Feedback for July 2002

More importantly, the issues that Brown brings up have long been debated by scientists, many of them before Brown was even born. Those debates were carried out in scientific journals, where the evidence is presented in a lasting form for everyone to see. Brown, and anyone else, is welcome to bring new evidence to these debates, but again, it is Brown who refuses to participate.

Walt Brown's web site, In the Beginning, is already linked from the Talkorigins.org Other Web Sites page.

[McLysaght et al., Nat Genet 31:200, 2002] discusses evidence for a genome duplication event early in chordate evolution

[Gallardo et al, Nature 401:341, 1999] discusses an apparently recent doubling of genome size in a rat

"Directed evolution of single proteins, metabolic pathways and viruses" by Claudia Schmidt-Dannert, Biochemistry 40:13125, 2001

That being said, it should be noted that these technologies support what creationists refer to as "microevolution," i.e. the ability of the Darwinian processes of mutation and selection to induce minor changes in existing species. Many creationists are willing to accept microevolution but reject "macroevolution," the idea that Darwinian processes can account for major adaptive changes such as the evolution of humans from our common ancestor with the apes, or the evolution of whales from a terrestrial mammal. I know of no consequence of the idea of macroevolution that has an impact on our lives in a way that convincingly validates the theory. There have been several attempts to interpret human disease from an evolutionary perspective ( for example, see "Evolution and the origins of desease," by Nesse and Williams, Scientific American 279:86, 1998), but I am not convinced that these attempts have provided insights that uniquely depend on, or validate, macroevolution. I would be interested to hear other viewpoints about this.

Evolution is not in the same category as religion, so whether you believe in god or not is irrelevant to your understanding of evolution.

As to how people can "believe on evolution"...it's a matter of actually looking at the physical evidence and drawing reasonable conclusions. I suggest that you study hard at school, get a good education, and if you are really interested, develop a solid background in math and chemistry and biology so that you can comprehend the evidence adequately. You are looking in the wrong place if you are trying to see a connection between religion and evolution: the connection is between evolution and the natural world.

Here are some possible starting points.

1. Read the Frequently Asked Questions document. It gives short questions and answers, but more importantly it links to places where you can continue to explore those questions which really interest you.
2. Read our Introduction to Evolutionary Biology . This is fairly demanding, but it is intended to be a kind of summary introduction.
3. If you are really intersted in Darwin himself, the best thing is to read his book, The Origin of Species. We have it on-line, and you can look at the list of chapters to see quickly the kinds of evidence available to Darwin. But why not get the book at a library and read it?

1. Macroevolution is not so much a theory as an observation. It is well established by evidence, of which fossil evidence is a small part. See 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution. But if you look at the closing remarks of the FAQ, you will see that this evidence is not the theory; it merely establishes the fact of macroevolution. The theory is the explanation for the facts. Two FAQs on the theory worth examining are the fundamental theory of mutation and selection, discussed in The Evolution of Improved Fitness, and some of the theory for patterns of macroevolution, discussed in Punctuated Equilibria .
   
   
2. I am not aware of any sensible notion of statistical improbability with respect to convergent evolution. There has been considerable use of zebrafish in experimental and observational biology. Here is a quick link I found (off-site) to a research group studying zebrafish and their eyes. According to this page:

   The development and morphology of the zebrafish eye is typical for that of vertebrate species and it is believed that the genetic mechanisms underlying both eye development and function are highly conserved between mammals - including humans - and zebrafish.

   So yes, similarity reflects common ancestry. I do not think there is any exceptional amount of convergence here, and numbers like 97% are not used to reflect similarity of entire complex organisms, but rather similarity of certain sequences in various proteins or DNA. You'll get different numbers depending on what it is you measure. You do not give sufficient information to determine what the 97% refers to; there is a huge amount of work to which it might relate in some way.
   
   
3. Yes, there are beneficial mutations. See Are Mutations Harmful? The major point to note is that whether a mutation is "beneficial" or not will usually depend on the environment. Mutations are often bad in some environments and helpful in others.
   
   
4. With respect to "gradual" evolution, the crucial point is that complex structures must have some explanation other than future utility. So the precursors of a bat must remain adaptive, at all times, according to the theory. I do not know why you presume the flaps must be a hinderance. There are plenty of examples of creatures right now with simple flaps of skin (flying squirrel) that are superlatively adapted without needing to "stumble around". However, we don't have a good fossil record for bats, and skin does not fossilize well anyway, so we don't really have the evidence to tell much about the lifestyle for ancestors of bats. A better example, for which we do have an excellent series of transitional forms, is the origin of whales.

You give no actual examples of supposed problems with the excellent FAQ, 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution , except, incredibly, the problem that it takes a side! It has this in common with the vast majority of scientific writing; read a scientific journal or book sometime. They give information.

This FAQ is a presentation of basic information for interested amateurs. Like a scientific text book, it presents what is known of the subject matter. There are no "sides" here, as far as science is concerned. The scientific case is open and shut, and has been for over a century. The evidence continues to accumulate, and the FAQ surveys some of that evidence. Faith does not come into it.

Generally, new contributors to the group are treated with civility; if they in turn show basic civility from the start; but that does not extend to automatic acceptance and approval of any opinions you might venture. It is expected that the group is for debate of various ideas, and creationist ideas in particular get refuted, because they are invariably very easy to refute. That is just a hard fact of life.

The view you express above is common, but I remain skeptical. I know too many Christians participating constructively and with open support from the nearly all the regular posters; and I see too many newcomers treated with perfect civility.

It is very common to get newcomers who enter with the expectation of a fight, who get twenty civil and substantive demolitions of their hypothesis and three responses calling them a moron. The temptation is to respond to the people who call you a moron rather than the people who present well argued civil refutations of your position. It is a big group, and some people are more civil that others. Taking out your ire on the ones who treat you badly is a natural instinct, but it inevitably leads to the incivility dominating the thread.

As a recent example, people might like to look at the thread Talk.Origins Can Be A Bit Discouraging, as archived on Google. Here a Christian speaks of how discouraging it is to be attacked by evolutionists. The overwhelming support shown for him in the subsequent thread demonstrates that his bad experiences, though common, is due to a handful of posters; and not any of the main groups of participants.

For others willing to have a go and see what it is like in the highly dynamic and challenging talk.origins newsgroup, do have a read of this introduction first.

On the second point, the question is: does proposing a long history of deep time deny the power to create? The answer is: no, it doesn't. A creator can take as long as He pleases, using what processes He pleases. The reason we, as finite beings, know that the world was not created in its present form over the space of seven days is not because this is impossible in principle, but because absolutely all the evidence indicates that things formed over much longer periods.

That is all there is to it. The evidence shows old age and long complex histories. The evidence could be faked by an omnipotent being; but this does not matter. Science goes by the evidence, and that evidence consistently shows old age and long history.

I recommend you borrow and read The Beak of the Finch, by Jonathan Weiner. It won a Pulitzer prize, and it is very readable indeed. It documents two decades of detailed direct observation of evolution in action. Gripping stuff; it may change the way you think about evolution, even for folks who already think they accept and understand the theory.

Evolution is like the building of a volcano. We observe all the process just fine. We haven't observed it continuously over a million years, but the rates we observe in the present, and the unambiguous traces of history we see laid down, together are incontrovertible for those willing to look at the evidence.

The science of twenty or thirty years ago was in high glee at the thought of having almost proved the theory of biological evolution. Today, for every careful, candid inquirer, these hopes are crushed; and with weary, reluctant sadness does modern biology now confess that the Church has probably been right all the time - George McCready Price, quoted in J. E. Conant’s The Church The Schools And Evolution (1922), p.18

…I am convinced that science is making substantial progress. Darwinism has been definitely outgrown. As a doctrine it is merely of historical interest. True, the current teaching of geology still occupy the center of the stage, and the real modern discoveries which completely discredit these teachings are only beginning to get a hearing. The New Catastrophism is the theory of tomorrow in the science of geology; and under the teaching of this new view of geology the whole theory of evolution will take its place with the many ‘perishing dreams and the wrecks of forgotten deliriums’. And at that time the entire teaching of science along these lines will be found to be in complete harmony with the opening chapters of the Ancient Hebrew Scriptures. ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’ - George McCready Price, quoted in Alexander Hardie’s Evolution: Is It Philosophical, Scientific Or Scriptural? (1924), pp.125-126

And this from his student Harold Clark:

The world has had enough of evolution … In the future, evolution will be remembered only as the crowning deception which the arch-enemy of human souls foisted upon the race in his attempt to lead man away from the Savior. The Science of the future will be creationism. As the ages roll by, the mysteries of creation week will be cleared up, and as we have learned to read the secrets of creative power in the lives of animals and plants about us, we shall understand much that our dim senses cannot now fathom. If we hope to continue scientific study in the laboratories and fields of the earth restored, we must begin to get the lessons of truth now. The time is ripe for a rebellion against the dominion of evolution, and for a return to the fundamentals of true science, Back To Creationism. - Harold W. Clark (1929) Back To Creationism, p. 139

Now here we are more than seventy years on from the time of these quotes and anti-evolutionists are still having the same fantasies about the scientific status of evolution. Meanwhile the scientific community has moved on adding to the mountains of evidence for evolution undaunted by the dreams of anti-evolutionists.

The facts of the matter are simple. Evolution (common descent) is not in doubt, or on the verge of collapse and it is not losing supporters within the scientific community at any greater rate than it ever has (which is practically none at all). This is something that is clear to anyone who even casually follows the scientific literature (and no, reading lists of specially selected out of context quotes doesn’t count).

Those people with relevant scientific degrees, who hold to so called “creation science” and/or intelligent design creationism, are a tiny and insignificant minority, and they are not even trying to change the views of the mainstream scientific community. Rather their target audience consists largely of those people already convinced (for theological reasons) of the falsity of evolution and their function seems to be to continually reassure that audience that its prejudices are justified.

I imagine that if one were to leave the earth in a space-ship traveling at relativistic speeds, and come back after another hundred some-odd years had passed, there will still be a small but vocal population of anti-evolutionists confidently predicting that the end of evolution was nigh.

To quote the paragraph by Gould to which you refer (from the Evolution is a Fact and a Theory FAQ

Moreover, "fact" doesn't mean "absolute certainty"; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are NOT about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us falsely for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Provisional in this context means that in principle, scientists always remain open to the possibility of new evidence upsetting established ideas. In that sense, CERTAINTY is unattainable in science. But, just as Gould says, we still refer to facts in science, and macroevolution is just such a fact.

For some of the many reasons macroevolution is a fact, see 29 Evidences for Macroevolution . See also (off-site) the full article by Gould, titled Evolution as Fact and Theory, in which he also says:

The second and third arguments for evolution—the case for major changes—do not involve direct observation of evolution in action. They rest upon inference, but are no less secure for that reason. Major evolutionary change requires too much time for direct observation on the scale of recorded human history. All historical sciences rest upon inference, and evolution is no different from geology, cosmology, or human history in this respect. In principle, we cannot observe processes that operated in the past. We must infer them from results that still surround us: living and fossil organisms for evolution, documents and artifacts for human history, strata and topography for geology.

You may choose not to use the word fact for things we know of the past. But for the rest of us, it is a fact that St Paul preached in Asia Minor, it is a fact that there were many dinosaurs on Earth 65 million years ago, and it is a fact that modern life forms are directly descended from radically different ancestors.

Through evolution, organisms can become either more or less complex by any measure I can imagine.

The more serious problem is that we can find missing links and transitional forms. Many of them. (Which, by the way, are frequently absolutely superlative and not questionable in the least. You can never be totally sure that a fossil is a direct ancestor, but the existence of excellent representatives of transitional forms is definite.)

See the Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ, and also a selection of other FAQs on Fossils and Paleontology. Check out the whales, for example.

Another problem is that you appear to be thinking we should find a smooth continuous sequence of gradations. But there are many reasons why the fossil record tends to be spotty at the level of species. See Punctuated Equilibria . Also, we don't seem to have at present a good FAQ in the archive which spells out some of the geological causes of a spotty record. Different environments are better for fossilisation. Hence, for example, we have many transitionals for human ancestry from savvanah environments, but very little for chimpanzee or gorilla ancestry, as they live in forested mountains. Erosion wipes out whole slabs of the record, making permanent gaps. Marine organisms often have very complete records, but terrestrial organisms much less so.

The fossil record is far from unique in its formation. When you examine the geological setting of fossils, you can see several ways in which fossils form. The only commonality is that something happens to prevent scavenging and decay. Usually this is rapid burial, which can happen in several ways, such as deposition of sediments at a river's mouth after a storm, collapse of a steep river bank, volcanic ash from a nearby eruption, or burial by sand in a windstorm. Fossilization also occurs from slow burial when other conditions prevent decay, such as a peat bog, anoxic waters in a deep lake, or tree sap (which can turn to amber over time). Finally, some other unusual conditions, such as the LaBrea tar pits, can preserve fossils. All of these different conditions are easily detected by looking at the rocks that the fossils are found in. And all of these conditions are normal; they all are still happening today.

There are large numbers of fossils for the simple reason that fossils have been created continuously for hundreds of millions of years. Many have been destroyed by erosion, too, but there are tons left. However, preservation is not random, so we get zillions of individuals preserved in some species and few or none in others.

Transitional fossils are not assumptions. Many fossils exist which are intermediate between other fossils in both form and time. (You have probably seen the Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ already.) You may disagree with the conclusion that these transitional fossils indicate common descent, but to call the fossils assumptions is to deny cold, hard reality.

Plants did not evolve into animals. Rather, plants and animals evolved from a common ancestor. This ancestor was almost certainly single-celled and lived a couple billion years ago. There are about 250,000 species of flowering plants plus a smaller number of non-flowering plants. If each species diversified into two others every 6 million years, the diversity we see today could be produced in only about 100 million years. Do the math. Granted, a uniform rate of diversification is not a realistic model, but since speciation can occur very much faster than 6 million years, the math shows that evolution of "many" species is not unreasonable. Oh, the oldest known fossil of a flowering plant is about 140 million years old.

Not all species in the fossil record are extinct. Ginkgo biloba is a counterexample.

Evolutionary change is observed repeatedly and routinely. See 29 Evidences for Macroevolution: Part 5, Change and Mutability. The only hoax concerning the moth in Great Britian is all the falsehoods being spread about it by Jonathan Wells and others. (See Icon of Obfuscation.) There are dozens of examples of natural selection besides the peppered moth, and creationists themselves admit the reality of the microevolution and natural selection that the moth exemplifies. What they don't appreciate is that the rates of change we see in microevolution are typically orders of magnitude greater than the rates of change we see in the fossil record across geological time.

Symbiotic relationships evolve gradually. I am not very familiar with your cactus/bat example, but what likely happened is that the cactus and bat each evolved some time ago, and the symbiosis between them evolved later, by degrees. You can see intermediate stages of such symbiosis in yuccas and yucca moths. With some species, the relationship is obligate; the yucca will die without the moth and vice versa. With other species, the moths prefer one species of yucca but can live off others; and the yucca gets most but not all of its pollination from one species of moth. Still other species the moths and yuccas show no great preference for a particular species.

I'm sorry, but I really haven't learned anything from your comment. Specifically, what is your objection about the vocabulary? Perhaps you find the refutations "horrendous" because they do a good job dismantling his ideas, but I think the vocabulary used is entirely appropriate.

I just checked: it seems to work fine. The problem is that it's rare to find any two people using it at the same time, which means the discussions are scintillating when I check in, but they may be rather boring and uninformed when you do.

You may attempt to criticize evolution as much as you want here, or better yet, on the talk.origins newsgroup. However, I will warn you that the "it's just a theory" argument labels you right off the bat as lacking in simple, basic knowledge about the nature of scientific theories. You might want to learn something about the subject before you rush in swinging, OK?

Look up the FAQs on Behe.

There are a number of people here who respond to feedback, so I can't speak for them, but I would guess that the assessments you'll find in those pages represents the consensus.

Personally, I think Behe's book is an example of poor scholarship and bad science.

Ooops. Male and female people (and monkeys) have the same number of ribs. Try counting them sometime.

Anti-evolutionists’ failure to familiarize themselves with common anatomical variations such as this has frequently led them to make nonsensical arguments like one that they often use in their attacks on the fossil evidence for horse evolution. For example the following is from Answers in Genesis:

The theory of horse evolution has very serious genetic problems to overcome. How do we explain the variations in the numbers of ribs and lumbar vertebrae within the imagined evolutionary progression? For example, the number of ribs in the supposedly "intermediate" stages of the horse varies from 15 to 19 and then finally settles at 18. The number of lumbar vertebrae also allegedly swings from six to eight and then returns to six again.

Their implication here is clear: the fossils in the horse lineage vary in their rib counts and therefore do not represent a true phylogenetic sequence. The flaw in this argument should be apparent once one understands that the number of ribs can vary within a single species, and modern horses may have 17, 18 or 19 pairs of ribs.

The use of such arguments (which are common amongst anti-evolutionists, just punch “ribs AND horse” into Google and see for yourself) reflects a basic ignorance of comparative anatomy, and frankly anyone so unfamiliar with the evidence is in no position to be passing judgment on the scientific merits of evolution.