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…

Three weeks ago, I experienced what some might call a synchronicity (a concept introduced by Carl Jung). Wikipedia defines it as follows:

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally unrelated. In order to be synchronous, the events must be related to one another conceptually, and the chance that they would occur together by random chance must be very small.

A “fundamentalistic atheist” (sorry about the label, can’t be helped) will typically assume that synchronicity is nothing other than observational selection, i.e. bias. We remember and notice the interesting coincidences more than the uninteresting ones. The “fundamentalistic theist” will typically assume that synchronicity is definite proof of the existence of their God.

The scientist? What will the scientist do? Ideally: neither. The scientist would think: “Hey, this is interesting! Can’t we test it? Let’s test whether it is nothing other than coincidence, or something more…” (assuming funding could be found for such experiments). A scientist that would love to “prove” it, should ideally try his or her best to disprove it, in order to avoid his or her own bias. (See What is Science?)

Incidentally, the Wikipedia page seems to indicate this matter is not yet satisfactorily settled. (Not that you can take Wikipedia’s word for it, though. Wikipedia is not God after all ) The (ideal) scientist would go look for literature on the matter, to find out what experiments have been done, and what can be learned from them. He/she will then design another experiment, possibly improving on previous ones, or otherwise re-testing previous ones, to test whether this is merely coincidence and observational selection or sampling bias, or whether there really is some unexpected and unpredictable coincidences that we can not yet explain.

If the scientist finds these coincidences, the conclusion is not “Wow! There is a God!” If the scientist finds it is nothing other than sampling bias, the conclusion is not “See! There is no God!”

In the first case, the conclusion is just: Ah, there is some surprising but measurable effect that we don’t yet understand. It would seem there may be some form of “connectedness” between things in the universe. Whether that “connectedness” is God or not, is not relevant to science. (Jung, for example, believed synchronicities occur too often to be random chance, even after controlling for observational selection.)

In the second case, the conclusion is ah, it would seem accounts of synchronicity really are nothing other than a case of sampling bias. Even if the sequence of events are purely random chance, I think the subjective experience of meaning behind a random sequence of events, can still be attributed to “God”. Why not? What’s wrong with that?

In this sense, I’d argue there is no way of either proving or disproving “God”. In this sense, God isn’t within the realms of science. In this sense, I feel I must agree with Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of “non-overlapping magesteria”, though I have yet to read any of his books.

Enjoy.

ps: So the discussion of such experiences is then not in the realm of science. (I wonder, does that put such discussions outside the realm of the “Freethinking Maties” society?) If it’s not a scientific discussion, what is it? Theology perhaps? Or something similar at least?