Feedback for July 1998

For example, one of the books used as a source for the show is Forbidden Archaeology by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson. One of the claims made on the show that came from this book is that blue spheres, of an apparently artificial origin, had been found in South Africa in rocks dated to 2.8 billion years. In support of this claim, Forbidden Archaeology cites an article in the Weekly World News. I leave it to the reader to decide whether a supermarket tabloid is a reliable and accurate source of scientific information.

As for "credible researchers," one of the "experts" on the show was "Dr." Carl Baugh, a young-earth creationist of suspicious credentials whose claims have been rejected even by other creationists.

I won't repeat the entire FAQ here, as readers can examine it for themselves. I will note, however, that credibility in science involves making claims that will withstand scrutiny. The claims made by "Mysterious Origins of Man" do not.

Since we at the Talk.Origins Archive feel that the evidence is overwhelming in favor of evolution as the best explanation for the diversity of life on Earth, we invite all of our readers to read the information presented here, contrast it with information presented on other sites, and most importantly, check it against the primary literature referenced in our FAQs, our reading list, and in our extensive bibliography. We feel confident that open-minded, critically-thinking individuals will come to the same conclusions we have.

The point you raise about education of the public is a good one that should be kept in mind by those attempting to dispel myths about evolution. I know that I learn information much better when I can touch it or manipulate it or get in mind some concrete example of how it applies in everyday life. For example, it has been pointed out that no farmer should be ignorant of evolution, since the rise of pesticide resistance in crop pests can have a major financial impact on their operations. Thanks for the book recommendations along those lines.

Consider the combination of chance and "editorial selection" that evolved the title of this newsletter. My spell-checker lacks the word "creationism" in its dictionary, so each time that word is encountered, an alternative pops up at the bottom of my screen, "cretinism" (i.e., "a congenital deficiency resulting in idiocy"). As for the word, "evilution," such a mutation would never have survived, had it not arisen in exactly the right ecological niche, viz., the minds of a few "creation evangelists."

I've never been particularly happy with the "only closed systems" and "See the Sun?" style of rebuttal. It strikes me as too glib and too abstract. Creationists do not "always forget" this, either. Some responses exist.

The real point is that no process necessary to evolutionary change has ever been shown to be thermodynamically unviable. This is mainly because the only processes necessary to evolutionary change are exactly the same ones that are involved in the reproduction and development of organisms, which we observe to happen.

See the Second Law of Thermodynamics FAQs for details.

Darwin was 50 when he published the Origin. He came up with the idea of natural selection as the mechanism for evolution in, I think, October 1838, and the Origins was published on 24 November 1859.

Wallace was converted to spiritualism around the end of the 1870s when he decided that natural selection was not able to account for the powers of the human brain. Since he was such a fanatic for the broad efficacy of selection in evolution (what we would now call a panadaptationist) his only other alternative was some kind of nonnatural process. Spiritualism was then in great vogue, including such luminaries as Conan Doyle amongst its devotees, and Wallace went for it in a big way, much to the embarassment of the other "X-Club" members of whom Huxley was the de facto leader.

Ironically, had Wallace admitted something similar to genetic drift as an explanation of the cognitive capacities of humans, then he might not have had such a troublesome time. Drift, as you will know, is the result of considerations by Sewall Wright in the early 1930s which were eventually incorporated into the "synthesis" through the urgings of Theodosius Dobzhansky, and it makes selection a major, but not sole, mechanism of evolutionary change, just as Darwin insisted it was.

England is named for the Angles, a Germanic tribe of raiders from Denmark who, along with the Saxons and the Jutes, invaded England in large scale during the fifth century A.D. and competed in the barbarian triathlon (plundering, pillaging, and looting), finally coming into control during the sixth century. So it's not "angel's land," it's "Angle land." And while some Danes (and even some Americans) may feel Denmark to be heaven, I doubt it is what John, the author of Revelations, had in mind.

See Britannia for a nice set of articles on the history of the British Isles.

A change in karyotype (number of chromosomes) is usually sufficient to produce either reduced fertility or complete sterility in crosses between the original population and the population with the new karyotype. There are many different ways that the karyotype can change. The most drastic is polyploidy, where the entire genomic complement gets duplicated two or more times. Within that, there is allopolyploidy, which happens in crosses between organisms of different karyotype, and autopolyploidy, which happens in crosses within the species. Wait a minute, you might say, didn't I just get through saying that different karyotypes were usually a bar to reproduction? Yes, the "usually" does not include allopolyploidy. Other means of changing karyotype include fusion, the merging of two or more chromosomes into one; fission, where one chromosome is divided into two chromosomes; and replication of particular chromosomes. (Trisomy-21 is the name for the retention of an extra copy of the 21st human chromosome, which causes "Down's Syndrome.")

I'll also quote a statement by Tom Scharle, which can be found in E.T. Babinski's Cretinism or Evilution?: Volume 4:

"Creationists ask, `How can man and chimpanzee be related if they don't have the same number of chromosomes?' (23 pairs in man, 24 in great apes). The answer is found in "The Origin of Man: A Chromosomal Pictorial Legacy" by Jorge J. Yunis and Om Prakash (Science, Vol. 215, Mar. 19, 1982, p. 1525-1530). This paper has a picture of all the chromosomes of man, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans with each pair of chromosomes lined up next to each other and showing the 1000 band stage with all the sections labeled. Just by examining the picture you can clearly see that the chromosomes are remarkably similar. The differences are equally revealing as a vast majority are simple inversions of sections of chromosomes. Chromosome #2 of humans is shown next to two chimpanzee (and gorilla and orangutan) chromosomes since the human chromosome #2 is twice as long as the chimpanzee (and the other two as well), yet all the bands match up showing that the one less human chromosome is merely the result of two chimp chromosomes getting connected together!"

Humans continue to evolve. It is not necessary for the karotype of a population of organisms to change in order for them to evolve; other, less dramatic changes can lead to variation and speciation. Furthermore, it is not possible to predict exactly which changes will occur in the future in the human gene pool, as such changes have their beginnings in random processes and are governed in subtle and complex ways by the interaction of the genetic code, the biochemical expression of that code, and the environment surrounding each human being, including interactions between humans. So we cannot tell now exactly what will happen to the human genome in the future.

Personally, I wouldn't recommend many titles from the "intelligent design" crowd, because (1) I'd want to read more than the few I've read so far in order to pick out the best ones, and (2) based on what I have seen, they really don't offer much to the debate.

If you take a standard creation "science" text and quietly cut out the truly worst arguments (e.g., on the age of the Earth), you'll end up with something that looks very much like the "intelligent design" position.

Yes, the Biographica should be updated. As the original compiler, I would be the logical choice for the person to update it. I've just written some software to make maintenance of Biographica and other similar resources easier. Yes, the suggestion to include a time-frame is a good one which I plan on using.

I think that part of the future utility of the listing is precisely that it does record such minutiae as what stances each of the listed people has taken in the origins debate. I have on occasion updated various entries in response to specific feedback. I'll see what I can do to make sure that unwanted implications are removed from your entry.

As for linking to an online bookstore, we may add that capability in the near future.

However, Kevin's statement is evidence that one can be a fundamentalist Christian and still accept evolution as the best explanation for the diversity of life on Earth. See the God and Evolution FAQ for more details.

The reader is correct that these feedback pages are not really the proper place for debate on matters of origins. That purpose is served by the talk.origins Usenet newsgroup, for which this archive was intended to serve as a repository. See the Talk.Origins Archive Welcome FAQ for more details. Also, see the newsgroup news.announce.newusers, as well as news.newusers.questions and its associated Web page for information on Usenet news.