According to Gould, Charles Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was wedded to gradualism, the idea that evolution occurs uniformly through steady but gradual transformation of whole lineages. Borrowing from Wikipedia again, “Authors such as Richard Dawkins argues that constant-rate gradualism is not present in academic literature, and serves as a straw-man for punctuated equilibrium advocates.” (Such as Gould.)

Whatever.

The most important point here, is science develops over time. Scientists do have incorrect theories that change (and improve), and they do disagree with one another. Truth in science is not declared by any particular scientist, it is discovered by the scientific process. Scientists disagree and propose alternative theories, and they try to disprove these theories, including their own. (As I explained in What is Science? in my (incomplete) series on the previous creationism seminar, one of the foundations of science is attempting to falsify (disprove) your theory. The more you fail to do so, the more you can trust it.)

If “creation science” want any respect, creationists should be trying to disprove their own theories using evidence, and they should disprove evolution using evidence, not just appealing to “authority”, especially not appealing to the “authority” of misquotes.

Getting back to Gould, he spends a lot of time arguing for punctuated equilibrium, and arguing against gradualism. Gradualism would suggest a continuous fossil record, while punctuated equilibrium would explain why transitional forms are relatively rare. In the process of doing so, he wrote a lot about the rarity of transitional forms, providing creationist quote-miners with a gold mine. From Gould’s article, Evolution as Fact and Theory:

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists—whether through design or stupidity, I do not know—as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.

Here is an example of a quote mine, very similar to one used in the slides in Dr Batten’s seminar (his slides probably didn’t have as much info, but the first sentence was key to what he wanted to communicate):

The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persist as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils ….We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.” – Stephen J. Gould – “Evolution’s Erratic Pace,” Natural History, vol. 86 (May 1987), p. 14.

Notice he is talking here about our favored account of evolution, referring to gradualism. In the creationism seminar, this quote was mined and taken out of context in order to undermine evolution as a whole. For a thorough treatment of this quote mine, explaining the context, see Quote #3.2 on the Quote Mine Project. To borrow “John (catshark) Pieret”‘s words from that page:

Gould, in this article and many more over the next twenty years, consistently and extensively explained his position and the evidence for evolution, including transitional forms found in the fossil record. The constant abuse of the body of Gould’s life’s work in the face of this is not merely dishonest, it is despicable.

Now, to Batten’s talk, using Auke’s transcription with minor corrections (Dr Colin Patterson, Archaeopteryx):

Batten: … if you go back a bit further you find a common ancestor with us, and <..> back further, you find a common ancestor with bananas, and all the way back to microbes that made themselves uh on the Earth. And so the fossils are supposed to show this process, but in fact they don’t.

As Stephen Jay Gould, a famous evolutionist, said, that, uh, the fact that the fossils don’t show evolution, is a trade secret of palaeontology, the study of fossils. If you go uh to the British Museum of Natural History, there is a palaeontologist there, by the name of Dr Colin Patterson, and he he wrote a book about evolution, but in that book he didn’t have any examples, like pictures or illustrations, of transitional fossils, of something becoming something else, and he was asked about that, and he replied and said

“I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book, if I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. Yet Gould and the American museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. I will lay it on the line: there is not one such fossil for which one could make a water-tight argument.”

Another misquote? Who knows. An in-depth treatment of an attempt to investigate this quote can be found at Patterson Misquoted.

Batten:Well there are a handful that get an airing at University, to convince students that evolution is true. But the big picture is that they are missing. And the ones that have an airing now, in 20 years time, will fall of their perch and will be replaced by some other conjectural transitional fossil.

No substance in that paragraph, nothing to respond to. Just unsubstantiated sweeping claims. Or lies, even.

Batten:Let me show you what happens. This is actually a dinosaur family tree from the Chicago Field Field Museum of Natural History, and we have the dinosaur family tree there. And uh we have all these different types of dinosaurs, uh sauropods, and uh tyrannosaurs and so on, and birds, birds are in there, what are they doing there? Well, of course the latest hypothesis is that dinosaurs evolved into birds, and birds are just a feathered dinosaur. The only problem with that is that archaeopteryx, which is a real bird, according to evolutionary dating, actually precedes by a long shot any of its supposed ancestors that are being portrayed in the museums and in popular treatments around the world.

Now I don’t know much about the Urvogel Archaeopteryx and its dating, does anyone care to contribute on this claim? Of course, with creationists’ misquoting tactics and terrible scholarship, and their refusal to own up to past mistakes, I do not blindly trust anything they say. I’d need citations… Wikipedia does have some information and explanations on the “controversy” about its phylogenetic position.

With regards to dinosaur ancestry of birds, I recently came across an article that sequenced Tyrannosaurus Rex proteins, indicating that its closest living relative currently in our databases, is the chicken. (Crocodiles and alligators have not yet been sequenced.) Popular media can be misleading, ignoring that important detail in the title: Who are you calling chicken? T. rex’s closest living relative found on the farm.

Mysteries in science are abundant. Some uncertainty about a particular specimen is not a disproof of evolution. There are many ways that evolution could be falsified though: find a contradiction in the fossil record, find a Pegasus, find a reptile with nipples, a mammal with feathers, something like that.

Creationists believe God created different “kinds”, and that some speciation could occur within kinds, but that the “kinds” are not otherwise related. A bird is a bird and a dinosaur a dinosaur, with no link between them? Ditto for fish and amphibians, reptiles and mammals, reptiles and birds, land mammals and whales? If creationism requires there to be no links between “kinds”, and if creationists were practising real science, finding transitional fossils would falsify their theory. That would explain why they keep on ignoring the transitional forms that do exist, denying the evidence: do they lack the humility needed to admit when they are wrong?

From the Panda’s Thumb blog, Transitional fossils in 18 minutes. Lots of material there, feel free to make use of the pause button and Google:

“And of course, the trees of life constructed from the fossil record are the same as those constructed from genetics, anatomy, embryology, molecular biology, and any other scientific discipline.”

Now I ask: my beef here is with CMI. Shofar hosts CMI, but for now, I choose to believe they do so out of ignorance. Is there any chance that Shofar would distance themselves from CMI, or shall I just go ahead and lump them together? I can add all my Creationism posts to the Shofar category…

Fossils take millions of years to form.

What an incredibly cute straw man.

Construction of the Straw Man

Gary Bates used a quote to introduce this straw man. This reminds me of the wonderful technique of misdirection used by magicians. By having a third party “introduce” the straw man, by placing lies in other people’s mouths, Gary Bates maintains some level of deniability. “No, I didn’t say that, some guy that came up to me said it.” This is very similar to Fred May quoting a lie from the pulpit in Shofar in the second quarter of 2004. Fred May didn’t lie. He didn’t even say the lie was truth. However, the quoted lie was presented in a fashion providing an opportunity for a credulous audience to swallow it. (For the record, the quoted lie was the one about NASA proving Joshua’s missing day: Snopes, Progressive Theology. I tried sending Pastor Sias le Roux an email inquiring about the matter, but received no reply. That was the beginning of the end of my 2004 Shofar stint.)

The quote:

A guy came up to me and said to me “You creationists talk about operational science, and you choose to ignore it.” I said “What are you talking about?” “Well, fossils. We know fossils take millions of years to form” he said. “Therefore your young earth ideas go straight out the window. We know fossils take millions of years to form.”

Once a straw man like this has been constructed, the rest is really quite predictable.

Hacking Apart the Straw Man

The first hack at the straw man was a picture of a fossil of an ichthyosaur giving birth, as proof that fossils could not take millions of years to form. I will spare you Gary Bates’ rhetoric on this matter. If you’re really bored, you can take a look at the Answers in Genesis entry about this.

No, wait, I cannot spare you Gary Bates’ rhetoric, I have to share it.

See what’s coming out of the birth canal? A baby! See? Frozen in the rocks almost. Preserved in the process of giving birth. …(?)… giving birth for millions of years while it was slowly being fossilised? It would be a pretty difficult labour, wouldn’t it? [cue lots of laughter from the choir.]

The second hack at the straw man was made in conjunction with taking a swipe at school textbooks. The story goes (somewhat paraphrased):

A fish swims along, sinks to the bottom, and is slowly fossilised. A little bit of mud, a little bit of water, sediment building up over millions of years, burying the fish. And then the process starts again, another one dies…

Right, another straw man constructed, time to take another nice couple of hacks at it:

Now lets go back a step here. Because in the real world, do fish generally sink to the bottom when they die? [cue a "No" from the choir]. No, they don’t. Do they? Maybe if any of you have been scuba-diving or snorkelling, have you noticed all the thousands of dead fish on the ocean floor waiting to be fossilised? [cue laughter] Of course not! Go home and do the experimental method, add a teaspoon of cyanide to the fish tank, find out if fish sink or float. [cue laughter]

Etcetera etcetera. Further hacks at the straw man, interspersed with laughter: examples of a fossilised miner’s hat and a roll of fossilised fencing wire, as proof that fossils can form rapidly. A question whether the dinosaur fossils you dig up come with labels stating how old they are [cue "no"]… (Um… Oh, wait, yea, the dinosaur fossils at the Creation Museum do have labels. Now if only the Creation Scientists could go bury those labels with the fossils, then we’d know how old they are, eh? Sigh, labels. Hehe. As if labels prove more than the dating techniques scientists use.)

This is how it looks to me: Ridicule, with a nice flavour of “oh those dumb scientists, if only they were as smart as us… if only they attended one creationism seminar, in ten minutes we’ll explain to them why decades and decades of serious scientific study is obviously wrong. I mean, c’mon, it’s obvious! Because we’re laughing at them and we’re so smart!

Undoubtedly they will say the same about the scientists. “Oh, the scientists think they’re better than us. They think they’re so smart, and we’re not, and they laugh at us”… I’m not completely sure how often this happens. You do get your self-righteous “better than thou” scientists that prefer to mock and ridicule the uneducated. While I think that is abhorrent behaviour, I understand it completely. It is a reaction to behaviour that they believe is abhorrent.

The Truth?

Now I am no palaeontologist, I have recently handed in my Masters’ thesis in digital signal processing. I did not even do biology at school, because our school system killed my interest in the interesting subject matter to the point that I was disinterested in having to learn any facts like a parrot. However, even I, relatively uneducated in these matters, save for my incurable curiosity and thirst for knowledge about this remarkable universe, can easily point out the flaws and likely explanations. Or is it just my love for critical thinking?

I’m hoping someone with more knowledge will correct me when I’m wrong. (I also wish Gary Bates had the same attitude.)

Science does not claim that fossils take millions of years to form. Science claims only that the fossils formed millions of years ago. Of course there aren’t thousands of fish lying on the ocean floor waiting to be fossilised. If there were, our fossil record would be so much more complete, valuable fossils would not be so rare, and the existence or absence of a continuous, gap-less fossil record would be much easier to demonstrate. Or maybe not, as the transitional fossils would be hidden amongst billions and billions of other fossils?

School textbooks: if they’re really that bad, they need to be improved. Unless Gary Bates is wilfully telling lies, he is demonstrating the gaps in our education system. If young earth creationism is a fact, it should not be necessary to resort to straw-man arguments. It should not be necessary to appeal to ignorance. It appears we either all need a better understanding of fossils and palaeontology, or dramatically improved critical thinking skills.

We hope to organise a series of talks on these matters early next year. If our school education system is also this poor, it would be a valuable service to all students on campus to introduce them to some serious science. I’m thinking the series should include a palaeontologist that can explain fossil formation and the reasons why scientific consensus concludes specific fossils formed millions of years ago.

Who is “we”? I’m not completely sure yet, but all will become clear in due time. We’re hoping for a diverse group cooperating for the benefit of everyone on campus. We also hope to include theologians in this series, to provide some context about the book of Genesis.

Personally, I’m hoping we can also give Shofar a slot in the series. I believe it is important for everyone to hear Shofar’s perspective as well. I will see what I can do about convincing “the others” of this idea.

A Celebration of Ignorance

Back to a Gary Bates quote:

And maybe this is the way that you can reach people using this subject matter. You don’t have to be really that informed about it. I actually said to the guy “Are you interested in fossils? I’m interested in fossils. Is there a particular fossil you’ve got a problem with?” Think about it. Do most people know the names of fossils? Do you know the names of those fossils? Some of you might, if you have studied palaeontology, but the average person in the street doesn’t. And that is my point. Most people think fossils take millions of years to form, based on what they’ve been told.

Oh what a celebration of ignorance. What a celebration of uninformed, uneducated bunk. I wonder how many people attending the seminar had studied palaeontology.

So why is such bunk swallowed whole? Because there is only one important thing in the world: to avoid going to hell after you die. To go to seventh heaven after you die. Often a fundamentalist will try to save you not because he is compassionate and does not want to see you burn in hell (they sometimes celebrate the fact that sinners will burn), but rather to carry out the divine mandate they have been given. It is their mission on earth to try and “save” as many people as they can. And they really do believe this. With such a perspective, using uneducated misinformation to talk about fossils is completely understandable, as fossils are really not important. Getting saved is much more important than knowing the truth…

The thing that causes non-Shofar Christians much grief, is the damage vocal creationists are doing to the sharing of Jesus’ message (the gospel, or “good tidings” or “good news”). By equating “good news” with logical fallacies and lies, people become disinterested in this “supposed good news”. This dogma is dangerous… They all sense it. Why can’t you?

If you would like to understand what fundamentalistic Christianity looks like to the outsider, you can take a look at Get the Good News Right.