Feedback for January 2001

Instead Hoyle & Wickramasighe prefer a variant of panspermia, the idea that life originated somewhere in outer space. In fact more than simply believing that the first simple life forms such a bacteria originated somewhere "out there", they think it is possible that more complex types of organisms might have been planted on earth at different time in its history. For example they believe that insects might come from outer space, and that they may be as intelligent as humans but are hiding this fact from us, and that the changes in life on earth are the result of a (natural) alien intelligence which has been raining mutation causing viruses down on the earth throughout geologic time. (See: Hoyle, Fred and Wickramasinghe, Chandra (1981) Evolution From Space, chap. 8 Insects from Space?, p.127)

Somehow knowing that these two astronomers think insects might be as intelligent as humans (not to mention some of their other odd ideas) makes their misguided (in my opinion) criticisms of main-stream biology seem even less biting.

As for your comments regarding the supposed lack of factual support for evolution, this is simply bombastic nonsense. Assertion is not argument.

I would suggest that it might be a good idea to question what you are doing in a christian school like that in the first place. Talk to your parents. Tell them what your problems are with inadequacies of the 'science' class at the school. Even if they are sympathetic to the beliefs espoused by the school, they might be swayed if you point out that the science class is very poor, and that if you plan on a professional career in science or medicine, this might not be the best place to get preparation. I can tell you that from what you say of your background there, you would be at a disadvantage in my university classes.

Alternatively, don't confront, just let it slide and continue to think independently. Your class is a lost cause, but you aren't. Keep reading. Ask your parents to buy you some introductory college texts in biology. Browse amazon.com for popular science books, and ask people here for recommendations. I think you just have to face the fact that your 'science' class will be a waste of time.

Unfortunately, like so many creationist arguments, it sounds good despite being false. And for that reason alone, it will probably won't be going away any time soon.

The authors of our FAQs are very interested in presenting accurate information. If you have identified specific inaccuracies, please be sure to email the author of the article in which it appears.

This archive, though, is not "of debate". The talk.origins newsgroup provides a forum for debate and discussion. I'm sure that your commentary posted there would spark a lively discussion.

Wesley

There does exist a literature on the evolution of death. Sir Peter Medawar made an argument concerning senescence around mid-20th century that more-or-less continues to be accepted today. In order to understand his argument, it is best to have some grounding in population dynamics. Senescence can develop and become fixed in a population because the future expectation of reproductive value for any organism steadily declines from an initial high value.

If you use "senescence" as a keyword in a literature search, I would be very surprised indeed if you did not find far more material than you will have time to read.

Pianka's "Evolutionary Ecology" cites a 1975 experimental study by Mertz on Tribolium beetles as evidence for the evolution of senescence, which puts the topic on an empirical as well as theoretical footing.

Wesley

See the World of Carbon at Arizona State University.

However, if your teacher tries to start some kind of a metaphysical argument about whether evolution implies a nihilistic view of life, the universe and criminal law, then he has left science behind, and it is appropriate to refer the argument to the comparative religion or philosophical subjects in your curriculum, if you are offered any.

I hope this helps you

When this happens, many things occasionally cause it to "miscopy" or the new strands are in some way malformed. Repair enzymes remove the damaged section and replace it. Sometimes, though, these errors are not such that the mistake gets noticed and the new sequence gets passed on to future cells.

In multicellular organisms, some cells are usually kept separate from the rest of the body cells - these are called the germ cells. If the mutation occurs in a germ cell precursor, or in the formation of the germ cell itself, then future organisms can inherit that mutation. Body cells (somatic cells) that mutate can cause cancers if the immune system does not detect them and destroy them. Some mutations in cancerous cells also cause it to lose the ability to die, and become malignant cancers.

Mutations are of various kinds. One nucleotide (single DNA or RNA molecules) might be replaced by another, or a pair of nucleotides might get inserted, or deleted, or a section might get inverted (so the sequence is 'backwards'), or a chromosome (the whole segment of DNA) might get broken, or attached to another, or lost, or an extra copy made, or the entire set of chromosomes (the genome) might be duplicated, in a process known as polyploidy.

What the causes of mutations are is partially known. Radiation, including UV light as well as radioactivity or X-rays, can break or knock out a nucleotide. Chemicals called "mutagens" can cause errors in DNA replication, as can heat or electrical current. Sometimes stress on a single celled organism such as a bacterium can cause the replication process to work wrongly, and increase the rate of mutation. Since bacteria have their genes in circular loops called "plasmids", if a mutation occurs in a stressed bacterium that would have been useful in an ordinary bacterium, it can sometimes be taken up by one and passed on - which is how bacteria often develop immunity to antibiotics.

I am not aware if the fusion of sperm and egg (gamete fusion) sometimes causes mutations, but I would not be surprised - however, most mutations in zygotes (fertilized eggs) tend to make the zygote inviable, and it dies during gestation.

Mutants are not the sort of things you see in the X-Men movie or in other science fiction shows. We all have a high likelihood of there being some mutations in one or more of our cells. If they are germ cells, and don't cause harm or actually help, they will probably be passed on to half of your children.

Mutations can be harmful, neutral or helpful to those that carry them, depending on the environment. Many are neutral and get passed on according to the odds. Sometimes neutral genes become advantageous in new environments later on.

Besides, don't you believe that God made nature before people penned the Bible? Why do you reject God's primary work in favor of secondary sources?

1. Not enough time for the human genome to evolve -- Although Finley says 0.75 new nucleotides per year is impossibly high, he doesn't offer any argument against this except incredulity. There are several facts which make such a rate plausible:
- Most of human DNA is junk DNA;
- Mutations are very common. Estimates of mutation rates vary, but there are likely tens of mutations per person per generation, and more than one per non-junk section of DNA per generation;
- Many mutations are duplications. These can add hundreds or even thousands of nuceotides at one shot;
- Sexual recombination makes it so the mutations can happen in parallel. Thousands of new mutations can occur at once in a large population, and sex and natural selection together make it possible for the good ones to get sorted out and all appear together in future generations.

2. The fossil pattern isn't smooth, but shows abrupt appearances -- Evolution doesn't claim the fossil pattern should be smooth. Rates of change will vary over time and between different species. The incompleteness of the fossil record means that most fossils give just a snapshot in time, so abrupt appearances in the fossil record do not mean abrupt origins. There are gradual changes in the fossil record, too. See, for example, Don Lindsay's page on the foram Orbulina. Human ancestry is another example of gradual change, despite what Finley says. See also Robert Carroll's Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution (Cambridge, 1997).

3. A minimum complex arrangement of interrelated parts is necessary -- Here, Finley makes the common but extremely wrong assumption that evolution works by adding new parts to existing organisms. On occasion, existing parts will be duplicated, but mostly evolution works by growing and modifying existing parts. Quadripeds, for example, did not evolve by adding a leg to three-legged animals; they evolved by gradually modifying existing fins into legs. Note that Finley's only example of a state with no plausible precursors comes from human engineering; he cannot find an example from biology.

If you had in mind that the passage you quoted was a criticism of evolutionists, perhaps you should study both it and the world more closely.

The advent of science has meant that some accomodation has had to be made in the theologies of various religions and denominations, but they have done this without too much harm to their central message.

Don't abandon your beliefs just because someone erroneously told you that Christianity and evolution are incompatible. Science cannot, by definition, address questions of ultimate importance - it is a way of addressing local questions only.

Personally, I believe that the universe is God's primary work, and that people who value scriptural interpretation higher than the evidence of the universe, as many creationists do, are the ones who display a lack of trust in God.

1. Radiometric dating techniques are extremely reliable. In particular, isochron dating has a built-in mechanism that warns the researcher if a date is flawed. If there is no warning, the researcher can be confident that the date is accurate.
2. Your assumption that we have not read the Bible is incorrect. Many of the contributors to this site are believers of various Christian sects; some have many years of Biblical study under their belts.
3. Furthermore, your assumption that evolution requires atheism is also incorrect. See God and Evolution, to start with.

Originally, uniformitarianism included a belief in a rough uniformity of rate of all natural processes. For example, the time required to deposit a given sedimentary formation would have been estimated by using observed deposition rates for similar present-day formations. This sort of strict uniformitarianism has been out of favor for a very long time. Even when it was in favor, it was recognized as being a convenient simplification at best.

However, uniformitarianism has always encompassed much more than that. For example, the uniformity of existence of natural processes, resulting from a uniformity in the basic laws of physics. Even though rate, intensity, and relative importance of natural processes may change over time, the processes observed in the present had been operating in the past as well. Those past processes left traces that look like the traces which those same processes are observed to leave today. "The present is the key to the past," is one way that it is stated.

Modern geologists use the term actualism for these concepts. You may think of actualism as being equal to the modern definition of uniformitarianism, or perhaps as the subset of uniformitarnianism which is still accepted. The overwhelming majority of modern geologists accept actualism -- meaning that they accept a number of the components of uniformitarianism as it was originally defined. You'll find a similar definition of actualism in most introductory geology texts, for example p. 521 of Cooper et al.'s A Trip Through Time, and p. G-1 of Dott and Prothero's Evolution of the Earth.

To the extent that geologists have rejected uniformitarianism, it's of little comfort to the young-Earth creationist cause. The evidence supporting actualism quite clearly rules out the history of the Earth which they desire (for religious, rather than scientific reasons) to support.

A nice book that touches lightly on these kinds of general aspects of the genetic material is Genome, by Matt Ridley.

- Provide an objective method of deciding disputed issues. Science gives such methods (allowing evidence to be directly examined by anybody and making predictions based on theories). The only method creationism offers is policial campaigning.
- Encourage the challenging of ideas. Science does this by requiring publication and rewarding new ideas. Einstein didn't get to be famous by saying all the scientists before him were right. Granted, scientists could do better with this, but they are nowhere near as hostile to challenging ideas as creationists are. Also, scientists are an extremely diverse group to start with. Although any given scientist is sure to have preconceptions, there is no such preconception among scientists as a whole. No, not even philosophical naturalism.
- Recognizing common sources of biases and counteracting them. Science does this by using such tools as statistics, control groups, and blind and double-blind protocols. Creationism doesn't.
In short, science recognizes the problem of biases and deals with it. Creationism, on the other hand, couldn't even exist without biases.

History is also against your thesis. New scientific theories such as evolution, plate tectonics, quantum physics, etc. have triumphed despite preconceptions being almost universally against them at first.

I am curious why you limited your challenge to evolution. Would it not logically apply equally to all sciences? Does the fact that almost everyone today has a preconception that the earth is round mean that we should be particularly skeptical of that theory, or do you think that there actual physical bases for such ideas?

On your other topic, ethics are based on human social interaction and can arise from evolving as a social species. For example, altruism benefits the giver because when others see someone acting altruistically, they are more likely to give to that person. [Wedekind, C. & Milinski, M., 2000. Cooperation through image scoring in humans. Science 288: 850-852.]

Contrary to the reader's assertion, brains are not necessary to sensing - and reacting to - external stimuli. Since this erroneous assertion underlies all the further commentary, I'm afraid that rather little remains of the reader's argument.

Even bacteria can show chemotaxis, orienting and moving along gradients of chemicals in their environment. Some bacteria even have the ability to orient to magnetic fields. Paramecia have an avoidance reaction, whereby contact with a negative stimulus causes a reversal of ciliary motion and a partial turn before forward motion is resumed. Certain non-motile cilia in Paramecia are thought to be entirely sensory in function. Gamete release in sponges can be triggered by the detection of sperm released by other sponges. The cnidocytes of the cnidarians trigger on mechanical and chemical cues. Cnidarians also have a nerve net arrangement, which receives activation from specialized sensory cells. Certain jellyfish orient to light or gravity, exposing photosynthetic symbiotes to sunlight. Aurelia spp. have light-sensitive ocelli. Cubomedusans have complex eyes with a lens, and are able to orient to point light sources.

None of the organisms above have brains, yet all are able to respond functionally to external stimuli. Even image processing can - and obviously does - occur in the absence of a brain, contrary to the reader's assertion. More exposure to invertebrate zoology might help the reader in figuring out what is within the realm of possibility.

Wesley

As for your second claim, it is simply false. While it is true that according to evolutionary theory there will have been innumerable intermediate species throughout the history of life on earth, it does not follow that we would expect to have a perfect record of all (or even a significant fraction of) those species. There are a number of good reasons for this ranging from the nature and frequency of fossilization to the processes by which speciation occurs. However despite these things we do have a fairly good record of the evolution of life on this planet and this record includes many examples of fossils intermediate between different fossil groups and between fossil and living groups. See (and these only discuss vertebrates):

• Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ
• Archaeopteryx FAQs
• Fossil Hominids: The Evidence for Human Evolution

Next you comment about "provable facts" (empirical, intersubjective, evidence) supporting evolution. If you are really interested in learning about the evidence, there are libraries full of literature which describing it in detail. I suggest you spend some time perusing the contents of the science libraries of your nearest university.

Lastly you repeat the old myth about Darwin supposedly questioning his theories just prior to his death. Sorry but the evidence simply does not support the veracity of this story. See:

• The Lady Hope Story: A Widespread Falsehood [off site]
• The Lady Hope Story: A Widespread Falsehood [Local FAQ]
• Did Darwin recant? [Answers in Genesis]

Of course whether or not Darwin ever doubted his theories is irrelevant to their current scientific status. Science does not accept or reject theories based on authority (even if the authority is the originator of the theories in question), so even if Darwin had become a flaming young earth creationist on his deathbed it wouldn't change anything scientifically speaking.

See Lloyd Pye's site for more.

Brown's challenge comes with hoops that any prospective debater must jump through. I am not surprised that few people wish to jump through his hoops, especially since most PhD's (getting a PhD is one of Brown's hoops) don't see anything in creationism worthy any scientific attention at all. If Brown wants to debate, he is free to do so. There are many scientific journals he can write to if he wishes.

The referent for "this" is unclear.

If Rocky is referring to any of the various forms of anti-evolutionary conjecture, he is being too kind in giving them the status of hypothesis.

If Rocky is referring to one of the many evolutionary mechanism theories of biology, he is simply in ignorance of the vast amount of theoretical and empirical work that underlies those theories.

Wesley

Why is it harder to believe in evolution than to believe that God is so shortsighted that He needs to tweak and correct His designs every few decades?

If we do decide to make the archive available on CD, we'll make that clear somewhere on the site.

When I bring up the opening page, I find this text:

This archive is a collection of articles and essays, most of which have appeared in talk.origins at one time or another. The primary reason for this archive's existence is to provide mainstream scientific responses to the many frequently asked questions (FAQs) and frequently rebutted assertions that appear in talk.origins.

It sure looks to me like a statement of perspective.

Wesley

The quoted statement is pretty much accurate. Darwin's work pretty much established the concept of common descent as acceptable to scientists, but Darwin's proposed mechanism of natural selection was not immediately or universally adopted. The re-discovery of Mendelian principles of heredity were at first considered inimical to Darwinian natural selection. It was only when the modern synthesis was formulated that natural selection became generally accepted as a sufficient explanation for adaptive traits in species. But even that acceptance does not reduce the controversy over how much of evolutionary change is due to the action of natural selection. Many researchers argue for a large or predominant role for the neutral theory, which asserts that most change occurs without selection coming into play.

The statement isn't calling the fact of evolution into question, but is noting that the relative importance of natural selection as a mode of evolutionary change is still controversial.

Wesley

With that out of the way, let me point out that Big Bang Cosmology does not propose creation ex-nihilo, that "nothing" somehow became "something". Rather, the general relativistic interpretation is that the initial state of the universe is undefined; it may have been "nothing", or it may have been "something", but general relativity cannot tell which. However, I am confident that the vast majority of scientists, whether religious or not, would reject the idea that the initial state of the universe was truly "nothing" (I personally do reject that idea). The matter will be resolved with the demonstration of a valid, quantum gravity theory, a version of general relativity that incorporates quantum mechanics in its theoretical structure. That will eliminate the undefined nature of the initial state of the universe, and permit us to consider what came "before" the Bang. At the moment, the most promising candidate for such a cosmology is string theory.

Evolution on the other hand is constrained in what sort of observations we might be able to make. For example, if it had turned out that the genetics of organisms classified into different phyla or classes where based on radically different systems (as opposed to them all using the same system, which they do), then this would have put a serious kink in the hypothesis that they all share a common ancestor.

You have to understand that science is not about coming up with an idea (based in religion or otherwise) and then looking for facts to support it. Rather the purpose of science is to take the known facts of the natural world and to produce testable explanations (theories) for them. Such theories should also suggest new tests and observations by which they can be further refined (or even replaced). Thus they stimulate further research.

In the case of evolution Darwin did not come up with common descent with modification, via natural selection, purely out of his imagination only to then set about trying to support the idea. On the contrary, what he did was to take numerous disparate facts/observations already well established at the time (mostly by creationists) and tried to come up with a testable, coherent, explanation for them. Something his (creationist) scientific contemporaries had failed to do. This included evidence from:

* The fossil record (its progressive pattern and the existence of intermediate forms).

* Systematics (the way in which organisms could be classified into a nested hierarchy).

* The geographical distribution of organisms.

* The comparative anatomy of organisms.

* The comparative embryology of organisms.

* The comparative behavior of organisms.

Later researchers added evidence from comparative physiology, ecology and, of course, genetics.

The pattern of evidence found in all these areas was, and is, highly consistent with descent with modification. Any alternative scientific explanation must give an even better, testable, coherent, explanation for the data from all these areas, and I'm afraid "it is thus because it pleased the Creator to make it thus" is not such an alternative.

I haven't researched web resources much. Universal Myths and Mysterious Places is the only web site I know of that collects a significant number and diversity of creation myths, but they are somewhat abbreviated. Chris Siren's Myths & Legends page has many links to other mythology sites, and you're sure to find creation myths on some of them.

If non-noxious mimics become plentiful ("Batesian overload"), it has been hypothesized that this would cause the noxious animal to diverge from its normal pattern to escape mimicry. Apparently, though, the purifying selection described above is almost always stronger than diversifying selection from mimicry load. (See the reference below.)

There are other factors that can cause variation in appearance. It is common for different warning colors to occur in different regions, for example, and if the Mullerian mimics are much commoner than their predators, purifying selection is weak.

For lots more information on this fascinating subject, see Mallet, J. and Joron, M., 1999. Evolution of diversity in warning color and mimicry: Polymorphisms, shifting balance, and speciation. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 30: 201-233. If you really get interested, there are 652 references on mimicry at MORE THAN 650 MIMICRY REFS.

Been there, done that.

• Draft article on information and evolution which discusses information increase.
• Response to a message from Lee Spetner that appeared in the Calvin evolution mailing list. I examine some assertions by Spetner that he need not provide a quantification of information to make his claims.

Also, the reader should examine William A. Dembski's Design as a Theory of Information, wherein he will find one of the leading "intelligent design" proponents attempting to quantify the maximum number of bits of information that natural selection can fix in a population per generation. The analysis fails to accurately do this, but it shows that even anti-evolutionary theorists may agree that information in the genome can increase.

In general, all anti-evolutionary "information theory" challenges are premised upon trying to conflate meaning with information. This is why Lee Spetner doesn't want to discuss quantification of "information", why Royal Truman dismisses Shannon's concept of information, and why William Dembski deploys the concept of "specification" to obtain complex specified information.

Wesley

You are probably right that it is a matter of faith whether or not God exists or was ultimately responsible for the universe's existence. However, it does not follow that everything regarding origins is a matter of faith. Evidence does exist, for example, for an old earth and lack of a global flood. See The Age of the Earth and Problems with a Global Flood. Belief based on this evidence, by definition (subject to my qualification above), is not faith. (Evidence exists for such things as love, too. I think most people would agree that people can recognize a loveless relationship and that such a relationship is not likely to last as long as one where the love is evident. Just because something can't be rigorously quantified doesn't mean there is no evidence for it.)

You are also wrong that scientists would not change their positions in the light of contrary evidence. It has happened before. In the early 19th century, scientists were predominantly creationists who believed a young earth and global flood. When they examined the evidence, they found it showed otherwise, and that is how we got to where we are today. (Davis Young's Christianity and the Age of the Earth contains a good history of these changing views.) If evidence for a young earth or global flood were found, scientists would initially be skeptical, but if the evidence held up under scrutiny, they would change their minds again.

We invite you, and all our readers, to explore this site in more depth, but also to explore the other sites listed in our extensive list of links and, most importantly, to read the primary literature referenced in our articles.

You are correct that inviable intermediate steps would be a problem for evolution. However, remember that the transitions are not between modern animals but between ancestors and descendants, and that the intermediate steps need not follow a direct path. Although there are cases where intermediates are unknown, nobody has yet found a case where intermediates are demonstrably improbable. (Irreducible complexity fails to do so because it doesn't take evolutionary mechanisms such as gene duplication, coevolution, and change of function into account.)

Your bombardier beetle information is inaccurate; see this FAQ for the full story. Nor is the human eye an organ of perfection. Other organisms have eyes whose retinas are not partially obscured by the blood vessels that server them, not to mention the fact that various animals excel humans in visual acuity, dark sight, range of peripheral vision, infrared or ultraviolet vision, and more. Nothwithstanding all that, organs of perfection would not, of themselves, contradict evolution. Darwin, in chapter 6 of Origin of Species, adequately covered how eyes could evolve.

Facts which are against a theory cause the theory either to be modified or discarded. In the case of evolution, the theory has been modified from Darwin's original to include Mendelian genetics, population genetics, horizontal transfer, and other more recent findings. Thus, what you (I gather) would call "ugly facts" have been incorporated into the theory to make it stronger. The problems which face evolution today are mainly disputes over specific details (e.g., where turtles branched off from other reptiles) and general areas that are still unknown (e.g., how common is speciation without geographical isolation). If you want to learn about them, though, you have to read current scientific journals. Creationists rarely come up with any "problem" that hasn't already been resolved at least 50 years ago.

By the way, this is not a question for "evolutionists." So-called polystrate fossils were explained by creationist geologists in the 1800s. That modern-day young-earth creationists use such arguments shows the poverty of their scholarship.