CRITIQUE OF BILL MORGAN'S "WEIRD SCIENCE"

by David C. Wise, 1990

The following is the HTML version of the critique I wrote in 1990 of local creationist Bill Morgan's creationist tract, "Weird Science." I used to post my transcription of the tract itself, Most of his tract is quoted faithfully within this critique, but if you really want a copy of the tract I could email it to you upon request.

The critique ran over 80 pages long (this HTML file is over 220,000 bytes long), so you might want to save time by downloading a copy and reading it off-line; eg, by saving the page to your computer or printing it as a PDF -- minimizing one's "connect time" used to be very important back when we were charged for each minute of connect time.

This critique came into existence because an Atheists United acquaintance, John, had been corresponding with Bill and asked me to read and respond to Bill's "Weird Science" for him. Writing this critique in my spare time (usually during lunch time) to me over a year to complete, by which time I had lost contact with John and, through him, with Bill. It was not until 1996 that I was finally able to get a copy of this critique to Bill Morgan. He has never responded to it, except to mention that one name had been misspelled.

In preparing this HTML file, I resisted the urge to rewrite portions of it, in order to preserve my response at that time. Over time, I intend to add commentary to this file, which I've started doing in the form of "FOOTNOTES" labeled with the year it was added.

Bill Morgan

You had berated Gene Johnson since he "could not find one error in [your] creation 'Weird Science'." I believe his apparent inability to do so was due to his relative unfamiliarity with "creation science." Similar to the experiences of the early debating opponents of creationists, he could tell that the cartoon's claims are false, but he couldn't quite explain why they are false. So being true to his word (a characteristic of atheists), Gene gave me a copy of his correspondence with you.

I realize that several months have passed since I received your dubious effort in June 1990. This response has been delayed by my having to write it during my lunch hours, many of which are preempted by work or other higher-priority projects. The long delay has not been due to any inability to respond to your often ludicrous claims. You say "not one evolutionist has yet [found a single error in it]", so you obviously must not have shown it to very many "evolutionists" (or have been extremely selective with your audience), because I have found errors in every single frame on every single page.

For one thing, it made me realize how long it has been since I last saw "Big Daddy," which apparently had inspired your effort. Of course, if you had remained true to that Chick publication then Dr. G.I.M Smart would have been short, pot-bellied, bald, unshaven, apparently unbathed (you could practically smell the Chick Pubs antagonists through the printer's ink), and chewing on a stogey. As it is, you did characterize your antagonist as being rude, arrogant, boorish, and showing absolutely no respect whatsoever for anyone else or their beliefs -- in short, a crude caricature. In truth, most atheists I know have been polite, clean-cut, respectful, and interested in learning a wide variety of subjects. Some of us are even mistaken for being Mormon, apparently because of our obvious clean living. But then, of course, your cartoon is not dealing with the real world, is it?

Your Dr. Smart even seems intent of destroying any and all faith in God, which is in keeping with the siege mentality that creationists are trying to maintain in "The Long War Against God." And throughout the whole thing, your protagonist remains stereotypically squeaky clean-cut (though I understand that flat-tops were considered radical nowadays) and always maintaining a respectful tone (not typical of most proselytizers I have encountered). Somewhat heavy-handed, even for propaganda, but let's face it -- a Goebbels you are not.

And of course, you do have an advantage being able to put any words you want into your characters' mouths; kind of like practicing that big argument with your boss or wife (isn't that the same thing?) in which you always seem to have and keep the upper hand while they cannot even lay a glove on you. Trouble is, it never seems to work that way in real life, does it?

As it is, your little cartoon does indeed raise a number of questions, but about creationism, not evolution nor science. I will try to address as many of these questions as I can, but because of the very limited free time available to me, I must be very brief. So I must beg your indulgence as I proceed point-by-point and frame-by-frame. I'll try not to bore you too much.

I'll gloss over the fact that the situation described here is very contrived. I mean, since when did PhDs teach junior high biology? Everybody knows those jobs go to the P.E. coaches <grin>.

[FOOTNOTE, 2014: That was a reference to the case of John Peloza, which was then still current, so I was intending that to be an inside joke that Bill should have gotten. Peloza was a high school PE coach who also taught biology in one small school district, then transferred to another district as a biology teacher. He sued the school district for infringing on his religious rights by forcing him to teach "the religion of evolutionism". His suit was dismissed for being frivolous and was then taken up by the appeals court which also found it to be frivolous. The school removed him from the biology classroom and returned him to teaching P.E.]

[FOOTNOTE, 2019: The irony of the infamous John Scopes Trial should be noted here. In the 1920's, four states passed "monkey laws" which banned the teaching of evolution in the public classrooms, such that you could not even begin to mention the "e-word" -- in some states, such as in Arkansas, the penalty was to bar you from ever teaching again, which led to Epperson v. Arkansas (1969) which resulted in the striking down of those "monkey laws".

It turns out that John Scopes was a PE teacher, similar to John Peloza (the irony part). In John Scopes' case, the ACLU wanted a test case against the "monkey laws" to take to the US Supreme Court, so Scopes agreed to violate the "monkey law" for them. He was convicted, but his conviction was overturned at the appellate level on a technicality that the judge had received the fine instead of the bailiff, so the case never made it up the chain to the US Supreme Court. Instead, that had to wait for Epperson v. Arkansas (1969) to strike down the "monkey laws" and then Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) to expose "creation science" as completely religious in nature, which led creationists to abandon the old smoke-screen of "creation science" for a new smoke-screen of "intelligent design". ]

Of course I am kidding, but the general lack of teachers who are competent in science coupled with the generally poor quality of science in the textbooks only seem to aggravate the problem of scientific illiteracy rather than to alleviate it. The misconceptions and false impressions learned in the science classroom are rarely corrected in later years and resurface frequently in the "evolution model", which is creationism's misrepresentation of evolution. Perhaps one of the worst problems with science education is that it often appears dogmatic and arbitrary because it presents WHAT scientists think without explaining WHY they think it. This engenders the false impression, which creationism tries to exploit to the fullest, that there is no evidence for evolution. This is a failing of science education, not of science itself.

We also see Dr. Smart failing to abide by the California Framework (granted, your work might just be rather dated). According to the Framework:

"Nothing in science or any other field of knowledge shall be taught dogmatically. A dogma is a system of beliefs that is not subject to scientific test and refutation. Compelling belief is inconsistent with the goal of education; the goal is to encourage understanding."

"To be fully informed citizens, students do not have to accept everything that is taught in the natural sciences curriculum, but they do have to understand the major strands of scientific thought, including its methods, facts, hypotheses, theories, and laws."

"If a student should raise a question in a natural science class that the teacher determines is outside the domain of science, the teacher should treat the question with respect. The teacher should explain why the question is outside the domain of natural science and encourage the student to discuss the question further with his or her family and clergy."

"Ultimately, students should be made aware of the difference between understanding, which is the goal of education, and subscribing to ideas, which is not."

Here we read the thesis of the work: "Every scientific law we know points toward creation." But then you completely fail to develop it! Instead, you do nothing but attack your version of evolution.

Obviously, you are relying on the "Two-Model Approach" (TMA), but that strategy is fraught with many glaring logical and ethical errors. In a joke, "Balanced Treatment" under the TMA has been described as a book with two chapters: Chapter One is "Evolution" and Chapter Two is "Everything That is Wrong with Chapter One." The TMA places all ideas having anything to do with "origins" (a creationist term) into one of only two groups: the "creation model" and the "evolution model." For purposes of assignment, only the "creation model" is ever defined; everything that does not belong to the narrow definition of the "creation model" gets dumped into the "evolution model", making the latter a monstrously huge, jumbled, and incoherent mess of conflicting and contradictory ideas, most of which are totally false and which have nothing to do with evolution. Then by attacking a few ideas of the "evolution model," and quoting many scientists criticizing parts of that "evolution model," creationists claim to prove the "creation model" by "disproving" the "evolution model" without ever having to present the "creation model" or any evidence FOR the "creation model," or to discuss or defend either the "creation model" or any evidence FOR it. Not only is the TMA approach misleading and dishonest, but it is impossible (not just intractable) to "prove" the "creation model" strictly by "disproving" the "evolution model."

Personally, I am very disappointed that you did not present any evidence FOR creation. Ever since I had started studying "creation science" in 1981, I have searched in vain for any of the purported evidence FOR the "creation model." I couldn't even get a straight answer out of Dr. Morris or Dr. Gish of the ICR. The only conclusion that I can draw from my experiences and the experiences of others is that such evidence simply does not exist. Here is how another searcher, Robert Schadewald, describes the usual answer he gets from creationists when he asks for the evidence FOR creation (and it agrees with my own experiences):

Schadewald : What evidence do you have FOR creation?

Creationist: Evolution sucks!

Schadewald : No, no. What POSITIVE evidence do you have for creation?

Creationist: Evolution POSITIVELY sucks!

Not only do I keep getting that same answer, but it also describes your entire work here. Do you have any evidence FOR creation? If so, then why didn't you present it?

Besides, the two "models" of the TMA do not even qualify as models (hence the ubiquitous quote marks). Models are formulated on the basis of existing evidence; no evidence, no model. So if they did qualify as models, then there would have to be evidence FOR the "creation model" as a result of that model's formulation. Conversely, if there is no evidence FOR the "creation model," then it never could have been formulated and so does not exist as a model. Rather than to digress further at this point on the TMA, I will return to a more complete discussion later.

When Smart (any relation to Maxwell?) insists upon teaching evolution as a "scientific fact" (see Page 1, Frame 1), the protagonist asks, "Which theory of evolution, sir?" Here you seem to be confusing the fact of evolution with the theories of evolution, though it is not entirely clear whether you are doing so intentionally or through your own ignorance. The general public's lack of understanding of basic scientific terminology coupled with creationists' constant substitution of the scientific meanings of the terms with the popular meanings (which are different), creates much confusion which the creationists exploit to mislead the public and to influence public opinion.

While the common application of the term, "fact", is solely to something that actually exists or has occurred, a scientific fact, in keeping with the entire scientific endeavor, is more tentative (EVERYTHING in science is subject to review, testing, revision, and rejection, even the facts). Unlike the popular usage, scientific facts include those ideas which, although not established beyond a shadow of a doubt, enjoy enough support from the evidence that, for all practical purposes, that can be taken as fact, in the common usage.

In this sense, evolution is indeed a scientific fact. So the question of the fact of evolution would ask whether species have indeed formed through "descent with modification from a common ancestor." "Descent from a common ancestor" since that is the central idea of evolution; "with modification" since the various descendant species are all different from each other and, obviously all except maybe one, are different from the ancestral species.

For that matter, through "basic created kinds" and "variation within basic created kinds," "creation science" itself teaches the fact of evolution. Even though they try to draw a very definite distinction between micro-evolution and macro-evolution, because of the nebulous "definition" of "kinds," which will often include entire higher taxa (especially in attempts to alleviate overcrowding in Noah's Ark), there is no way for creationists to avoid advocating "descent with modification from a common ancestor," AKA evolution. And when used to alleviate overcrowding on Noah's Ark, wherein all present species descended from single breeding pairs representing each "basic created kind" with a few millennia, then "creation science" also ends up advocating an extremely rapid rate of evolution far more rapid and radical than any proposed by the most radical of evolutionists. I have developed these ideas more fully elsewhere and would be happy to share it with you at a later date. However, we digress.

Likewise, "theory" has a very definite scientific meaning which differs from common usage. Instead of being some kind of unsubstantiated guess (ranging from "questimates" to SWAGs), a scientific theory is a model explaining a fact or facts. As such, theories play a central role in the most fundamentally important activity in scientific endeavor: understanding the natural universe. Without theories, we would have a confusing mass of unrelated data with no clue as to how to make any sense of it (remember, raw data is useless -- it only becomes information after it has been organized and/or processed into a usable form). Nor would we have any hint of what kind of research to follow nor how to go about it; science would lack any sense of direction without theories to direct and to motivate research. Even if the theory is wrong (which all of them are in one way or another), the results of the research that it spawns would usually expose what is wrong with it and will often provide clues for correcting (i.e. refining) the theory. Like an iterative numeric method, each step contains error, but with each step the method should approach the answer ever closer. Even if the final result still contains error, we are infinitely closer to the absolutely correct answer than if we had never tried in the first place. Bill, are you criticizing science for being science?

One point that seems to either be lost on creationists, or they simply choose to ignore it, is the distinction between the fact of evolution and the theories of evolution and the fact that they form two entirely different questions which are largely independent of each other. The fact of evolution is the question of whether or not evolution has actually happened and the theories of evolution try to explain how it happened, i.e. try to determine the mechanism(s) of evolution. Even if we never find the mechanism of evolution, that has no bearing on whether or not evolution happened. And even if evolution did not happen, the principles of the possible mechanisms would still have taught us much of the natural world and have already contributed to our technology, as in the practice of Evolutionstechnik by German engineers and genetic algorithms by our own engineers.

One common complaint from Dr. Gish of the ICR is over the "mechanism of evolution"; a few years back on KABC radio's "Ray Briem Show," Gish repeatedly harangued that evolution was in big trouble because such a mechanism does not exist. Basically, he kept claiming that science should be able to explain everything (and kept challenging science to come up with specific answers) and yet it cannot and creationism claims not to be able to explain anything, so creationism is superior to science in explaining the natural world (huh? I couldn't figure that one out either when I heard it).

Ironically, he answered his own harangue indirectly on the same show. When Fred Edwords brought up Judge Overton's decision in the Arkansas "Balanced Treatment" trial, Gish claimed that a philosopher of science, Larry Laudan of the University of Pittsburgh, had proclaimed that decision to have been a mistake that would come back to haunt us. When Gish sent me a copy of that article ("Science at the Bar: Causes for Concern"), I found that Laudan actually commended Overton for his decision, but he felt that it had been arrived at for the wrong reasons and that it rested on "a host of misrepresentations of what science is and how it works", especially in his revival of "discredited criteria for distinguishing between the scientific and the non-scientific." Rightfully so, there is much trepidation over lawyers deciding what science is, just as when they decide what religion is.

In the photocopy of the same article, somebody (possibly even Gish, but I do not know his handwriting) had written in the margin, "Mechanism of evolution." In that paragraph, Laudan writes:

"For centuries, scientists have realized that there is a difference between establishing the existence of a phenomenon and explaining that phenomenon in a lawlike way. Our ultimate goal, doubtless, is to do both. But to suggest, as Overton does repeatedly, that an existence claim (e.g. there was a worldwide flood) is unscientific until we have found the laws on which the alleged phenomenon depends is simply outrageous."

In other words, determining that a phenomenon exists and explaining how it works are two different endeavors; even Gish responded to me as an apparent quotation (though it is not clear from where): "The fact of evolution is establishing the existence of evolution, whereas evolutionary theory is explaining the mechanism of evolution in a law-like way." But then Gish tried to apply a double standard and exclude evolution from Laudan's protection while including creationism by insisting that Laudan was talking specifically about creationism and that it did not apply to evolution.

Your protagonist goes on to state: "There are three different theories on evolution: chance evolution, progressive evolution, and theistic evolution." My first response would be to ask, "What the hell's 'chance evolution' and why didn't you include Darwinian evolution?" The only reason that I do not is because I am familiar with "creation science" and I realize that you had pulled these "theories" straight out of your "evolution model", which, you should be realizing by now, has very little to do with evolution.

Basically, theistic evolution says that God did it, but that he used natural processes, including evolution. Although "creation science" insists that we do not know, and cannot know, HOW the creator created, we somehow "know" that it was through processes no longer in operation (contrast this with the basic assumption of uniformitarianism that the processes we see operating in the present are the same ones that operated in the past -- WARNING: this does not demand slow, uniformly constant rates of operation!). Despite their admitted ignorance, "creation scientists" somehow know that theistic evolution is false, heretical, and all sorts of other mean, nasty, and ugly stuff. Since this issue directly involves creationist orthodoxy and does not deal with the scientific aspects, I have given it very little thought. And since it does not try to explain HOW evolution happened, but rather WHAT was directing it behind the scenes, how can your protagonist say that it "disproves the other two"? If anything, it very favorably complements progressive evolution by providing it with a guiding force.

Progressive evolution is an old and discredited idea which actually originated in creationism. In the decades and a few centuries B.D. (before Darwin), naturalists noticed that there are many similarities (homologies) among different species and that they could be grouped together according to how many and to which homologies they possess in common. One of these naturalists was Linneus, a creationist and ardent believer in the fixity (i.e. immutability) of species, who organized these groups into a hierarchy of relatedness which is the Linnean system of classification that, with a few corrections, we still use at present.

But rather than the branching pattern of evolution, many of these naturalists saw a linear progression from simpler organisms to more complex ones, a "Ladder of Life" or "Great Chain of Being" putting each fixed species into its proper place in the Creation -- from Protozoa and bacteria at the bottom to Man, the "Crown of Creation," at the top. Then when naturalists started considering evolutionary ideas to explain the patterns of life, it was these linear patterns to which they applied themselves. For example, in Lamarckian evolution, which was discredited over a century ago, this "Ladder" was more like an escalator with all beings striving upwards toward greater complexity and greater perfection, i.e. towards Man and with new life constantly forming to fill the vacated lower rungs. Very early on, Darwin broke away from this type of thinking when he realized that there was no need for organisms to continue to change if they don't need to.

Even though we now know that such a linear view is highly inaccurate and misleading (from plant proteins found in "wet fossils" we have found that even though the morphology did not seem to change, the biochemistry had continued to change, i.e. evolve), there are many people who still think in terms of "Ladder of Life." For example, I keep hearing creationists insist that evolution is slow, gradual change at a constant uniform rate from simple to more complex; at best, this is a caricature, which makes it quite at home in the "evolution model." Since the evidence clearly contraindicates this view and since no scientist would support it, this caricature provides a handy strawman for discrediting evolution (there is a more complete description of strawman tactics in the discussion on the "Two-Model Approach").

Even a supposed scientist, Michael Denton (it turns out that he was far less knowledgeable than he thought he was), has made the mistake of using "Ladder of Life" thinking. In his book, _Evolution: A Theory in Crisis_ (you may have heard of it), he claims to have found that protein comparisons completely fail to support evolution because we do not find the modern descendants of ancestral intermediates to still be intermediate in their biochemistry. "Ladder of Life." But we have already seen that there is no reason to assume that the more "primitive" lifeforms only evolved up to a certain point and then stopped changing altogether once they found their place in the natural order; life is not a ladder, but rather it is a branching tree. When Denton does finally compare protein differences in terms of a branching-tree pattern, he is dismayed to find that they fit almost perfectly!

Then there is that joker you slipped in: "chance evolution." Only my familiarity with "creation science" saved me from total confusion, because I recognize it as a caricature of Darwinian evolution, which is most decidedly NOT "chance evolution."

But in the meantime, the "evolution model's" "chance evolution" provides creationists with a handy strawman upon which they base many misleading probability arguments. Even Denton repeatedly characterizes evolution as random chance and uses that to argue against evolution. Proceeding from the misrepresentation of evolution as random change and that complex structures are supposed to have formed spontaneously into their final forms through blind chance, creationists show that the probability of such random events occurring is so ridiculously small as to be virtually impossible. For example, they calculate the probability of the 20 different amino acids stringing themselves into just the right order to spontaneously form a modern protein 200 amino acids long as being (1/20)^200, or 10^(-260). Of course, this not only completely ignores the numerous possible amino acid substitutions that would still yield a functional protein, but it also completely ignores the manner in which we would expect evolution to produce a modern protein. This protein forming ex nihilo is far more reminiscent of creationism than of evolution and the remote probability of it occurring only emphasizes creationism's dependence on a creator. According to evolution, that protein would have evolved from a more primitive form.

To put these probabilities into some kind of perspective, let's try a simple probability calculation. I wrote a computer program that randomly picks 26 letters of the Roman alphabet (the same letter can be picked more than once) and strings them together to hopefully produce the alphabet in alphabetical order. The probability of success is (1/26)^26 or about 10^(-37). In order to have one chance in a hundred of succeeding, we would have to try at least 10^34 times. My poor little XT can only do a little less than 200 tries per second, but if we use a supercomputer that could do one million tries per second, then it would take that supercomputer millions of billions of years of constantly trying just to achieve one chance in 100.

This is called single-step selection and it assumes a series of attempts to achieve the end-result in a single step; unless complete success is achieved in a single step, then that step fails completely and you have to start all over again from scratch. There is no reward at all for partial success and the results of any partial success are scrapped and not carried over into the next attempt. That is what your "chance evolution" models, but it is not how evolution works and it is most definitely not how life itself works.

Instead, refer to Richard Dawkins' treatment of cumulative selection, a model for natural selection, in the first half of Chapter Three, "Accumulating Small Change," of his book, _The Blind Watchmaker_. Believe it or not, I understand more about your reluctance to read and understand it than you think (and possibly more than you understand yourself), but READ THIS BOOK. It should help to clear up a lot of the misconceptions you have about evolution, provided you want them to be cleared up.

I have also written a program, MONKEY, that tries to build the alphabet with randomly-selected letters, but using cumulative selection instead of single-step. Under cumulative selection, you start with a random string (26 letters long in this case), make multiple copies of it which are very similar, yet slightly different from, the original string, and out of those copies pick the one that is closest, no matter by how little, to the target (in this case the alphabet). Then repeat the process. In contrast with single-step selection, this method succeeds very rapidly and very consistently.

In one test case, I had 100 copies made in each iteration, each copy differing from its "parent" through the substitution of a randomly-selected letter at one randomly-selected location. In this case, my XT (no supercomputer by any stretch of the imagination), running compiled code (i.e. NOT a BASIC interpreter), succeeds in producing the alphabet in less than 15 seconds -- repeatedly, consistently, without fail. The 20-copy case can sometimes take up to a minute and the 10-copy case as much as 30 minutes, but they still run incredibly faster than the single-step model. I have also calculated the probabilities involved in cumulative selection. It turns out that the probability of the 100-copy case succeeding within 80 iterations is greater than 99.99%, approaching dead certainty! Even for the 10-copy case, the probability of succeeding within 100 iterations is greater than 50%. Since cumulative selection models natural selection, it is easy to see why John Maynard Smith says that natural selection makes the improbable inevitable.

If you have an MS-DOS computer or access to one, and if you are interested, then I can give you a copy of MONKEY. That will include both the Turbo Pascal source and the .EXE files, the program which calculated the probabilities (using Markovian chains and stochastic matrices), text files listing the probabilities of sample cases, and a document file discussing single-step and cumulative selection and an analysis of the probabilities involved. It's a real eye-opener, which is probably one reason why you avoided any mention of natural selection or of DARWINIAN evolution.

So you see, Darwinian evolution does not operate by "blind chance," but rather by natural selection which is very deterministic. And as long as the organisms remain sufficiently well-adapted to their environment, which should be the rule, then natural selection will be very conservative and prevent change. But when the environment changes, as in an actual climatic change or the migration of the population into a different environmental niche, then natural selection should work much faster (provided the other conditions of variability, etc, are met). Despite all the hype about punctuated equilibrium (PE) overturning Darwinism, PE is actually part of Darwinism and Darwin himself anticipated many aspects of PE, especially the long periods of stasis interspersed by short periods of rapid change. All that PE really changed was the emphasis on slow gradual change that Darwin had started because he was arguing against saltationism (i.e. the idea of entire large changes, such as the acquisition of an entire complex organ, appearing suddenly within a single generation -- in a way, creationism is the ultimate form of saltationism). Again, read _The Blind Watchmaker_ for clarification.

The only reason I can possibly see for this frame was the need to inject a little comic relief. I mean, you can't possibly be presenting this as a serious argument for a young earth, can you? It's too ridiculous. We could just as well use my "bible" at work, the _Turbo Pascal Version 5.0 Reference Guide_:

Me : Could you please tell me where the _Turbo Pascal Version 5.0 Reference Guide_ states the age of the earth?

You: No, I can't.

Me : The _Turbo Pascal Version 5.0 Reference Guide_ does not state the age of the earth. That's why you can't.

Now tell me just how much sense THAT makes.

I know that you probably worship the Bible and that you believe it to be an infallible authority on all subjects, kind of a "Paper Pope." With such a world-view, it may seem natural to you that everyone would turn to the Bible as a final authority in resolving any question, including the age of the earth, but that is not so. Rather than taking everything strictly on authority (even though that was the way in the Dark Ages, we started doing things a little differently in the Renaissance, or "rebirth" of Western civilization), science demands examination of the evidence. Part of the purpose for "creation science" is to show that the Bible's statements about the natural world are true; to use the Bible as a sole authority in determining the age of the earth is a blatant case of circular reasoning that even you should have spotted. Besides, your protagonist never did even try to support the young-earth claim; he side-stepped it entirely. It's as if he were trying to claim that since the Bible completely fails to establish the age of the earth, then science must be wrong. Huh?

Despite "creation science's" extremely soft public stand on the young-earth question (when asked directly before a public audience what the age of the earth is, Gish would not answer directly but rather stated that it is of little importance to creationism and that some creationists are young-earthers while others are old-earthers; when John Morris was asked the same question among creationists, he answered, "If the earth is more than 10,000 years old then Scripture has no meaning"), the vast majority of creationist "science" is dedicated to proving a young earth and to discrediting any and all evidence indicated the earth's great antiquity. Of course, much of the work exposing creationism's wrong-doings has been in their young-earth claims, some of which are more blatantly false and misleading than others. Still, most of the general public, or believers in "creation science" for that matter, would not be aware of the falsehood of the creationists claims, so I do not understand why you did not have your antagonist ... excuse me, "protagonist" ... simply rattle off some impressive looking scientific buzzwords that no reader would be able to understand, but boy would it impress them!

Actually, your strange appeal to the Bible here does remind me of something that happened while I was in the Air Force. I was sitting in the Rec Center late one Sunday morning (I forget now what I was waiting for) when somebody switched the TV from a Frisbee tournament to a televangelist. This preacher set up a hypothetical situation involving a conference of believers from all the world's religions and at which each member of the audience was to imagine himself representing Christianity (he didn't quite specify whether the other sects of Christianity would also be there, but obviously these fundamentalists are the only True Christians there are, right?). Then he asked the audience how they could possibly prove conclusively to the other conference members that Christianity is the one True Faith. Quite simply, while the other faiths have their own sacred texts, only Christianity is based on the Bible which is the Word of God himself!

I could not believe what I was hearing. That was the most inane piece of circular reasoning I had ever heard; not even a satirist could have come up with a better spoof! Just as I was about to laugh out loud, I looked around and saw something even more incredible; everybody else watching it was agreeing with the guy! (Actually, about three airmen were watching it, another was completely ignoring it while reading a magazine, and yet another airman was sound asleep) Even though to this day I still cannot really believe that it had ever happened, I have seen many similar cases, especially in "creation science."

Apparently, the main purpose of this frame is to reinforce the fundamentalist siege mentality actively promoted by creationism, namely that the "state religion" of "secular humanism" is using the guise of "church-state separation" to destroy Christianity. Of course, this position ignores the necessity of keeping the government from legislating religion and of state-run schools from providing anything but a secular education; religious education must be provided by the students' parents and/or church, NOT by the state.

The other purpose of this frame is to introduce the subject of the next frame: supposed errors in reconstructing the descent of Homo sapiens sapiens. The chart is very reminiscent of that perennial Zondervan chart which seemed to mimic Chick publications' artwork, though with much more of a burlesque flavor, what with the hominids facing attacks from all directions by dinosaurs (and I do mean from ALL directions). The whole thing (the Zondervan chart, that is) is intended as a caricature, as is evidenced by the misrepresentation of discredited "Men" as being currently taught when they had been dropped decades ago and by the discrediting of well-documented "Men" on the basis of single fossils and misconceptions.

Response

Oh, no. Not this nonsense again. Instead of trying to deal with the current list of hominid fossils, you put together a parade of straw men just so you can blow them away. Your techniques vary a bit from one to the other. Some of these (Nebraska and Piltdown) were discredited long ago and would never be included in a legitimate chart. Then you try to isolate two others (Heidelberg and Peking) as being individual hominids based on questionable or nonexistent evidence when they actually are examples of Homo erectus, which is well-documented and widespread.

Let's get down to some specifics:

Heidelberg Man:

The remains of Heidelberg Man indeed consist solely of a single massive lower jaw found in a sand pit near Heidelberg, Germany. This jaw is large and heavy and lacks a chin, unlike modern man. The teeth are of moderate size and are generally like modern man's. In many respects, it resembles Neanderthal, which some scientists consider it to be ancestral to. The consensus is that it is a later grade of Homo erectus, whose remains have been found in Africa, Asia, and Europe and whose later examples are found to grade into Neanderthal forms. Homo erectus is well-documented and widespread, so the Heidelberg remains are hardly an isolated case.

I have not heard of anybody having claimed that it was human. Could you please provide more information on this point?

Nebraska Man:

"Nebraska Man" (Hesperopithecus) was a mistaken, though not undisputed, "reconstruction" from a human-looking tooth. Hesperopithecus only lasted a few years before it was refuted by the same team that had found it. Even though it was laid to rest over half a century ago, creationists continue to misrepresent it as part of current evolutionary thought.

Harold Cook found the tooth in Nebraska in 1917 and sent it to vertebrate paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, President of the American Museum of Natural History, in March 1922 to determine the tooth's affinities. Osborn determined that the tooth appeared to be "one hundred per cent anthropoid," announced Hesperopithecus haroldcookii as the first anthropoid ape from America, and sent casts of the tooth out to 26 institutions in Europe and America.

As would be expected, Hesperopithecus was largely met with skepticism, but a few scientists did acknowledge Osborn's claim. One of them, British anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith, helped an artist, Amedee Forestier, come up with an imaginative artistic reconstruction, which appeared in the Illustrated London News. Osborn and his colleagues were unimpressed with the drawing, feeling that "such a drawing or 'reconstruction' would doubtless be only a figment of the imagination of no scientific value, and undoubtedly inaccurate." This "reconstruction" did not appear in any other publication until it was "rediscovered" by creationists and reprinted in their own books.

Rather, Osborn chose to interpret the fossil as that of an anthropoid ape and put a colleague, William King Gregory, in charge of defending it. At first, Gregory concluded that the tooth "combines characters seen in the molars of the chimpanzee, of Pithecanthropus, and of man, but ... it is hardly safe to affirm more than that Hesperopithecus was structurally related to all three."

Then later in 1923, Gregory backed off a bit and suggested that it was of the gorilla-chimpanzee group. Indeed, it was Elliot Smith who had made the overzealous extrapolations from the tooth; most other scientists, including its discoverer and defender, were much more cautious. Which is as it should have been. Starting with further field work at the original site in 1925, doubt began to spread about the tooth's owner. By 1927, Gregory became aware that Hesperopithecus was an extinct peccary (pig) and he printed a retraction in the journal, _Science_. As far as science was concerned, that was the end of "Nebraska Man."

Misidentification of incomplete fossil specimens is not uncommon; the self-correcting nature of science normally takes care of them as it did for Hesperopithecus. Nor was the misidentification of the tooth totally unwarranted. It does bear a compelling resemblance to hominid molar teeth in terms of size, shape, and wear patterns. However, the tooth is not an upper molar, but a rotated upper premolar (or bicuspid) which had undergone abnormal wear. Ironically, 13 years prior Harold Cook and W.D. Matthews, a colleague of Osborn, had observed a startling resemblance between the premolars and molars of Miocene peccaries and anthropoid apes, so that they "might well be mistaken for them by anyone not familiar with the dentition of Miocene peccaries."

A mistake was made and it was corrected, as it should be in science. And in this case, it only took five years to go from "discovery" to refutation -- by its very discoverers! When a creationist makes a mistake, he simply denies it and continues to use the mistake.

Now, given all this, why did you misrepresent "Nebraska Man" as being current?

Piltdown Man:

Like "Nebraska Man," Piltdown Man (Eoanthropus dawsonii) was a mistake that has been corrected. The main differences are in how long that correction took and that it had been a deliberate hoax. It is still not known "who dun it" and the finger has been pointed at the discoverer Charles Dawson, his digging partner Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Piltdown proponent Arthur Smith Woodward, and, more recently, even at Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Dawson had discovered the first skull fragments in a gravel pit at Piltdown in 1908. After collecting fossils there until mid 1912, he took them to Woodward for evaluation. When the three (Dawson, Woodward, and Teilhard) continued digging later in 1912, the first jaw was found. Woodward published in December.

The find instantly attracted much criticism. The skull was thick but otherwise indistinguishable from modern humans and the jaw was identified as "chimpanzee" (actually it was from an orangutan) except for the wear on the teeth which appeared human (those wear patterns had been filed in). The critics, who were many, clearly saw that the combination was a monstrosity and argued that the remains were of two different animals that had been mixed together. Since it fit the current ideas of human evolution that a large brain would have developed first, Woodward stoutly defended Piltdown Man until his death at the end of the 1940's. Then in 1914 a second find associating a human skull and apish jaw with human wear patterns tipped the scales in favor of Woodward and most critics were effectively silenced.

It was finally in 1953 that Piltdown was exposed by Kenneth Oakley, J.S. Weiner, and W.E. le Gros Clark. When the bones failed an fluoride age test, further examination showed that they had been chemically stained to simulate great age and that the teeth had been filed down. Furthermore, the mammal fossils that had been found at Piltdown had been planted there and the flint tools found there had been recently carved. Just as the critics had said, the skull was human and the jaw was ape. The whole thing was a hoax.

True to the corrective nature of science, Piltdown Man was publically exposed as a hoax and he was "evicted" from the family tree, never to be used again -- except by creationists. When scientists construct any kind of chart or tree of human descent, Piltdown NEVER appears on it. Why then did you include him and misrepresent him as a currently accepted human ancestor? Are you deliberately trying to deceive your readers?

Creationists parade Nebraska and Piltdown Man to show the folly of science, yet both cases actually illustrate the greatest strength of science: through continual testing and re-evaluation, mistakes can be detected and corrected. Both Nebraska and Piltdown were mistakes, they were discovered and immediately revealed to the public for the mistakes they were, and neither received any further consideration from science. Contrast this with many creationist claims, such as the Paluxy "man-prints" and the self-exploding bombardier beetle, which creationists of the ICR have admitted as being mistakes and yet they continued to use the same claims. They proclaim loudly about the dust motes in science's eye, yet they cannot see the boulders in their own eye.

Peking Man:

Here is another case of creationists trying to discredit science by concentrating on a few specific details about one specific fossil and forgetting the entire story. In 1927 while digging in cave deposits at Choukoutien, about 50 km southwest of Beijing (then Peking), Dr. Davidson Black discovered a few hominid molar teeth and named them Sinanthropus pekinensis ("Peking Man"). Two years later, his team discovered a complete and undistorted skull of the same species. While Black felt that his naming was justified, anthropologists at the time felt that the find was another example of Dubois' Pithecanthropus ("Java Man"), which we now call Homo erectus. After the discovery, Black sent photographs, measurements, and a preliminary descriptive account to Marcellin Boule at the Institute of Human Paleontology in Paris.

When Black died in 1934, he was replaced by Franz Weidenreich, who produced the definitive monographs on the fossils. He made further photographs, note, measurements, and a set of excellent casts, which he took with him as he fled the oncoming Japanese invasion. He had left the original fossils in China to be evacuated with a Marine detachment, but when they arrived at the port on 7 Dec 1941, their ship was sunk and they were captured. The original fossils disappeared.

Now Dr. Gish of the ICR freely admits that if we can trust Weidenreich's work then Peking Man would indeed "occup[y] a position intermediate between anthropoid apes and man." So of course Gish and other creationists do everything they can to discredit Weidenreich's work and to claim that the only evidence for Peking Man are the casts and a few teeth. Gish even goes so far as to cast doubt on the very existence of the caves at Choukoutien.

After World War II, especially after China opened to the West again, further digging at those "nonexistent" caves has yielded many more finds, so that the evidence for Peking Man is massive. Interestingly, the back part of a skull found in 1934 fits perfectly with a front portion found in 1966. On top of all this evidence, Peking Man is no isolated case, but is only one of many examples of Homo erectus remains which have been found in Africa, Asia, and Europe, with late examples grading into Neanderthal forms. Homo erectus is well-documented and widespread.

"No evidence"?

Neanderthal:

"That Neanderthal, ... [is] as human as any human today?" This brings to mind the following comment:

"Indeed, W. L. Duckworth [British professor at the turn of the century] once exuberantly exclaimed that if Neandertal man entered a bar in modern dress the majority would not notice him. One marvels at the sort of person Duckworth drank with." (_The Piltdown Men_, Ronald Millar, p. 148)

A good part of the disagreement over Neanderthal does lie in how to classify him. This ranges from treating him as part of our genus and species (Homo sapiens neandertalensis) to classifying him as a late form of Homo erectus. Indeed, late examples of Homo erectus are found to grade into early Neanderthal forms.

One thing they do all agree on is that Neanderthal predates modern man. Even if we do group him within our own genus and species, the fact remains that Neanderthal morphology is very distinctive and different from that of modern man. Even though creationists try to explain their morphology away as having been caused by disease, none of those claims stand up to examination. In a systematic study of multiple Neanderthal crania, G. M. Morant found certain characteristics of all the skulls to lie either well outside or entirely outside the interracial distributions for modern man.

New Guinea:

What the hell is "New Guinea Man"? I've never heard of this one before and I have been unable to find any mention of it anywhere, not even in creationist books. Is there another name used for it and what is the story supposed to be?

Cro-Magnon:

Cro-Magnon remains date back about 40,000 years and are indeed very similar to modern man. There are a number of small skeletal differences between Cro-Magnon and modern man, but only about as much as between the modern races. Cro-Magnon is clearly an earlier form of modern man which is very closely related to us and I know of no scientist who claims differently. What claims were you thinking about?

This does raise an interesting problem about "missing links." In their "no transitional forms" complaint, creationists often demand to know where the "missing links" are: i.e. given two different forms, come up with one that is intermediate between them. The practical problem with this is that once you do that, you no longer have a single to gap to account for, but two gaps for which you must now find two more intermediates! Accomplish that and you will have four gaps requiring four more "missing links." And so on, with the quantity of demands doubling each time! It'll never end until a continuous spectrum is achieved, which is impossible since there isn't even a continuous spectrum from one generation to the next; in strict terms, you cannot be considered as being a transitional form between your own parents and your own children, even though you are definitely related.

Furthermore, Richard Dawkins has suggested that if the fossil record were entirely complete, if every single "missing link" were present and accounted for, that the patterns of evolution would be extremely difficult to see. We wouldn't know where to draw the lines. We already see this happening with species of frogs ranging across the Eastern Seaboard of which neighboring species are related closely enough to interbreed and yet the more distant species are too different to be able to. Where can we draw the line between them? The same thing has happened to herring gulls that ring the Arctic Sea; by the time the gradations make it around the pole, you have an entirely different species. Just where along that continuum do you draw the lines?

So then, if you would not accept a "missing link" that is different from us nor one that is very similar, what kind of "missing link" would you accept?

Oh, I have so often heard that cry, "... but they're still MOTHS!!!" What do you expect evolutionary change to be?

That is NOT a rhetorical question, nor is it to be asked solely of creationists. Part of the disagreement among scientists is over the question of exactly what constitutes evolutionary change. Some maintain that a new species must be formed before it can be called evolution and others say that the modification of a species through evolutionary processes should also count. The former is termed macroevolution, which creationists reject, and the latter is termed microevolution, which creationists accept and teach as "variation within basic created kinds." The general consensus on macroevolution is that it occurs through the accumulation of a sufficient amount of microevolutionary change.

Every source that I have read on those moths says basically the same thing, that they are a prime example of NATURAL SELECTION in action, NOT of macroevolution. Nowhere does anybody claim that a new species had been formed, rather that an existing species had been changed through evolutionary processes. The same thing holds for the insects developing immunity to pesticides.

The definition of evolution is "descent with modification from a common ancestor." It does not specifically require a new species to form.

A brief word about that "they were still fruit flies, weren't they?" There are many different species of fruit fly, as there are of moths, frogs, and birds. When macroevolution occurs and a new species of fruit fly is formed, then that new species will "still [be] fruit flies," won't they? Such an argument actually says nothing whatsoever and is nothing but a smokescreen.

[FOOTNOTE, 2019: The technical term in cladistics for the branching-tree patterns we see in phylogenetic trees is Monophyly. When new species evolve from an ancestral species, they're still the same "kind" (called a "clade") as the ancestral species. Even as those new species produce other newer species, even entire subtrees, all those new species and new subtrees are still in that original ancestral specie's clade. A common term to describe that is "nested clades", in that all descendent clades are still in that original ancestral clade.

An example to describe nested clades would be your dog (or your neighbor's). The ancestors of all canids (Canidae -- follow this link for a graphic presentation of the following) evolved two major clades, one of which split into two other clades: canini (canines) and vulpini (foxes). Canini split into two groups, one of which is Canina, which itself split into two clades for wolf-like canines and for jackals. The canines split further into several branchings off of various wolf species until we get down to Canis lupus (gray wolf) and Canis lupus familiaris (dogs). In addition, above the level of Canidae we have a common ancestor (Carnivoramorpha) with the felid (cats) and ursine (bears) clades. Carnivoramorpha in turn came from the placental mammal clade, which is from mammalia (which includes marsupials and monotremes (egg-laying mammals). Mammals are part of the synapsid (mammal-like reptiles) clade, which is part of the amniota (egg-layers) clade, which is part of the Tetrapoda (four-limbed), which is part of Chordata (vertebrates), which is part of the Kingdom Animalia.

That means that the clade for every single animal is nested within another clade, which is nested within yet another, etc, which in turn means that every single animal is . So, that dog is not only a variant of the gray wolf, but it's also still everything that came before that last speciation event. That dog is still a canine, a Canidae, a carnivoramorph, a placental mammal, a mammal, a synapsid, an amniote, a tetrapod, a vertebrate, and an animal. And every descendant species that may evolve from dogs will not only still be in the dog clade, but also be in every single clade that the dog clade is a part of. That is what makes "they were still fruit flies, weren't they?" such a meaningless argument; all it accomplishes is to demonstrate the creationist's own ignorance, kind of like that old classic "Why are there still monkeys?" (which I have seen used in the wild several times). Apply that cry of "... but they're still MOTHS!!!" to that dog by crying "... but it's still a MAMMAL!!!" and you can clearly see how stupid this creationist claim is.

Another way in which creationists get this wrong is when they insist that evolution would require something like a dog giving birth to kittens -- not only have I seen many creationists make that claim, but Bill Morgan also has used it. That is absolutely wrong, that is not how evolution works, nor is it anything like what life does. Once you have split off far enough into your own clade ("far enough" to no longer be able to form hybrids with your closely-related clades), you cannot simply jump to another clade; instead, evolution works by increasing the diversity of an existing clade with sub-clades. For that matter, if a dog were to give birth to kittens, that would serve as evidence against evolution, as well as disproving almost everything we know about biology. ]

 

"Never has one species evolved into another, and never has science showed it."

You haven't even tried to look, have you? What about the banana moths on Hawaii, which exist nowhere else and are otherwise very similar to native moths but could not have existed on Hawaii before the Polynesians brought the banana tree there. Or the Hawaiian wallaby, which descended from some Australian wallabies that escaped from a zoo in the last century. Not only are they smaller and of a lighter color than the original species, but they have developed an enzyme that allows them to eat native Hawaiian plants that are poisonous to Australian wallabies. Or the continuous gradation of insect species up the side of a Hawaiian mountain. Or the same kind of gradation of frog species stretching from New England to Texas. Or the two different species of herring gull in Britain in which as you circle the Arctic Ocean you find the one gull species gradually grading into the other species. And so on.

Part of this claim of yours is the mistaken notion that everything in science must be directly observable. In reality, very few things are directly observable, so we must instead work with indirect observations. Despite the great difficulty of directly observing evolution, due primarily to the extended time frames required, there still exists a vast body of evidence supporting evolution, which you cannot simply redefine or wish away.

To demonstrate the problem presented here by time, try this little experiment. Prove through direct observation that an avocado seed produces a tree that will bear avocados. Do it by planting an avocado seed and then harvesting avocados from the tree that grows from that seed. You have one week in which to perform the experiment and present your results. Well, how about it?

The only practical way to perform that experiment would be to find different stages of an avocado tree's life cycle and to determine that that is indeed what they are. Similarly, evolutionary change normally spans centuries or millennia, when the species is not in equilibrium, so it is human impossible for an individual to sit and observe it. Thus we must work with evidence of past change and realize it for what it is. To blindly insist on nothing but direct observation would only enforce a regimen of abject ignorance, which would serve creationism's purposes quite well.

Ah yes, the old "transitional species" trick. The whole illusion depends on redefining the word "transitional" and very well illustrates creationism's practice of "Word Magick."

According to common usage, a transitional species would be any species between an ancestral and a descendant form. To use human lineages as an analogy, we could be considered transitional between our own parents and our children. However, in systematics, "transitional" has a much more specific meaning; there, a transitional form must be exactly midway between the other two forms in each and every one of its characteristics. By this definition, we could not possibly qualify as transitional between our parents and our children, even though we know full well that we are firmly in the direct line of descent (assuming, of course, spousal fidelity).

In reality, we do not find true transitional forms which are exactly midway in ALL characteristics, but we do find many intermediate forms which possess characteristics of both groups that they bridge as well as some characteristics which are indeed transitional. Think about it. How reasonable is it to assume that ALL characteristics would evolve at rates that are EXACTLY proportional to each other. Shouldn't we rather expect different groups of characteristics to evolve at different rates? And shouldn't each rate vary at different times depending on the actual selective pressures being exerted at that time?

Archaeopteryx is a case in point. A widely misquoted scientific statement says that Archaeopteryx is not a transitional form (in the strict sense, that is), but rather is a mosaic. This means that it has characteristics of both dinosaurs AND birds, as well as some intermediate characteristics. In comparing 27 characteristics of birds, coelurosaurs, and Archaeopteryx, we find two features in which all three groups were the same (eyes having a sclerotic ring and scapulae having the same shape). In two other features, birds and Archaeopteryx were the same and different from Coelurosaurs (body covered with feathers and fused clavicles [wishbone]). In 17 other features, Archaeopteryx is different from birds and the same as the coelurosaurs (femur, fibula, sternum, ribs, gastralia, cervical vertebra type, caudals, vertebral column, humerus, ulna, carpometacarpus, teeth, palate, occipital condyle and foramen magnum, anteorbital skull openings, external nostrils, and external mandibular). In the remaining 6 features, Archaeopteryx is intermediate between birds and Coelurosaurs:

Feature ---------- Flying Birds -------- Archaeopteryx -------- Coelurosaurs
-------            ------------          -------------          ------------
Metatarsals ------ Fused --------------- Partly fused --------- Little fused

Bones ------------ Hollow, ------------- Hollow, not ----------- Some hollow,
                   pneumatic             pneumatic               not pneumatic

Coracoids -------- Long, narrower, ----- Wider, rounded, ------- Widest, rounded,
                   free                  fused to scapula        fused to scapula

Pelvis ----------- Elements fused -----  Unfused, simple, -----  As in Archaeopteryx
                   together and to       triradiate.             Pubis more
                   vertebral column      Pubis slightly          forward-projecting
                   to form rigid         forward-projecting    
                   synsacrum. Pubis
                   rearward-projecting.

Orbits -------- Large, incompletely ----- Smaller. Bony -------- Smallest.  Bony
                surrounded by bone        surround               surround
                                          complete.              complete (?)

Braincase ------ Greatly expanded, ----- Moderately expanded --- Not expanded
                 extensively fused       fusion less             not fused
                                         complete

With Archaeopteryx we have something that is clearly intermediate, even though it is not strictly "transitional." It is such a good example that we can view Archaeopteryx as either a birdlike dinosaur or as a dinosaurlike bird, both with equal ease and with equal justification. Indeed, Dr. Gish recently tried to do both in the very same article intended to eliminate it as an intermediate! Creationism IS more fun than science!

So the trick is to take a systematicist stating that no "transitional species" have ever been found, which is true in accordance with his restrictive definition of the term, and quote him to an audience who understands the term in much looser terms, e.g. meaning something like "within the lines of descent," thus presenting an "evolutionist expert" as "supporting" the creationists' claims. You can see that redefining terms on the fly like this allows creationists to misquote their sources without having to change a single word.

There is another variant in this argument, the question of direct ancestry as opposed to "cousinship." One of the puzzles of paleontology, one which will probably never be solved conclusively, is determining the direct lines of descent. To scientists working on this problem, an intermediate form would be one on the direct line of descent and so a descendant of a related branch would not qualify as an intermediate. Here again, creationists will quote scientists as saying that positively identified "intermediates" (i.e. direct-line ancestors) do not exist and lift them out of context to appear to say that no hint of common ancestry exists.

For example, creationists have often tried to use an earlier bird fossil (whose identity is still much in dispute) as evidence that Archaeopteryx is not an intermediate form. That does not necessarily hold true. For example, there is nothing keeping an earlier population of Archaeopteryx from giving rise to another descendant species which formed the line of descent to birds. In the meantime, the original population of Archaeopteryx could continue on little-changed, so that the specimens we found would be descendants of that original population. Even if they are not in the direct line of descent to birds, they would still be related to birds and would still teach us a lot about the transition from dinosaurs to birds. To claim that they are not related to birds simply because they are not in the direct line of descent would be like saying that your grandfather's brother's son's son, who is not in the direct line of descent to you is totally unrelated to you.

A final word on this variant. Part of the creationist argument seems to derive from the misconception that when one species evolves from another, the older species should cease to exist. The most naive example of this that I have ever heard was said by a caller on the Ray Briem Show when Duane Gish and Fred Edwords were guests: the woman said, "If we evolved from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys?!"

I know that I would insult your intelligence by explaining this, but I will anyway. The general understanding of speciation, from Darwin's time to Gould's, is that a portion of a population becomes isolated from the rest of the population and evolves into a new species in response to a different environment. There is nothing in this process that requires the original species to become extinct unless that sub-population also happens to be the entire population of the parent species. Remember, the evolutionary pattern is one of increasing diversity.

Now as for the transitional fossil sequences themselves, you obviously have not looked very far. You can find many such references in the article "Paleontologic Evidence and Organic Evolution" by Roger Cuffey in _Science and Creationism_ edited by Ashley Montagu (Oxford University Press, 1984). In that article, Cuffey conducted a brief search, by no means exhaustive, of readily available materials to compile a bibliography of about 160 references of transitional fossils, including species of algae, corals, angiosperms, foraminiferans, bryozoans, brachiopods, gastropods, pelecypods, ammonoids, trilobites, crustaceans, echinoids, condonts, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, the crossopterygian-amphibian transition, the amphibian-reptile transition, the reptile-mammal transition, hominids, etc. He listed the references according to the following classifications of transitional fossils (going from more complete to less complete knowledge):

1. Sequences within a single higher taxon which grade continuously from one species to another without break.
2. Sequences which grade continuously from one species to another without break and linking across from one higher taxon to another.
3. Series of chronologically successive species within a single higher taxon which grade from an early form to a later form.
4. Series of chronologically successive species which grade from an early form to a later form and cross boundaries separating different higher taxa.
5. Continuous series of higher taxa grading from earlier to later forms, sometimes crossing from one higher-rank taxon to another (not usually used to construct transitional-fossil sequences).
6. Isolated individuals (e.g. the most famous example, Archaeopteryx).

This critique has already grown to considerable size. If you want to read the article, then you should track down the book (it also contains a number of other interesting articles, describes the events surrounding the Arkansas "Balanced Treatment" law, and contains the decision of the court). If you would prefer, I could photocopy the article for you.

"Life starting from non-life" is called Abiogenesis, as opposed to the general observation of life coming from life, or Biogenesis. It seems that no creationist presentation ever goes by without throwing this challenge out. The obvious intent is to tie evolution with abiogenesis and to make it appear to the audience that evolution depends upon abiogenesis, so that any failure to explain abiogenesis can be declared a failure of evolution.

As it turns out, Darwinian evolution does not deal with the origin of life from non-life, but rather with descent with modification from a common ancestor, which presupposes life and so conforms to Biogenesis. Abiogenesis extends the ideas of evolution and so depends on evolution, whereas evolution does not depend on abiogenesis.

Think about it. Darwinian evolution is "descent with modification from a common ancestor," i.e. that all species are the modified descendants of earlier species. This means the Darwinian view is that a species existed which produced offspring that were very similar to, yet slightly different from, the parent generation (a very common every-day occurrence). If the environment changes (through climatic change or migration), then the differences between the original ancestral species and its descendants would increase through differential reproduction (AKA natural selection) until they become two different species. Furthermore, if different groups of the original ancestral species' descendants had moved into different environments and so were subjected to different selective pressures, then they would become different from each other and also become two different species.

Notice that in each generation, Darwinian evolution has LIFE (an ancestral species) giving rise to LIFE (a descendant species). This is in complete agreement with Biogenesis. DARWINIAN evolution presupposes life; it describes the origin of species from ancestral species. Darwinian evolution depends on the ability of a population to make near-perfect copies of itself (but not too perfect); this is a property of life. Darwinian evolution does not claim that life started from non-life," it does not depend on that claim, and it does not, in and of itself, even raise that question. Darwinian evolution deals with proximate origins, not ultimate origins.

Rather, "life starting from non-life" is a part of Abiogenesis, which does directly raise and try to answer the question of the origin of life from non-living matter. This area of study has adopted some evolutionary ideas, both Darwinian and non-Darwinian, adapted them to new and different kinds of problems, and extended them beyond their original scope. It's an entirely different and very difficult game of which we've barely begun just to learn the rules.

Abiogenesis is admittedly a rather weak science, mainly because it has so little direct evidence to work from. Almost all the evidence from the origin of life has been eradicated, most likely through the action of life. Any attempt to repeat the process in nature will be halted either by the wrong conditions (e.g. atmospheric content) or by the action of existing life (e.g. proteinoids immediately being eaten by existing bacteria).

Just about all that scientists can do at this point is to take their current understanding of the processes that were probably involved, try to reconstruct how it might have happened, and see how much sense it makes. It can be frustrating work, but it does show some promise.

It's like working a jig-saw puzzle without a pattern picture and with most of the pieces missing. But even though most of the key pieces have not been found yet, what we have found is very promising. Sidney Fox's work with thermal proteins show that amino acids will form together quite readily when heated and that the proteinoid microspheres that form when water is added can persist for indefinite periods of time over a wide range of conditions and that some of them exhibit enzyme-like and other activities, albeit weak. Orgel's experiments show enzymes producing RNA. ###

For a long time, we have been vitalists, i.e. we have believed that there was something insubstantial and magical about life, something that we could never find nor duplicate. Yet we have found that the stuff and processes of life are very much physical and mechanistic. The stuff of life are molecules and they operate very regularly through biochemistry; there is nothing mystical about it.

Abiogenesis depends upon the ideas of Darwinian evolution to the extent that they apply to this problem, but it is doubtful how far they can apply. Darwinian evolution depends very heavily on the property of replication (so that it can bring the power of natural selection to bear), so until that property can be established Darwinian evolution can contribute very little if anything. Scientists even apply a different term, chemical evolution, which relies on deterministic chemical reactions, rather than the principles of Darwinian evolution.

It is not evolution that depends on abiogenesis, but rather the materialistic view of the universe, a view which I happen to share.

Of course, Darwin knew nothing about genes and chromosomes. How could he have known about them? He published _Origin_ in 1858, eight years before Mendel published his paper. Furthermore, Mendel's work remained forgotten until 1900, 18 years after Darwin had died in 1882. Mendel's work was rediscovered in 1900 by de Vries, Correns, and Tschermak when de Vries was preparing to publish a paper on his hypothetical "pangens", which were to explain mutations that he had observed in his experiments. These pangens, which had no known physical existence, were renamed to "genes" in 1909 by Johannsen, who considered them to be just an abstract idea, a kind of unit of measure, like an inch. Chromosomes were first discovered in the 1870's, but it wasn't until about 1885, a few years after Darwin's death, that Weismann linked them to heredity, again with little physical evidence.

T.H. Morgan was convinced that Mendel was wrong and went about trying to disprove genetics in the Fly Room at Columbia, where in 1910, he ended up proving him right. Not only did he prove the existence of genes and that they were placed on the chromosomes, but he and his research team succeeded in assigning specific genes to specific chromosomes and even to specific locations on those chromosomes.

So genes and the role of chromosomes in heredity weren't discovered until after Darwin's death. Please explain to me, then, why Darwin SHOULD have known about them.

And besides, so what if Darwin knew nothing about genes and chromosomes? Remember back to the discussion of Laudan's article following Page 1, Frame 3: "For centuries, scientists have realized that there is a difference between establishing the existence of a phenomenon and explaining that phenomenon in a lawlike way." Darwin realized that the many forms of life on this planet are not fixed and immutable but that they change over time by adapting to their environments. That he could not in his time explain where the species' variability came from or exactly how they do inherit their characteristics does not diminish the fact of evolution in the least.

Do you expect Darwin to be omniscient? Does every single thing he had ever written have to be correct for any of it to be correct? That seems to be what you are saying in this frame. He was not a god, so why demand infallibility of him?

Indeed, you seem to projecting onto him the demands you make on your own god and on your bible. Assuming you to be a fundamentalist (your writings bear all the marks), you are in the uncomfortable position of requiring all of your Scripture to be absolutely and completely true and correct. If any part of it is shown to be incorrect or false, then that would cast doubt on the rest. This means that if anything in the real world contradicts Scripture or shows it to be incorrect, then that shows that Scripture is NOT infallible nor of divine authorship; it loses its authority and your faith loses its basis. Indeed, Dr. John Morris of the Institute for Creation Research has gone so far as to publically proclaim (at a creationist convention -- he wouldn't dare say it to the general public), "If the earth is more than 10,000 years old, then Scripture has no meaning."

So what do you do with any evidence that appears to contradict Scripture? You try to reinterpret it. If that fails, then you try to ignore it. If you cannot, then you try to explain it away. If you cannot, then you attack it and try to discredit it in any way you can. Since evolution appears to contradict Scripture and creationists cannot explain it away, it is no accident that the primary goal of "creation science" is "killing evolution instead of playing these debating games that we've been playing for nigh over a decade already" (Letter from Paul Ellwanger to Tom Bethel, presented as evidence in McLean vs Arkansas Board of Education, 1981, Judge Overton presiding).

As it was, Darwin had gotten a lot of things right, but he also got a few things wrong. For one thing, he could not explain inheritance and variation. Empirically, he could see that offspring resembled their parents and that they were also slightly different. But he could not explain how those characteristics were inherited nor what the source of variation was. One mistaken notion that he and most others had was that inherited characteristics blended, rather than remained discreet as Mendel had found and Morgan had verified, so that a new characteristic would always run the risk of getting diluted in succeeding generations; he could not explain why this did not happen. Then in his later years, in an effort to explain the source of variation, which he could not explain since he did not have de Vries' knowledge of mutations, he had to resort to the Lamarckian idea of acquired characteristics, which Darwin developed in his "Pangenetic Theory." It was wrong.

Ironically, when the scientific world finally discovered Mendelian genetics, their first impression was that it disproved Darwin because it showed that his ideas about characteristic blending and acquired characteristics were wrong. Then, with the Great Synthesis, they realized that genetics provided the source of inheritance and variation that Darwin had been seeking in the first place, albeit in vain.

"Darwin said our eyes evolved from freckles caused by the sun. Somehow a nerve attached itself to the brain, and that's how we got eyes."

I recognize both the "freckles" and the "callouses" statements here as creationist caricatures of Darwin. In the section, "Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication," in Chapter Six, "Difficulties of the Theory," of _The Origin of Species_, Darwin describes various forms of "eyes" which might offer some insight into how the eye could have evolved:

"The simplest organ which can be called an eye consists of an optic nerve, surrounded by pigment-cells and covered by translucent skin, but without any lens or other refractive body. We may, however, according to M. Jourdain, descend even a step lower and find aggregates of pigment-cells, apparently serving as organs of vision, without any nerves, and resting merely on sarcodic tissue."

Are these "pigment-cells" your "freckles"? It should be obvious even to you how much your oversimplification distorts and trivializes Darwin's statement and how much it misleads your readers.

"Do you know how Darwin said our legs evolved? ... from rolling around the ocean floor we got callouses which through time evolved into legs!"

I could not find Darwin's statement about the "callouses." Please provide the bibliographic reference for it so that we can see what Darwin really said. Or was this taken from his "Pangenetic Theory", which scientists know full well to be wrong? If so, then why present it as if it were relevant to current evolutionary thought?

"It takes much more faith to believe in evolution than a creator."

Since you have been talking about your "evolution model" and calling it "evolution," I would agree with you here; your "evolution model" is one of the most unbelievable things I've seen. However, it has very little to do with evolution.

Now that we're at the conclusion, you're supposed to show that you have supported and developed the thesis of the work. Yet here we find that you have not only failed to do so, but that you have also avoided doing so.

You gave us the thesis back in Frame 2 of Page 1: "Every scientific law we know points toward creation." And then you completely failed to develop it! Instead, you did nothing but attack your caricature of evolution, the "evolution model." I do understand your reasoning in doing so. The logic of the Two-Model Approach requires the "creation model" to be "proven" solely through "disproving" the "evolution model" without ever presenting the "creation model" nor any evidence FOR it. We have already discussed the intellectual and ethical bankruptcy of the Two-Model Approach, so I'll not digress here. However, I must still point out that your thesis claims that that evidence DOES exist, and yet you COMPLETELY FAILED TO PRESENT ANY OF THAT EVIDENCE OR TO EVEN INDICATE ITS EXISTENCE!

Nor are you alone. One Golden Rule among creationists is to avoid presenting or discussing the "creation model" in public. This rule is almost never violated, and then usually only by amateurs, and is adhered to at all costs, including the refusal to even defend the "creation model." This is very easy to understand; presenting or discussing the "creation model" would reveal to the public, whose opinion creationists are trying to sway, that, despite creationists' claims, there is actually no scientific basis to creationism and that "creation science" is just Genesis, pure and simple (often very simple). This would completely blow away the facade of "science" behind which creationists have been trying to mask their actions.

For example, in a debate between Craig Nelson and Henry Morris (Purdue U., 29 Oct 1981), it was Nelson who had to present Flood Geology and then he presented geological evidence that directly refutes it. Morris, the Father of Flood Geology (that's right, FG is HIS baby), refused to defend Flood Geology, claiming that to do so would be bringing religion into a "scientific" debate.

Indeed, one of the more laughable creationist exercises was when the ICR's lawyer, Wendell Bird, tried to distinguish between the "Scientific Creation Model" and the "Biblical Creation Model", pointing out that:

"... a sharp and consistent distinction between a scientific creation model and the Biblical creation model is essential both to the scientific credibility of creationism that is formulated solely on the basis of available physical evidence, and to the theological purity of the Christian doctrine of creation based on the Bible, and consequently the Constitutional acceptability of the creationist viewpoint in the public schools." (_Acts & Facts_, December 1978, pp 4-5)

Bird then lists seven points of the two "different" "models," the one's points "on the basis of scientific evidence" and the other's "on the basis of Genesis." Lo and behold, the two "models" are completely identical, point-for-point, virtually word-for-word, except for some purely superficial renaming and rewording designed to remove overt religious wording from the "scientific model." Creationist watchers are very familiar with this game of "Hide the Bible" that creationists have been playing these past 20 years as they try to sneak their religion into the public schools. Now that the courts and some of the public are getting wise to that trick, Bird and other creationists are starting a new game of "Hide the Creationism" by coming up with impressive new scientific-sounding euphemisms, like "abrupt-appearance theory" and "discontinuist biology." But we both know that taurine manure by any other name smells just the same.

Also, there are those words, "only a theory" and "a theory which science cannot prove," which betray your misunderstanding of science.

There seems to be this mistaken view of science in which scientific ideas somehow get promoted from SWAG to hypothesis to theory to fact to law. If, instead, you remember that "Theories do not become facts, they explain facts," then you will have started on the road to enlightenment.

Another word for "theory" is "model". It would be useful to remember that a model describes something. In science, that something is a phenomenon or phenomena or process which has been observed, either directly or indirectly. It is the job of the model to describe that something in such a way as to explain it. A model cannot be proven, only disproven. That is to say that the model needs to be tested and, since all models are by their very nature incomplete and imperfect, corrected and refined. The initial formulation as well as the iterative process of testing and refining that is part-and-parcel of model-building generates the body of evidence FOR that model. That is why I use quotation marks whenever I refer to the "creation model"; its total lack of evidence tells me that it is not a model. One of the big problems for the "creation science" is that it doesn't describe or explain anything.

Let's digress momentarily at this point. I have often heard creationists rail against scientists talking about the "fact of evolution." As it turns out, there is both the "fact of evolution" AND the "theories of evolution." The fact of evolution is "descent with modification from a common ancestor" and the theories of evolution try to explain the fact of evolution. It's as simple as that.

Now a "fact" in science is a little different than a "fact" in everyday life. To most of us, a fact is something known beyond a shadow of a doubt to exist or to have happened and cannot be questioned. Yet in science, all knowledge is tentative and every scientific idea, including their "facts," are constantly being questioned by scientists. So a scientific fact is not as ironclad as an everyday fact, but rather is an idea which has so much evidence supporting it that for all practical purposes we can consider it to be an everyday fact, except that we will continue to question it and to test it.

So when we talk about the "fact of evolution," we mean that the evidence indicates common ancestry for the species that we find today. When we talk about the "theories of evolution," we are talking about our attempts to explain how the current species descended from their ancestral species. This is how, as the draft for the California Science Framework stated, evolution is both fact and theory. Even Gish realizes this, as evidenced in his letter to me: "The fact of evolution is establishing the existence of evolution, whereas evolutionary theory is explaining the mechanism of evolution in a law-like way." Creationists try to "disprove" the fact of evolution by pointing to deficiencies or conflicts in the theories of evolution, but now you know from Larry Laudan's statement that the existence and truth of a scientific fact is not dependant on attempts to explain it:

"For centuries, scientists have realized that there is a difference between establishing the existence of a phenomenon and explaining that phenomenon in a lawlike way. Our ultimate goal, doubtless, is to do both. But to suggest, as Overton does repeatedly, that an existence claim (e.g. there was a worldwide flood) is unscientific until we have found the laws on which the alleged phenomenon depends is simply outrageous."

When you said "Evolution is only a theory which science cannot prove," you forgot to mention that science cannot prove ANY theory, it can only falsify it. The same holds for scientific facts; no one accepts them as TRUTH because they cannot be proven. That is also why every scientific idea undergoes constant testing. Since error is inherent in every scientific idea, we must constantly test and refine (i.e. reduce the error of) those ideas, analogous to having a numerical method converge on a solution. This is part-and-parcel of the scientific method.

It seems that most of the "scientists" who are also creationists instead tend to be engineers. I know how disdainful many engineers are of theoretical science, so I find it ironic that creationists stress the need to "prove" a theory. You see, it is only in the most theoretical of sciences, such as mathematics, that you can deal in such proofs.

These are basic scientific terms and concepts that should have been learned in science class. That our students fail to learn them is a failure of science education. But instead of trying to help alleviate the problem, creationists exploit the general public's ignorance of science and generate even more confusion with their distortions. All that creationists accomplish is to increase and perpetuate the public's ignorance. Of course, this furthers the creationist cause, since creationism depends on continuing ignorance to survive.

QUESTIONS ATHEISTS HOPE YOU'LL NEVER ASK THEM:

Why do I get the feeling that you haven't talked with very many atheists? You probably got all those blank stares because your questions are so off-the-wall that the poor atheist couldn't believe (a redundancy?) what you had just said.

Let me make one comment before we start. You repeatedly depict the Atheist as not knowing the answer to any of the questions and saying "I don't know." While it is true that there are many questions that we simply do not know the answers to and so the only honest answer IS "I don't know," you are actually just playing out a standard fundamentalist approach to proselytizing: make it look like the other guy doesn't have any basis for his position and then make it appear that you have all the answers. Many religions, Christianity in particular, rely on authority, so the more authoritative you can make yourself appear the more persuasive you can make your scam -- er, I mean pitch -- appear, especially if the mark -- er, I mean the perspective convert -- is ripe for the fleecing -- er, I mean the picking. I couldn't help noticing, though, that while the Christian was busy "stumping" the Atheist, he avoided answering his own questions. I have noticed the same thing happening in the creationist literature, in which creationists insist that science be able to answer every question, castigating it when it cannot, and then declare creationism to be better because it cannot answer any questions.

Realize that there are many questions for which we do not have the answers, so it is no sin to admit that you do not know. Rather, the sin lies in pretending to have the answers when you don't. Scientific knowledge may be imperfect and very incomplete, but at least it is honest about what it does and does not know and it is open to testing and correction. On the other hand, revealed knowledge claims to have perfect knowledge which is closed to testing or correction (after all, how can you improve something that is already perfect?).

If given a choice between imperfect scientific knowledge which we can test and improve and somebody's untestable claim of perfect knowledge, guess which one I, or any rational person, would choose.

First you engage in a gross oversimplification, then you compare apples and oranges.

First off, an explosion occurs when an oxidation-reduction (redox) reaction is initiated in a mixture of fuels and oxidizers. The fuels lose electrons to the oxidizers, liberating oxygen atoms which in turn bond to the fuel molecules. The fuel/oxidizer mixture is unstable, but the redox reaction forms stable reaction products. The explosion occurs because the heat is more confined and the reaction occurs much more rapidly than if the fuel had obtained its oxygen from the air, as in normal oxidation (e.g. a fire). Any physical structures surrounding the explosion would indeed be damaged or destroyed, which is often what is desired and which can be used to help construct such structures as ditches and channels.

On the other hand, the Big Bang is supposed to have started as pure energy in a very confined space (if such terms had meaning then). It rapidly expanded, as an explosion would, but since there were no physical structures surrounding it, there was nothing to be "demolish[ed] and destroy[ed]." Instead, it cooled as it expanded and particles formed out of the energy. A better analogy here would be the release of super-heated steam (i.e. steam kept under high pressure); as the steam expands, it cools and a different state, water droplets, condense out of the steam-ball. Once the matter condensed out, it was able to start interacting to start forming the larger structures we see in our universe.

Your confusion of these two similar yet very different kinds of events indicate either your lack of understanding about the Big Bang or your intention to mislead the reader.

And besides, explosions do not "always demolish and destroy." Consider the case of a supernova, in which a massive star "explodes." Actually, the entire star itself does not explode, but rather the shell of matter comprising its upper layers is blown off with great force. That force is so great that it fuses nuclei of atoms of those layers together to form the heavier elements.

So you're back to chewing on this rag again. The only purpose of this "question" is to depict the Atheist as being totally ignorant and yourself as being authoritative. However, your earlier treatment of the "theor[ies] of evolution" (Page 1, Frame 3) has already shown that you do not know anything about evolution.

Without a trace? You forget the australopithecines, Homo erectus, Neanderthal, and Cro-Magnon. Although you had tried in vain to discredit them, we still have the remains of hundreds of individuals. I would hardly call this leaving no trace.

Now of course, if you want to claim that there should be a single line of hominid fossils displaying a slow and gradual change at a constant uniform rate of all characteristics from modern ape to modern man, every single step of the way preserved perfectly in the fossil record, then I must ask you to justify such highly unrealistic expectations. I realize that such expectations are very much a part of "creation science's" "evolution model," but, as you must have learned by now, that has practically nothing to do with evolution. So get with the program, okay?

Here is an interesting note. Gish has conceded that if Weidenreich's model of Peking Man is correct, then it would indeed qualify as a "missing link" between ape and man. Therefore, he claims that Peking Man was "100% ape." And since Peking Man was just one example of numerous and widespread Homo erectus finds, he must also claim that they too were "100% ape." And yet those numerous finds do confirm Weidenreich's work. So by Gish's own criteria, Homo erectus does qualify as a "missing link," though Gish will never admit it in public. This led to an episode in Gish's ill-fated presentation at UC Berkeley (9 April 1982) when Tom Jukes came forth with a cast of a Homo erectus skull, which Gish unhesitantly proclaimed to be 100% ape. Jukes then produced a gorilla skull and proceeded to instruct Gish, amidst much laughter from the audience, in the many and distinct differences between hominids and apes.

At the same time, both the ICR and yourself claim that Neanderthal Man is 100% human. And yet we have found a number of later specimens of Homo erectus ("100% ape") grading into early Neanderthal ("100% human"). By your own definitions, these would be just the "missing links" that you say do not exist. QED.

[FOOTNOTE, 2019: Refer to the article on the TalkOrigins Archive, Comparison of all skulls. The standard creationist position is that every fossil hominid is either 100% ape or 100% human and that no transitional fossil exists. Furthermore, they insist that you can clearly tell the difference. In that article, Jim Foley examines the writings of 10 creationists for their assessment of six hominid fossils. What he found is that they could not agree with each other which was "100% ape" and which was "100% human"; if the differences were so clear, why do they all come up with different assessments? Furthermore, some of the creationists changed their minds in different books.]

Why should they? Surely even you must be aware that the genotypes of offspring are derived from the parents' (barring the affects of any mutations) so that offspring are of the same species as the parents. Darwinian and neo-Darwinian evolution call for the gradual accumulation of changes.

Here is how evolutionary theory says it should work: start with a population of organisms that share a common gene pool. A portion (or even all) of that population becomes reproductively isolated, most commonly for geographical reasons, and accumulates different small changes than the main population. In addition, the subpopulation will usually experience different selective pressures if it is in an environment that differs from the main population's. All this will increase the genotypic differences of the two populations until they are different enough to be considered two different species. The two species would still be very similar, but different enough that they would not be interfertile. Still more time and change could have their descendants forming separate genera or other higher taxa.

I know that you were trying to allude to Goldschmidt's "Hopeful Monsters" here, but actually you are invoking "saltationism" which was a carry-over from 18th & 19th century creationist thought. It was his opposition to just this kind of idea that new, complex, and complete forms could suddenly appear in a single generation which forced Darwin to over-emphasize the gradualness of evolutionary change. Yet even Punctuated Equilibria, which is hyped up as opposing gradual change, actually supports gradual change in generational time; it is in geological time that change is abrupt.

There is no reason to expect apes in zoos to bear Neanderthal "ape-men." And besides, didn't you claim on Page 3 Frame 1 that "Neanderthal ... [is] as human as any human today"? Why are you suddenly reversing yourself here and calling Neanderthals "ape-men" now? Can't you make up your mind? Or does the truth not matter at all, as long as you can do the Lord's work in trying to kill evolution?

[FOOTNOTE, 2019: This is precisely the type of stupid claim steeped in ignorance that I mentioned in the Monophyly footnote above. Humans, gorillas, and chimpanzees are all in the Homininae clade, but gorillas split off into Gorillini leaving humans and chimpanzees in Hominini. Now we hominini are split into two clades at the genus level: Homo and Pan. Even assuming that Bill meant chimpanzees instead of gorillas, they would be in a different clade from Neanderthal who was in the Homo clade. A non-Homo ape (remember, we are also an ape species) could not be expected to give birth to a Homo since we're in different clades, albeit closely related. It would be like that other really stupid form of this claim expecting evolution to require a dog giving birth to kittens.]

Look at that tree outside your window. Watch it closely for one minute. Has it stopped growing? No? Prove it. You can't. What does that prove? Nothing.

In the same manner, the rate at which evolution operates takes much longer than a single human lifetime to accumulate enough change for a new species to form, something to the order of 10,000's of years. Still, within a single lifetime we can observe populations adapting to changes in their environment. Even though such changes have not resulted in new species, they are still part of evolution.

I know of no reason why evolution should have stopped. Rather, the onus is on you to explain why you think that evolution should have stopped. Well?

As the genotype describes the genes and the phenotype describes the physical characteristics (i.e. expression of those genes), the karyotype describes the chromosomes, i.e. their number and physical structure.

One of the interesting facts in karyotypic evolution is that many mammal karyotypes evolve rapidly, causing big differences between related species. One of the more extreme cases is that of two subspecies of the muntjac (a small deer native to Southeast Asia), wherein the Indian muntjac has 7 (male) and 6 (female) chromosomes and the Chinese muntjac has 46 chromosomes. A less extreme case has the house mouse with 40 chromosomes and the tobacco mouse with 26. How do the karyotypes of humans and chimpanzees compare to this?

These changes require at least two chromosome breaks followed by a joining of the broken ends. Our knowledge of this is recent and incomplete; we are still learning about it. However, we have found that while such changes in a heterozygote result in infertility, homozygotes of the new karyotype are fully fertile. So not only is there no barrier to the new karyotype getting established, but reproductive isolation from the parent population, a prerequisite for speciation in current evolutionary theory, is built-in.

But please tell us, just what are the differences between the karyotypes of apes and humans?

[FOOTNOTE, 2019: The different chromosome counts are explained by human Chromosome 2 having formed through the fusion of two ancestral chromosomes. As explained in Wikipedia (Chromosome 2: Evolution):

All members of Hominidae except humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans have 24 pairs of chromosomes. Humans have only 23 pairs of chromosomes. Human chromosome 2 is a result of an end-to-end fusion of two ancestral chromosomes.

The evidence for this includes:

• The correspondence of chromosome 2 to two ape chromosomes. The closest human relative, the chimpanzee, has near-identical DNA sequences to human chromosome 2, but they are found in two separate chromosomes. The same is true of the more distant gorilla and orangutan.

• The presence of a vestigial centromere. Normally a chromosome has just one centromere, but in chromosome 2 there are remnants of a second centromere in the q21.3–q22.1 region.

• The presence of vestigial telomeres. These are normally found only at the ends of a chromosome, but in chromosome 2 there are additional telomere sequences in the q13 band, far from either end of the chromosome.

According to researcher Jacob W. Ijdo, "We conclude that the locus cloned in cosmids c8.1 and c29B is the relic of an ancient telomere-telomere fusion and marks the point at which two ancestral ape chromosomes fused to give rise to human chromosome 2."

One of the things I've learned over the past 30 years.]

This is a question for cosmology. The prevailing idea, AKA the Big Bang, has all the matter in our universe condensing out of the original ball of energy. Is this exactly how it happened? Probably not, but at least it gives us a working hypothesis which will direct and motivate further research that will allow us to improve or even replace the Big Bang. That's how science works. Am I to take it that you want to criticize science for doing science?

As stated before, Abiogenesis is a relatively young field of study working from incomplete and often non-existent evidence. Nobody can answer this question, least of all you. We are still working on it. One thing we do know is that life processes, even down to the molecular level, all have a physical basis. There is no need in invoke vitalism or any other mystical idea to explain life as we know it. This fact holds the promise that the origin of life could very well have been through natural processes. Now the challenge is to figure out what those natural processes were and under what conditions they had operated to produce life.

We have just started learning the mechanisms of thought. As in the study of life processes, we find that thought processes have a definite physical basis. There is no need to invoke mystical forces in order to explain thought.

But could intelligence have come about? Obviously, a complete human brain is not necessary before it could serve any function. Once nerve tissue can be grown, then the configurations in which it can be grown are many, all of which are useful. A simple neural net, as in a hydra, confers upon its possessor advantages not enjoyed by those organisms without one. The development of ganglia allows the development of behavior. In vertebrates, a brain stem is quite useful. Grow a limbic system (AKA "reptilian brain") on top of that and you allow a much wider range of behaviors, including territoriality. Grow a cortex (AKA "mammalian brain") on top of that and you get an even wider range of behaviors, including the ability to learn. Top it off with a neo-cortex, as in humans and apes, and you have an even wider range of behavior possible, including that for which we reserve the word, "intelligence."

In short, how did matter get intelligence? It evolved.

It is indeed true that society determines morality, but it is a gross oversimplification to say that society could set the moral standards arbitrarily. For one thing, that would not work. For another, society is also affected by morality and depends very much on it. Rather, morality evolves as part of the society's culture. The only real difference between cultural and biological evolution is that cultural change can be very rapid and in direct response to conditions (like acquired traits). But even then, it must stand the test of time, i.e. be selected for or against through that culture's ability to promote the survival and thriving of its society.

Here's basically how it works. We cannot survive alone, but we can survive and thrive by banding together and working together. Our individual survival depends on the society surviving and society's survival depends on our cooperation and our own collective survival. That behavior which promotes group cohesion and cooperation will benefit the society and better ensure our individual survival. Such behavior would be considered right behavior. On the other hand, that behavior which weakens group cohesion and which hinders cooperation will endanger the survival of the society and hence the overall survival of the individuals. Such behavior would be considered wrong behavior. While some individuals may enjoy some short-term benefits by engaging in wrong behavior, the detrimental effects that behavior would have on their society will exact their toll in the long run.

One important point that needs to be made here is that both the society AND its individual members must benefit from the arrangement in order for morality to work. Obviously, the needs of individuals and of society will conflict at times and individuals will need to subvert many of their own desires and some of their needs in the interests of society. But at the same time society must reciprocate with benefits for belonging to society, the very least being not to endanger its members' well-being. If society cannot do that, then its members will become disaffected and will turn either against or away from that society and will engage in those "wrong" behaviors they deem necessary to meet their needs.

Even at those times when a member is required to give up his life for his society, society must reciprocate. This is most often done through a guarantee of the survival of the member's kin -- indeed, if the threat require self-sacrifice threatens the survival of the society itself, then the survival of kin is being defended along with the society. Of course, an infra-structure for assigning surrogate care-givers is assumed here; in a culture that does not provide care for widows or orphans, the occurrence of altruism should be lower than in a culture which does provide care.

Indeed, this kind of arrangement -- self-sacrifice in either direct or indirect defense of offspring or of kin bearing offspring -- makes much more sense in evolutionary terms than does any metaphysical or mystical explanation of altruism. If evolution is viewed as a game in which the one with the most surviving genes wins, then the development of altruism to increase the chances for survival of those bearing one's genes (e.g. offspring and kin) becomes necessary and makes evolutionary sense. Otherwise, a creationist who believes in the inherent corruptness of human nature (remember, I received my Christian training from Fundamentalists) must try to explain how altruism could be so much a part of corrupt human nature. Indeed, altruism is so deeply ingrained in human nature that it is constantly being extended beyond kinship boundaries and applied to friends, associates, communities, and even nations and all of humanity. It most frequently comes out not after calm deliberation, but as an immediate instinctual response to an emergency situation. This instinct for altruism is so strong that it can easily be manipulated by politicians, the military, and demagogues. How does this make any sense, except in the light of evolution? It most certainly does not make any sense in light of the Fundamentalist view that such higher ideals as altruism must stem from JHWH.

Now that the subject has come up, I have a problem with the Christian view of morality, in that there is no apparent function for morality. Salvation is solely through accepting Christ as your personal savior; morality has nothing to do with it. All that Christianity teaches is that these are the rules and if you break them then you will be punished, sometimes with eternal torment, unless you can qualify for divine forgiveness (requirements may vary according to denomination). Once you receive forgiveness, it is as if the transgression had never happened.

And yet the transgression did happen and its effects continue. Unlike the Christian view, which trivializes morality, the evolutionary view sees morality as being very important and moral acts and transgressions as having very definite effects that do not simply go away with absolution. Moral transgressions do not simply count against the individual as he gets marked for divine retribution for offending JHWH. Rather they also affect other individuals as well as the whole of society. And when society is affected, everybody is affected; no wonder moral transgressions receive such near-universal censure.

Even so-called "victimless crimes" will adversely affect the individual's ability to contribute to society and so will place more of a load on those who do contribute as they not only have to shoulder that individual's load but also have to support that individual to the extent that he loses the ability to support himself. In short, there is rarely such a thing as a "victimless crime"; society itself is victimized eventually.

And society is weakened as the incidence of immorality increases, thus reducing its ability to serve its primary function: to promote the survival of its members. The evolutionary view makes this abundantly clear. On the other hand, the Christian view trivializes immorality as a purely individual offense against YHWH as it trivializes morality as being rules set arbitrarily by YHWH requiring obedience for no other reason except to please JHWH (or at least to avoid being punished by Him). But then to teach that morality can have no reason nor function nor even existence without JHWH and that human nature is so corrupt that without JHWH we will surely sink into the mire of hedonism and that with JHWH to answer to we could do whatever we want, as Christianity -- especially Fundamentalism -- does teach, goes beyond trivialization and verges on the criminal! For in so teaching, Christianity is preparing, even forcing, its followers to abandon morality and to embrace immorality and hedonism should they ever lose their faith in the existence of JHWH. Such teachings are unconscionable and deserving of moral outrage!

It should be quite obvious that while a society might try to arbitrarily set its own rules, it cannot arbitrarily set the effects of following those rules. That is done by natural selection. Nazi Germany is an example of the consequences of a society trying to arbitrarily make its own rules. Their propaganda softened the moral impact of their mass executions by depersonalizing the victims as not-quite-human (a tactic also practiced by our own military when it trains our youth to fight and kill a faceless impersonal "enemy"), thus allowing the people to keep from seeing them as "one of us." Think of the distinction between killing and murder; you kill one of "them" but you murder one of "us." Yet even with this buffer, the Nazis were becoming cavalier about killing and the value of life was dropping. By exalting the sacrifice of the individual for the good of the greater whole, the system violated morality's basic rules of reciprocity; only in times of greatest danger to a society can it withhold benefits from its members and even then, that withholding must be temporary. The system fostered fear and distrust, both of which weaken society. Private armies and power bases were being established. Only a strong charismatic leader could hold them together and even he was slipping. Even if we had not defeated the Third Reich, it would have torn itself apart.

Believe it or not, one of the more important factors in morality is attitude. Moral behavior cannot be purely arbitrary, but is based on one's moral judgement. If the situation encountered is common and straight-forward enough, then predetermined rote moral behavior, the kind that Christianity specializes in, will most likely be used. But if the situation is not straight-forward enough, which is most often the case, then one must make a moral judgement. In making such a judgement, then the manner in which one views the world and society becomes important; in other words, one's attitudes will direct one's moral judgement. Unfortunately, Christianity stresses the following of arbitrary moral rules (many of which do have practical value which is never taught) and so hinders the ability of its followers to develop moral judgement. Furthermore, training in moral judgement is usually denounced as "secular humanism" which Fundamentalists actively campaign to have removed from the schools. Many moral issues are important not for the issues themselves, but for the attitudes they spawn.

Morality is not cut-and-dry or black-and-white, but can be very complex as one surveys the webs of cause and effect. To bind morality to a fixed set of rules not only trivializes it, but can also rob it of its beneficial effects. For example, some moral codes forbid birth control. In a society which requires a lot of manual work, such as an agrarian society, the more workers there are the better it is. So a high birth rate is needed to help ensure a large-enough labor force and to overcome a high mortality rate. In such a society, everybody of practically any age can contribute their share. Use of birth control in such a society would be against the interests of the society and so limits on the practice of birth control would be beneficial.

The story can be quite different in an industrial society which needs a much smaller work force and in which only a trained work force can contribute. There, the rest of the population cannot contribute, except to prepare to replace portions of the work force. During this time, the work force must support the entire population. If the population excess grows too large, then not only does the strain of supporting it become greater, but there will never be enough slots opening up in the work force. A part of the population will be perpetually unemployed and so will always place an added burden on society. Birth control would help keep the size of this population excess down to a manageable size. In this society, practicing birth control would be beneficial and banning it would be detrimental.

The purpose of this simple comparison is to illustrate that a moral code cannot be arbitrary and absolute; whether it is good or bad depends on its context within the society that would practice it. This is what Fundamentalists decry as "situational ethics," though as you can plainly see here, it is not individuals arbitrarily choosing what is convenient, but rather the society choosing what will work for that society. The "absolute" moral codes of the Old Testament had evolved within a particular nomadic society. Then when they settled down, they had to adapt it to fit an agrarian society. Gentiles borrowed this and adapted it to their European societies (now don't try to tell me that you haven't picked and chosen what out of the Bible to obey and what not to -- when did you last observe the Day of Propitiation? (Lev.23:29-30)). In our own case, America started out as an agrarian society in which multi-generational extended families were the norm. Then as we became more industrial and urbanized, the traditional extended families were replaced by the new nuclear families which are ill-equipped to deal with such problems as care for the elderly, child-care, idle youth, total dependence on one or two providers, etc. Needless to say, Reagan's songs of praise for the "traditional" nuclear family fell on deaf ears here.

Of course, my simple comparison was also simplistic, since besides a moral code's effects, there are also numerous side-effects. The promotion of birth control can make sex "safe" and so can allow it to shift away from procreation towards pair-bonding and mutual enjoyment. Carried further, sex can start to become recreational and, since there is less chance of "getting caught" with an unwanted pregnancy, infidelity may increase. This is especially bad in a nuclear family, since the discovery of infidelity is liable to split the family and deprive it of a provider or care-giver, something that it can little afford (an extended family is much more sturdy and better able to survive such a loss). And in a patriarchal society where the identity of a child's father is important, anything that raises doubts, as infidelity surely will, will cause trouble. Also, increased promiscuity will provide vectors for the spread of various diseases. Less tangibly, promiscuity will cheapen sex and diminish what is perhaps its most important role -- to promote a couple's intimacy.

Similarly, banning birth control has its side-effects too. Obviously, it means more mouths for the family to feed, which is made worse by the limited resources of a nuclear family. Not only must the mother endure child-birth more, which is a definite health hazard, but she usually must provide child-care and if she cannot, then somebody must. For example, Ann Landers recently ran a letter from a Catholic girl whose chances of going to college are being destroyed by her parents' procreative irresponsibility; her mother keeps having babies she cannot take care of, so this daughter must stay out of school to take care of the family and watch her excellent scholastic record be destroyed along with her chances for a good life. Cases of infidelity will still occur and be more likely to be discovered and dealt with severely; single indiscretions will more likely result in life-altering repercussions. But more commonly, fear of pregnancy will hinder a couple's intimacy. And, of course, banning birth control in an over-populated world that is already experiencing famine is tantamount to species suicide.

Is birth control good or bad? It depends on the circumstances. Both positions generate both good and bad effects. One cannot make an absolute moral judgement on the issue. Most moral issues are the same way. So morality is not exclusively the domain of religion and to teach that it is would be to misrepresent it. Rather than rely on the fairy-tale threats of eternal punishment by a Big-Brother god, we should learn to develop and apply our moral sense, doing what is right because we know it to be right. Unfortunately, many people are either unable or disinclined to develop or exercise any moral sense. For such people, the threat of Big Brother watching them may be just about all that they can understand and that can dissuade them from immorality (which, you remember, will affect us all). If there can be anything approaching an absolute in morality, it should be truthfulness. And yet truthfulness here would prove detrimental by relinquishing control over the irresponsible members of society. I have heard another atheist say that since his Fundamentalist neighbor believes that without faith in his god he would be an axe-murderer, then by all means that neighbor should remain a Fundamentalist! You will condemn this as "situational ethics," but it would perhaps be prudent to perpetuate the religious lie in this case, just as long as we remember that it is a lie and not use it to hamstring society with other lies, such as "creation science."

Which brings us to one of the basic moral problems that "creation science" presents. Whatever our differences of interpretation may be, we should be dedicated to being truthful. And yet the methodology of "creation science" regularly employs -- no, it depends on -- misquotation, distortion, misleading arguments, and deception. They abandon moral standards in order to serve what they see as the higher ideals of achieving the dual goals of "creation science": killing evolution and evangelizing through creationism. In the service of their god, the so-called "God of Truth," they are ready and eager to lie and to conduct any subterfuge deemed necessary. For decrying "situational ethics" so much, they certainly are adept at practicing it! It should not surprise you that part of my motivation in opposing "creation science" is moral outrage.

An atheist has far better opportunities to be moral than does a theist. An atheist must think about moral decisions, thus developing his moral sense, whereas a theist just does what he is told and can leave his mind in neutral, which can make him shiftless <grin>. An atheist must learn to recognize the valid and very real reasons for morality; a theist is just trying to avoid punishment and to collect on a reward (which makes it almost impossible for a theist to be altruistic). An atheist can appreciate the very real importance of morality; a theist finds morality relatively unimportant since salvation depends solely on having the right beliefs. An atheist can accommodate and incorporate new discoveries without losing his moral balance; a theist must fend off the same discoveries that would topple him. A theist tries to maintain beliefs that are contrary to fact and in defending them from the real world engenders an unhealthy attitude of dishonesty and deception, eventually coming to rely on deception in all his dealings; an atheist bases his beliefs as much as possible on the real world and on rational thought and honesty, thus engendering much healthier and more positive attitudes which reflect in his dealings with others. Indeed, the only time an atheist must resort to deception is when he must hide the fact of his atheism to avoid attacks from theists.

Consider that the prison populations consist of a disproportionately large Christian segment, whereas the atheist segment is disproportionately small when compared with the general population. Either atheists are generally more moral than Christians, or they are a lot smarter and don't get caught. Yesterday, a Muslim co-worker volunteered in a discussion here that a lot of his friends are atheists and humanists ("humanist to the core") and that they are much more moral than most of the religious people he knows.

You're saying that the lack of any scientific error shows that the Bible is the "Word of God." So by your reasoning, if we find even one scientific error in the Bible, then we will have demonstrated that the Bible is indeed Man's work and not JHWH's. Of course, having over-confidently put the Bible in such jeopardy, you cannot allow it to come to pass. So you must accept as scientifically correct:

1. that bats are birds (Lev.11:13-19 & Deut.14:11-18)
2. that rabbits chew cud and possibly have hooves (Lev.11:6 & Deut.14:7)
3. that some insects have only four legs (Lev.11:23,42)
4. that camels do not have cloven hooves (Lev.11:4)
5. that the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds and grows into the greatest of all plants (Matt.13:31-32) [ever hear of the sequoias?]
6. that turtles have voices (Song of Sol.2:12)
7. that all kinds of curious critters existed for which there is no physical evidence whatsoever: unicorns, dragons, winged serpents, fiery serpents, cockatrices, satyrs, four-footed birds (!?!?!?!?).
8. that pi = 3 exactly (1 Kings 7:23-26)
9. that the earth is flat and immobile.

Now I have seen some of the attempts to explain away #8. The reference is to "Solomon's Sea" which had a circumference of 30 cubits and a diameter of 10 cubits. The most recent apology (how can I trust a religion which expends so much time, i.e. millennia, and effort to dream up excuses?) appeared in Bible-Science Newsletter 28:7-8 (Jul/Aug 90) in which Frank Vosler suggests that the rim flared out at the top and that the two measurements were taken from two different cross-sections of the vessel. He makes a few assumptions and, of course, comes up with just the right answer.

Actually, it doesn't really matter whether or not Vosler and the other "Solomon's Sea" apologists are right. If they are wrong, then we find the Bible making a demonstrably false statement (i.e. pi = 3) and so your claim is also false. If they are right, then we find that we had been misled by the Bible having given incomplete information and so arrived at a false conclusion because of our faith in the Bible. No damage done? Hardly. Late in the last century, a state legislature, Indiana I think, passed a state law fixing the value of pi at the whole number of three (3); none of this humanistic talk of irrational numbers for them! Fortunately, nobody paid them any attention, but what if the education system had been forced to obey that law? The damage to mathematics education and to the mathematics and engineering professions in that state would have been incalculable (especially by anyone trained in biblical mathematics!). Others have been fooled by incomplete and misleading information from the Bible; mightn't the same have happened to you about evolution?

Item #9 is more blatant. The cosmology presented in the Bible is overwhelmingly and consistently flat-earth and geocentric, both views being definitely scientifically incorrect. Modern proponents of either view (geocentrists are not necessarily flat-earthers, but flat-earthers are also definitely geocentrists) base their views firmly and entirely on the Bible and cite hundreds of scriptures just in support of geocentrism alone. They don't even try to put on a charade of being scientific, as creationism does. For example:

• "He has fixed the earth firm, immovable." (I Chronicles 16:30)
• "Thou hast fixed the earth immovable and firm ..." (Psalm 93:1)
• "He has fixed the earth firm, immovable ..." (Psalm 96:10)
• "Thou didst fix the earth on its foundation so that it never can be shaken" (Psalm 104:5)
• "... who made the earth and fashioned it, and himself fixed it fast ..." (Isaiah 45:18)

Biblical geocentrism is very obvious, but biblical flat-earthism is more subtle, so you have to look at the general pattern. Despite a few aberrant or ambiguous passages that might be construed as indicating sphericity (and seized upon for just that purpose: e.g. Job 26:7), the biblical view is clearly flat-earth and in accordance with the neighboring Sumero-Babylonian and Egyptian cosmologies. The earth is flat, resting on a firm and immovable foundation, and enclosed by a physically hard vault (i.e. "firmament" or "raqiya" from "riqqua" meaning "beaten out", as a lump of brass would be beaten into a bowl; e.g. Job 37:18) beneath which move the sun, moon, and stars, all much smaller than the earth. This view starts in Genesis and persists consistently through to Revelation. Needless to say, our scientific knowledge reveals this view to be gravely in error.

You characterize the Atheist as still looking in vain for scientific errors, but it is obvious that you have not bothered to look at all. Your boast of inerrancy is very hollow indeed and I am very impressed by it and what it says of your religion. It reaffirms my joy of being an atheist.

I have lost count of the number of times I have heard that liturgy sung. But you seem to be so well practiced in singing it that I bet you can do it without even thinking. Come to think of it, you have to avoid thinking in order to sing it!

Well, we have already seen that the Bible lacks scientific accuracy, so let's have a quick look at the other points.

"Fulfilled prophecy":

Discussion of creation/evolution should properly be a question of science; there should be no need at all to drag either the Bible or any of its prophecies into it. However, if one should wish to drag them in, then one must examine such claims rigorously, considering the magnitude of those claims and the great importance placed on them.

So there are some basic questions which must be addressed. Are the prophecies about specific events or are they general so that interpretation can make them seem to fit any event? Is the fulfillment observed and recorded independently and reliably, or does it occur in the next chapter of the very same book (such as Isaiah 7:14 being fulfilled in Isaiah 8:3)? Did the fulfillment actually occur or could it have been contrived to bolster a group's claims (such as the mystery prophecy "fulfilled" in Mt 2:23)? Do the interpretations of prophecies at different times by different groups yield consistent results -- i.e. can they be interpreted reliably or are the current interpretations as off-the-wall as the past ones? How many times has the End of the World been upon us and how many Beasts and Anti-Christs have there been throughout Western history (this is not counting the many times that other cultures' prophecies about the "end of the world" have been "fulfilled")? What about failed prophecies? And what about competing prophecies, such as those by Nostradamus, whose interpreters claim to have a much better record than the Bible?

This may seem picky to you, but if fulfilled prophecy is to be taken seriously then it is not a matter to be approached lightly and most certainly not by taking Scripture on face value. The history, cultures, languages, archaeology, etc are all needed to fill in the context for the correct interpretation of the "prophecies." Has this been done?

"Fulfilled prophecy, scientific accuracy, historic accuracy, no contradictions"? If I may quote that great American philosopher, Marion Morrison (AKA the Duke): "Not hardly." Unfortunately, your faith requires it all to be true. You have taken the Bible and elevated it to "Paper Pope," demanding of it the divine property of Inerrancy. Either it is all absolutely true and your faith and everything else in your life has value, or one small part of it is false, which falsifies the whole of it and then nothing in your life has any value. What a dangerous and foolish way to live!

Of course, you can never allow yourself to lose your faith, which is where the fun really starts. As an example, let me share a recent message from the Religion Forum on Compu-Serve which I feel expresses the spirit of apologetics very well. Charlie Board had just asked if anyone had a list of biblical contradictions:

>
> #: 57683 S14/SKEPTIC/SECULAR HUM
> 17-Aug-90 20:34:28
> Sb: #57532-Biblical Contradictions
> Fm: TT NEWMAN 71630,261
> To: Charlie Board 71470,2342 (X)
>
> Hey Chuck my main man!
>
> Nada, Nein, Njet, No! After boundless searches in all
> the preceding millennia, scholars have unequivocally
> established that there's NOTHING in the Bible that
> contradicts itself. It was made very clear that if
> there were anything in the Bible that would contradict
> itself, it could not be a contradiction, or it could
> not be in the Bible, as the Bible cannot contradict
> itself since it is the Bible.
>
> I hope this concludes your dismal search and the no
> doubt questionable venture you were sure to embark
> upon.
>
> Always cheerful and glad to help, Thilo
>

I hope you didn't get lost in all that circular reasoning (if I may use the term loosely). In other words, any contradictions that are found in the Bible get defined out of existence and can be completely ignored. I especially like that little touch of saying that a contradiction found in the Bible could not be in the Bible (so how was it found in the Bible in the first place?). Watching mental gymnastics like this is like watching a contortionist tying himself into a bowline -- only more painful to behold. Obviously, the Dark Side does not restrict itself to creationism (I suspect it to be a widespread side-effect of fundamentalism, but nobody wants to discuss it).

Oh, haven't I discussed the Dark Side of the Farce yet? This idea got its name from a response I sent on Compu-Serve to someone commenting on the mental gymnastics our resident creationists will go through and on their repeatedly avoiding to answering our direct questions. Since I see "creation science" as being somewhat farcical (I haven't told you yet about Gish's Bullfrog Affair, Morris' human population model -- AKA the "Bunny Blunder" -- , Bomby Meets Gishzilla, Slusher's Incredible Time-Travelling NASA Document, Brown's Remarkable Rattlesnake Protein, etc.), I took on the persona of Obiwan Kanobi (or was it Darth Vader?) and warned the guy to "beware the Dark Side of the Farce." Well, the term stuck. I have tried to generate discussion of it on the Religion Forum, but everybody ignores it. It must be hitting a nerve.

[FOOTNOTE, 2019: Links to my pages on those topics I just listed can be found on my links page:

• Dr. Duane Gish's televised lie, The Bullfrog Affair. Includes the story of Walter Brown's Rattlesnake Protein claim.

• Dr. Henry Morris's Human Population Model, AKA, the The Bunny Blunder

• "Moon Dust", the story of my research into a specific creationist claim, that a "1976" NASA document, written "well into the space age," shows that a 4.5 billion-year-old moon would have the layer of meteoric dust hundreds of feet thicker than what we found. It turned out that the source of the claim, Harold Slusher, not only misrepresented the date of that 1965 NASA document (hence my reference to time travel) but also data in the document so that he could apply extraneous factors to his formula to inflate his results by a factor of 10,000.

• "Bomby Meets Gishzilla" (taken from the classic animated short, "Bambi Meets Godzilla"). I have not written a page on this claim, so here are some links to articles on Gish's bombardier beetle claim:
  • The Bombardier Beetle Myth Exploded, National Center for Science Education (NCSE), Creation Evolution Journal, 1981.
  • Bombardier Beetles and the Argument of Design, TalkOrigins Archive FAQ.
  • Claim CB310: "The bombardier beetle cannot be explained by evolution. It must have been designed." TalkOrigins Archive Index to Creationist Claims project.
  • Claim CB310.1: "The bombardier beetle would explode if the hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone that produce their ejecta were mixed without a chemical inhibitor. Such a combination of chemicals could not have evolved." TalkOrigins Archive Index to Creationist Claims project.

]

Basically it stems from the belief that the Bible is the Literal Word of God and so must be inerrant and completely true and factual, i.e. the premise from you yourself are proceeding here. This means that any error or false statement found in the Bible must be either explained away or eliminated. This must be done automatically and unconsciously in order to preserve the illusion of inerrancy, the object of the entire endeavor. The price of losing that illusion is the loss of one's faith, which for a fundamentalist is one of the most important things, if not THE most important thing, in his life. What wouldn't he do to defend it?

I first encountered the Dark Side early on in conversations with a creationist. Like many, I made the mistake of thinking that he simply did not know of the false premises and reasoning of "creation science" and that once he learned the truth, he would realize his error and mend his ways. All very rational, but it didn't work that way! Instead, the more evidence I presented of creationist error and dishonesty (of the leadership, such as the ICR), the more intransigent he became. What I did not realize at the time was that he, as do too many creationists, believed that the truth of the Bible, and hence his entire faith, depended on "creation science" being right. As too many creationists do, he perceived my efforts to expose the fallacies and lies of "creation science" (yes, we have caught "creation scientists" lying) as direct attacks on his faith, and what wouldn't he do to defend his faith? I couldn't understand his reaction at the time, but it did start me thinking about the problem and led me to discover the "Dark Side."

The more I studied it, the more insidious the Dark Side proved to be. Its most obvious effect is to keep the victim's mind closed. Since any evidence contrary to the victim's beliefs could invalidate, or at least shake, those beliefs, the Dark Side invokes various defense mechanisms to "protect" the victim from that evidence. These can manifest themselves as dismissing the evidence out of hand without hearing it, suddenly having something else very important to take care of, reinterpreting the evidence to mean something entirely different, not wanting to hear the evidence, not noticing the existence of the evidence (selective blindness), hearing the evidence but not being able to understand any of it (selective dumbness), etc. Believe me, I've seen all of these used. The desired effect is to filter out anything that can cast any doubt on the victim's beliefs.

Usually in the victim's everyday life, he can avoid being exposed to or having to deal with dangerous evidence, so the protective role of the Dark Side would seem fairly benign. Unfortunately, there are times when the evidence cannot be avoided nor rendered ineffective. At such times, the Dark Side turns malignant and destructive. Unable to fend off the evidence any more, it turns on the victim and destroys his faith.

Case in point: at the 1986 International Conference on Creationism (ICC), Glenn R. Morton, a practicing petroleum geologist (area geophysicist for Arco Exploration Co.) and a staunch creationist, asked ICR geologist John Morris (son of Henry) how old the earth is, whereupon Morris answered, "If the earth is more than 10,000 years old then Scripture has no meaning." Then Morton told of having hired several graduates of Christian Heritage College where the ICR had taught them that certain geological evidence did not and could not exist if Scripture is to have any meaning. All of them suffered severe crises of faith when they were faced with those very geological facts every petroleum geologist deals with on a daily basis.

"If the earth is more than 10,000 years old then Scripture has no meaning." This is no aberration, but an ICR policy that has become even more blatant with the addition of Ken Ham to the ICR staff. It was present in the ICR "textbooks" a decade back wherein the students (of elementary and junior-high age) were repeatedly pressed to make an immediate and personal choice between the Creator and evolution. Reports have filtered out of the classrooms about young children who took those lessons to heart and chose to become atheists. Thank you, ICR, and how do the millstones fit?

Indeed, I consider the ICR to be the organization most actively promoting atheism in this country today, thanks to the Dark Side of the Farce. I consider this to be unfortunate because they also stress the standard maliciously false teachings about atheism being evil and immoral and leading to hedonism and all other kinds of mean, nasty, ugly stuff. Such teachings are totally false, as you now know (excuse me, as you SHOULD now know if not for the Dark Side), and have the tragic effect of predisposing the ICR's victims -- er, I mean followers -- to failure and ruin should they ever seek freedom from the clutches of the Dark Side. Finding an atheist organization and learning the truth about atheism would save them, but unfortunately, the antagonism of theists force us atheists to keep a low profile. This makes it that much harder for those who need us the most to find us (case in point: former Fundamentalist preacher, Dan Barker, lost his faith in Southern California and needed help with his new life, yet didn't find out about Atheists United until after he had moved half-way across the country). This is yet another reason for my moral outrage at the ICR's activities.

But let us return from this digression.

"Historic Accuracy":

So far we have already found that the Bible is scientifically inaccurate and that the claims of "fulfilled prophecy" still need to be substantiated. Its historical accuracy is also questionable, for example:

1. Chaldeans did not exist as a cultural entity until 1000 years after the "time of Abraham" (Genesis 11:28)
2. The royal name, "Ramses," did not come into use until the end of the 14th century BCE, after the "time of Joseph" (Genesis 46:11)
3. Dan did not exist by that name until long after the "time of Abraham." (Genesis 14:14) What was later called Dan was a town of Gentiles called Laish, until the tribe of Dan seized it and renamed it, as described in Judges 18:27-29.
4. Hoshea started his rule of Israel in the 12th year of Ahaz, king of Judah (II KINGS 17:1). The conquest of Samaria occurred in 721 BCE, the 9th year of Hoshea (II KINGS 16:9), so Hoshea started to rule in about 730 BCE and Ahaz in 742 BCE. Hezekiah took over from Ahaz in the 3rd year of Hoshea (II KINGS 18:1), or 727 BCE. Ahaz' reign is given as 16 years (II KINGS 16:1), even though the arithmetic comes out to 15 years (very minor point that could be accounted for). Got that so far? Sennacherib invaded Judah in 701 BCE, in the 14th year of Hezekiah (II KINGS 18:1 & Isaiah 36:1). Hence, Hezekiah's rule started in 715 BCE, six years later than reported in II Kings 18:1. This also means that Ahaz' reign lasted 21 years instead of the 16 years reported.
5. Nebuchadnezzar's reign in Babylon started in 605 BCE and he sacked Jerusalem in 587 BCE, in the 18th year of his reign. The Bible says it was in the EIGHTH year of his reign (II Kings 24:12).
6. When he sacked Jerusalem in 587 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar took the king, Jehoiachin, prisoner (II Kings 24). Jehoiachin was released by Evil-merodach after 37 years (II Kings 25:27). Yet Ezra 1:1-3 says that it was Cyrus who had released the captives in the first year of his reign (559 BCE). This makes the length of the captivity 28 years instead of 37. Besides, how does this square with Jeremiah's prophecy of 70 years? (Jeremiah 25:11 -- is this one of your "fulfilled prophecies"?)
7. Daniel 5:2 mentions Belshazzar and "his father Nebuchadnezzar." However, Belshazzar was NOT the son of Nebuchadnezzar and there were several other kings between their reigns.
8. Daniel 6:1 mentions "Darius the Mede," yet the Medean kingdom had already been conquered by Cyrus. This reference is thought to be a fabrication inserted to support the prophecy in Isaiah 3:17 of a second world empire preceding the Messianic times (are we back to that "fulfilled prophecy" question again?). Darius the Great was a PERSIAN who came after Cyrus, conqueror of the Medes.
9. Darius was not the son of Ahasuerus (Xerxes). Xerxes was the son of Darius and Xerxes' successor was Artaxerxes. (Daniel 9:1)

Finally, the claim that the Bible contains no contradictions is ludicrous and utterly groundless. I have before me a listing of a few of the contradictions; they take up 13 typed pages in 12-pitch with no margins. I do not wish to type them all nor would Dark Side be likely to allow you to read them. Some refer to duplicate references of the same events or things and yet the particulars are quite different (different sizes, counts, contents, people participating, genealogies, etc.). Here are just a few examples:

1. The tribes of Sheba and Havilah were either descendants of Kush (Hamite; Genesis 10:7) or of Joktan (Semitic; Genesis 10:26-29).
2. Esau either sold his birthright to Jacob for "bread and pottage of lentils" (Genesis 25:30-34) or for "one morsel of meat" (Hebrews 12:16).
3. Either Bashemath was the daughter of Elon the Hittite (Genesis 26:34) or of Ishmael (Genesis 36:3).
4. Was Zibeon a Hivite (Genesis 36:2) or a "Horite" (Genesis 36:20)?
5. Genesis 14:14-16 says that Lot was Abram's brother. Genesis 11:27 gives their genealogy as Abram's father begetting Abram, Nachor, and Aran, and then Aran begat Lot. This makes Lot Abram's NEPHEW, not his brother.
6. In Genesis 37:28, Joseph's brothers abandoned him in a pit, where Midianite merchants found him and sold him to Ishmaelites, who in turn brought him into Egypt. Genesis 37:36 says that it was the Midianites who sold him into Egypt. In Genesis 45:4, Joseph says that his brothers had "sold [him] into Egypt" then in the next verse says that God had sent him there. Who dun it?
7. In Genesis 45:9-13, 46:31-34, and 47:1-6, Joseph invites his brothers to Egypt and Pharaoh doesn't know about it until later. But in Genesis 45:16-20, it is Pharaoh inviting Joseph's brothers.
8. What was the name of Moses' father-in-law: Reu-el (Exodus 2:18), Jethro (Exodus 3:1, 18:1-2,5-6,9-10,12), or Raguel (Numbers 10:29)?
9. In Exodus 6:3, God tells Moses that He had appeared unto Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but was not known by his name, Jehovah. And yet in Genesis 22:14, Abraham names a place "Jehovah-jirah" after Him. Lucky guess?
10. In the final plague, God kills all the firstborn of Egypt, including the first born of cattle (Exodus 12:29). But the cattle had all died in a previous plague (Exodus 9:3,6)!
11. Similarly, where did Pharaoh get the horses to chase after the Israelites (Exodus 14:9)? All the horses had been killed by plague in Chapter 9.
12. In II Kings 14:23, Jeroboam began his reign in the fifteenth year of Amaziah and Azariah took over for Amaziah in the 27th year of Jeoboam, or 42 years after Amaziah started his rule (II Kings 15:1). II Kings 14:1-2 says that Amaziah only ruled for 29 years.
13. David was the SEVENTH and last son of Jesse (I Chronicles 2:13-15). But when Jesse paraded SEVEN of his sons before Samuel, he must explain to Samuel that his youngest, David is not among them. I Samuel 17:12 confirms that Jesse had EIGHT sons, not seven.
14. I Chronicles 18:4 says that David took 7000 horsemen to smite Hadarezar, king of Zobah. II Samuel 8:4 said he took 700. Both cannot be right. I Chronicles 19:18 and II Samuel 10:18 repeat this error.
15. Baasha built Ramah in the 36th year of the reign of Asa (II Chronicles 16:1). But Baasha had died in the 26th year of Asa (I Kings 16:6,8). This means that he built a city after he had been dead for ten years! My grandfather was right, we HAVE gotten soft!
16. Jehoram was 32 when he began his reign and ruled for 8 years until his death at the age of 40 (II Chronicles 21:5,20). His YOUNGEST son, Ahaziah, took over for him at the age of 42 (II Chronicles 22:1-2), making him two years OLDER than his father! Before we proclaim a miracle, II Kings 8:26 contradicts this by saying that Ahaziah was only 22 years old.
17. Satan provoked David to take a census of Israel, thus displeasing God (II Samuel 24:1). But it was GOD who moved David to take the census (II Samuel 24:1). Is the Bible saying here that they are one and the same?
18. The amazing thing about the Gospels is that they were picked because they agreed so much with each other, which makes one wonder about the gospels that were not picked. Still, the disagreements and contradictions between them are so numerous, that I get writer's cramp just thinking about it.
19. How did Judas die? He purchased a field with his blood money and then fell over and split his guts open (Acts 1:16-18). He also threw the money in the Temple (the priests bought a potter's field with it) and hanged himself (Matt. 27:3-7). Which is it?
20. Herod kills James in Acts 12:1-2, but James is still alive in Acts 15:13. Damned pesky, these Christians, they refuse to stay dead!

Another category of biblical contradiction consists of the many contradictory commands and teachings. Here are a few examples:

1. God says that He visits the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations (Exodus 20:5) and this message is repeated in Exodus 34:7, Deut. 5:9, Isaiah 14:21, and Lamentations 5:7. However, Ezekiel 18:20 states that "the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father" and Deut. 24:16 says (and II Kings 14:6 repeats) that "neither shall the children be put to death for their fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin." Which is it?
2. We are not to make any likeness of anything in heaven or on Earth (Exodus 20:4), and yet in the building of the Tabernacle, God instructs them to make 2 cherubim (Exodus 25:18).
3. Leviticus 11 lists all the forbidden foods, even though in Genesis 9:3 God says "Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you." This is repeated in I timothy 4:1,3-4 and Romans 14:14,20. Well, can we eat or can't we?
4. Numbers 23:19 says that "God is not a man, that he should lie; neither is he the son of man, that he should repent." And yet the Bible is full of God repenting or promising to repent (e.g. Genesis 6:6-7, Exodus 32:14, Jonah 2:10 & 4:2, Jerimiah 18:8, I Samuel 15:11 & 25, Deut. 32:36, Psalm 135:14, II Samuel 24:16, I Chronicles 21:15, etc.). That God does not repent is repeated in I Samuel 15:29; in the same chapter it is twice stated that God repented!
5. Ministers should be no younger than 30 and should quit by 50 (Numbers 4:23) and those working in the Tabernacle are commanded to be between 30 and 50 ( Numbers 4:3). In Numbers 8:23-24, this is changed to 25 to 50. By Ezra 3:8, the lower age is down to 20; this also in I Chronicles 23:24 and II Chronicles 31:17.
6. Deut. 27:22 says "Cursed be he that lieth with his sister ..." And yet when Abraham lay with his half-sister, Sarah, God said, "yea, I will bless her, and she shall be the mother of nations" (Genesis 17:16).
7. What is the Bible's position on wisdom?:
   1. "Happy is the man that findeth wisdom" (Proverbs 3:13)
   2. "The wise man shall inherit glory" (Proverbs 3:35)
   3. "wisdom is the principal thing, therefore get wisdom" (Proverbs 4:7)
   but,
   1. "In much wisdom is much grief" (Ecclesiastes 1:18)
   2. "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise" (I Corinthians 1:19)
   3. "Neither make thyself overly wise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself?" (Ecclesiastes 7:16)

   Nu?

8. What about what happens to the righteous and the wicked?:
   1. a. Psalm 92:12 says that the righteous shall flourish, but Isaiah 57:1 says they perish. Ecclesiastes 9:2 says all thing come alike to all.
   2. b. Proverbs 10:27 and Psalm 55:23 say the wicked shall be short-lived, but Job 21:7-9 says the wicked live to be ripe, old, and powerful.
   3. c. But then Job 18:5,11,18-19 tell that terrible things will happen to the wicked, while Psalm 73:3-5,12 says the wicked aren't plagued like other men.

   What's right?

9. God does not lie or deceive people (Numbers 23:19). But Ezekiel quotes God, "And if the prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a thing, I the Lord hath deceived that prophet" (Jeremiah 23:34).
10. If a prophet renders a false prophecy, God will punish not only him, but "his House" as well (Jeremiah 23:34). Even if God had deceived that prophet. What happened to the teaching that a person should be punished only for his own crime (Ezekiel 18:20, Deut. 24:16)?
11. "For by grace are ye saved ... Not of works, lest any man should boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9). But "There is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works" (Ecclesiastes 3:22).
12. Jesus said that he came not to destroy the law, and that not one jot or tittle would pass away (Matthew 5:17-20). But Paul says that Jesus had abolished the law (Ephesians 2:15), that "we are delivered from the law" (Romans 7:6), and that the old covenant is "ready to vanish away" (Hebrews 8:13).
13. "Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man" (James 1:13). But Genesis 22:1 says that God tempted Abraham.
14. "He that saith he is in the light and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now" (I John 1:9). He that loveth not his brother is not of God (I John 3:10) and "whoever hateth his brother is a murderer" (I John 3:15). And yet Luke 14:26 says that we MUST hate our brother in order to follow Christ.

If the Bible must possess these characteristics of "Fulfilled prophecy, scientific accuracy, historic accuracy, no contradictions among 40 writers over a 1600 year period of time" in order to be "from God," then by finding these characteristics to be absent from the Bible, which we have found, we have shown that the Bible is not "from God" but rather has been "written by Man." The reason this particular lie of yours (granted, it was given to you by your religious teachers) works so well in proselytizing and is so rarely exposed is because most of your marks (or Johns, since you prostitute truth in these endeavors, especially in "creation science") are not sufficiently familiar with the Bible to expose it. Indeed, only a religionist would waste that much time and effort on the Bible.

"I believe in God and also believe in Science."

You "believe in Science" as much as you believe in Truth; only so far as you can prostitute it to serve your religion. If your religion is really supposed to be the true religion and your god the "God of Truth," then how can they be served through lies and deception?

Creationism watchers are well aware of the two goals of "creation science": 1) killing evolution and 2) evangelizing through creationism. You would do well to mark the words of Gregg Wilkerson, cofounder of Students for Origins Research, at the 1990 International Conference on Creationism: "Creationism by and large attracts few to the gospel, but it turns many away."

EVOLUTIONISTS BELIEVE:

• "Everything in the universe (the sun, planets, animals, food, oxygen, gravity, emotions, etc) is the result of RANDOM ACCIDENTS."

Do you really think scientists believe that nature is supposed to operate purely by "RANDOM ACCIDENT"? How very curious. That you have obviously learned this from "creation science" gives us yet another good reason why it and its distortions do not belong in the science classroom.

Pay attention now. Nature operates by natural processes. Nothing happens "by accident"; everything happens through cause-and-effect. The operation of nature is very deterministic, especially on the macroscopic level. Yet the whole tangled interlocking web of cause and effect is so complex and our understanding of it to date is so inadequate that we can just barely begin to deal with a few parts of it deterministically. Besides, in order to solve a specific problem deterministically, we would need complete knowledge of the circumstances -- clearly an intractable requirement.

Instead, we find it much more convenient, practical, and productive to deal with these problems stochastically. That is to say that we take advantage of the APPARENTLY random manner in which the universe seems to operate and make book on the outcomes of different processes. This apparent randomness does not eliminate the underlying determinism of nature; it does, however, allow us to deal with it.

Let's consider the archetypical probability problem: pulling colored marbles out of an urn. By reaching in and blindly pulling out a marble, we perform a random draw and we can calculate the probability of drawing out that particular color (indeed, we must to pass the course). And yet our pulling out that particular marble was no "random accident." The forces exerted upon the marbles as they were poured into the urn and shaken up, and as they collided with each other, are fairly well understood and if we could apply that knowledge to this problem we should be able to know exactly where each marble is placed in that urn. Yet doing so would be a monumental task beyond our present abilities, so we say that we have a random mixture. Similarly, when we reach into that "random mixture" and grasp a marble, it is again with forces that are well understood, but we lack all the pertinent data for solving this problem deterministically, so we say that we have performed a random draw. Everything about the problem is deterministic, but since the deterministic solution of the problem is intractable, we instead solve it stochastically, even though it is not truly random.

Physics problems are extremely simple compared to biological problems. In Darwinian evolution, an organism's chances for survival depend largely on its ability to adapt to the conditions in the environment. This is called "natural selection," which is extremely deterministic. However, the interplay of all the different factors in the environment that affect the organism and its survival are so complex and poorly understood that we cannot approach the problem deterministically but must phrase it in stochastic terms, such as talking about the "chances for survival," as I had above, and working with probabilities. This does not make natural selection any less deterministic.

Similarly, the causes and mechanisms for many mutations are fairly well known, but the need for perfect information prevents us from using that knowledge to solve practical problems. So again, we must deal with the outcome stochastically as if it were random, which it actually is not.

If you still want to insist that scientists believe that "the universe ... is the result of RANDOM ACCIDENTS.", then please explain and justify your claim.

• "They believe in a "god." Their god is Father Time. Give mud 500,000 years and it will turn into people."

Only 500,000 years? Last I heard, about 3.5 billion years were supposed to have transpired between the first bacteria and the appearance of Homo Sapiens. I have heard that creationists advocate extremely radical rates of evolution (refer to "variation within basic created kinds," especially as it relates to trying to alleviate the overcrowding of Noah's Ark), but isn't compressing 3.5 billion years of evolution into a mere 500,000 years more than a just little ridiculous? Besides, evolutionists are not pagans worshipping Saturnus (I'm sure you've spent a few New Year's Eves yourself bidding "adieu" to the old boy).

Here you are developing the previous statement by saying that the only way that "random accidents" could produce new species is by giving them enough time to make enough tries. That is to say, if a given event has a probability, p, of occurring, then we can determine the probability of its having occurred at least once after n independent trials. Since the probability of the event not occurring, (1-p), is less than one, then the probability of the event not occurring within n trials, (1-p)^n, becomes ever smaller as n grows larger and so the probability of the event having occurred at least once is (1 - (1-p)^n), which increases asymptotically to 1.0 as n increases sufficiently large.

One problem with this, as creationists have pointed out repeatedly, is that for a very small probability, p, the number of trials, n, would have to be so large as to require an inordinate amount of time to accomplish; therefore when Time tries to come to the rescue, it is with too little too late.

I already discussed this above and will briefly recap it here. Creationists usually base their probability arguments on single-step selection, which yields extremely poor results, so that the only hope for success is through a sufficiently large number of tries over a sufficiently large amount of time. As I already demonstrated, the probability of a fairly simple task, e.g. generating the alphabet, through single-step selection is so small that a supercomputer would have to work on it for millions of billions of years to perform the 10^34 tries necessary just to have one chance in 100 of succeeding. But then single-step selection has nothing to do with evolution.

With cumulative selection, the story is quite different. Within 80 iterations (100 copies per iteration), the probability of success is over 99.99%, approaching dead certainty! My XT clone accomplishes this in less than 15 seconds -- repeatedly, consistently, without fail. Cumulative selection models natural selection, which IS what evolution is based on. Cumulative selection is the reason why natural selection can make the improbable inevitable.

[FOOTNOTE, 2019: There's a much simpler common sense response to this ridiculous "Their god is Father Time" claim that we believe that time alone will do the job. Rather, it is the evolutionary processes at work automatically when life does what life does: gestate, grow, survive, reproduce. Those events and processes are not instantaneous, but rather they require time. It almost seems like creationists live in an alternative reality in which you can mix together the ingredients for a cake and instantly have a cake without having to bake it for 45 minutes. Or, they believe that all they have to do is sit and wait for 45 minutes and time alone will create their cake. No, reality is that you need to use the process for making a cake, which includes all the measuring and mixing and baking for the required amount of time. All of that does take time.

To see how time requirements are arrived at, let's consider the evolution of a hypothetical species which will require 1,000 generations. This species has a gestation period of 9 months and 19 years maturation before starting to reproduce. Life span is not important, since the length of one generation is based on how long it takes to start producing the next generation, which in this case is 19.75 years, which I'll round up to 20 years to keep it easy. So for this hypothetical evolution to happen, it would require 20,000 years (1,000 generations × 20 years/generation).

So it has never been a mere appeal to time, but rather that for the processes to work it does require time. ]

• "They believe in fossils that don't exist."

This claim is so broad and so off-the-wall that I cannot tell what you are talking about. Please explain and give examples AND references.

• "They think they are scientific, but their "science" is not produced by the scientific method (it is not observable and has not been proven by experimentation)."

"[N]ot observable"? Not "proven by experimentation"? Is that really what you think defines the scientific method? Is your understanding of science really so meager, or do you have to make an effort to appear ignorant? I do recognize your rhetorics as coming straight from the ICR's distortion and misrepresentation of what science is. That so many people have apparently been taken in by this sophistry is a sad commentary on the poor state of science education in our country. Unfortunately, people such as you are industriously trying to make the situation worse.

Earlier in this response, we have already discussed what the scientific method is. To very briefly recapitulate, observations of a phenomenon or an event, coupled with our current understanding of the natural universe, are used to develop hypotheses which try to explain that phenomenon/event. These hypotheses are tested, for the purpose of elimination (since science normally operates with multiple working hypotheses) and/or refinement. The means of testing hypotheses include logical consistency, further observations, and, where feasible, experimentation. The latter two means, which you wish to make solely responsible for determining what is scientific, are guided by the hypotheses and theories involved; without such a theoretical basis, scientists would have no idea what to try to observe nor how to set up an experiment. Scientific knowledge progresses through our growing understanding of the natural universe. That understanding comes to us through the body of theory produced by the scientific method. Hypothesis-development and theory-building are the heart and soul of the scientific method, for which observation and experimentation are just tools. Without the understanding which comes from that body of theory, none of the particular observations of nature would make any sense at all.

Your statement echoes creationists' insistence that something must be directly observable in order to be considered by science (this is used to try to exempt past events from scientific consideration). However, most things in science cannot be observed directly, but must be "observed" indirectly through their effects. In observing something's effects, we must use our body of theory to construct our effective "observation" of that thing itself. This applies equally well to events in the past, which we indirectly observe through the evidence left by those events, and to events in the present. Not only is science in no way precluded from reconstructing past events, but it is the best and most reliable means we have of doing so.

Similarly, creationists' insistence that all results be reproducible through experimentation is an invalid and unrealistic restriction for science. Most phenomena are simply not reproducible under the controlled conditions of an experiment; we must go out into the field and observe them as they occur under uncontrolled conditions. Now it is true that the results of an experiment must be reproducible, but that is NOT the same as saying that everything in science must be subject to experiment. It is also true that an observation should be reproducible UNDER THE EXACT SAME CONDITIONS, but such a requirement would be impractical to enforce since it would often be impossible to recreate the exact same conditions for the second observation and since our limited understanding of the phenomenon may not allow us to even determine whether the exact same conditions are present or not.

Besides, experimentation does not "prove" anything, it can only lend support to or falsify a hypothesis or theory. Even if an experiment does lend support, a later experiment testing a different part of that hypothesis or theory could falsify it. As I said earlier, the only sciences that can actually deal in proof are the most highly theoretical ones, such as mathematics, and we both know what creationists think about theory.

Bill, please do everyone, and especially yourself, a big favor and learn something about science.

• "They believe life came from non-life. Despite much effort this hasn't ever been done by science."

Our inability to produce life from non-life at this point in our science and technology is solely a reflection on our own inabilities, not on any inherent problem in the question of Abiogenesis.

So if we cannot produce life from non-life, why do we think that it must have happened in the past? Because there are many indications that it could have and none that it could not have.

For example, from biochemistry we have learned that on all levels, from molecules to cells to tissue to organs to organisms (even up to eco-systems), the mechanics of life are purely physical. There is no evidence supporting the 19th century idea of vitalism, that some kind of animating spirit must be infused into matter to bring it to life. As long as the right molecules form and are brought together, they will interact and carry on life's processes. We would be very hard-pressed to distinguish where non-life ends and life begins. Indeed, the boundary between life and non-life has become increasingly blurred.

The building blocks of proteins, amino acids, have been found to form through naturally occurring processes, as demonstrated in the Urey-Miller experiment. Furthermore, in the experiments of Sidney Fox, heated amino acids have been found to spontaneously form into chains (called proteinoids or thermal proteins) which not only form into microspheres in water, but also carry on catalytic activity. It has been found that RNA molecules are able to autocatalyze and to replicate themselves.

We have nothing approaching a complete picture, a theory of Abiogenesis, but rather a collection of hypotheses for various of the steps in the whole process. But enough of the these steps have been found to be feasible, which lends greater weight to the feasibility of the whole process. As we learn more about the processes involved, then we will be able to refine the hypotheses, fill in more of the gaps, and develope a theory of Abiogenesis. There is much work ahead in this effort, which has only recently begun.

By the way, I have heard the argument that even if scientists did succeed in creating life in the laboratory, then that would only prove creationism in that it took intelligent design to do it. Not necessarily so. In a lab experiment, e.g. a chemistry experiment, we cannot directly cause a reaction to occur; all that we can do is to create the conditions necessary for that reaction. If those same conditions can exist in nature, then that same reaction can occur in nature, without involving any intelligent design.

• "They believe matter (any physical substance) came from nothing."

Huh? Haven't you heard of the Laws of Conservation of Matter and Energy? Basically, they say that matter and energy can be neither created nor destroyed, only transferred and/or transformed.

Matter can come from energy, which is not "nothing" -- the current scramble for energy sources is testimony of that. Please explain and substantiate your claim.

• "FACT: Evolutionists have much, much more faith in their belief than Christians have in theirs."

Rather, evolutionists have much more confidence in their ideas and methodologies than Christians have in theirs, or else Christians would not need to go to such extremes and convoluted apologetics to try to protect their beliefs. A single scientific discovery could blast literalist Christian beliefs apart whereas by its very nature science can correct itself and accept and integrate that new discovery. This results in fundamentally different ways in which scientists and religionists view the unknown: when scientists see a mystery, they want to solve that mystery; when religionists see a mystery they want to keep it a mystery, especially if they maintain, as I have so often seen in creationist arguments, that "Mystery = God."

• "When you pinpoint what Evolutionists really believe in it is obviously not only less scientific than Creation, it is also LESS LOGICAL than Creation."

OK, when you finally "pinpoint what Evolutionists really believe in", let us know (you obviously have no inkling at present). Better yet, why don't you try learning something about evolution and the related sciences? Then maybe you could come up with some real and constructive criticism rather than a propaganda hack-job like "Weird Science."

QUOTATIONS ("EVOLUTIONISTS SAY:" & "CREATIONISTS SAY:"):

What can I say, except that your quotations are so poorly documented that it is nearly impossible to verify them. The only reason I was able to check some of them out is because they have been used in other creationist works, works which, unlike yours, at least provide enough of a bibliography to verify the quote.

There is a very real need to verify creationist quotations, because the practice of "creation science" has been made infamous by its many and sometimes rather blatant misquotations. Especially at the ICR, this practice has been elevated [word choice?] to an art form wherein the loss of context and redefinition of terminology can make an apparently verbatim quotation say something entirely different, if not the exact opposite, of what it originally meant. What were the contexts of your quotations, that you do not wish us to find out (since you have seen fit to hide the sources from us)?

Obviously, part of lifting a quotation out of context involves hiding its age from the reader, as the ICR is well known for misrepresenting old and outdated ideas as current. It turns out that most of your own quotations are outdated, so it should come as no surprise that you hid their age from us -- or are you yourself ignorant of your own sources?

Of your thirteen quotations, I was unable to find any mention of four of them: Dr. Le Cont De Moy, Dr. Bernard Covell, Dr. G.L. Gepson, and the un-named "Yale Biology Chairman" (rather blatantly covering your tracks, isn't this?). I either could find mention of or already knew about nine of them: Dr. Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945, worked 1925-1948), Austin Clark (wrote 1929 and 1930), Sir Arthur Keith (1866-1955, wrote 1925-1948), Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Ernest Albert Hooton (1887-1954, wrote 1931-1942), Dr. David Pilbeam (current), Richard Leaky (current), and Dr. Colin Patterson (current).

I could only find a reference to your misquotation of one of them, Dr. D.M.S. Watson, and that was only because it was repeated in a recent article in the Bible-Science Newsletter. You have him say:

"Evolution is accepted by zoologists not because its [sic] been proved or observed, but because Creation is incredible."

The BSN article takes similar license, although it clearly states that it is repeating Dr. Henry Morris' quotation of Watson. Here is what Watson really said ("Adaptation," Nature vol 124, 10 Aug 1929, pp 231 - 234, from the presidential address to Section D, Zoology, of the British Association, delivered at Johannesburg on 1 Aug 1929).:

"Evolution itself is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or is supported by logically coherent arguments, but because it does fit all the facts of taxonomy, of palaeontology, and of geographical distribution, and because no alternative explanation is credible."

Further in his speech, Watson said:

"The extreme difficulty of obtaining the necessary data for any quantitative estimation of the efficiency of natural selection makes it seem probable that this theory will be re-established, if it be so, by the collapse of alternative explanations which are more easily attacked by observation and experiment. If so, it will present a parallel to the theory of evolution itself, a theory universally accepted not because it can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible."

So your quotation is a mangled mis-quotation, a composite of two different parts of Watson's speech. In the first paragraph, he named two primary characteristics of a scientific fact, that it fit all the facts and that no credible alternative explanations exist, and he states that "evolution itself" (AKA "the fact of evolution") possesses those characteristics. He is not calling the fact of evolution into question, but rather the two competing theories of evolution:

"Whilst the fact of evolution is accepted by every biologist, the mode in which it has occurred and the mechanism by which it has been brought about are still disputable. The only two 'theories of evolution' which have gained any general currency, those of Lamarck and of Darwin, rest on a most insecure basis ... "

Remember that at this time, the Modern Synthesis had not yet taken place (its groundwork had just been laid in the 1920's and it did not come to fruition until about 1940). The earlier part of the century had seen Darwinism apparently refuted by genetics and largely supplanted by Lamarckism. It remained obvious that life was interrelated and that common ancestry (AKA "the fact of evolution") was the best explanation for that observed interrelatedness. The only real question was HOW descent from that common ancestry could have occurred (AKA "the theories of evolution"). Dr. Watson contended that the experimental could and should be applied to the problem. The conclusion recapitulates these points:

"Thus the present position of zoology is unsatisfactory. We know as surely as we ever shall that evolution has occurred; but we do not know how this evolution has been brought about. The data which we have accumulated are inadequate, not in quantity but in their character, to allow us to determine which, if any, of the proposed explanations is a vera causa. But it appears that the experimental method rightly used will in the end give us, if not the solution of our problem, at least the power of analysing it and isolating the various factors which enter into it."

By the way, in the original source of the second part of your misquotation, we see Dr. Watson apparently anticipating "creation science" and beating it to the punch. The Two-Model Approach, as I have discussed earlier, postulates only two alternatives, the "creation model" and the "evolution model," and then seeks to "prove" the "creation model" solely by discrediting the "evolution model." Here, Dr. Watson supports acceptance of the fact of evolution by presenting an "only alternative, special creation," and then stating that that "only alternative" is "clearly incredible." How's 'bout them apples?

Judging from past experience with "creation science," I can only assume that your other quotations are equally suspect, especially the more dated ones, which would reflect outdated ideas and conclusions no longer held by the scientific community. Indeed, in the case of the un-named "Yale Biology Chairman," there is absolutely no way to determine WHEN that one was said, let alone whether it was ever said at all. We also have no idea of the context out of which those quotations were lifted, nor if those quotations ever even exist.

In other words, if you are going to quote a source, then document it so that we can verify it. If we have learned nothing else from "creation science," it's the absolutely vital need to verify everything a creationist says.

WERE YOU DESIGNED? OR DID YOUR GREAT, GREAT, GREAT, GREAT, GREAT, GRANDPA CRAWL OUT OF A SWAMP? FACT: Design requires a designer. Were we designed or are we an accident? BRAIN: Your brain is much more complex than any computer ever designed. EYES: Your eyes are much more complex than any camera, telescope, or microscope ever designed. SKIN: Your skin is much more complex than any air conditioning system ever designed. FOOT: Your foot is much more complex than any building or bridge ever designed. STOMACH: Your stomach does more amazing chemistry than any lab ever did. CELLS: You were once smaller than this dot. But you had all the genetic info and chromosomes you ever need for life. HEART: Your heart is much more complex than any pump ever designed. It is very clear you are an extremely complicated design, and thus have a designer. Man can't make one living cell that can reproduce itself. Your designer gave you billions!

At the heart of this last section is the basic question: is there evidence that we were designed? After all, it's not as if we have "JHWH" or "Calvin Klein" stitched across our spleens. Also, you again make the mistake of equating evolution with things happening by accident.

Do not make the mistake of confusing complexity with design. Many complex systems arise in nature without having to be designed. In each of the "complexity" examples you cite, the "greater complexity" arises from the basic differences between biological systems and human technology, differences which should decrease after we start applying bio-technology.

Naturally, we are going to see greater complexity in the biological systems. The component parts of these biological systems operate on a tissue, cellular, and even molecular level, whereas the components of the corresponding technological systems operate on a gross macro level. The number of component parts of a biological system is vastly greater than that of the corresponding technological system.

However, in almost every case, we find the technological system outperforming the corresponding biological system. Of course, the systems being contrasted perform different functions on vastly different scales, which greatly weakens any basis for comparison.

The basis for comparison is weakened further by the fact that the technological systems are known to have been designed, which has not been established for the biological systems. Complexity alone is not a mark of contrivance. Are those features unique or unable to function in any capacity at all if slightly different? Or are they instead variations of common themes that occur in almost organisms determined to be related closely enough to be expected to possess such common features?

An interesting side-note is the growing subject of Evolutionstechnik, or "evolutionary engineering." With "genetic algorithms," the engineer creates a number of "chromosomes" of values for the problem at hand and, through an iterative process which mimics evolution, selects the fittest ones, "mates" them through an analog of genetic recombination, thus generating "offspring," selects the fittest ones, etc. Occasionally, small mutations are introduced to kick the process out of possible sub-optimal solutions (arrived at due to poorly selected initial conditions). The process converges to an optimal solution very rapidly. The overall method involved is similar to Dawkins' WEASEL program in The Blind Watchmaker and the subject of Evolutionstechnik was covered in his PBS show of the same name.

For more information on genetic algorithms, read "Natural Selection for Computers" by Ivars Peterson (Science News, 25 Nov 1989, pp 346-348), "Natural Selection by the Numbers" by Frank Sonleitner (NCSE Reports, Vol 11 No 1, 1991, pp 18-19), and Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning by David E. Goldberg (Addison-Wesley, 1989).

An interesting question that this subject raises is why creationists keep claiming and "proving" mathematically that evolution couldn't possibly work and yet here we have engineers showing that evolution works very well indeed as a design tool. The reason is that creationists do not deal with evolution, but rather only with their "evolution model." In order for evolution to work, we need four major elements:

1. mutation,
2. reproduction,
3. genetic recombination, and
4. natural selection.

Evolutionary theory and genetic algorithms deal with all four major elements, which explains why they work so well. All creationists ever seem to deal with is mutation, so that they are actually refuting instantaneous creation by purely random processes, which, you should finally have learned by now, is NOT evolution.

Letter "From the mind of BILL MORGAN" to Gene Johnson:

There's not much in your letter that I can analyze, since it consists of little more than taunts, harangues, bluster, and posturings. To be frank, when we saw that "From the mind of BILL MORGAN" stationary, we had quite a good laugh at how little evidence of thought there was between its ears (seriously, I'm not making this one up). However, I did find a couple things to comment on.

"I don't mind teaching you about your theory, I'm quite used to it thank you. ... To summarize P.E. a snake laid an egg and a bird came out."

And here I was not sure whether you knew what you were talking about. Now with that one line, you have dispelled any doubts that I might have had. Now I definitely know that you do not know what you are talking about.

The first blatantly obvious error, besides your complete lack of understanding of Punctuated Equilibria (PE), is in saying that that first bird came out of a snake egg. The class Aves is descended from the order Dinosauria, NOT from the order Ophidia (snakes). Both lines had branched off from the stem reptiles and started diverging from each other very early in the history of Reptilia. I would have hoped that in such a simple factual matter you would have tried to get your facts straight before posing as an expert.

PE is really a fairly straight-forward idea, so it's surprising that it is so little understood, and hence so widely misrepresented in the creationist literature. It has been presented and discussed fairly extensively in the popular scientific press, so you should have learned something about it if you had done any research at all on the subject.

Actually, PE doesn't really say much that is new. All it really boils down to is that the rates of evolutionary change are not constant, but rather variable. Simple as that. Even Darwin knew that and said as much when he wrote that differing degrees of selective pressure would result in different rates of change. And if you stop to think about it, why should anyone realistically expect the rates of evolutionary change to remain constant? What mechanism would hold those rates constant?

On the other hand, it does make a lot of sense that the rate at which a population changes would depend on the amount of selective pressure being applied to the population and that selective pressure would depend on how well adapted it is to its environment. For example, if a population is not well adapted to its environment, then the selective pressure for it to change should be great and we should expect to see a higher rate of evolutionary change in that population at that time. However, if that population IS fairly well adapted to its environment, then the selective pressure for it to change should be very small and we should expect to see a very low rate of evolutionary change, if any at all, in that population at that time. Indeed, we should expect to find natural selection weeding out most change and holding the rate of change effectively at zero, i.e. in stasis.

Since the Darwinian process can converge on a solution with relatively great rapidity, as evidenced by Dawkins' WEASEL program and my MONKEY program, we would expect these periods of change to be short and rapid (we shall see shortly how to interpret "rapid"). Then once the population has become well enough adapted to the environment, or perhaps even as it approaches that point, then the rate of change should decrease until the new species enters into evolutionary stasis. Then when the environment changes again such that the survival conditions change (through climatic change or migration into a new niche or into a new environment), selective pressure would again increase for the population to change.

Since the periods of change are rapid and the periods between environmental change should be relatively long, the pattern of change that this should produce would be long periods of stasis interrupted by very short periods of "abrupt" change (like "rapid," we shall soon see how to interpret "abrupt"). In PE, the short periods of rapid change, when they result in a new species, are called speciation events. This has long been the pattern seen in the fossil record by palaeontologists, but they couldn't tell if it was the actual pattern of evolutionary change or if it was an artifact of the formation of the fossil record. PE suggests that it is the former.

Gould and Eldredge's paper, "Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism," was written primarily for palaeontologists and so the time scales involved in discussing PE are in GEOLOGICAL time, not in generational time nor entity time. It is important to keep this in mind in order to properly interpret how long an "abrupt" event would take: within minutes in entity time, months to decades in generational time (depending on the species), or thousands of years in geological time. Since PE uses a geological time scale, these "abrupt" speciation events are thought to require 5,000 to 50,000 years.

Just as a comical contrast, we should consider the consequences of one creationist argument for reducing the sheer number of animals crowded onto Noah's Ark, namely that instead of having pairs from every species onboard, he only had breeding pairs from every "basic created kind," which then diversified through "creation science's" version of micro-evolution, "variation within basic created kinds," into the present-day species.

However, the production of all the species of a fairly simple and little-diversified "kind," the "basic canid kind," having produced dogs, wolves, jackels, foxes, etc., would have required a speciation event to have occurred about once every 50 to 100 years between the end of the Flood and the present day. Comparing this to the most radically rapid rates of speciation advocated by the most radical (in terms of rate of evolution) evolutionists, 5,000 to 50,000 years, we find that creationists are advocating an even more radical form of evolution themselves, one operating at a rate 100 times and greater than the most radically rapid rates considered by evolution! And this is nothing compared to the even higher frequency of speciation events required for "basic created kinds" that have diversified into far greater numbers of species than the simple "basic canid kind"!

But that radically rapid evolution being advocated by creationists is nothing compared to what the evidence indicates that it must be. Baron Georges de Cuvier, the Father of Palaeontology (he was the one who would reconstruct a whole animal from only a few parts), was a very vocal opponent of evolution. In his Treatise sur la Theorie de la Terre, he refuted evolution (Lamarckian, at that time) by pointing out that the mummified remains of humans and animals from ancient Egypt were virtually identical to present-day humans and animals; no apparent change had occurred in the past 4500 years. Since the ICR dates the Flood at somewhere between 4600 BCE and 2000 BCE, what this all means for creationism is that all the evolutionary change that is requires has to be further compressed into a span of 0 to 2000 years!

Yet another element in PE is the old Darwinian idea of a sub-population undergoing speciation after being isolated from the main population, so that the speciation event would involve that one sub-population within a relatively geographical location. Hence the very low probability of an individual being fossilized, coupled with the very short time period involved, coupled with the small geographical area involved, coupled with all the difficulties of finding those fossils, would all conspire to make finding fossils in the middle of a speciation event very difficult. Rather, after the new species had formed and entered into stasis and migrated out over a larger range, would fossils of it be more common and easier to find.

In The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins points out that while the media (and helped, or at least not hindered, by Gould and Eldredge) has hyped PE as refuting Darwin, in reality it is very much in agreement with much of Darwinism. As I pointed out before, Darwin himself anticipated that the rates of evolutionary change would vary. Although PE bills itself as an alternative to gradualism and is abrupt in GEOLOGICAL time, it is also GRADUALISTIC in GENERATIONAL time. Speciation does not occur in a single generation, as your caricature of PE would have it, but rather over many generations. Eldredge even suggests that most speciation events involve "rather modest degrees of change." He also states that "[t]he assertion that punctuated equilibria represents a resurrection of Goldschmidt's 'macromutations' and 'hopeful monsters' remains the most serious and irksome misconstrual of our ideas."

Now the reason that constant gradualistic change is so strongly associated with Darwinism is because Darwin was fighting against saltationism, the "hopeful monsters" of his day. The saltationists argued that entire new structures, such as new organs, new limbs, eyes, etc., would appear fully formed within a single generation. Darwin strongly opposed saltation, so strongly that he over-emphasized gradual rates of change, despite Huxley's repeated warnings that he was effectively digging evolution's grave in doing so. In doing so, the truer ideas of varying rates of change, of which both Darwin and Huxley were well aware, were lost to the public and to the scientific community.

This explains why Goldschmidt met with such resistance at a time when Darwin was making a long-overdue comeback (c 1940 with the Modern Synthesis). Goldschmidt's ideas appeared to be a resurrection of saltation. Actually, Goldschmidt was not arguing for instantaneous perfection, but rather was drawing on his experience in embryonic development, in which a small change in the development of the embryo can result in profound changes in the adult form. Similarly, small changes in the genotype, especially in rate genes, can produce large changes in the phenotype, while not greatly affecting interfertility (thus ameliorating the often raised question of where a "hopeful monster" would find a mate). Dawkins' "biomorphs" do a good job of demonstrating that the amount of change in the genotype does not necessarily translate to a proportional amount of change in the phenotype.

So, Bill, did you finally learn something about PE? If nothing else, perhaps next time you will not spout off about teaching a subject you obviously know nothing about.

And finally:

"Don't feel bad that you couldn't find one error in my creation 'Weird Science,' you are not alone, not one evolutionist has yet!"

Strange, I found it to be full of errors. If nobody has been able to find any errors in it, then you obviously had not given it a very wide circulation. Either that or you are applying the ICR's snake-oil tactics of keeping your losses secret and then blowing into the next town before they can hear the news so you can claim no defeats. That had worked well for the ICR, especially when they controlled all national reporting of their debates, but then the Committees of Correspondence came along and spoiled it for them.

But wait! I just realized my mistake! You are a literalist! So I misread this part and instead should have read it LITERALLY! Of course! That must be it! Eureka! "[Y]ou couldn't find ONE error" -- of course not, I found MORE than just ONE, indeed so many that I lost count! "[N]ot ONE evolutionist has yet" -- no, not ONE, but many must have, assuming that you have been foolish enough to give them copies.

Is that it? Did I get it right this time?

Bill, I have been studying "creation science" in my spare time for the past decade. I have had many discussions with creationists, mostly in the Religion Forum on Compu-Serve. I have even participated in a few local debates (a kind of creation/evolution amateur night).

From my experience, it has become painfully evident that most creationists do not know anything about evolution, but rather have learned "creation science's" "evolution model," which, as I have described before, is little more than a caricature of evolution and associated sciences, full of false, outdated, and discarded ideas which "creation science" misrepresents as current thought in order to deceive its audience into rejecting evolution. Sadly, most, if not all, of the "creation science" leadership have succeeded in deceiving themselves as well.

Consider for a moment the most famous teaching of Chinese general Sun Tzu: "Therefore I say: 'Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril." (The Art of War, Chapter III, "Offensive Strategy," Verse 31)

The enemy that you have chosen to fight is evolution and the associated sciences. Yet instead of fighting your enemy, you engage in mock battles against your "evolution model," a straw man, an insubstantial shadow. You constantly ignore your chosen enemy and repeatedly fall victim to your real enemy, self-deception.

Know your enemy. If you choose to fight evolution, then learn everything you can about it. What does it really teach? What is the real evidence both for and against it? Is it really the loathsome monster you have been told?

Know yourself. What really are you seeking? What do you still need to learn or to research? Do you really have the ability, knowledge, and understanding that you need to carry on the fight? Are you really carrying on the fight, or are you being misled and deceived into fighting shadows?

And know what you are trying to spread, "creation science." Do you know and understand it? Are its teachings and claims true? Is it truthful in its deeds, or is it spreading deception? Are its arguments truthful and valid, or are they utter nonsense? Does it indeed raise valid questions about evolution, geology, astronomy, physics, etc., or is it just wasting its time attacking a straw man, the "evolution model"?

In reading your "Weird Science," I found that you do not know anything about evolution. I found that you have been taken in by the deceptions of "creation science." I found that you apparently have no regard for seeking the truth and following it wherever it may lead you. You do not wish to learn nor to teach, but merely to persuade by whatever means possible. You are disregarding the standards of truth and instead are practicing the situational ethics of the ends justifying the means.

And yet if you want to be effective in fighting against evolution, then you MUST learn everything you can about it. And you MUST learn what "creation science" is doing wrong to avoid repeating the same mistakes and learn what it is doing right to build on that (please don't press me for any examples here, but I'd guess there might be something that it's doing right -- I mean nothing can be completely wrong, can it?).

I do not oppose anybody just for rejecting evolution, but I do oppose their rejecting it because of the deceptions of "creation science."

Here is a brief bibliography that might help you get started in your education:

• Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism by Philip Kitcher. This was my first book on "creation science" from which I learned several of the ICR's claims and their inherent problems. Kitcher has been a very effective debater with a reputation that must be greater than I had thought. During our first conversation, Scott Alexander of a local creationist fossil shop remained very calm and unexcited. However, when I noted that his selection of books was very one-sided and needed to be more balanced and he asked me for some suggestions, all I had to do was to just mention Kitcher's name and Alexander's eyes popped out, his veins stood out, and he lost his composure ("Balanced Treatment?!? Not in MY shop, you don't!" [my paraphrase, not his exact words]).

• Origin of Theses: A Look at the Quality of Two "Theses" from the Institute for Creation Research "Graduate School" by Kevin R. Henke (MS Geology).

  In this set of WordPerfect files, Henke evaluates two geology "theses" submitted to the ICR GS and greatly praised by ICR officials. Henke finds both to be substandard because of poor quality and bogus science, including a lack of understanding of basic science and the scientific method (e.g. not knowing what "theories," "hypotheses," "models," "laws," etc. are nor that scientists use "multiple working hypotheses"). Available from the NCSE.

• In the Beginning ... A Scientist Shows Why the Creationists Are Wrong by Chris McGowan.

  McGowan presents a number of creationist claims and then explains why they are wrong. For example, as a zoologist, he shows that one major problem with the idea of separately created kinds very distinctly separated from each other is that there are a number of animals which stubbornly refuse to be neatly classified (e.g. Amphioxus has characteristics of both vertebrates and invertebrates and has arbitrarily been classified as vertebrate). He also does a good job of listing and illustrating characteristics of major taxonomical groups (e.g. reptiles, mammals, birds) and comparing the characteristics of transitional forms to show why they are considered transitional.

• Science Held Hostage by Menninga, van Till, and Young.

  An excellent book written by three conservative Christians who teach science at conservative Calvin College. They try to define the proper boundaries between religion and science and then take creationists and proponent of "scientism" to task for violating those boundaries. All three were targets of an ICR smear campaign in which Duane Gish tried to get them fired and Davis Young is currently "Public Enemy #1" at the ICR.

• Science and Earth History: The Evolution/Creation Controversy by Arthur Strahler (Prometheus Books, $39.95, 600 pages, 8 x 11).

  By far the best, most comprehensive, and most fair (also read "least polemic") book I have found on the subject. The general structure of the book's sections consist of pairs of chapters: the first chapter of each pair presents the creationist view of a given topic and then the second chapter presents the scientific view. The earlier sections of the book review the nature of science and the history and nature of creationism. The book is very comprehensive; Strahler covers just about every aspect of the subject we could think of. His own expertise in geology especially comes out in those sections. I highly recommend this book.

• Scientists Confront Creationism editted by Laurie Godfrey.

  An excellent anthology of articles dealing with the nature of "creation science," contrasting its claims with the actual evidence, and presenting some of the evidence for evolution.

• Science and Creationism editted by Ashley Montagu.

  Another good anthology. Includes articles on radiometric dating, transitional fossils, and proteinoids. The final articles cover the trial of the Arkansas creationist law (1981), including a history of events, personal experiences in observing the trial and giving testimony, and the Decision of the Court delivered by Judge Overton.

• Reviews of Thirty-One Creationist Books editted by Stan Weinberg.

  These reviews of creationist books were written in response to a 1982 creationist drive to have some of these creationist books included in the public schools of 60 Iowa communitites. These reviews proved useful to school boards, administrators, teachers, and librarians in opposing the creationists, who gave up after being defeated in the first 25 communities targeted.

• Evolution vs Creation by Frank Awbrey and William Thwaites (1981).

  Syllabus for their two-model course taught at San Diego State University. Roughly half the lectures in the class were given by members of the ICR. It was in this class in 1979 that Gish's false claims about the bombardier beetle were exploded in public (sorry about that pun) with Gish present; despite Gish's backing off from his claims at that time, the ICR still uses those same claims. Thwaites is currently having problems getting approval to continue the class (while the NCSE is trying to urge him to update the class notes). Available through the university bookstore as an "Aztec Lecture Notes."

Periodicals:

• Creation / Evolution.

  A journal formerly published quarterly (ostensibly, though in fact less frequently) since 1980 by the American Humanist Association, it has just this month been acquired by the NCSE. This journal is intended to print technical refereed articles on the subjects of creation/evolution (the refereeing is done by volunteers -- when I tried to urge Dr. Gish to have the ICR's claims refereed, he wrote that they couldn't because the cost would be too prohibitive with their tiny budget, which must be far greater than the AHA's budget!). In earlier issues, C/E also ran some news items, although that function properly belonged to the NCSE's Creation/Evolution Newsletter. C/E has run two debates-in-print so far (one on the Argument-from-Design with Geisler and a recent toe-to-toe between Walter Brown & Jim Lippard) and Gish has expressed interest in doing one on thermodynamics.

• NCSE Reports (formerly Creation/Evolution Newsletter) published bi-monthly by the National Center for Science Education (NCSE).

  It has been around since 1980, when it had started out as a one-sheet newsletter for a local Committee of Correspondance (CC). Its main purpose has been to keep the various CCs informed of creationist activity and legal/legislative actions on the local, state, national, and international levels. Subscribers also submit articles describing the results of researching creationist claims and of new creationist campaigns/strategies that they have encountered. Another mainstay has been reports and reviews of debates and of creation science conventions (such as the two International Conferences on Creationism, which I have not seen any mention of in Acts & Facts). There are also reviews of books and articles of interest, and some technical articles (which more properly belonged in C/E), including some good critiques of Michael Denton's microbiology arguments. Finally, the NCSE offers tapes to rent or buy, debate transcripts, and books at reduced rates for NCSE members (including all that I listed above and below, except for Kitcher and Futuyma). Also, back issues of both Creation/Evolution and NCSE Reports are available through the NCSE. Finally, NCSE Reports will occasionally list the CC liaisons for each state and for the Canadian provinces.

  NCSE has just taken over publishing Creation/Evolution. The new schedule calls for four issues of NCSE Reports and two issues of Creation/Evolution to be published each year. Creation/Evolution is carried by some libraries (I have found it in the library of a local Christian college). I do not know if any libraries would carry NCSE Reports, but I wouldn't rule it out altogether. If you cannot find them at your local library, ask the librarian to see a List of Periodicals, which would list periodicals and which libraries have them.

  By the way, here is the address & phone # of the NCSE:

  NCSE
  P.O. Box 9477
  Berkeley, Calif 94709
  (415) 843-3393
  

The following are not "evolution text books," but should help you to learn a little about what evolution is and what it actually teaches:

• Science On Trial by Douglas Futuyma.

  I was torn between listing this book here or above. The book was intended to counter creationist claims, but Futuyma chose to do so by explaining evolution and presenting evidence for it. Only in the last chapter does he addressing creationist claims directly. I have encountered two people (one a creationist, the other an evolutionist) who complained about this book. However, I found it to be a good and non-polemic book and it was also fairly well received in Science Held Hostage (pp 133-139).

• The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins (1986).

  A recent popularization which has been widely read by those interested in the subject of evolution and yet was almost totally unknown by a room full of creationists (at a local debate) four years after its publication. He does a good job of explaining various aspects of evolution to the layman. The title comes from his answer to Paley's "watchmaker" Argument-from-Design, in which Dawkins identifies the "Watchmaker" as the forces of nature which are blind to the outcome of their actions. In Chapter 3, Dawkins discusses the use of "cumulative selection" to solve the old "monkeys typing Shakespeare" problem. This prompted me to perform experiments which overwhelmingly supported Dawkins and which show that most of the creationist probability arguments are based on false assumptions (i.e. they are calculating the probabilities of the wrong things). I had to laugh when the same old nonsense appeared recently in the Bible-Science Newsletter; apparently they haven't heard of The Blind Watchmaker either.

• Blueprints by Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey.

  This is a good layman's book for tracing the history and development of evolutionary thought through the individuals involved -- Buffon, Lamarck, Darwin, Mendel, de Vries, Morgan, Woese, etc -- and for reviewing how they reached some of their conclusions and some of the problems which they encountered (though not as comprehensively as in Evolution: History of an Idea, which was intended as a textbook).

• The Hominid Gang by Delta Willis.

  I just picked this one up last week, so I haven't had a chance to read it yet (which usually takes about a year to get to doing). It was favorably reviewed in the Jan/Feb '90 issue of NCSE Reports as being an up-to-date summary of what we know of human evolution as of 1989 as well as being a book, not just about what scientists have found, but about how science and scientists work (something about which "creation science" displays much ignorance). The reviewer notes that she scores many points for evolution simply by presenting the evidence very readably. She also notes and counters details such as the much-quoted Wade article stating that all the known hominid fossils would fit on one billiard table; she shows clearly that it would take at least a baseball field, with hundreds of individual ape and human fossils in the Nairobi Museum's "Hominid Vault" alone.

• Time Frames: The Evolution of Punctuated Equilibria by Niles Eldredge.

  You may as well learn it from the horse's mouth. Includes the original paper, "Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism," by Gould and Eldredge.

I hope this list proves useful to you. It may prove difficult to find them all and definitely expensive to purchase them. However, I have found some in libraries, especially college/university libraries, and even in some Christian college libraries.

Until you can get started with your reading, perhaps this selection from "Evolution vs Creation", the syllabus for Awbrey and Thwaites' two-model class at San Diego State University (in which half the lectures were given by speakers from the near-by ICR), will help you gain some basic understanding of what Darwinian evolution is:

[Pp 59 - 60]:

"Darwin's theory of evolution is the most satisfactory non-supernatural explanation yet devised to explain the apparent relationships among Earth's organisms. Actually, Darwin proposed two theories: 1) descent with modification, i.e. that all living species are the modified descendants of previously existing species and 2) that natural selection, i.e. differential reproduction of genetically determined variations, is the major driving force of evolution. Each theory, in turn, is based upon a number of postulates and gives rise to a series of predictions and testable hypotheses. Prof. Ralph W. Lewis of Michigan State University has devised the following list of evolutionary postulates from Darwin's Origin of Species.

1. Postulates of the Theory of Descent with Modification
   1. All life evolved from one simple kind of organism or from a few simple kinds.
   2. Each species, fossil or living, arose from another species that preceded it in time.
   3. Evolutionary changes are gradual and of long duration.
   4. Over long periods of time new genera, new families, new orders, new classes, and new phyla arose by a continuation of the kind of evolution that produced new species.
   5. Each species originated in a single geographic location.
   6. The greater the similarity between two groups of organisms, the closer is their relationship and the closer in geologic time is their common ancestral group.
   7. Extinction of old forms (species, etc.) is a consequence of the production of new forms or of environmental change.
   8. Once a species or other group has become extinct it never reappears.
   9. Evolution continues today in generally the same manner as during preceding geologic eras.
   10. The Geologic Record is very incomplete.

2. Postulates of the Theory of Natural Selection
   1. A population of organisms has the tendency and potential to increase at a geometric rate.
   2. In the short run the number of individuals in a population remains fairly constant.
   3. The conditions of life are limited.
   4. The environment of most organisms have been in constant change throughout geologic time.
   5. Only a fraction of the offspring in a population will live to produce offspring.
   6. Individuals in a population are not all the same: some have heritable variations (= variable traits).
   7. Life activities (= "struggle for existence") determine which traits are favorable or unfavorable by determining the success of the individuals who possess the traits.
   8. Individuals having favorable traits (= favorable variations) will, on the average, produce more offspring and those with unfavorable traits will produce fewer offspring.
   9. NOTE: Natural Selection is the term used to encompass statements 7 & 8.
   10. Natural selection causes the accumulation of new variations and the loss of unfavorable variations to the extent that a new species may arise.

"Like all scientific theories, the theory of evolution is constantly being questioned by scientists. No one accepts it as the Truth because science cannot verify theories, it can only falsify them. Attempts to falsify the theory of evolution have led to modifications in the theory and will undoubtedly produce further changes. For example, postulate 3 of descent with modification, gradual change, may give way to the hypothesis that most evolutionary change occurs rapidly in speciation events, followed by long periods of stability. Such challenges, and the changes that may follow, are the way that scientific knowledge progresses."

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First uploaded on 2000 July 02.
Updated on 2019 March 26.

E-Mail Address: dwise1@aol.com.