[Hat tip to Larry Moran at Sandwalk.]
A few months back Frank Sherwin, “Senior Science Lecturer” at the Institute for Creation Research, launched an amusing attack on evolution that is nigh on word-salad; this time focusing on insects, and how they are supposedly problematic for evolutionary theory.
As usual it is stated with the confidence and the faux authority that is typical of “creation science” practitioners but when you actually look at it and try to make sense of what is being said it quickly becomes apparent that much of it is really unintelligible nonsense.
Premise Media, the production company that produced the creationist pseudo-documentary “Expelled“, has gone bankrupt and is putting the film up for auction. The opportunity having presented itself, the TalkOrigins Archive Foundation is making a run at acquiring it.
Getting the rights to the film and related production material (unedited interviews of scientists etc.) could be an invaluable source of ammunition in the defense of science education against the attacks of intelligent design creationists, so if you’re able please consider making a donation to the Foundation (if the bid is unsuccessful your money still goes to a worthy cause) .
Update: TalkOrigins lost the biding war. Oh well, it would have been interesting.
Yes, according to U.K. creationist YouTuber davemakesawave who started leaving comments in response to a short video I did regarding so called “polystrate” fossils and the claims creationists make about them. However this post, as the title suggests, is not about “polystrate” fossils; for those interested in them I suggest the following links as good starting places.
As I said davemakesawave started off commenting on my “polystrate fossil” video but the topic of our exchange veered of that subject immediately with him making some rather grand claims about the state of science education at “top UK universities”. Given the limitations of YouTube video comments I thought this would be a better venue to thoroughly examine his allegations.
The following is the exchange that davemakesawave and I have had so far:
davemakesawave: Polystrate fossils are creation nonsense? What?
Me: It says “linked comment” but there’s no link. Was there something that you weren’t clear about regarding the nonsense creationists spout about “polystrate” fossils?
davemakesawave: No nothing at all thank you, I am quite clear about polystrate fossils especially as some UK universities now openly concede that the fossil record does not show evolution.
Me: No doubt. There are so called “universities” in the U.S. that spread lies and misinformation as well (Liberty U., Bob Jones U. etc.). Of course with the U.K. being historically so central to the formation of modern geology there is even less excuse for it.
davemakesawave: Interestingly it is the top UK universities that are teaching the fossil record does not show evolution, even though the lecturers are also promoting atheism; it is not based on bias, it is based on real science but without evolution, atheism has no basis whatsoever. Interesting isn’t it? And this is partly why I dumped atheism some 28 years ago; this and God revealing and proving himself to me. My story is on YT An Atheist Saved In Jesus Name if you want to watch it. Tx
Me: Sorry Dave, I’m going to call bullshit, on this. I don’t believe for a second that the biology & geology departments of, say Oxford or Cambridge, would teach any such thing. The time ordered pattern of change in the fossil record is perfectly consistent with descent with modification (evolution), indeed evolution is currently the only logical and coherent explanation for this and other patterns found in nature.
So name specifically which “top UK universities” are staffed with incompetents or shut up. And spare me your atheist baiting and witnessing. Defend your scientific claims or take it somewhere else.
And now we’ll look at davemakesawave’s response to my demand that he back up his claim:
Institute for Creation Research President Dr. John Morris has taken to recycling; in this case he’s dusted off some nonsense from an article he wrote 3 years ago titled “Evolution’s Biggest Hurdles” (Morris 2008) and repackaged it as “The Biggest Problems for Evolution” (Morris 2011).
As I usually do I started out writing a point by point re-rebuttal to Morris’s new article; even though I already wrote a fairly extensive rebuttal to the earlier version. However, as I was writing, and as it got longer and longer, I realized that I was going to bury the lead way too deep. So, I am dropping most of the rehashing and jump to the new issues I want to address.
First though just a little of the lead in for context:
Morris: Even though the gaps in the fossil record are found between each basic animal type, there are two huge gaps in particular that should be emphasized. The evolutionary distance between single-cell organisms and the vast array of multicellular, highly complex marine invertebrates precludes even rapid evolution.
Oh boy, this is déjà vu all over again.
From earlier context (see below) the “rapid evolution” he is referring to here is supposed to be punctuated equilibrium, however P.E. about apparent, geologically, “rapid” transitions (say a few tens of thousands of years) and concerns species level transitions (like those necessary to evolve horses and zebras from a common ancestor) not multicellular organisms from unicellular ones. Again, I’ll have more on his use of P.E. below.
As for the gap between unicellular and multicellular organisms the (really) short answer is: choanoflagellates (colony forming single celled organisms that are strikingly similar to cells found in sponges called choanocytes). Again, see my earlier post “You can tune a piano but you can’t tunicate” for more.
Morris: In the supposedly 600-million-year-old layers of rock designated as Cambrian (which contain the first appearance of varied multi-cell life), sponges, clams, trilobites, starfish, etc., are found without the required evolutionary ancestors.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. I covered this before as well.
1) There are fossils of multicellular organism in Precambrian strata (the Ediacaran biota for example).
2) Amongst those Precambrian multicellular organisms are sponges and jellyfish.
3) “Clams” (bivalve mollusks) are known from the Cambrian but only from few tiny extinct types.
4) Starfish or sea stars (Class Asteroidea) fossils do not appear in the fossil record until the Ordovician.
Morris: The gap from marine invertebrates to the vertebrate fish is likewise immense.
Again, Dr. Morris doesn’t want you to know about invertebrate chordates or the evidence for a relationship between chordates and echinoderms. I’ll have more on this in a few moments.
OK, now we get to it:
Morris: To make matters worse for the evolutionists, fish fossils are also found in Cambrian strata.
If we define the colloquial term “fish” in the usual way (in reference to all aquatic, gill bearing, vertebrates) then yes, a few genera of “fish fossils” have indeed been found in Cambrian strata.
However the word “fish”, is not a scientific term, so the question must be; exactly what sort of “fish” has been found in the Cambrian strata? Dr. Morris does not grace his readers with any further comment on this question; there is however a prominent illustration of a fossil fish that accompanies the article. Here is a screen shot of the page the article appears on:
And here is a larger version of the fish fossil picture:
I think it is fair to say that most people who are not particularly familiar with vertebrate phylogeny and paleontology—including most of Dr. Morris’s readers—might assume when they read in his article that “fish fossils are also found in Cambrian strata” that the large centrally displayed picture of a fossil fish might in fact be one of the Cambrian fish Morris is referring to.
Asks the most recent Jesus and Mo:
And then they flew off to their respective flocks to claim victory…
[Hat tip to Wonderful Life.]
Intelligent Design creationist Denyse O’Leary, in the midst of rationalizing (over at Uncommon Descent) why ID creationists spend all their time attacking science rather than doing science, has provided yet another example of how antievolutionists are pretty much pathologically unable to portray evolutionary theory (or its supporting evidence) accurately:
O’Leary: To me, Darwinism is like bad money. It becomes an intellectual vice. People are always looking for natural selection to generate random mutation, the way they are always trying to pass on the likely-bogus G-bill (when they are not out looking for the lucky strike). [Emphasis mine]
Yeah, right Denyse, it’s scientists engaging in an “intellectual vice” not creationists like yourself who spend all their time confidently bashing something they clearly don’t understand.
Newsflash: natural selection does not “generate” mutation; mutation is an independently occurring source of variation from which natural selection “selects” after the fact.
For heaven’s sake, Google it Denyse! Here, I’ll do it for you; the top two hits for “natural selection” are:
Wikipedia – Natural Selection
U.C. Berkley – Natural Selection
That took mere seconds and after mere minutes of reading you won’t find anything on either of those two pages about natural selection “generating” mutations, random or otherwise. Here’s a bonus one on genetic variation from Wikipedia.
Is it really so much to ask for them to have a basic understanding of the science they put so much energy into repudiating?
[Hat tip to Larry Moran over at Sandwalk. Larry took the time to address O’Leary’s aforementioned rationalizations, have a look-see.]
The Institute for Creation Research has graced us once again with a brilliant display of their scientific prowess. This time the focus of their efforts revolves around the recently published description of a newly unearthed dinosaur species Eodromaeus murphi.
Eodromaeus is a small (slightly over a meter in length) South American dinosaur from the mid-Triassic (230 MYA). This date makes it one of the earliest dinosaurs and its describers, Ricardo Martinez et al., argue that it should be classified as a basal theropod ―the carnivorous branch of the “lizard-hipped” or saurischian dinosaurs (Martinez et al., 2011).
What has ICR’s, or more specifically ICR “science writer” Brian Thomas‘ knickers in a twist is that in the same paper in which they describe Eodromaeus the authors also argue for the reclassification of another dinosaur, Eoraptor (described back in the early 1990’s), which is from the same location and roughly the same time period as Eodromaeus.
A couple of years ago, after hearing that creationists had purchased Dinny the dinosaur and converted perverted him—and his sidekick Rex—into tools for peddling their rank ignorance, I went out to Cabazon to see for myself how badly they had been abused. What I found was not happy-making, nor would it be for anyone who cares about knowledge, science and truth, or who finds the thought of children being mislead distressing.
What I found was that Dinny had not only been taken hostage by creationists but judging by their posted material, creationists who seem to be enamored with the “teachings” of some of creationism’s lowest common denominators; professional hucksters such as (the felonious) “Dr.” Kent Hovind and “Dr.,” Carl Baugh, two people that even other young earth creationists (YEC) tend to distance themselves from.
Even worse they seemed to be doing fairly good business as they were in the process of expanding the attraction by adding a number of decently executed life size dinosaur models.
Dinny the dinosaur (foreground) and Rex (background).
As I said that was two years ago. Last summer my wife Kathy and I happened to find ourselves not far from Cabazon and I figured we should swing by and see what new devilry might have befallen Dinny.
Playing Chess with Pigeons 