Scientific American threatens AiG : Demands immediate removal of Web rebuttal

The prominent magazine Scientific American thought it had finally discredited its nemesis—creationism—with a feature article listing ‘15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense’ (July 2002). Supposedly these were the fifteen best arguments that evolutionists could use to discredit the Bible’s account of Creation. (National Geographic TV also devoted a lengthy report to the article.)

Within 72 hours, Dr Jonathan Sarfati—a resident scientist at Answers in Genesis–Australia—had written a comprehensive, point-by-point critique of the magazine article and posted it on this Web site.

So Scientific American thought it would try to silence AiG with the threat of a lawsuit.

In an e-mail to Dr Sarfati, Scientific American accused him and AiG of infringing their copyright by reproducing the text of their article and an illustration. They said they were prepared to ‘settle the matter amicably’ provided that AiG immediately remove Dr Sarfati’s article from its Web site.

AiG’s international copyright attorney, however, informed Scientific American that their accusations are groundless and that AiG would not be removing the article. Dr Sarfati’s article had used an illustration of a bacterial flagellum, but it was drawn by an AiG artist years ago. AiG had also used the text of SA’s article, but in a way that is permissible under ‘fair use’ of copyrighted materials for public commentary. (AiG presented the text of the SA article, with Dr Sarfati’s comments interspersed in a different color, to avoid any accusations of misquoting or misrepresenting the author.)

Why the heavy-handed tactics? If AiG’s responses were not valid, why would Scientific American even care whether they remained in the public arena? One can only presume that Scientific American (and National Geographic) had the ‘wind taken out of their sails.’ Dr Sarfati convincingly showed that they offered nothing new to the debate and they displayed a glaring ignorance of creationist arguments. Their legal maneuver appears to be an act of desperation. (AiG is still awaiting SA’s response to the decision not to pull the Web rebuttal.)

Natural selection and other mechanisms—such as chromosomal changes, symbiosis and hybridization—can drive profound changes in populations over time.

Again, do these profound changes increase information? Populations are seen losing information, and adapting within the constraints of the information they already have; goo-to-you evolution requires something quite different, the progressive addition of massive amounts of genetic information that is novel to not only that population, but to the biosphere.

The historical nature of macroevolutionary study involves inference from fossils and DNA rather than direct observation. Yet in the historical sciences (which include astronomy, geology and archaeology, as well as evolutionary biology), hypotheses can still be tested by checking whether they accord with physical evidence and whether they lead to verifiable predictions about future discoveries. For instance, evolution implies that between the earliest-known ancestors of humans (roughly five million years old) and the appearance of anatomically modern humans (about 100,000 years ago), one should find a succession of hominid creatures with features progressively less apelike and more modern, which is indeed what the fossil record shows.

What the fossil record shows in reality, even granted the evolutionary ‘dating’ methods, is that this clear-cut progression exists only in the minds of evolutionary popularists. Marvin Lubenow, in his book Bones of Contention (right), shows that the various alleged ‘ape-men’ do not form a smooth sequence in evolutionary ‘ages’, but overlap considerably. For example, the time-span of Homo sapiens fossils contains the time-span of the fossils of Homo erectus, supposedly our ancestor. Also, when the various fossils are analysed in depth, they turn out not to be transitional or even mosaic. The morphology overlaps too—the TJ paper by creationist John Woodmorappe, titled The non-transitions in ‘human evolution’—on evolutionists’ terms concludes from the analysis of a number of characteristics that Homo ergaster, H. erectus, H. neanderthalensis as well as H. heidelbergensis, were most likely ‘racial’ variants of modern man, while H. habilis and another specimen called H. rudolfensis were just types of australopithecines. In fact, H. habilis is now regarded as an invalid name, probably caused by assigning fragments of australopithecines and H. erectus fossils into this ‘taxonomic wastebin’.

But one should not—and does not—find modern human fossils embedded in strata from the Jurassic period (65 million years ago).

Of course I don’t believe the millions of years in the first place (see The Young Earth, right, for some reasons), but I know enough to know that Rennie has made a blooper even under his own perspective. Evolutionists assign the date of 65 Ma to the K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary) not the Jurassic period, which is alleged to have been 208–144 Ma. [After this rebuttal was first posted, the web version of the Scientific American article corrected their error]

Actually, evolutionists could easily accommodate such ‘out of place fossils’, as they have with living specimens of the Coelacanth fish and Wollemi Pine. These are just as sensational from an evolutionary paleontologist’s perspective as finding a living dinosaur. Since the materialistic paradigm (interpretive framework) is all important, evolutionists would be able to explain an ‘old’ human fossil by ‘reworking’ (displacing from the initial burial depth), or may even reassign such bones to another creature, since after all ‘we know’ that humans can’t be that deep in the fossil record! For example, the famous fossil footprints at Laetoli, Africa, of an upright walking biped—the University of Chicago’s Dr Russell Tuttle has shown that these are the same sorts of prints as made by habitually barefoot humans. But since they are dated at millions of years prior to when evolutionists believe modern humans arrived, they are regarded as australopithecine prints, by definition, even though australopithecine foot bones are substantially different from human ones. And then in an amazing twist, the same prints are held up as evidence that australopithecines walked upright like humans—regardless of the fact that other aspects of their anatomy indicate otherwise. Another good example of how a researcher’s presuppositions can lead to all sorts of special pleading is the explaining away of clear evidence for a fossil belemnite in Fossil flip-flop.

The fossil order can be explained in a creationist framework, which avoids some of the contradictions of the evolutionary view. See Where are all the human fossils? and The Fossil Record: Becoming More Random All the Time (more technical).

Evolutionary biology routinely makes predictions far more refined and precise than this, and researchers test them constantly.

Evolution could be disproved in other ways, too. If we could document the spontaneous generation of just one complex life-form from inanimate matter, then at least a few creatures seen in the fossil record might have originated this way.

This would not ‘disprove evolution’, since big-picture Evolution is really just a grab-bag of ideas about naturalistic (God-less) origins. Evolutionists already believe in spontaneous generation, but now call it chemical evolution. They would actually be delighted if any or multiple examples of spontaneous generation were documented, because it would vindicate their belief that life came into being without an intelligent Creator. It would also solve their problem with the DNA in microbes not showing a pattern consistent with common ancestry—in this regard multiple spontaneous origins have already been proposed, without any suggestion that this would ‘disprove evolution’.10

Incidentally, it’s important to note that a non-complex life form is an impossibility, since it needs to have the ability to reproduce. Even the simplest known true self-reproducing organism, a Mycoplasma, has 482 genes with 580,000 ‘letters’ (base pairs). But even this appears not to be enough to sustain itself without parasitizing an even more complex organism. Most likely, the parasitism resulted from loss of some of the genetic information required to make some essential nutrients (see Genome decay in the Mycoplasmas). Therefore a hypothetical first cell that could sustain itself would have to be even more complex.

If superintelligent aliens appeared and claimed credit for creating life on earth (or even particular species), the purely evolutionary explanation would be cast in doubt. But no one has yet produced such evidence.

The Bible claims to be a revelation by the Creator of life and the Universe, who certainly has ‘claimed credit for creating life on Earth’, yet Rennie does not see this as casting doubt on evolution. And there is excellent evidence that the Bible’s claims are true (see Q&A: Bible). But Rennie has apparently already made up his mind that this evidence doesn’t exist—this would presumably upset his materialistic faith.

It should be noted that the idea of falsifiability as the defining characteristic of science originated with philosopher Karl Popper in the 1930s. More recent elaborations on his thinking have expanded the narrowest interpretation of his principle precisely because it would eliminate too many branches of clearly scientific endeavor.

This is simply an attempt to immunize evolution from the same criticism that’s advanced at creationists. As often pointed out, it’s hard to come up with a definition of ‘science’ that includes evolution and excludes creation unless it’s blatantly self-serving. Sometimes these definitions are self-contradictory, e.g. some, including Gould, have claimed that Creation is not scientific because it’s not testable, but then they go on to explain how it has allegedly been tested and shown to be wrong.

. Increasingly, scientists doubt the truth of evolution.
No evidence suggests that evolution is losing adherents. Pick up any issue of a peer-reviewed biological journal, and you will find articles that support and extend evolutionary studies or that embrace evolution as a fundamental concept.

It’s logically possible for a belief to lose adherents even if journals still publish articles supporting this belief. Rennie might benefit from some study of simple logic (my paper Logic and Creation might help).

Conversely, serious scientific publications disputing evolution are all but nonexistent. In the mid-1990s George W. Gilchrist of the University of Washington surveyed thousands of journals in the primary literature, seeking articles on intelligent design or creation science. Among those hundreds of thousands of scientific reports, he found none. In the past two years, surveys done independently by Barbara Forrest of Southeastern Louisiana University and Lawrence M. Krauss of Case Western Reserve University have been similarly fruitless.

But would they know what to look for? And as shown below, and above with Scientific American itself, creationists are hardly likely to want to blow their cover and risk the discrimination epitomized by Scientific American. Would Nature or Science, for example, ever knowingly publish a paper favourable to Creation? Hardly. But in spite of the bias against such publication, creationist scientists have managed to publish papers when the creationist implications are disguised subtly enough. This shows that they do carry out real scientific research. See Do Creationists Publish in Notable Refereed Journals?

Creationists retort that a closed-minded scientific community rejects their evidence.

An absolutely amazing comment coming from a journal that’s publicly reached the nadir of anti-creationist censorship and discrimination, as shown above!

Yet according to the editors of Nature, Science and other leading journals, few antievolution manuscripts are even submitted.

As shown, there is clear proof of censorship by Scientific American, Science and Australasian Science, where they have even denied creationists the normal courtesy of the right of reply. So why would scientists bother to waste their time? They know that their papers will be rejected, no matter how good the research! Which is why creationist scientists have, years ago, commenced their own peer-reviewed journals.

Some antievolution authors have published papers in serious journals. Those papers, however, rarely attack evolution directly or advance creationist arguments; …

Of course not, with the fanatical censorship.

… at best, they identify certain evolutionary problems as unsolved and difficult (which no one disputes).

An interesting admission, but that’s hardly the impression that evolutionists usually give to the public.

In short, creationists are not giving the scientific world good reason to take them seriously.

So why is Rennie taking us seriously by writing this article?

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