Though I doubt there are many evolution defenders who would be that ignorant of basic Judeo/Christian theology.
[Via Pharyngula]
Category Archives: Evolution
Evolution Rap from the Galápagos
A (slightly embarassing) Darwin day at USC
This past Wednesday (4-15-09) I attended an interesting set of ‘Darwin Year’ lectures at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (Darwin Today: Evolution and Scientific Thought). The lectures were moderated by USC anthropologist Craig Stanford and the speakers included: Donald Johanson (paleoanthropologist and discoverer of the famous Lucy fossil), USC paleobiologist/ecologist David Bottjer, USC microbiologist Steve Finkel and last but certainly not least was my friend Eugenie Scott, director of The National Center for Science Education.
All the talks were interesting but the most entertaining was probably Dr. Finkel’s which focused on bacteria. In addition to all the fascinating stuff on evolution in prokaryotes his talk contained lots of amusing gross-out trivia about such things as how there are 300,000,000 bacteria per gram of fecal material living in the average persons colon (that’s about the same as the number of people living in the U.S.).
The talks wrapped up with an interesting round-table discussion of sorts between the speakers and the audiences (which contained several other USC faculty members), mostly revolving around the subject of Genie’s talk, which was of course on K-12 science education and the effects of antievolutionists on it.
I’ll be kicking myself for months because of Genie though (it’s not her fault though). Within the first minute of her talk she put up a slide of the NCSE’s logo and asked if anyone recognized the image. When no one spoke up she quickly said “tell’em Troy”.
Deer in the headlights.
I wasn’t expecting to be put on the spot, at least not that soon, I mean Genie has asked me questions during her talks before, which is normally fine, but this time my brain locked up. Fortunately she quickly let me off the hook and told everyone that it was based on a drawing from one of Darwin’s notebooks.
NCSE's logo
Of course this sort of thing happens to all of us, especially when we are surprised and under pressure, but in this case I have little excuse. You see just a few months ago I went to a special Darwin exhibit at the Huntington Library (San Marino, CA) and contained in that exhibit was the very notebook of Darwin’s in which appears the drawing which the NCSE’s logo is based upon. I even remember saying to myself, “oh look, there is the drawing the NCSE is using for their logo.”
The original from Darwin's notebook.
Flash forward to last Wednesday, and it’s “ah, uhm, ah, I don’t remember exactly where that’s from…”. Arrrrgh!
Ah well, as a consolation prize I was able to get a photograph of myself with Don Johanson to add to my collection.
Donald Johanson and yours truly.
[slapping self in head, “Darwin’s notebook, Darwin’s notebook…”]
Ray Comfort’s appalling ignorance
Both P.Z. Myers and Larry Moran have commented on this but I want toget my own licks in. Ray Comfort (AKA Banana-Man) has squatted down and grunted out a fresh piece of “literature” attacking atheists (whatever) in which he also goes after evolution (which he mistakenly considers to be synonymous with atheism). Apparently his tripe isn’t selling as well as he thinks it should and so he gone on a whine-fest about how this is due to some sort of atheist conspiracy in a posting over at WorldNutDaily.
The article quotes him on one of his reasons for believing that evolution is an “unscientific fairytale”:
“I simply expose atheistic evolution for the unscientific fairy tale that it is, and I do it with common logic. I ask questions about where the female came from for each species. Every male dog, cat, horse , elephant, giraffe, fish and bird had to have coincidentally evolved with a female alongside it (over billions of years) with fully evolved compatible reproductive parts and a desire to mate, otherwise the species couldn’t keep going. Evolution has no explanation for the female for every species in creation,” he said.
Ye gods! Folks, this is a discussion stopper. It is beyond the pale. It is stupidity squared. If you are someone who thinks that evolutionary theory requires that the origin of new species involves the separate, independent, origination of each sex of said new species, that this must happen each and every time a new species evolves, and further that this is to happen by coincidence, then you are far, far, too ignorant of the subject to even think about criticizing it.
Let me try and reformulate this in theological terms for anyone out there that might harbor some misguided sympathy for Mr. Comfort’s views.
Imagine if someone came into your church (to put it specifically in Christian terms) and said, with all seriousness, that they thought Christianity was a fairytale: “Because I can’t believe in this Jesus guy with his blue skin and eight arms. Nor can I accept his teaching that the only way to get to heaven was to die bravely in glorious combat.”
How seriously would you take such a persons critiques of the Christian faith?
Well that’s exactly how Comfort comes across to anyone with even a basic understanding of evolutionary theory when he utters nonsense like this. He either has absolutely no clue as to what he’s talking about, or he is deliberately misrepresenting things (lying) to score rhetorical points.
Either way he has disqualified himself from participation in any serious discussion of the subject (not that anyone was taking him seriously to begin with).
Intelligent design creationism playing the racism card… again
Andrew Sibley, who I recently used as an example of the two faces of intelligent design creationism, has gone on another ‘Darwin was a racist/evolution leads to racism’, tear over on Uncommon Descent, basing his comments this time largely on an article (“What’s wrong with Darwinism?“) by another character by the name of Tony Campolo on a site called Christian Today. I was going to rip into Campolo’s piece given it contains outright falsehoods about Darwin, but my colleague Jason Rosenhouse has done an excellent job of doing so already over on Evolutionblog, so time saved.
However since Mr. Sibley has my attention once again I want to address his contribution to this steaming pile:
Campolo acknowledges that Darwin was a product of his time, and clearly Darwin did not invent racism with some of his relations for instance taking an interest in abolishing the slave trade. Darwin too in his early life questioned slavery, but what happened to lead him to embrace ideas where Africans and Aborigines were considered closer to apes than Caucasians? Instead, a plain reading of the Bible teaches that all mankind are related and are of common ancestry.
Darwin “questioned slavery”, “in his early life”, really? Well, now that we’ve had the ‘good facts‘ version let’s look at the actual facts.
The two faces of intelligent design creationism
Over at Uncommon Descent they are taking advantage of the brouhaha over the New York Post’s ‘gunned-down chimp’ cartoon (which many have taken as a racist slur against President Obama) to take their own pot-shots at evolution and in the process they have served up another example of the two faces of intelligent design.
This particular snark (“Is this Darwin’s legacy?”) is brought to us by UK weather-guy/meteorologist Andrew Sibley:
Four and twenty sauropods baked in a pie…
We find still more creationist ignorance about basic zoological facts, this time from Dr. David Menton of Answers in Genesis.
AiG recently republished on their website a Menton piece from last year attacking the evolutionary relationship between dinosaurs and birds.
Often my first instinct when I run across these things is to launch onto a point by point refutation but I am going to restrain myself this time and simply highlight one rather obvious error in Dr. Menton’s article that in my opinion should cast doubt on anything else he has to say on the subject (especially since he claims to be an anatomist).
Darwin and Lincoln’s bicentennial
Happy Darwin/Lincoln day everyone! On this auspicious day we celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of both the founder (but not finisher) of evolutionary biology, Charles Darwin, and the great emancipator Abraham Lincoln, both of whom were born on this day, February 12, in the year 1809. Tis a day to celebrate both knowledge and freedom.
David Attenborough on his upcomming evolution documentary
Intermediate fossils and the pre-Darwin (creationist) geologists
RBH left a comment to a previous posting that inspired me to put some material together to address his (or anyone’s) reservations on the subject of intermediate fossil forms and the pre-Darwin (creationist) geologists.
Another really helpful post, Troy. Thanks!
Thanks RB!
Addendum
I realized during my discussions with RBH in the comments to this post that my main point behind writing about this subject might not be transparent to the average reader who doesn’t eat, sleep, and breath the creation/evolution debate. So I add this preface to give the reader a context for why I am going on at length about early 19th century geologists.
My point in all this is less about understanding the often vague and sometimes even contradictory views of the pre-Darwin scientists (as worthy as that subject of study is) and more about countering the arguments from modern antievolutionists that intermediate fossils do not exist and that those paleontologists who claim that they do, do so only because they are reading their “evolutionary beliefs” into the evidence.
If the pre-Darwin creationist geologists saw intermediates this tends, strongly I think, to falsify that argument. The same applies to the overall pattern of the fossil record and the geologic column that illustrates it (which is also frequently claimed by antievolutionists to be a evolutionary invention).
RBH: I do have one reservation. You wrote
The changing pattern of the fossil record and the existence of intermediate fossil forms was recognized by scientists (who were creationists) long before Darwin brought evolutionary theory into the scientific mainstream.
The changing pattern in the fossil record was surely observed; Cuvier in France and Owen in England — both eminent comparative anatomists in the first half of the 19th century — were very clear on that.
Indeed, Cuvier, Owen and just about every other geologist/paleontologist in the world at the time.
RBH: But Owen opposed Darwin’s hypothesis of species transmutation and common ancestry specifically because he did not see transitional/intermediate forms in the fossil record to which he had access.
I can’t speak much about Cuvier, but Owen is a little difficult to pigeon-hole into modern categories (perhaps a theistic evolutionist of sorts). He did oppose Darwin, particularly Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection but seemed to have been open to the idea of some sort of secondary causation for living things (as opposed to their direct creation by God).
Playing Chess with Pigeons 