Feedback for June 2002

You'll see the occasional clumsy swipe at physics from the creationists. But it is usually produced by a "minor player" without serious formal training in the field -- and it would not be taken seriously by the few creationists with real physics backgrounds. See, for example: "A Call For Reformation in Modern Science" by Charles W. Lucas, Jr. (Proceedings of the 1986 International Conference on Creationism, vol. 1, pp. 83-87). Lucas' abstract reads in part:

[...] the scientific community has claimed credibility for many new theories comprising much of modern science that can not logically qualify as science. These theories include the theory of relativity, the theory of quantum mechanics, the Dirac Theory of the atom [...]

In my opinion, a paper of the quality of that one would not pass scientific peer review. However, far too many creationists appear willing to overlook shoddy work as long as the result supports their cause. (In the long run, I think it does their cause more harm than good.)

The main conclusion of " The Earth's Magnetic Field is Still Losing Energy" is stated in the title, namely that the total energy of the field appears to be decreasing. Maybe he is right. But his conclusion, that the Earth's magnetic field is young, does not necessarily follow from that observation.

Let's assume that Humphreys is right, and the total energy in the field has decreased, and is decreasing even as we speak. So, how does one decide what the field was doing, before there were any IGRF data to analyze? The data themselves don't carry any information along those lines, so one must adopt a model which will answer the question. Humphreys has adopted his own model, and has assumed that the Earth is young, and that the field has decayed constantly at the same rate. Hence, the argument that the data show a young field and/or Earth cannot be true. Only the model can be depended upon to do that (which is of course true whether one believes the Earth to be "young" ot "old").

The evolutionary competition will hold that the energy fluctuates with time, sometimes going up, and sometimes going down, depending on the details of how magnetic fields are generated in the deep Earth. Such a model is every bit as compatible with the data, and with Humphreys' own conclusion that the total energy is on the decrease, as is his own model. The data cannot discriminate between them.

So we look elsewhere, to see if there is a way to discriminate. We have a dynamo theory in place, which explains in detail how the Earth's magnetic field is generated. Humphreys does not criticize, or even mention standard dynamo theory in his latest paper (at least not that I saw). But that standard theory is quite good at generating Earth type magnetic fields from first principles, and it also generates physically realistic models for magnetic field reversals (as far as I know, Humphreys does not dispute the fact of field reversals, only the time scale involved).

I would say that Humphreys' new paper changes little, if anything. We are still unable to distinguish, from these observd data alone, between a "young" or "old" magnetic field. Humphreys still has not produced a model dynamo that is as detailed, or as powerful, as the standard theory. In short, Neither Humphreys, nor anyone else, has yet come up with any good reason for throwing out the theory we have, in favor of the theory they have. He still has to come up with a better explanation than the standard.

To access the talk.origins newsgroup, try clicking on this link. If that doesn't work, you can access it through a Web-based newsserver, such as Google Groups.

The section of the PBS Evolution series you were watching was indeed titled "What About God?" The person depicted was Ken Ham, who is the founder of an organization called Answers in Genesis. AiG's American headquarters is located in Florence, Kentucky, near Cincinnati, Ohio.

There are a number of groups committed to upholding the teaching of quality science in the United States. Some of them, such as Kansas Citizens for Science, can be found in our list of links to other sites. The National Center for Science Education is the national clearinghouse for such efforts, and if you have further interest in promoting quality science education, I'd suggest you begin there.

The "lies" and "hoaxes" you refer to are, of course, available for everyone to see at public libraries. They are well indexed and referenced in a variety of ways, and thousands of librarians all over the world are ready to help you find them. There are even organizations such as Earthwatch and UREP that encourage interested laypeople to join scientific expeditions themselves, see how the research is done, and join in the actual work. Few other fields go to so much effort to make their "lies" (other people call it "evidence") so public.

I'm sure you can think of several diverse reasons why some feedback questions go unanswered, so there is no need to address that part of your message.

One last question for you to think about: How could the King James Version of the Bible be translated from the Vulgate if there are still new copies of the Vulgate around?

The stuff about Roundworld, though, is pretty good, although they do report as scientific consensus some ideas that are far from certainly accepted (such as the idea that having a big Moon is what caused us to have a liveable atmosphere) and they tend to use a notion of evolution known as "gradism", which briefly supposes that evolution tends to generate new grades of organisation (a view I am not comfortable with myself).

The origins of life discussion is not bad, although it, too, is incomplete (hey, this is a popular work; what can you ask for?). However, I thoroughly recommend the chapter "The Descent of Darwin". Also I particularly like the dialogue on pages 240-241 about how the best achievement that the dinosaurs had was to not die for 100 million years:

'Not dying out is some kind of achievement, is it?' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

'Best kind there is, sir.' [Rincewind]

As to atheistic antievolutionism (which is not quite the same as creationism - the absence of evolutionism is not ipso facto creationism), this is an old view - at least back to the French enlightenment. It is equivalent to the idea of Aristotle that the world is static and without beginning. But less generally, when people say they reject the "theory of Evolution" it usually means that they reject the idea of evolution by natural selection, not common descent. I am not aware of a single thinker who rejects common descent for any reason other than a religious one.

Whatever Ed Conrad is pushing, I'm fairly sure it is not relevant to theism or atheism...

But even using the simplistic view of information that creationists use, it takes no effort to show that the "mutations can't add information" argument is utter hogwash. Consider a population of identical, asexually-reproducing organisms with the following genetic code:

ATTGTCAAG

We know that one possible mutation is for a section of the genome to be duplicated. So let's say that one of the organisms in the population has an offspring with a duplication mutation, like so:

ATTGTCAAGAAGAAG

This organism then reproduces. Its offspring has another mutation, one that substitutes several bases for their complements (T for A, C for G):

ATTGTCAAGATCTTG

That offspring reproduces. Now instead of one population of organisms with genome ATTGTCAAG, we have three:

1. One with genome ATTGTCAAG.
2. One with genome ATTGTCAAGAAGAAG.
3. One with genome ATTGTCAAGATCTTG.

The creationist argument that "mutations can't add information" is simply wrong.

Here is an alternative view of science (one of several alternatives). A scientist has a question about something. He (or she) considers several alternative possible answers (hypotheses). He tries to figure out how each hypothesis might imply a prediction that he could test by seeking new data. He collects data that would test the various predictions, and checks how well those data fit with the predictions of each hypothesis. When he has found data consistent with one hypothesis but not with a second hypothesis, he concludes that the first hypothesis is better supported by evidence. He publishes his data and conclusions in a scientific journal. This is the paradigm used by astronomers who can’t do experiments with stars, and the paradigm used by evolutionists who can’t go back in time.

Let’s look at your examples and see what evolution predicts and what the data are. Does evolution or creation predict that an insect exposed to a pesticide should turn into a different species? Neither model makes this prediction, so that fact that pesticides don’t lead to new insect species is consistent with both evolution and creation (i.e., this is not a prediction that distinguishes the two hypotheses). Does evolution predict that because we have “amazing abilities” we should be able to duplicate the evolution of a monkey by laboratory experiments? It does not, since evolution is supposed to act over millions of years, and regardless of our abilities we can’t do experiments that take that long.

Does evolution hypothesize that humans evolved from monkey species living today? It does not. It hypothesizes that modern monkey species and humans both evolved from a common ancestral population that lived millions of years ago and split into two separate populations, one of which evolved into modern monkeys and one of which evolved into humans. Does this model predict that there should be no modern monkeys? It does not, though many creationists mistakenly confuse the common ancestral animals (which are all dead) with monkeys alive today simply because the common ancestral species probably looked more like a modern monkey than like a human.

So you have discussed some “predictions” that don’t really follow from evolution or that don’t distinguish evolution from creation.

But the hypothesis of evolution does make some predictions that are different from expectations of the creation model, and testing these predictions can help scientists distinguish which model is better supported by the evidence. One evolutionary prediction is that we should find fossils of extinct species that have some characteristics of monkeys and some characteristics of humans, and those intermediate fossils should be from geologic layers that were laid down after the presumed common ancestor of humans and monkeys. Such fossils have been found. They don’t prove evolution, but they are consistent with the evolutionary prediction. See Fossil Hominids: The Evidence for Human Evolution Another prediction of evolution is that useless DNA mutations or virus insertions that altered the DNA of common ancestors of humans and monkeys should have been inherited by both humans and modern monkeys. Such shared mutations have been found. They don’t prove evolution but they are consistent with the evolutionary prediction. See Plagiarized Errors and Molecular Genetics Another Argument in the Evolution-Creation Controversy. The creation model makes neither of these predictions, so these sorts of data favor the evolution model. A nice list of evolution predictions and evidence that tests them is found at 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent. All of these WebPages include references to the original scientific journal articles so you can check for yourself how strong the evidence is.

One version of the creation model includes the notion that all animal species were created within one week and lived simultaneously. This model would be supported if remains of humans (and other modern species) were found in the same geologic layers as the remains of dinosaurs or trilobites; but such remains are found only in very different layers. This evidence doesn’t disprove the creation model, but it does massively contradict it. Creationists who try to explain away this contradiction use a variety of vague ad hoc theories (“hydrodynamic sorting” or “selective escape” from floods) that they have never tried to validate by testing how animal remains sink or float, or by studying what happens to different species of animals in floods.

It would be nice to see proof - like monkeys evolving into humans over millions of years - but we can’t get such proof, so we rely on the scientific, if indirect, approach of testing predictions that follow from competing hypotheses. We are left with a body of published scientific evidence that supports (not proves) evolution, and a body of evidence that contradicts several creationist models.

(Also, changes from flat to spherical earth and from geocentricity to heliocentricity are not fickleness in science but more an adoption of it. And spericity of the earth has been the dominant belief since the ancient Greeks.)

All that aside, I agree that persistent beliefs deserve serious evalutation. Such an evaluation has begun in David E. Jones' book An Instinct For Dragons. Jones notes the consistency of common human belief in dragons and makes a case that it originated as a result of predation on our ancestors by snakes, large cats, and birds of prey. Other researchers are looking for a basis for belief in God; for example in Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief by Newberg, D'Aquili, and Rause; and The "God" Part of the Brain by Matthew Alper. The field is still young, but expect more from it in the future.

To answer your second question, when molten rock (magma or lava) cools, the type of rock which is produced depends on two main factors: the chemical makeup of the molten rock, and the speed with which the rock cools. Granite and rhyolite have essentially the same chemical composition, but are made up of crystals of different sizes. The larger crystals of a granite are the result when a body of magma cools very slowly below the surface. A more fine-grained rhyolite results when the magma cools rapidly at or near the surface. When a granite is melted and allowed to cool rapidly, a rhyolite will result.

Say, how did you type that message without any fingers, O Undifferentiated & Unfertilized Gamete?

Kathleen Hunt's Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ lists over three hundred transitional fossils in the vertebrates alone, and it is far from a complete list of vertebrate transitionals. She notes that one of the reasons why transitionals are little know is that, to paleontologists, they are so prosaic that they are not worth devoting a lot of time and effort to.

Some of the transitions seen in the fossil record are gradual transitions between species or genera. Each of these involves several different fossils and so adds greatly to the number of transitional fossils. In the case of hyenids alone, there are hundreds of fossil specimens linking over a hundred species.

The fossil record for some marine groups, especially those with hard parts such as molluscs and diatoms, is even better than the record for vertebrates. Again, gradual transitions composed of many distinct fossils are not uncommon. With microfossils, the number of fossil specimens in a transition can easily get into the millions. Kenneth Miller, in Finding Darwin's God pp. 44-45, tells of a continuous record of the diatom Rhizosolenia spanning almost two million years and including a speciation event. A smooth transition between foraminifera genera is described in A Smooth Fossil Transition: Orbulina, a foram. And of course, marine fossils are even less glamorous than vertebrate fossils, so they get even less popular attention.

• Solar Fusion and Neutrinos
• Talk.Origins Solar FAQ

As for short period comets, the evidence is certainly compatible with the theory that there exist populations of objects which replace old used up comets with fresh new comets (the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud). The creationist argument relies on the absolute non-existence of any such populations, a claim very hard to reconcile with observations which imply to the contrary.

• A Response to the Short Period Comets Argument

The assumption that change in the size of the genome is linear with time is wrong. There are a variety of genetic changes which result in an increased genome size, ranging from insertions of one to a few bases through duplication of entire chromosomes to complete duplication of the entire genome through polyploidy. These are discrete events that do not necessarily come evenly spaced in time.

Wesley

You can access talk.origins, at the least, through Google Groups.

Darwin did not exclude intervention by God, so much as making it unexplanatory. In his discussion with Asa Gray, who did argue for God's providential intervention, Darwin pointed out that trying to make predictions about evolution on the basis of a concept of God was unnecessary and prone to error. But there is scope for those who wish to to include a role for God.

We do not intend to imply that God directed evolution in ways which can be distinguished from chance or ordinary natural process. However, there is no reason to suggest on scientific grounds that God was not involved, either.