Feedback for May 2002

I searched this site for all references to "Jehovah's Witnesses" that I could find. The primary references are Jehovah's Witnesses and Evolution, by Alan Feuerbacher, and a book review by Corey Carroll, a former Jehovah's Witness. Both are discussing the assertions made in the book Life: How did it get here? By evolution or by creation?, published by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. Both are harsh on the book and the assertions it makes, but I did not see any general denigration of the Jehovah's Witnesses. The only other article talking about the Jehovah's Witnesses is The Vapor Canopy Hypothesis Holds No Water, which addresses the vapor canopy hypothesis specifically and only mentions the Jehovah's Witnesses in passing. In short, I don't see the "bashing" that you reference.

You might be referring to an off-site article, in which case, we have no control over its content.

Personally, I do believe in God, although this has not always been the case. I firmly believe that God is the one who created the universe, and every one in it, and that God did so deliberately, and with intent. I simply do not feel that there is any need to believe in a young age for the earth.

If you are interested in trying to understand how people can have faith in God without rejecting large portions of science, you might want to take a couple of minutes to read the God and Evolution FAQ on this site. You might also find the Various Interpretations of Genesis FAQ to be helpful.

On the other hand, the debate over evolution obviously has a lot to do with the bible, so it is not entirely irrelevant. Here are some comments on my own behalf as an individual.

Your idea reminds me of a similar idea by Robert Best, who wrote Noah's Ark and the Ziusudra Epic: Sumerian Origins of the Flood Myth.

Methuselah is recorded as having lived for 969 years. Best suggests scribal translation errors from the Sumerian number system, resulting in a factor of ten error throughout. Best also offers a similar explanation for another ancient document, the Sumerian king lists, involving a factor of 3600. Sumerian stories include the flood, and the list of kings before the flood includes ages which are many thousands of years long!

I am not presenting this idea because I endorse it. But it seems worthy of consideration. You can read about it on the web site for Robert Best's book.

2. Evolution is not speculation. The theory of evolution and the fact of common descent are based on hard physical evidence. See 29 Evidences for Macroevolution. Evolution is no more a religion than plumbing is.

3. There is no such law of biogenesis.

4. The creationist version of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is not true. Order arises from disorder all the time. Creationists claim that that is impossible without some kind of intelligence or program to guide it, but (A) evolution has such a program in the form of natural selection, and (B) it happens even without a program.

5. We do not ban prayer or creationist concepts in public school. You are free to believe what you will and pray as you wish as long as it isn't disruptive. What is banned is using public time and money to push prayer and religious concepts on others.

1. Evolution can occur at a much faster rate than millions of years. Indeed, depending on the circumstances, it can be observed in a short time period as measured on human scales. How much change can occur in a particular population of organisms over a particular period of time depends on factors such as mutation rates, population size, gestation periods, selection pressures, and the magnitude of the effect to be observed.
2. Evolution doesn't really go about creating body features that are completely "useless" and then suddenly make them "useful." Instead, evolutionary processes often modify and adapt features in populations that serve other purposes. Thus the limbs of reptiles in a certain population become less good for walking but better for gliding short distances, then gliding longer distances, and finally for flight. Consider, for instance, the modern example of many bats, who can fly but who can also walk around (if poorly) on their wings.

The second law of thermodynamics refers to a quantity called entropy, and this is carefully explained in the essay. Creationists deliberately confuse this with the notion of organization; a subject which is not addressed at all by the second law.

Mr Steiger's essay explains the concepts of thermodynamics and entropy. He shows that the second law does permit increasing order, in a thermodynamic sense. Thus creationist appeals to the second law as a problem for evolution are nonsense.

You are raising another matter: the matter of organization. Mr Steiger does not talk about organization much in his essay, because the subject of the essay is thermodynamics, and thermodynamics does not refer to organization. This is another reason why appeals to the second law are nonsense; the second law simply does not deal with the matters of complex organization that worry you.

Mr Steiger also has another essay which you should read. It is on the subject of Attributing False Attributes to Thermodynamics.

Basically, I would put the matter thus: thermodynamics is not about organization, in the sense that you speak of. Eggs develop into chicks, and seeds develop into flowering plants, all the time, and with no violations of any physical laws. A thermodynamic analysis would look at energy flows and entropy changes; and completely miss all the really fascinating stuff about the natural growth and development of the complex systems involved in a chicken or a flowering plant. Study of embryonic development rarely considers thermodynamics; any more than it considers laws of conservation of energy or momentum. Those laws are about other subjects, like energy, or momentum, or entropy; we are more interested in something else: the developing organism.

There is no scientific law of any kind that says this development is impossible. After all, we see this development happening all the time. On the other hand, such development cries out for some explanation, and we have some idea of the processes involved as an embryo grows into its adult form; and a lot still to learn.

You, on the other hand, are probably concerned about evolution; which is not about "eggs developing into chickens" but more about "animals other than chickens changinging over many generations into chickens". We have a lot to learn about that, also, but the underlying processes are reasonably well understood, and in no conflict with any physical laws.

Or you can read USEnet news through a web interface such as Google (formerly DejaNews). Here is a link straight to the Google talk.origins page.

1. Some people speak of choosing because of the human tendency to use anthropomorphic language to convey ideas. This is often misleading, and certainly selection does not involve intent. On the other hand, the words random and chance are likewise misleading. Selection is, in a way, the very opposite of chance, and the word proclivity seems very appropriate. The word random suggests a lack of correlation with circumstances. Now mutations are certainly random in this sense; but selection means a very non-random and unavoidable tendency (a proclivity) for some mutations to be removed from the gene pool, and others to be retained. There is also a role for random drift, in which some mutations just happen to be retained by sheer chance. This is what happens in the absence of selection.
2. An optic nerve would be no good at all by itself. We do not think that evolution involves development of an optic nerve, followed later by the addition of the eye. Here are some web sites (off-site) which deal with evolution of the eye. Life's Grand Design by Kenneth Miller, Where d'you get those peepers by Richard Dawkins, Evolution of the Eye, Uncovering The Ancestry of A Complex Organ. The optic nerve developed along with the eye and the rest of the nervous system.

Quantum mechanics, for example, is the theory which gives the best explanation for facts of subatomic physics. The quantum effects are real; they are facts. And the theory, or model, which explains those facts is one of the well tested models in science. There is room to press the details, such as questions about mass of a neutrino, or about underlying models involving strings or branes, but any model we come up with, at any time in the future, will still need to explain the same facts about particles and interferences and so on.

Evolutionary biology is a field of science. It deals with certain facts, like the long history of life, and the shared ancestry of living creatures, and the diversification of life, and the effects of diversity of mutation and selection. The theory, or model, which ties these facts together and puts them into a coherent framework is the theory of evolution. Any theory we come up with, at any time in the future, will still need to address the facts of life's long history and diversification.

The article is definitely a must read. Too many people fail to understand what it means to be a theory in science.

You might like to read it again. There is nothing there silencing an enemy, as if that was even possible. It is a plain straightforward explanation of what biologists mean by saying evolution is a theory; and what are the basic facts which any theory will need to address.

See Ed Brayton's response on this subject in the October 2001 Feedback.

There were 2 members of the court who dissented from the findings, and seven who concurred with the finding. The two dissenters, of course, were not scientists or evolutionists, but two supreme court judges. You can read the various opinions at the link supplied above.

The Supreme Court has consistently found that creationism is religion, not science; and indeed this is pretty obvious.

There is a British physicist, one H Lipson, who spoke skeptically about evolution in 1980 or so; but he is not an evolutionist; and as far as I know he had nothing to do with the Supreme Court in the USA. There can't be too many other alternatives; finding scientists with anything positive to say about creationism is hard work. You can find a few, but there can't be too many Lipsons amongst them.

And like it or not, the theory of evolution is a part of modern mainstream science. Research is carried out in the field. Experiments are conducted and observations recorded. Predictions are made and then tested. Results are published in peer-reviewed journals. All of this is precisely what mainstream science does, and the overwhelming consensus of science, after 150 years of testing and criticism, is that evolutionary theory is the best model to explain the diversity and characteristics of life on Earth.

We recognize that many people disagree with the conclusions of mainstream science. We also try to let those people speak for themselves. That is why we maintain a tremendously long list of links to other sites, including many creationist sites, so that visitors to our site may compare the information we provide with that on other sites and judge for themselves.

Furthermore, I would take issue with the reader's characterization that we treat creationists as "whackos." I certainly don't think creationists as a whole are crazy or morons, and I believe that most of this site's contributors feel the same way. Misguided, yes, and often woefully ignorant about that which they seek to criticize, but not crazy or stupid.

How do we achieve a population? Well, we might have a self-copying system (not a cell, exactly, but some kind of protocell). Each time these duplicate, some error can be introduced, so that over a very short time, variation will occur in the population. Thos that happen to be more effective at getting hold of the resources they need to duplicate will tend, on average, to become the most common in the new population.

A single bacterium can generate a colony of bacteria in a very short time, and mutations occur regularly even today, on which selection for antibiotic resistance can occur, to give an example. In the early days of life, when there were few if any error correction "devices", variation would come about rapidly.