Feedback for April 2002

Griffiths, Paul E. What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

As well as being a philosophical introduction, the author discusses the evolution of emotions and is very au fait with the subject.

Copies of Darwin's book are available freely. I recall but do not have the details to hand, that there was a critical edition recently with notes on current thinking.

The claims on the www.bible.ca website about human and dinosaur tracks found near the Paluxy River in Texas are hardly new, and hardly convincing. In fact, they have been so thoroughly debunked that even well known young-earth creationist groups such as Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research state that those tracks should not be used as evidence that humans and dinosaurs lived together.

More information about The Texas Dinosaur/"Man Track" Controversy can be found on the archive. The author of those pages, Glen Kuban, has also examined the claim about the hammer in more detail on his own website than he does here. For his analysis, visit The London Hammer: An Alleged Out-of-Place Artifact.

However, your students may not copy any or all of it and put their name to it, as a student at my own university did in presenting some of my own work to my own thesis supervisor :-)

You can also find your four points addressed within the archive.

1. There are heaps of transitional forms in the fossil record. See the Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ. A great example of a recently found link is in fossils of now exinct species in the whale lineage, showing the transition from terrestrial to aquatic forms. See The Origin of Whales and the Power of Independent Evidence. We also have a number of FAQs dealing with specific cases of transitional forms in the fossil record, which you can find by browsing the archive.
2. There are many "ape man" fossils available, showing a whole range of forms at various degrees of transition between modern human and our common ancestor with the great apes. We have available a list of Prominent Hominid Fossils.
3. There is no contradiction with empirical science; indeed evolution is the unavoidable conclusion of empirical science. See 29 Evidences for Macroevolution.
4. There is no contradiction with scientific probability. See our FAQS on Evolution and Chance.

To the best of my knowledge, the oldest flood story is the Assyrian myth of Utnapishtim. At least, that is the oldest written myth. Other myths may have more ancient oral histories.

One of the people most instrumental in the formation of this archive was Tero Sand. He died in 1996 having spent most of his life as a quadriplegic. He did not seem to allow his condition to lower his standards of evidence and argument. Tero had a fine set of web pages of his own, which he titled his "Anti-Crap Pages".

Wesley

For suitably civilized debate, it is better to have actual arguments, and not rely over much on capitals, or putting 'scare quotes' around words like scientists. You would need to demonstrate that you are actually aware of what evidence has been marshalled, and which the scientific world finds so convincing, in any credible critique of that evidence.

Good luck! Perhaps we will see you in the news group.

The changes in populations that are considered evolutionary are those that are inheritable via the genetic material from one generation to the next. Biological evolution may be slight or substantial; it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportion of different alleles within a population (such as those determining blood types) to the successive alterations that led from the earliest protoorganism to snails, bees, giraffes, and dandelions.

It can be hard for the general public to appreciate the distinctions which are used in science, and indeed you have missed the distinction yourself. This is not about being smart; it is a matter of education on the details of scientific models and terminology — even for those who cannot accept the actual validity of models in use.

Evolution and evolutionary biology is inconsistent with a strict literal interpretation of the Genesis creation accounts, but it is debatable that such a strict historical reading is reasonably called a teaching of the bible. Thus evolution does not exclude religious belief; but it does exclude the beliefs of some people, and it certainly rules out taking early Genesis as a plain account of events as they occured historically.

There is another essay by Professor Moran in the archive which is worth a look: Evolution is a Fact and a Theory.

See What is Evolution?

You present three questions, and so I have numbered my responses.

1. We have no FAQ specifically on radiocarbon dating, because it is not a method which is particularly relevant to evolution. It works over too short a time span. However, this is a frequently asked question, and so an FAQ on the subject would indeed be a useful addition to the archive.

   Since we have no FAQ at present specifically on this subject, I'll have to comment briefly on my own behalf.

   Radiocarbon dating is generally quite reliable, but it is not unusual to get bad results, in a few percent of cases. So calling it almost flawless is certainly an exaggeration.

   However, the particular criticisms you give are not quite correct. It is physically impossible for radiocarbon dating to give results in the millions of years. The real situation is that clams and snails living in water that it saturated with carbon from sources other than the atmosphere will (of course) give incorrect results, of up to several thousand years. The cases you mention were studied many decades ago, and were perfectly consistent with expectations. The studies were demonstrations of a well understood source of error, for materials that should not be dated with radiocarbon.

   The classic reference is

   Rubin, M., and D. W. Taylor (1963) "Radiocarbon activity of shells from living clams and snails." Science. vol. 141, p. 637.

   If you can find and read the paper; you will find it is not a disproof of radiocarbon dating, but a confirmation that material incorporating non-atmospheric carbon is not suitable for radiocarbon dating, as expected.

   The seals are a similar case, though I do not have a reference handy.

   A useful on-line discussion of this phenomenon (the reservoir effect) can be found at Radiocarbon Web-Info maintained by Dr Tom Higham, of the Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory, at the University of Waikato in New Zealand.

2. We have a good FAQ on The Age of the Earth. Basically, the earth is 4.55 billion years old, give or take a percent.

   We also have an excellent FAQ on Changing Views of the History of the Earth. Since the advent of absolute dating methods early last century, estimates of the age of the Earth have all been consistently several billion years, and with improved methods and techniques estimates have steadily converged and become more accurate. From 1953 onwards, all estimates converged on something over 4 billion years, and from then on have simply become more and more precise. In the present time, the age of the Earth known with considerable confidence to within a percent or less.

   It is simply misleading to say that the age of the Earth keeps changing.

3. Mt. St. Helens certainly is discussed in the archive, in quite a few places. The most detailed discussion is in our FAQ Coal Beds, Creationism, and Mount St. Helens ; which focusses on claims about coal formation. See also Karen Bartelt's discussion of her visit to the ICR, which considers creationist arguments on Mt. St. Helens.

   Basically, you have been mislead. It is most certainly not the case that the sediment and areas surrounding Mt. St. Helens should have taken millions of years to develop. No competent geologist would say anything so completely absurd. The Mt. St. Helens deposts are mainly layers of ash, and nothing like the consolidated layers of rock which one would expect over millions of years. There is nothing in the Mt. St. Helens debris which is in any conflict with standard geological models.

I am sure you have a lot of other information; but that is why this archive exists. There is a lot of misinformation put out, and we keep seeing the same errors repeated again and again. You will find our search facility a useful tool to discover our responses to many of the arguments you have been given from creationist sources.

Go to KR Miller’s Review of Darwin's Black Box for his review of Behes book (1996). See also Miller’s book Finding Darwin’s God (1999).

I’m sure it may make some people feel better to believe that acceptance of evolution is equivalent to atheism but this is simply not the case. Nor is it the case that all (or even most) atheists justify their atheism by appealing to the fact of evolution. Evolution may be consistent with atheism but it absolutely does not mandate it.

So all this bluster about “gambling with one’s soul” and the inadequacy of the “non-believer’s education” is nothing more than a straw-man argument used to avoid actually dealing with the empirical evidence.

First, the issue for evolutionists is not rejection of God. Many evolutionists believe in God; and there is nothing in evolution which denies God's existence. The dispute is over a history of life; since the creation myths of the bible present a different history.

Second, evolution is not established by logic. It is established by evidence. The reason your model cannot be adopted also is that it flies in the face of evidence. It is not a matter of different logic. It is a matter of whether or not you are willing to go where the evidence leads.

Third, since creationists reject the evolutionary model, there is no basis at all in this argument for calling them less narrow-minded; unless you consider the person with the most ridiculous model to be the least narrow minded; which would be rather silly.

Finally, and most importantly, this approach simply misrepresents the nature of the debate between evolution and creationism.

Creationists hold that accepting global floods and young Earth and seperate creation of living species is consistent with evidence and logic and reason. They are saying that logic and reason and evidence are all consistent with the creationist model. They are wrong, of course, and this archive explains why they are wrong in exhaustive detail.

It is the last gasp of a discredited and disproven position to deny that the tools of evidence and reason have a role to play in shedding light upon the past.

(1) recent phenomena concerning genetic redundancy that reveal shortcomings in evolution

(2) examples of evidence that violate evolution

(3) "falsification" of molecular genealogy of cytochrome c evolution

If you can specify exactly what you have in mind, including references to the scientific literature so we can access the details, we would be happy to comment, and will try to correct relevant Web postings as appropriate.

As to "what is in it" for us who support Talk.Origins, we have many volunteers with differing motivations, but none of us (I think) are out to promote nihilism or to challenge religious faith. Many of us are deeply religious. My personal motivations rest first on a conviction that citizens of our country (indeed of the world) need to make many decisions that can be informed by science, so our students need to be taught how to apply the best standards of scholarship in evaluating conflicting scientific claims. Second, creationist claims of evidence that contradicts evolution have, in my experience, almost always been founded on data or logic that offend good standards of scientific scholarship. I consider it a kind of civic responsibility to offer any expertise I have to prevent the spread of such poor "science." That's why I support Talk.Origins.

Stunning logic and irrefutable proof for a terribly young earth, eh?

But the approximation is not entirely appropriate. A more detailed analysis shows that the spindown rate would be very high while the earth is very young, and much smaller thereafter. Paleontological evidence agrees with this theoretical conclusion.

We don't know.

Alternatively, if you really have to have an answer and are satisfied with answers that have no power to help develop models of the history of events and processes involved in the very early universe, you could try

God did it.

Evolution deals with events long long after the origin of the universe, and makes no reference to the origin of the universe. Evolution is concerned with the development and diversification of life on Earth; something which has only occurred over the last 4 billion years or so, subsequent to formation of the planet Earth. No matter how you choose to answer the questions you have posed, the answers have no impact on evolutionary theory.

Of course, your use of the pejorative term propaganda does suggest the possibility that there is more to your not accepting evolution than your questions about a totally different area of science: cosmology.

Actually, the Chinese character for boat (chuan 2) consists of the boat radical on the left and a phonetic element on the right. The phonetic element has two parts, which are irrelevant to the meaning of the character. The upper part appears to be the same as the character for the number eight, but is actually a primitive that means "to divide". The lower part is the character for "mouth". It is true that the character for mouth is often used to represent a person, but in this case, the entire right side has only phonetic significance.

Furthermore, no Chinese flood myths include an ark with eight passengers. Instead, they typically involve a brother and sister in a hollowed log or gourd.

What scientists can do is to observe two populations of organisms that are subjected to different stresses and contingencies. Having done that, they have observed speciation, both in the laboratory and in the wild. See our articles entitled Observed Instances of Speciation and Some More Observed Speciation Events. Those articles give references to some research detailing observed speciation events.

"Darwin's theory consisted of three inferences based on five facts derived in part from population ecology and in part from phenomena of inheritance.

Fact 1: All species have such great potential fertility that their population size would increase exponentially (Malthus called it geometrically) if all individuals that are born would again reproduce successfully.

Fact 2: Except for minor annual fluctuations and occasional major fluctuations, populations normally display stability.

Fact 3: Natural resources are limited. In a stable environment they remain relatively constant.

Inference 1: Since more individuals are produced than can be supported by the available resources but population size remains stable, it means that there must be a fierce struggle for existence among the individuals of a population, resulting in the survival of only a part, often a very small part, of the progeny of each generation.

These facts derived from population ecology lead to important conclusions when combined with certain genetic facts.

Fact 4 No two individuals are exactly the same; rather, every population displays enormous variability.

Fact 5 Much of this variation is heritable.

Inference 2: Survival in the struggle for existance is not random but depends in part on the hereditary constitution of the surviving individuals. This unequal survival constitutes a process of natural selection.

Inference 3: Over the generations this process of natural selection will lead to a continuing gradual change of populations, that is, to evolution and the production of new species."

I hope this helps.

Against stupidity the very gods
Themselves contend in vain.

I'm the person who responded to the anonymous reader. I didn't claim that the archive had no photographs.

I think that photographs have great pedagogical value. I wish it were easier to provide more of them.

Wesley

Furthermore, if the earth spun much faster in the past, the effective surface gravity would have been rather less, and not more (because of the effect of "centrifugal force").

What is really needed is a set of files which gives responses for the many flawed arguments which keep getting raised again and again in these debates; and this is one of the things we try to provide in this archive.

The general feeling seems to be that the web site is another parody, like the Landover Baptists, but much more subtle and dead pan. No further analysis necessary; it is all some kind of bizarre joke.

Lacking a specific reference, the "young ages" which your correspondent refers to are most likely that sort of result -- an artifact of the carbon-14 assessment technique. Such results are not taken seriously, because it is understood what they mean: an age out of range. Anyone trying to use such values as "actual ages" is, in my opinion, trying to mislead.

One more thing: the less carbon-14 remains, the more susceptible the method is to contamination. A relatively young 1,000-year-old sample contaminated by 1% ancient carbon would give an age about 50 years wrong. A 100,000-year-old sample contaminated by 1% modern carbon would give a result about 65,000 years off (an entirely meaningless young result of about 35,000 years) -- even if it were possible to assess the quantity of carbon-14 without measurement error.