I think you'll eventually come around.
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