Feedback for March/April 2001

Because the tract is so delightfully lunatic, I'll also answer your questions directly, in the hope this may help you savour it.

1. You refer to page 8 of the tract. Jack invented these "six basic concepts" himself, I suspect. He has just listed some steps in the formation of the universe, with characteristic incompetance. Jack's steps:

   Cosmic evolution -- Big Bang makes hydrogen. In fact, hydrogen formation occurs fairly late in the Big Bang, and one of the successes of Big Bang cosmology is that it predicts with quite good accuracy the relative abundance of Hydrogen and Helium. There are plenty of unresolved questions on the origins of the universe, but the really interesting questions generally refer to stages before the nucleosynthesis of hydrogen and other light elements.

   Chemical evolution -- higher elements evolve. Heavier elements are formed by well understood processes. These processes can be repeated in the laboratory, and are observed to be going on at present in stars. This, of course, does not involve any chemistry, but involves nuclear fusion reactions. Chick calls this "faith", which apart from being ludicrous, is also a common creationist cheapening of the meaning of faith for a Christian.

   Evolution of stars and planets from gas. This is also observed to be going on right now.

   Organic evolution -- life from rocks. This is not "evolution", but biogenesis. None of the work on biogenesis is sensibly described as life from rocks; that is just a Chick misdirection.

   Macroevolution -- changes between kinds of plants and animals. This is the one which comes closest to being reasonable. Macroevolution is evolutionary change above the level of species (not "kinds"). Macroevolution is an observed fact of how life diversifies.

   Microevolution -- changes within kinds. The word "kinds" here and in the previous point is a dead giveaway. It is a term with no meaning.

   Only the last two points are actually about biological evolution. For how the terms are used, I recommend the following two FAQs: Macroevolution, and 29 Evidences for Macroevolution.

2. No. Experts are well aware that Lucy is not a chimpanzee, and even creationists rarely repeat such nonsense. Lucy is an Australopithicene. The origins of this absurd fancy by Chick might be that Sir Arthur Keith, early in this century, and before he had actually looked at the evidence, suggested that early Australopithicus finds were actually closer to chimpanzees than humans. In 1947, having now seen the actual evidence, he retracted, and no-one since has ever seriously proposed such a silly notion; except isolated creationists who don't know anything about the subject. There is a review of what creationists usually say about Australopithecines as a part of the Fossil Hominids FAQ.
3. Leaky never found a 212 million year old skull. The origins of this untruth are might be a very early and hopelessly inaccurate dating of tuff in which skulls were found; but that date was never associated with the fossil, and was always recognized as incorrect for the tuff as well. There were some more serious dating anomalies, with the skull originally being thought to be 3 million years old, and now revised to 1.9 million years. The actual skull concerned is a famous Homo habilis skull, described in the habilis section section of the fossil hominids FAQ.
4. Piltdown man was a fake, and Nebrasaka man was an error quickly corrected. Heidelberg man is a perfectly good late erectus fossil; certainly not modern human, but far more like human than any ape. In short, a classic transitional, and no fake. Peking man refers to some very early erectus finds, and indeed the original fossils were lost, although excellent casts remain. No fakery indicated or involved. Creationists rarely note that there have been heaps of other erectus finds, which are nicely consistent with Peking man. Neandertal man are not fakes either, but a well established human species, now extinct. Chick dishonestly says that the find is of an old man suffering arthritis. This is dishonest, because amonst the many many Neandertal finds there was indeed one of a Neandertal with rickets; but there is not the slightest reason for thinking it is a modern human with rickets, nor for thinking that the characteristics distinguishing Neandertals from humans have anything to do with rickets. ("Arthritus" is a bit of Chick incompetance here.) Cro-Magnon are indeed fully modern humans, and no-one knows what Chick means by New Guinea man. Nothing false here either.

   More seriously, Chick simply ignores the really important hominid fossils.

5. The bit about upside down trees running through millions of years of strata is just another untruth. There are, of course, trees in which the roots have penetrated down into lower strata, and trees which are buried by strata that are laid down rapidly (not over millions of years). This bit of nonsense is discussed in our Polystrate fossils FAQ.
6. On embryonic gill slits, Chick places into the mouth of the professor a notion which was indeed disproven a century ago. We really ought to have a FAQ on this subject in the archive. In the meantime, Troy Britain has written a useful page on creationist claims about Haeckel, which might be worth reading; and see also this very readable discussion of embryonic development.
7. Saving the best for last... page 19 of the tract is about what holds the nucleus of an atom together. Chick suggests that it is held together by Christ!

   There are four fundamental forces which govern the universe. One of these is the so-called strong force, and this is what binds the nucleus together. The strong force is mediated by gluons, which (incredibly) is mentioned in a footnote, saying "If gluons aren't the answer... what is?". Of course, gluons are the answer, and so where does that leave Chick's "explanation"? Now actually, the tract was first written in 1972, and gluons were discovered in 1979. Kent Hovind rewrote the tract in 1992, so he must have added this footnote, apparently totally oblivious that he is presenting gluons as a disproof of the bible.

   A clearer example could hardly be found of a creationist twisting the bible into an absurd parody of science, and setting up their faith for unjustified ridicule.

I don't think that this site complains even once about such a thing. There is a difference between a statement of beliefs and a scientific theory of creation. The ICR can and does provide the former, but they have not produced the latter.

Wesley

Creationists assume without proof, and in definance of all the paleontological and molecular evidence, that there are limits to change, and that things are arrayed in "kinds". However, this view was last accepted in biology sometime around the early 19th century, and even before Darwin, the notion of macroevolution was broadly accepted.

There is a loose usage of the term by some scientists, though - they often mean patterns of macroevolution - trends in the fossil record like the increase in brain size in hominids, or the relative extinction rates of different but related antelope, and so forth. This looseness has caused all kinds of confusion, because some want to say that [the patterns of] macroevolution are not caused by the processes of microevolution - that is, there are some other processes that are responsible for evolutionary trends and the like than what happens within species. In short, some believe that microevolution does not add up to macroevolution. This is a contentious and to my mind unresolved issue in the science.

Creationists often quote this sort of debate out of context in order to gain comfort at the confusion in the ranks of their enemies, but actually, properly understood, it gives no such thing. All agree that evolution occurs, and that microevolutionary processes are the cause of certain kinds of change. The remaining issue is whether some evolutionary patterns are due to other processes as well.

Punctuated equilibria is a theory based upon research and findings in living populations, whose import Eldredge and Gould explicated for fossil lineages. Many of the (false) assertions that Harry makes are specifically discussed in the Punctuated Equilibria FAQ.

Wesley

Larry Moran's article is not intended to present evidence for the facts; that is available in many other FAQs in the archive. Lots of creationists say evolution is just a theory as if they are passing on a commonly accepted principle. Larry demonstrates that what is actually commonly accepted is that evolution is a fact, and more than a fact; it is also a theory explaining the facts.

If he conveys the impression that only a sloth in a cave would be unaware of the facts, this is not actually far wrong; although I (and Larry, I hope) would usually express this rather more gently. The levels of popular education on this subject are simply atrocious; and there is an active movement trying to keep it that way.

If you want evidence, try these other FAQs:

• Fossil Hominds
• Plagiarized Errors and Molecular Genetics
• Transitional vertebrate fossils
• 29 Evidences for Macroevolution
• Evidence for Evolution: An Eclectic Survey
• Observed instances of speciation
• Some More Observed Speciation Events
• Horse evolution

Fact: an observed bit of data

Theory: an idea which explains our observed data

Evolution is both a fact and a theory, but in different senses of the word. If we define evolution at its most basic - a change in the frequency of alleles in a population over time - it is a fact. We observe this change all the time. Perhaps this is what you mean by "microevolution". Few people dispute evolution as so defined, of course.

But if we are discussing the basic theory of evolution - the idea that modern plants and animals are derived from a common ancestor - then we are dealing with a theory, one that was created to explain the facts.

The facts which are explained by this theory are very wide ranging and they are found in several different fields of study - anthropology, biogeography, genetics, comparative anatomy, biochemistry, and so on.

Your analogy of comparing something that can be both "fact and theory" with being both "alive and dead" or "right and wrong" is obviously flawed. Fact and theory are not opposites, as your examples are. And as I just explained, evolution is both of those things only when using the term two different ways - both of which are accurate.

Ed Brayton

Fact: an observed bit of data

Theory: an idea which explains our observed data

Evolution is both a fact and a theory, but in different senses of the word. If we define evolution at its most basic - a change in the frequency of alleles in a population over time - it is a fact. We observe this change all the time. Perhaps this is what you mean by "microevolution". Few people dispute evolution as so defined, of course.

But if we are discussing the basic theory of evolution - the idea that modern plants and animals are derived from a common ancestor - then we are dealing with a theory, one that was created to explain the facts.

The facts which are explained by this theory are very wide ranging and they are found in several different fields of study - anthropology, biogeography, genetics, comparative anatomy, biochemistry, and so on.

Your analogy of comparing something that can be both "fact and theory" with being both "alive and dead" or "right and wrong" is obviously flawed. Fact and theory are not opposites, as your examples are. And as I just explained, evolution is both of those things only when using the term two different ways - both of which are accurate.

Ed Brayton

As to your question, off the top of my head I would guess computer simulations aren't going to be the big break through, for several reasons. First, we don't actually have a sufficiently clear idea of the conditions on the early Earth. Second, earth is a big place, and conditions vary. We don't know which part of the environment to simulate. Third, chemistry is complex; and computers have a hard time simulating more than one particular reaction or solution at a time. Some problems in organic chemistry, such as inferring the shape of a protein from its chemical composition, are quite intractible; the crucial steps in biogenesis would be much worse. Fourth, you're right -- we don't know yet precisely what chemical interactions are involved.

In my opinion, the most intersting work involves examining actual physical systems in the lab; and it must be said that computers and computer simulations can be a useful adjunct to such studies.

You'll see many examples in the NASA exobiology research projects page.

As for mutants being less likely to survive: we are nearly all mutants. Most humans have a number of mutations (about 1 to 6) in coding DNA, and probably on average around about 60 mutations all up, but that includes mutations in junk DNA which have no real consequences.

There certainly are beneficial mutations; although do note that beneficial is with respect to a given environment. What is beneficial in one circumstance might be detrimental in others. More significantly, it is by no means apparent that speciation depends on "beneficial" mutations. Sufficient accumulation of neutral mutations (most mutations are neutral) in an isolated population may be enough to bring about speciation.

Yes, we see all of this in the natural world.

Some references from our archives:

• Are mutations harmful? This FAQ also deals with mutations rates, which indicate that we are nearly all mutants, and gives examples of beneficial mutations.
• The Evolution of Improved Fitness by Random Mutation plus Selection. Unfortunately, this link appears broken at the time of writing this feedback response; I'll chase this up.
• Random Genetic Drift. I think we evolutionists often spend too much time addressing the "beneficial mutations" idea, leaving the incorrect idea that evolution involves some kind of continual "improvement". Actually, new species are generally just different, and sometimes adapted to different lifestyles or niches.

So, what is the 2nd law of thermodynamics, anyway? Here it is: Given a system that is (a) thermodynamically isolated, and (b) in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium, which makes a transition to another state of thermodynamic equilibrium, the change in entropy for the system will be greater than or equal to zero.

It's reasonable to assume that the universe itself, as a whole thing, is indeed thermodynamically isolated, and on average in equilibrium. It will, on the whole, probably obey the 2nd law as stated (although this is a debatable point). But small parts of the universe could easily be far from equilibrium, and far from isolated, in which case one must use great care in trying to apply the 2nd law, since those smaller systems do not meet the necessary criteria for applicability of the 2nd law.

Take for instance, the Earth. It receives a small number of high energy, low entropy photons from the sun. It radiates a much larger number of higher entropy & lower energy photons into space. Since the Earth is approximately in equilibrium, on average, it has to radiate the same energy (on average) as it receives. But is radiates much more entropy. So, the net change in entropy is greater than zero, as expected from the 2nd law; the entropy of radiation + earth (before) is less than the entropy of radiation + earth (after). The Earth loses entropy (change less than zero), but the 2nd law is not violated.

And how about the universe, how long does it take to "run down"? Well, our own sun is about 4.6x10⁹ years old, and can be expected to hang around like a "normal" star for about 10¹⁰ years. But a minimal mass M-dwarf star (about 0.08 solar masses) will last, as a "normal" star, for about 10¹⁴ years. That's 10,000 times longer than the sun. It will take about 10¹⁵⁰⁰ years (!) for all matter to decay spontaneously into iron (by quantum tunneling). It will take anywhere from 10¹⁰²⁶ to 10¹⁰⁷⁶ years (!!) for all matter to decay into black holes. But even then, the universe you wind up with is full of black holes in equilibrium with the Hawking radiation from other black holes. That Hawking radiation will create local entropy sinks & sources, local non-equilibrium bubbles. So, in principle, even if the universe expands forever, there will never be a time when all parts of the universe share the same entropy. And that is in keeping with the 2nd law, which controls only the gross entropy of the universe.

Now, since we have only been around for about half of 10¹⁰ years, and we have to wait at least until 10¹⁰²⁶ years have gone by to start talking about an entropically boring universe, my advice is not to worry over much.

The "evolutionary concept" says only that the universe changes with time. As that seems to be a self evident truth, one would assume that the same is true for the "evolutionary concept".

As an individual, you are contributing. You contribute to the fitness of the differences in your genetic material through the things you (are able to) do, and hence how well and how many progeny you have. Don't knock it. It's immortality of a kind.

Interestingly, the word "evolution" comes from an older term, from around the 16th century, that did mean development. It got applied to what we now think of as evolution because Lamarck though evolution was like development. Darwinian evolution rejects this, but the word stuck.

Although there is some room to move on the matter of our relationship with Neandertals, it has long been the case that most investigators considered Neandertals as a distict but closely related human species; not ancestral, but an extinct side branch which has been displaced by modern humans. The mtDNA evidence tends to confirm this view. Our Fossil Hominds FAQ collection contains a detailed discussion of Neandertal DNA and its implications.

Ask your creation scientist contact if he would be willing to agree to a formal written debate on the issues. Either I or other scientists would be more than happy to engage him in an exchange of written essays, which could be distributed far more widely on our web pages and reach a much larger audience than whatever your local auditorium might hold.

Amazingly enough, most creation scientists, who make the boldest claims about their prowess in stage debates, seem to suddenly develop acute cases of cowardice when they are requested to agree to a written debate with a limited topic of discussion. Kent Hovind has refused to engage in such a written debate when offered the opportunity. It seems that given the inability to get away with "Gish gallop" tactics on stage, and having every misleading statement they make available for scrutiny and extended analysis, they suddenly decide that they have urgent business elsewhere.

Better yet, why not have your creation scientist colleague try to convince everyone on the talk.origins newsgroup that his arguments are good? Surely he should have no trouble in doing that, if he says that he always beats evolutionists in debate and that their evidence is weak to boot.

I'll look forward to seeing his highly persuasive and scholarly material in the talk.origins newsgroup, then.

Wesley

We have no means of "cutting you off". If you cannot post to the talk.origins newsgroup, please contact your Internet service provider for assistance.

It's possible that you haven't yet realized that the feedback system for this archive is not the talk.origins newsgroup itself. Items for broad discussion should be posted to the talk.origins newsgroup. The feedback system should be used for commentary specific to the content of this archive site.

I'm sure that your contributions will spark lively and interesting discussions on the talk.origins newsgroup.

Wesley

• As documented in this archive's Isochron Dating FAQ, isochron dating methods don't require or assume an initial daughter product level of zero (see fig. 5 as well as the linked text).
• As documented in this archive's Isochron Dating FAQ, isochron dating methods have built-in detection for later gain/loss of parent or daughter (see figs. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and the surrounding text).
• As documented in this archive's Age of the Earth FAQ, a large body of evidence from many different fields indicates that decay rates have not changed noticeably over the history of the universe (much less "changed by eight or more orders of magnitude in the last few thousand years" -- which is what would be required to compress multi-billion-year isotopic ages into the young-Earthers' less-than-ten-thousand-year timescale).

You and I are amazingly complex creatures, yet we grew from one celled organisms just fine, in a few decades; no violation of thermodynmics involved. There is no violation of any physical laws when I tidy my office, or flowers grow in my backyard, or when pretty salt crystals grow inside my pool filter.

Briefly: your problem is not with evolution, so much as with comprehension of the theory of thermodynamics. See The FAQs Thermodynamics, Evolution and Creationism.

If you want to rebut Glenn's document, you'll have to do better than just copying irrelevant, outdated claims. You'll have to address the actual evidence which is presented and referenced there.

First, you mispresent Huxley; he is saying the exact opposite of what you claim. The odds you give for a horse arising without evolutionary processes, and specifically without selection. The calculation appears in Evolution in Action (1953). From page 43:

A little calculation demonstrates how incredibly improbable the results of natural selection can be when enough time is available. Following Professor Muller, we can ask what would have been the odds against a higher animal, such as a horse, being produced by chance alone: that is to say by the accidental accumulation of the necessary favorable mutations, without the intervention of selection.

This is widely cited by creationist sources as being the probability of a horse arising by evolution. Of course, the truth is that it is a probability for a horse arising WITHOUT evolution. Your sources are lying to you.

As to the second point, I have a pack of cards, and have just dealt myself a sequence of 52 cards. The probability of that sequence turns out to be 1 in 52!, pretty close to 1 in 8 by 10 to the power of 67. So this neatly disproves your statement about things with a probability of less than 1 in 10 to the 50 being impossible. Using several packs, I can easily generate events far more improbable than this.

We have several FAQs on "chance" in the archive. You might like to start with Chance from a Theistic Perspective, and then follow some links.

What you mean by the "odds of a single mutation" is unclear. The odds of a mutation appearing in just one new human are much better better than even. The numbers are hard to estimate, but a human individual may have on average about 64 new point mutations; and maybe from 1 to 6 non-silent mutations in coding DNA. Mutations are observed all the time; to try and say mutation itself is improbable is simply a refusal to look. See the FAQ Are mutations harmful? for commentary on these figures.

Also, to speak of "an evolving creature" is rather misleading. Populations evolve, not individuals. Mutations accumulate from many individuals, so speaking of an individual needing several mutations is just incorrect. The majority of mutations have no discernable effect, and most of those which do have any effect are deliterious. Selection, however, acts to accumulate and concentrate advantageous mutations, which can arise one at a time in different individuals just fine. This point is fundamental. A good start might be the Introduction to Evolutionary Biology FAQ.

The point about hald a wing, or half an arm, is also based on a misconception. Intermediate species in real evolutionary theory remain entirely viable. The notion of "half a wing" is explicitly discussed in the above introductory FAQ. In brief, the intermediates invariably have different functions, and only become co-opted for new functions (like flight) when this can be selected. Thus, when a wing is a half-wing, it is actually still an arm, specialized for whatever function is used at the time the organism is living.

You spoke of the evolution of the horse: see our Horse Evolution FAQ for a better idea of what really goes on. Evolution of whales would be an even better example, and I hope we get a detailed FAQ on that subject in the archive sometime. In the meantime, check out the Enchanted Learning site on whale evolution. A recent book, "The Emergence of Whales, Evolutionary Patterns in the Origin of Cetacea" editted by J. G. M. Thewissen (Plenum Press, 1998) has a lot of detail about this evolutionary lineage, for which a wealth of new fossil evidence has recently been found, enabling a quite fine grained look at the evolution of whales.

In a smooth terrain, jumps in all directions are likely not to be too different in outcome. So mutations can accrue that are "neutral" in that landscape, and in later terrains they may become useful.

There is no such things as a "beneficial" or "harmful" mutation in any absolute sense - it is always relative to the situation in which the organism finds itself.

The second law of thermodynamics is valid inside the universe. There is no guarantee that the second law is valid outside the universe. While "outside the universe" is a slippery concept at best, if the universe indeed actually began with a seminal event, if indeed there was a "time" when the universe did not exist, then the process which brought it into existence was certainly a process "outside" the universe. But even inside the universe, the 2nd law holds only for statistically large number of particles. It is not necessarily valid in systems that are dominated by quantum mechanical effects. So, if the universe came into existence via some process analogous to quantum mechanics, then even "inside" the universe, the 2nd law might well not apply. But the presumption that the universe "came into existence" at all, through any event, is really based on an extreme interpretation of general relativity, where the initial state of the observable universe is undefined. That weakness should be removed by a viable quantum theory of gravity, allowing the universe to be eternal, and making the Big Bang an event relative to some reference frame.

Conservation of angular momentum

Those questions are much easier to answer (and have been answered here countless times over the years). Planet building is a stochastic process; it is not the smooth collapse of some giant cloud, but rather the violent growth from smaller to larger "planetesimals" until you get to the full sized planets. It is most likely that the peculiar rotation of Uranus (which orbits the sun "laying down") was caused by a large collision event late in the planet accretion process. The retrograde rotation of Venus on its daily axis could have the same cause, but here the retrograde motion is really very small (tip Venus a couple of degrees and its motion becomes prograde). Venus could have gotten its peculiar daily rotation by exchange of angular momentum with its extremely dense (and fast moving) atmosphere. As for the moons, all except Triton are the smallest moons and the farthest moons from their own planets. They were all captured into retrograde orbits, which means that they orbit the planet in the direction opposite to the planet's "daily" spin, whereas most moons orbit in the same direction as their planet's "daily" spin, which is called prograde. Eventually, the spin of the planet will pull the moons into reversing the direction of their orbital motion, into prograde orbits. Likewise Triton, though it will take much longer since it is much bigger.

As far as his first claim goes even if it were true it would not take away from the geologic columns accuracy or usefulness as an idealized picture of the earths biological and geologic history. However the fact of the matter is that there are several locations on earth were one can find representative rock layers of every period in the geologic column stacked one atop the other just as they are in the idealized column. Follow this link to an article by Glenn Morton which documents these locations.

Also one can find most of the phanerozoic column represented in Colorado Plateau in the western United States. Starting at the bottom of the Grand Canyon in Arizona (late pre-Cambrian) and going north in a step-wise manner to Bryce Canyon (Eocene) in Utah. In fact this part of the western U.S. is sometimes called the Grand Staircase because of the way the geologic layers are exposed. Follow this link to an article by Jon Woolf for more on the Grand Canyon area as it relates to the claims of creationists.

Regarding Harry's second basic claim that the column exists only in the minds of "evolutionary geologists" or is based upon the "assumption of evolution", he couldn't be more wrong. The geologic column, in pretty much in the form we have it today, was in fact originally described by catastrophist "creationist geologists" in the late 18th and early 19th century long before Darwin brought evolution into the scientific mainstream with the publishing of the Origin of Species in 1859. For example the Rev. Adam Sedgwick, professor of geology at Cambridge, named the Cambrian period, and was one of Darwin's most outspoken critics who once said that evolution was little more than a "phrenzied dream" .

No doubt Harry and many other lay creationists will not want to believe this coming from an evolutionist but perhaps they will believe it coming from Institute for Creation Research (ICR) geologist Steven Austin:

"It may sound surprising, but the standard geologic column was devised before 1860 by catastrophists who were creationists. Adam Sedgewick, Roderick Murchison, William Coneybeare, and others affirmed that the earth was formed largely by catastrophic processes, and that the earth and life were created. These men stood for careful empirical science and were not compelled to believe evolutionary speculation or side with uniformitarian theory." - Impact #137

A good concise history of the history of the geologic column (written from a Christian friendly perspective) can be found on the web site of the Geoscience Research Institute. Follow these links to go directly to the two parts of the article: Part I & Part II

A Lady fair, of lineage high,
Was loved by an Ape, in the days gone by -
The Maid was radiant as the sun,
The Ape was a most unsightly one -
So it would not do -
His scheme fell through;
For the Maid, when his love took formal shape,
Expressed such terror
At his monstrous error,
That he stammered an apology and made his 'scape,
The picture of a disconcerted Ape.

With a view to rise in the social scale,
He shaved his bristles, and he docked his tail,
He grew moustachios, and he took his tub,
And he paid a guinea to a toilet club.
But it would not do,
The scheme fell through -
For the Maid was Beauty's fairest Queen,
With golden tresses,
Like a real princess's,
While the Ape, despite his razor keen,
Was the apiest Ape that ever was seen!

He bought white ties, and he bought dress suits,
He crammed his feet into bright tight boots,
And to start his life on a brand-new plan,
He christened himself Darwinian Man!
But it would not do,
The scheme fell through -
For the Maiden fair, whom the monkey craved,
Was a radiant Being,
With a brain far-seeing -
While a Man, however well-behaved,
At best is only a monkey shaved!

[from Princess Ida, Act II]

It seems to me that the people who best appreciate this marvelous and subtle world don't waste time wondering why they don't have answers given them on a plate. They actually go out and look for answers. The results are often surprising, and are sometimes hard to accept for those who cannot comprehend the size, the age, and the complexity of the universe.

I suggest to you that things are not meant to be discovered by faith. Faith is not about discovery; it is about acceptance, and by definition is not a source of new discovered information.

Alas, faith is sometimes uncritical. For some people, faith corresponds to acceptance of a set of propositions; and tragically sometimes people even have "faith" in propositions which are in direct conflict with what can be discovered by those willing to follow the signs and evidence afforded by examination of the world in which we live.

I consider such a faith to be shallow. It only makes it harder for people to comprehend the world, or the gifts of God. I have rather more respect for a faith which is not characterized by simple assent to propositions (and especially not a blind insistence on medieval cosmology) but by a basic trust and confidence that gives strength to life without insisting on knowing all the answers.

Typically, biologists speak of "selection pressures", but this, and Sober's "forces" terminology is metaphorical. All this means is that there is a bias in the fitness of some gene or trait. There is no actual physical force that all and only selection processes undergo or have.

In fact, as Sober points out in his 1984, fitness itself is what philosophers call a "supervenient property". This just means that it is a property that can be gotten in any number of ways, but if two organisms are physically identical and in the same environment, they will have the same fitness. By extension, then (although Sober doesn't follow this up), selection is a supervenient process. This makes sense. Selection occurs on a range of physical things from viruses to diseases to plants, animals, fungi or algae. It even occurs, according to Dawkins and others, on cultural "things" (called "memes" by some). It need not occur on genes (Sober and Wilson 1998, Wilson and Sober 1998)

In each case of a selection process going on, there will be a physical explanation along the lines of "organisms that can [metabolise the toxins of their prey animals] will survive longer and so have more progeny relative to those that do not". The text in brackets will be different for every single case.

So I think of selection as an explanatory scheme into which the details are put for each instance. That is, you fill in the blanks (on the basis of evidence and experiment) to explain why this variation and not that variation took over or dominates a population or species of organisms.

References

Sober, E. (1984). The nature of selection: evolutionary theory in philosophical focus. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

Sober, E. and D. S. Wilson (1998). Unto others: the evolution and psychology of unselfish behavior. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

Wilson, D. and E. Sober (1998). “Multilevel selection and the return of group level functionalism – response.” Behavioral & Brain Sciences (2): 305-306.

Your proposal fails to take into account the actual evidence concerning the famous "Berezovka" frozen mammoth available in the FAQ, which indicates it was buried in a landside, and that it was found in an extremely dessicated condition (preserved under dry conditions). Also, your proposal is physically impossible, since water does not pack snow. Snow under water melts quite rapidly.

Your feedback is directed at Mark Isaak's FAQ Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution. This article is not making any comments at all about how other people believe the world came about. It is exclusively concerned with correcting some common and fairly trivial misconceptions people have about how we think the world came about.

If I dismissed Christianity because I found many flaws in the Qur'an, should you not point out to me that I am not actually criticising Christianity when I look at the Qur'an? And if someone dismisses evolution because they think it proceeds by random chance, should I not point out that actually evolution does not work by random chance, but depends crucially on the non-random effects of selection?

It is foolishness to take offense at a clarification of our views as if this was putting down your views.

In nature, today, we can find a whole continuum of increasing cell-type differentiation and increasing interdependence. It's not an all-or-nothing thing, as creationists often assert -- and as your feedback about James' article appears to imply. This point was addressed in more detail in this archive's October 1998 feedback (about halfway down the page). For further information on this topic: see John T. Bonner's book The Evolution of Complexity [e.g., at Amazon.Com].

Best's book is by far the best supported argument I have seen for the local flood theory. I personally disagree with parts of it, mainly because I think he treats his sources too literally sometimes, and his scenario is necessarily speculative, but it is entirely plausible.

Inventing Saran Wrap, while a notable accomplishment, does not qualify one to comment on biology.

Although Harry begins his tirade with "Many of today's most distinguished scientists...", the scientists he mentioned aren't exactly current.

Etheridge worked at the British Museum in the 1880's.

Fleischmann was a vocal creationist (and rather obscure as a biologist) in the 1920's.

This holds for all scriptures, not merely the Torah or Q'uran or Bible. It equally holds for the collected works of Marx and Lenin. None of these sources have any clout in science, because science works from the data - evidence, observations and experiment - and its models and theories in everything from physics to astronomy to biology must account for data, not holy writings.

Individual scientists may think that the holy books are authoritative to themselves. They may try to reconcile science with their scriptures if there is some apparent conflict. They may revise science or theology to do so, but this is not relevant to science itself, just to the individuals, and of course their religious communities.

Science, on the other hand, has no need to reconcile itself with old texts of any kind; not even old scientific texts like The Origin of Species or Newton's Principium.

Evolution is inconsistent with a whole range of things, particularly observations that there is no variation in species for selection to act on, and on evidence that the age opf the earth is less than a few million years old. Neither of these views are, in fact, observed or proposed by scientists, but if they were, evolution as we now know it would fall in a heap and be abandoned by scientists. So it can be (but so far hasn't been) "disproved".

Note that actual proof and disproof is only found in mathematics, and what science does is much less logically exact, but the argument holds anyway.

Neither Schweitzer nor Horner (her supervisor) make the patently absurd claim that this proves anything is only a thousand years old; they are completely happy with the well established dates for dinosaurs of 65 million years or more.

For what it is worth, Mary Schweitzer is a Christian, and quite irritated by the creationist nonsense on this matter.

See this New Scientist article on the subject. See also the following abstract of Preservation of biomolecules in cancellous bone of Tyrannosaurus rex by MH Schweitzer, C Johnson, TG Zocco, JR Horner, and JR Starkey, in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 1997, 17(2):349-359.

The tracks stuff is covered here in considerable detail. The dinosaur tracks are quite genuine, and very interesting. The "human" tracks are bizarre.

Size dimorphism between genders is pretty common, and which gender is larger depends on the taxon. Mammals may be actually somewhat unusual in having males which are larger than females, so really the case to be explained is "larger males". Where there is anisogamy, females put a larger investment per offspring into reproduction than males do. It's pretty straightforward to see that a larger female may be able to produce either more or larger eggs, or otherwise to outproduce a smaller female of the same species. Males can produce adequate amounts of gametes without needing to be larger than females. If resource partitioning is a factor, then having some difference in size between genders can be favored on that point alone.

Certain anglerfishes take size dimorphism to an extreme. The females are many times larger than the males, and a male may attach itself to the female and take up existence as a parasite upon her body.

Wesley

I am forced to guess what you are concerned about. I don't know your beliefs, so it is not clear where you feel insulted.

I am guessing you feel insulted because much of the information presented here is given as a response to "creationists", and yet you feel that "creationist" ought to include those who believe in a creator God and who also accept the discoveries of science for the processes and the history of life in Earth.

However, the term "creationist" is by history and by common usage directed not at any doctrine of creation, but at those particular doctrines of creation which are in conflict with conventional science; and in particular with evolution and geology. You will end up talking at cross purposes with all sides of this debate if you insist on some other definitions for "creationist".

This site attempts to address the many confusions and errors promulgated by various kinds of creationists, but most especially "young-earth creationists". See our FAQ What is Creationism for other forms of creationism.

Bear in mind that the contributors to this site include a number of Christians who believe God creates, and that creation is consistent with evolution, as you may do also.

Sometimes, however, even "simple" questions betray fundamental confusions that cannot be answered simply.

For example, the first part of your feedback uses the word "theory" in way that suggests confusion about the meaning of the term. In science, or in mathematics, "theory" generally refers to a framework or body of principles that is able to explain and interpret facts or observations.

If you read about the "theory of relativity", or "theory of evolution", or "theory of calculus", or "quantum theory", or "theory of music", you are actually reading about the underlying foundations and principles of that field. Look in a library some time for all the books which have the word "theory" in their title: they nearly all use the term theory in this sense, as an explanatory framework.

See the FAQ Evolution is a Fact and a Theory.

There is overwhelming hard evidence for evolution. Here are some of the FAQs which explain various bits of evidence:

• 29 Evidences for Macroevolution
• Evidence for Evolution: An Eclectic Survey
• Observed Instances of Speciation
• Some More Observed Speciation Events
• Fossil Hominids
• Transitional Vertebrate Fossils
• Horse Evolution

You speak of "tough questions" for which you see more "theory" than fact; but what tough questions are these? I am well aware of some tough and contentious questions on aspects of evolution; but I doubt if you are refering to these, since they they do not concern the kinds of elementary fundamentals troubling to creationists. The kinds of questions raised by creationists are usually not tough questions at all; but I cannot speak directly to the questions you have in mind, since you do not indicate what they are.

The second part of your feedback presumes that we brush off valid points as ignorance, and that we can't answer simple questions. If you can present an actual example of us brushing off valid points as ignorance, please do so plainly.

This response may even seem to be a bit of a brush off, but I really don't have anything much to go on.

For instance, in my experience creationists almost never provide any valid points at all. It can be time consuming to address the confusions and errors inherent in creationist rhetoric, but the actual content very rarely includes anything at all of genuine scientific interest. If you have a specific valid point in mind, you might like to bring it to the attention of the talk.origins newsgroup, which is the appropriate venue for considering such matters.

The range of possibilities formed by joining existing genes is vastly greater than the range of possibilities formed by mutation alone. Since all or nearly all genes work in combination with other genes to form traits, slight changes in one or more of the genes that go to make them up can add a lot of novelty for selection to work on.

Stress can in some restricted cases (notably in bacteria) cause mutations to occur, but it canot trigger mutations that are necessarily favorable, because neither genes nor evolution "knows" what is going to work out until it is "tried".

A few seconds with the search facility here shows that there is a FAQ on the topic:

The Recession of the Moon and the Age of the Earth-Moon System

Wesley

It is not true that the evidence is biased. It can be argued that the interpretation of evidence may be biased by accepting the axioms of science. And even then, interpretations have to compete in the marketplace of ideas called "scientific peer review". If you have an idea, and someone else comes up with an idea that does a better job of explaining the evidence and generally making itself useful in elucidating the mechanisms of our physical reality, the way to bet is that their idea will eventually displace yours.

Between Jim's first paragraph and second lies a huge non sequitur. It does not follow from an assumption that science is not necessarily "dependent on God" that God is "absolutely impossible". It wasn't rabid atheists who introduced and made common the use of methodological naturalism as the underlying basis for how science gets done. That was accomplished by theists. They had good reasons for doing so. The modern anti-science movement that seeks to displace any trace of naturalism, including a modest methodological naturalism, from the practice of science ignores the contribution to the advance of science that their theistic predecessors made by adopting it.

Around the world, many people of science also demonstrate faith in God. See the God and Evolution FAQ. This obviously indicates a problem for the thesis that a universal tenet of science is the impossibility of God. In short, "mainstream science" does not imply that God is impossible. Neither does "mainstream science" make any affirmation of God. In this case, the reality is that "mainstream science" makes neither affirmation nor denial of God's existence. There is, of course, no logical problem with that at all.

Scientists (including secular ones), meanwhile, have been doing an absolutely outstanding job of making predictions about reality. The last century saw an astounding amount of change derived, in large part, from the application of scientific principles through engineering to technological advance. I find it amusingly ironic that Jim obviously entered his comments denigrating science via use of a computer.

Wesley

However, it's a bit odd to reference Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days as evidence. That book is a work of fiction. It's a bit like referencing Watership Down as evidence that rabbits can talk to each other.

We have no argument with people who assert little more than "God made the universe," and I personally don't consider such people creationists. For better or worse, the term "Creationist" has come to refer to people who turn their religion into testable (and often false) scientific claims about origins. Those are the creationists whom this web site refers to.

Standard (and non-standard) Big Bang cosmology incorporates a universe which has evolved in time, and was in the beginning extremely dense and extremely hot. The second law, applied to this model, requires the formation of condensed "cool" regions, at the expense of sparse "hot" regions. That is what cosmological evolution theorizes, and that is what is actually observed. So, in reality, theoretical cosmology, observational cosmology, and the laws of thermodynamics, are all in perfect accord.

Predictions as to the future evolution of the universe continue to rigidly obey the second law. However, the time scale is somewhat long. A minimal red dwarf star, about 0.08 of the sun's mass, will survive as an ordinary star for about 100,000,000,000,000 (that's 10¹⁴) years, as compared to our, own sun's expected lifetime of roughly 10,000,000,000 (or 10¹⁰ years). But other cosmic processes take much longer. For instance, decay of black holes through Hawking radiation will take about 10⁶⁴ years. One can expect all ordinary matter to spontaneously change into iron-57 (the most stable nucleus), but it takes roughly 10¹⁵⁰⁰ years. One can even expect all ordinary matter to spontaneously collapse into black holes, but the time scale could be anywhere from 10¹⁰²⁶ to 10¹⁰⁷⁶ years, depending on specifics of the mechanism. Since our own universe is only roughly 15,000,000,000 (1.5x10¹⁰) years old, we have a long way to go before the "running down" becomes a particularly important effect.

Our past, present and future, according to evolutionary theory, does not in any way contradict any law of thermodynamics. My source for comment made here is the paper Time without end: Physics and biology in an open universe by Freeman J. Dyson, Reviews of Modern Physics v51 n3 pp447-460, July 1979. Also see A dying universe - The long term fate and evolution of astrophysical objects by F.C. Adams & G. Laughlin, Reviews of Modern Physics v69 n2 pp337-372, April 1997 (the cover story in the August 1998 issue of Sky and Telescope magazine is by Adams & Laughlin, based on this study).

And in the archive, see "Thermodynamics, Evolution and Creationism".

There has long been a pair of dubious assumption that we are much more complicated than a fruit fly, and that we ought therefore to have significantly more genes than a fruit fly, but both are unfounded. I see no strong argument that Homo sapiens is more complex than Drosophila, and the vertebrates with the largest genomes are the amphibians, an observation that long ago called into question the idea that genome size ought to be a correlate of morphological complexity.

In any event, the simple number of genes is not the issue. Molecular genes interact in complex ways, and the development of an organism is specified by, among other things, the timing of the expression of genes (controlled by other genes, called regulatory genes). This means that genes can form a "space" of complexity of a very high order. The difference between simple organisms and complex ones seems to be largely a matter of timing.

You asked this same question in the February Feedback - see also Wesley Elsberry's reply then. [This was not visible to Biswajit when he posted this feedback in March.]

See: Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ: Transition from Synapsid Reptiles to Mammals

The fact of the matter is that the fossil record documenting the transition from synapsid reptiles to mammals is one of the most complete and compelling in vertebrate paleontology, your ALL CAPS clamoring not withstanding.

If you disagree I suggest you try to make your case on the talk.origins newsgroup. Be prepared to argue the specific details of anatomy which you feel disqualify these fossils from being intermediate in form. Merely asserting that they don't count, or quoting others opinions (out of context) is not considered to be a scientific argument.