Feedback for August 2000

This FAQ has no one author. It has been put together with input from a variety of folks, at least some of whom are Christians and not atheists. There is certainly nothing in the FAQ intended to put down Christians.

I see nothing in the FAQ which speaks of heaven and hell, or of God doing impossible things.

You do seem to be quite incorrect, on all counts.

• Some Questionable Creationist Credentials
• How Good Are Those Young-Earth Arguments? A Close Look at Dr. Hovind's List of Young-Earth Arguments and Other Claims (1995)
• Kent Hovind's Bogus Challenge
• The Wild, Wild World of Kent Hovind

There are many different hypotheses about where life began, and it may be that it actually occurred over tens of thousands of years in many locations: in subterranean chambers fed by the products of vulcanism, in hydrothermal srpings, in the sea, and so forth. If it did involve these many early locations, then the chances that life would arise yet again is correspondingly reduced, since those niches are now occupied with hungry bugs.

So perhaps we agree on the big picture.

On the little picture, however, there are some problems. Your own comments at the start of the feedback include a few misconceptions.

It is true that ancient Hebrew was written without vowels, but this does not prevent translation. It just makes it more difficult to tell how a word is pronounced. (However, the actual situation is not that simple. See Consonants and Vowels in the Hebrew language, off-site).

The word used in Genesis is "yom", and this is written Yud-Waw-Mem. This is definitely the very word chosen by the biblical writer, and there is no difficulty in translating it. The claim that the association with "day" was chosen arbitrarily at the time of translation is false. The verses speak of morning and evening in each day, and they directly link the creation week to divine institution of the seventh day, the Sabbath, as a day of rest.

As for being literal: that surely is the problem with young Earth creationists. The talkorigins archive advocates no particular method for interpretng Genesis. It does point out that a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 as history is in confict with some elementary facts; but since you are apparently not a fan of this style of reading, we are possibly in agreement on this.

Your quoted quip looks to me like a famous statement by Voltaire: Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer (If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him). An examination of the phrase in context is available on-line, not that I think it particularly relevant.

Darwin was a Christian in his youth, but not throughout his life. The loss of his Christian faith is well documented, and it is generally thought that the final straw for Darwin was the death of his daughter. His scientific insights remain valid in any case, and I do not know anyone who chooses their religious beliefs by attempting to follow Darwin's beliefs.

The first law of thermodynamics actually says that energy is conserved. If you consider the fundamental laws of physics to be in some way inconsistent or invalid, I will not attempt to disuade you. Bear in mind that potential energy is negative for the purposes of this law, and the total energy of the universe could even be zero. But frankly, we don't know.

Biological evolution is not any old change. The word refers exclusively to change in heritable characteristics of populations, and it most definitely does not refer to changes that take place during an individual person's lifetime.

Apart from these points of detail, our emotional reactions to the article you are criticising are probably fairly similar.

As for the spindown rate of the Earth, it is currently about 0.0015 sec per day per century. If we just extrapolate that number straight back over 10,000 centuries (your million years), it adds up to 15 seconds. That means that a million years ago the day would have been 15 seconds shorter. I don't think that would make much of a wind. Of course, that "uniformitarian" assumption is not exactly a good one, as we would expect the spin down rate to be larger as we go back in time. But a million years is not very far in time, and the approximation of constancy is not bad. But the ultimate cause of that spin down is the tidal interaction between the Earth and moon. As you will see in "The Recession of the Moon and the Age of the Earth-Moon System", that is in reality not a problem either, even when we include the full variability of the spin down rate.

No proof? By appropriately re-defining the meaning of "proof", you can easily insist that there is "no proof" by your own private standards. However, by all of the commonly accepted standards of "proof" in the empirical sciences, an age for the Earth of around 4.5 billion years stands as an incontestable fact, as thoroughly proven as any empirical science is capable of "proof". On the other hand, the "scientific" contentions of young-Earth creationists are shot through with errors large and small, usually making them unrecognizable as science. Not only does this archive sport a whole section entitled "The Age of the Earth FAQs", offering a great deal of support for the evolutionary old age, but also see the book "The Age of the Earth" by G. Brent Dalrymple (Stanford university Press, 1991), wherein the author spends several hundred pages detailing the foundations of our scientific understanding of, and "proof" for, the Earth's old age.

And finally, you can also visit my own webpage " A Radiometric Dating Resource List", which is perhaps the most complete sinlge point of reference on the web regarding the use of radioactive isotopes to date rocks, and aid in the determination of the most probable age of the Earth.

Why Is High Intelligence So Rare?

Adaptations that are favored by selection, such as eyes or bioluminescence, originate in evolution scores of times independently. High intelligence has originated only once, in human beings. I can think of only two possible reasons for this rarity. One is that high intelligence is not at all favored by natural selection, contrary to what we would expect. In fact, all the other kinds of living organisms, millions of species, get along fine without high intelligence.

The other possible reason for the rarity of intelligence is that it is extraordinarily difficult to acquire. Some grade of intelligence is found only among warm-blooded animals (birds and mammals), not surprisingly so because brains have extremely high energy requirements. But it is still a very big step from "some intelligence" to "high intelligence."

The hominid lineage separated from the chimpanzee lineage about 5 million years ago, but the big brain of modern man was acquired less than 300,000 years ago. As one scientist has suggested (Stanley, 1992), it required complete emancipation from arboreal life to make the arms of the mothers available to carry the helpless babies during the final stages of brain growth. Thus, a large brain, permitting high intelligence, developed in less than the last 6 percent of the life on the hominid line. It seems that it requires a complex combination of rare, favorable circumstances to produce high intelligence (Mayr, 1994).

The Talk.Origins Archive is a collection of articles and essays that explore the creationism/evolution controversy from a mainstream scientific perspective. In other words, the authors of most of the articles in this archive accept the prevailing scientific view that the earth is ancient, that there was no global flood, and that evolution is responsible for the earth's present biodiversity.

We do not present the viewpoints of scientific creationists directly — there are several different ones, by the way — but instead provide numerous links to such sites to allow them to speak their own minds.

Personally, I am one of those non-religious types, and I don't believe in a supreme being. So maybe your remarks are more directed towards me and my ilk than the others. I do not believe that "it all came together by chance", and I suspect that very few people who have actually studied cosmology would believe such a thing either. This is a major misunderstanding typical of creationists, namely their belief that all "evolutionists" must (a) be atheists, and (b) believe that everything happens by chance. But both are very wrong.

"Evolutionism" and "atheism" are equivalent only in the misguided jargon of creationists. See, for instance, the "God and Evolution" file in our archive. Lots of people believe in God and evolution, and find no problem for themselves therein. There is no justification for the presumption that one must be atheist to be an "evolutionist".

The universe is a giant mechanism that operates, we assume, in accordance with rules that are consistent throughout the universe. As scientists, we try to figure out what those rules are. Theoretical physics and cosmology is the area of scientific study where we try to discover the most fundamental of those rules, the most basic rules of nature, from which many other rules are derived. Those rules are not random, and therefore nothing which happens as a consequence of those rules can be totally random either. We all know that those rules could have been designed by a supreme being, and I think perhaps all of us would agree that to deny the possibility altogether would be rather short sighted. However, it is no less short sighted to demand that they must have been designed by a supreme being.

That said, I will tell you what I believe, just for myself. The universe, is the way it is, and we are the way we are, because the unaltering laws of the universe make it so. I neither know, nor much care, whether a "supreme being" is responsible for all this or not. The idea that it would be a supreme being who personally cares about me & mine strikes mas as ludicrous, but that is only my own opinion, not necessarily shared by the rest of the archives authors. I do not doubt at all that the universe, and all life within it, have evolved from some more primitive form, but I cannot say for sure (nor can anyone else), what that primitive form may have been.

"Horses" is not a species name, and we have excellent evidence that horse species evolved from other species, and that the earliest species was very unlike anything we would call a horse today.

We have experimentally observed speciation where the progeny of ancestors cannot interbreed with other descendents of those ancestors. In the case of plants, this can often be repeated in the lab and the field. The point about speciation (the splitting of one species into two) is that it happens to populations, not individuals, and the populations can evolve in ways that make them mutually infertile.

The argument rests on your assertion that "you cannot breed one species and get a different species". Since it is already shown to be false (species of fruit flies were speciated in the 1930s, if I remember aright), the whole argument falls down.

The usual creationist reply is that "they were still fruit flies", but this is not the point. "Fruit flies" is not a species name, but a generic term for a group of organisms that we happen to think are similar. But if each species is slightly different from its closest relatives, then with extinction such groups can evolve from an ancestor that is intermediate between two such "distinct" groups.

Whatever you do, don't get into the tactic of attacking all their views on the basis of a single problem (eg, biblical historical literalism) they may have (apart from anything else, it invites the same response). Always stress that your aim is to correct misunderstandings, not attack their religion as a whole. Their beliefs will be stronger for knowing the truth of the matter.

A second variety of creationist is not intellectually honest with themselves. No amount of evidence or argument will impinge upon their "terrible certainty" that they are right and you are wrong. Typically, these people either wish to be deluded or are incapable of making a rational argument when their core beliefs are under threat, and you will find that after giving them the information, they will merely repeat their initial claims.

If you want to keep these people as friends, don't argue about it. Talk about baseball or football instead. Unless, that is, they start to impose these beliefs on you and your children in the public arena.

A radioactive nucleus can be triggered to decay by outside events, such as the induced chain reaction fission of ²³⁵U in nuclear reactors. But alpha and beta decay, the most common decay modes for radiometric dating, are not affected by environmental concerns. There are models from which you can derive computed half lives for radioactive decay, but that's not where the equation you ask about comes from. However, the half life calculations based on standard models in nuclear physics, do reproduce rather nicely the observed decay half lives. There is a recent, and extensive, mathematical & physical review of the theory, "Microscopic Theory of Cluster Radioactivity"; R.G. Lovas et al., Physics Reports, 295(5): 265-362, February 1998. I suggest you consult this excellent resource for a thorough updating on the microscopic theory. You can also find a nice rendition of an explicit half life calculation for alpha decay of a deformed or spherical nucleus in "Alpha decay and nuclear deformation: the case for favoured alpha transitions in even-even emitters"; F. Garcia et al., Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics 26(6): 755-769, June 2000

On the experimental side, perhaps you should consult an appropriate text book on the subject. I like Gunther Faure's book Isotope Geology, but another good one is Alan Dickin's Radiogenic Isotope Geology. Both share links to Amazon.com on my Radiometric Dating Resource List page. A good online source would be the Geoscience 656 Lecture Notes from Cornell University, which can be downloaded in PDF format, and also cover basic radioactivity.

Yes, a large number of biological texts do use "macroevolution" to mean things other than evolution at or above the species level. They are either wrong or too restricted, for that is how the term was developed, and what it logically refers to.

However, many biological terms evolve. A nice story is the fellow who, wanting a non-level specific term to refer to any lowest level taxon without the connotations of "species", invented the word "deme" (from the Greek for a people, hence population). Sewall Wright promptly started using it for a breeding population, and the original sense was lost.

Dictionaries typically give the most widely used sense, but this is often the wrong sense. This is true in the common definitions of macroevolution because most studies of macroevolution have, due to the sampling rate of paleontology, been restricted to very long-term and large-scale evolution. But conceptually, it is what the FAQ says it is. See also my comments in the March 2000 and October 1999 Feedbacks

• McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education

An Old Earth Creationist (OEC) thinks that the earth is old, and that there were forms of life once existing that no longer exist, but denies that species evolve (transmute) from one into another and that the reason for the relationships of features between species such as humans and apes has anything to do with common ancestry. They are not progressionists, but providentialists pure and simple - everything that happens in biology is the direct result of the will of God.

For the different kinds of creationism, see Mark Isaak's What is Creationism? FAQ and the more detailed treatment in Robert Pennock's Tower of Babel.

For the significance of the distinction between progressionism and providentialism in biology, see

Ruse, Michael. 1996. Monad to man: the concept of progress in evolutionary biology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

The problem with intelligent design creationism (ID) is that for a scientist qua scientist it leads to no research or inferences. ID is basically a failure of investigation and this is directly contrary to science. So far, no ID proponents has been able to show how an ID hypothesis adds to any research at all.