The article and video hit a number of frequent objections to evolution.  Actually, it would be more correct to say that the article and video address a number of objections to a strawman caricature of evolution.

The distinction is important because more often than not, the vocal evolution deniers out there will start their sales pitch by claiming that "evolution says <something>", and typically that <something> is either something that evolution doesn't "say" at all, or else "says" quite a bit differently than the denier suggests.  Some examples:

• Have you ever seen a dog give birth to a cat?
• Evolution says that man came from monkeys, so why are there still monkeys?
• DNA evidence proves that all humans came from one woman!
• Most mutations are harmful and would kill an organism!

The first two, of course, are the same concept phrased slightly differently, and reflect at least three misunderstandings - that individual organisms evolve directly into other individual organisms like some sort of Pokémon,  that one species will cease to exist once it gives rise to a new species, and that humans are descended from monkeys.  (There's a part in the video starting at 5:33 that covers these with a nice little graphic.)

The third one is a distortion of the concept of the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA). We commonly see the term applied to the unfortunately named idea of a Mitochondrial Eve - the most recent common female ancestor of all living humans.¹

The reason that it's a distortion is that the MRCA depends on what group you're looking at.  The MRCA of all living humans is not required to be the MRCA of all humans that have ever lived:

(From Wikipedia)

The MRCA of everyone alive today could thus have co-existed with a large human population, most of whom either have no living descendants today or else are ancestors of a subset of people alive today. The existence of an MRCA does therefore not imply the existence of a population bottleneck or first couple.

At this point, some alert individual might assert that even if you expand the pool to all humans that have ever lived, you still necessarily end up back at a first couple, but you'd be wrong because there isn't a requirement that the female MRCA and the male MRCA live at the same time.  Think about it.  If our notional female MRCA had children by two different men, and descendants of all of those children survived to the present day, then neither of her partners would be the male MRCA - her father would be.  (There's also the little matter of identifying exactly where you draw the line between human and non-human.  For a very relevant graphical demonstration, see here.)

The last point is simply untrue.  Most mutations aren't fatal.  Most are neutral.  The fatal ones tend to get removed from the population pretty quickly for obvious reasons.  Neutral ones can just sort of drift around in the gene pool without any particular consequences.  Beneficial ones tend to increase in frequency.²

We could go on with this, and we'd see the same thing over and over again.  That suggests to me that the evolution deniers out there aren't at all interested in addressing the subject on the basis of facts and evidence, but rather seek to turn it into an exercise in emotional manipulation.³

The lesson here, as always, is to do some fact checking when you run across references to cats birthing dogs and such.  If nothing else, ask yourself  "if this is such a simple and obvious flaw in evolution, then why on Earth does anyone still accept it?"   Your answer should be "maybe this supposed flaw has already been addressed, or maybe whoever proposed it doesn't understand evolution very well."

-Jay

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¹So named because mitochondria within cells come from the mother - sperm lack mitochondria. Similarly, we can talk about a Y-chromosomal Adam.

²But remember that beneficial depends on the environment, and may be a tradeoff.  Conspicuous physical displays may increase the chances of finding a mate, but may also increase the chances of getting eaten.

³Ken Ham is perhaps the current master of this approach. What the man actually knows about evolution is unlikely to fill a thimble, so he takes the fear-mongering approach of linking evolution to everything that is bad in the world. Ham also attracts attention for his horribly distorted theology. James McGrath recently had a post up summarizing some of the criticism Ham has been receiving from within the evangelical community of late.

The main idea here is that ideas interact with each other to produce new ideas, and those new ideas drive progress. 

Enjoy.

-Jay

A couple of weeks ago, James McGrath posted an article on his blog, Exploring Our Matrix, containing this video:

This is part of a longer HBO documentary called Friends of God, which can be found here.

Anyway, in his post, James (who, I'll point out, is an associate professor of religion at Butler University)  calling out  people like Ken Ham (who, near as I can tell, isn't an associate professor of anything) for "false teaching".  My take on James' post is that he feels that people like Ham are encouraging Christians to stand up for pseudoscience rather than relevant social issues.¹

So, it seems that Ham took note of James' post and took exception, and wrote this little screed to whine about it.

A few things that immediately jump out at me:

1. Ham fails to link to James' original post.
2. Ham fails to address James' main complaint - that Ham and folks like him are distracting people from what should be the main efforts of Christianity.
3. Ham does little more than accuse James of not being a real Christian - he plays the No True Scotsman card.²

Really, when all is said and done, Ham hasn't done much more than complain that James was mean to him and that he's right and James is wrong.

This puts James in the same Ham-category as folks like P.Z. Myers,³ which is rarefied company indeed, so in an odd way, Ham may have done James a favor (I'd venture to say that Exploring Our Matrix will be pretty close to the top of Google hits for  "McGrath Ham Answers in Genesis").

Now, there are several facets to this little kerfluffle.

One is that it becomes obvious very quickly that Ham is using a different definition of Christian than James is.  James' definition is fairly broad and inclusive.  Ham's is much more narrow, and appears to mean "evangelical fundamentalist Christians who espouse a literal interpretation of the Bible."  It's interesting, but not particularly surprising, that Ham's definition excludes the majority of people around the world who would self-identify as Christian, including most Catholics and many mainline Protestant denominations.  What's interesting about this is that Ham's brand of Christianity seems to be much more concerned with pushing an agenda based on reinforcing a literal/inerrant view of the Bible rather than doing the sort of humanitarian things that we like to think of religious organizations as doing.  Ham's Creation Museum cost around $27 million to build.  What would $27 million buy in humanitarian aid?  Based on numbers from Doctors Without Borders, here are some possibilities:⁴

And Ham would rather spend the money convincing people that this is a true story:

Another is that Ham is counting on his readers not to look any further into the matter than what he (and by extension Answers in Genesis) say.  He's banking on the fact that his readers are content to believe him without bothering to check into the matter for themselves.    To put it more bluntly, Ken Ham doesn't want his readers to think for themselves.  He wants an unthinking "Amen, Brother Ken!".⁵ Ham assumes that his readers are ignorant not only about science but about Biblical scholarship, and that they won't bother to fact check him.

A third is that Ham makes the claim that "the Gospel" is not dependent on the age of the Earth, which I initially thought was meant to leave open the possibility that if someone were to somehow prove to him that the Earth is ~4.5 billion years old, he would still believe the Gospel messages.  The problem is that Ham has stated clearly (and even says at the start of the video clip above) that he believes in the literal truth of the Bible, and he's festooned his Creation Museum with exhibits and unscientific propaganda that presupposes a semi-literal interpretation of the Genesis creation stories.⁶ On further reflection, though, I think he probably meant the  statement to imply that the age of the Earth is dependent on the Gospel, which would be more consistent with Ham's overall message.

One thing that James didn't comment on was the fact that in the video, Ham was going directly after the kids.  His audience appeared to be composed almost entirely young children, and he had them under his spell.  He wasn't attempting to educate them - he was attempting to indoctrinate them, and he appears to be fairly successful at doing that.⁷ For many of those kids, the message Ham sends to those kids gets reinforced at home, at church, probably in school, and perhaps in the books and videos they're exposed to.  How are children (or adults, for that matter) supposed to develop the ability to think for themselves if they're never given the chance to see any information that contradicts what they've been told?

A bit later, but still early in the video, there's a sound-bite from a woman talking about how the Biblical creation myths are much easier to explain to children.⁸ As if ease of explanation is an indicator of accuracy.   Sure, evolution can be a complicated subject to explain to kids, because it necessarily requires giving them some background, but there are resources that can help, such as  Daniel Loxton's Evolution - How We and All Living Things Came to Be. (NCSE has a sample of the book available here.)  I can appreciate the desire of a parent to want to give her children simple, concise explanations to complex questions,  but the creation myths really don't explain anything.  They just push the questions away and substitute nonsense for answers.

But I digress.

What Ham has done with regard to James' comments is not unusual - in fact it's a very predictable response:

1) Gainsay your opponent's criticisms without substantively addressing them.
2) Accuse your opponent of apostasy.
3) Reiterate your position as many times as you can, and back it up with sources that agree with you.
4) Move on to a different topic as fast as you can.

This technique works surprisingly well in live debates (because the format of discussion favors quick, broad responses and isn't usually conducive to detailed rebuttals), lectures (because they tend to be less interactive and it's relatively easy to dodge difficult questions), and books (I trust that I needn't explain why).  I take some comfort in the fact that it's less effective on the internet for many reasons, not the least of which is that a certain number of intellectually honest and curious people will take the time to look at both sides of the matter and make an informed choice for themselves.

I give James a lot of credit.  By going against the grain of the more conservative Christian views, he's basically painting a big target on his chest.  I've seen relatively few people try to argue against his rationale - typically they do just what Ham does and resort to personal attacks.  Readers can draw their own conclusions from that.

-Jay
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¹I'm simplifying a little.

²The last time I brought up NTS here was pretty interesting.

³P.Z. visited Ham's Creation Museum a while back.  This photo came from that trip.

⁴Basically I just scaled the Doctors Without Borders numbers up to a $27 million donation. I also will point out in passing that while many religious organizations perform good humanitarian work, it's not uncommon to attach sectarian strings to it. A missionary group that goes into an area and makes conversion either an expressed or implied condition of rendering aid, be it building a school, providing clean water, providing vaccinations, or whatever, is little better than a group that goes into an area and forces conversions at gunpoint.

⁵I've said it before, I'm sure, but if a position like Ham's is so unquestionably correct, it should be able to stand up to the scrutiny of, say, pretty much the entire population of working biologists, astronomers, geologists, and so forth.  Ham's position of Young Earth Creationism doesn't stand up to much of anything.

⁶Stories. Plural. Ham does what a majority of people do and conflates the two distinctly different creation accounts in Genesis into a single story. The first runs from Gen 1:1 to Gen 2:4.  The second picks up at Gen 2:4.  Pay attention to the order in which things are created, particularly man and woman.  I use the term "semi-literal" here to emphasize that his hybridized story contains elements of both but is identical to neither of the Genesis accounts.  He's basically crafted a third story.

⁷This isn't a particularly difficult process, either, as anyone who has ever been around small children that believe in Santa Claus can appreciate.  Once they bite on the base story (Santa, for example), you convince them that questioning the story has dire consequences (Santa won't bring you presents), and you try to shield them from information that contradicts the story (like the jerk in the 4^th grade that tells everyone how he caught his dad putting his new bike together on Christmas Eve).  The same propensity that children have for believing when their parents tell them not to touch a hot stove leaves them open to believing in a fat man in a red suit handing out presents, or that a very unique rabbit leaves baskets of candy, or that Ken Ham knows what he's talking about.

⁸Shortly thereafter, the video shows some clips of a lecture addressing the question of whether there were dinosaur references in the Bible. The lecturer makes a statement about the word "dinosaur" being a new word, like "airplane", so it's not surprising that it isn't in the Bible. He then tosses out the ridiculous claim that the creature Behemoth in the Book of Job was really some sort of sauropod. There are a number of reasons why such a claim is absurd, not the least of which is that he's trying to make one creature stand in for two very diverse orders of animals. That's absurd on its face. (Also, the Biblical Behemoth is said to eat grass like an ox. Sauropods didn't eat grass. The teeth are wrong.)  I'm fairly certain that the Bible makes no mention of marsupials, either, which (in my opinion) is at least as interesting a problem as the lack of dinosaurs.

⁹Ham's position - that the Earth is young, the Flintstones could have been a documentary, and that organisms were created pretty much in the same forms that they have now should cause serious heartburn for anyone that takes the time to think it through.  If you somehow manage to stitch the creation stories together successfully, then you've got two mutually inconsistent flood stories to deal with.  Trying to weave all of this together into a c0herent history requires introducing all sorts of wild speculations and special one-off miraculous events.  It's not pretty.

The scientific evidence is completely consistent with a universe that's in the neighborhood of 15 billion years old, with an Earth that's around 4.5 billion years old, with life initially emerging around 3.5 billion years ago and gradually evolving into the various organisms we see today.

The scientific evidence is completely inconsistent with a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation stories.

In Ken Ham's world, science is wrong and the Bible is unassailably correct. Period. He frames the matter as an all-or-nothing choice, when in fact there are many others, such as:

• The Bible is the aggregated product of many human writers attempting to explain the world around them as best they could through the filter of their evolving religious views. Using it to explain how the universe, the Earth, and life on Earth came to be is an inappropriate use of the material. The universe, the Earth, and life are understood increasingly well through science. If you want to learn about the Earth, look at the Earth, not ancient creation myths.
• The Bible is, in fact, literally true, but God deliberately made the universe and the Earth look old in order to fool us. Perhaps this was to test us, or perhaps God has a strange sense of humor, but in any case, this requires deliberate, calculated deception on the part of God.
• The Bible is, in fact, literally true, but Satan screwed around with the universe after creation to make it look old in an attempt to lure people away from God. This raises a number of questions about why God would allow Satan to get away with this, but again we have God being a willing party to a deception.
• L. Ron Hubbard had it right and it's all about volcanic eruptions, DC-9 planes flying through space, and thetans.
• An Invisible Pink Unicorn poofed the universe into existence last Thursday, creating everyone in-place with a full set of memories and experiences that never really happened.
• The universe as we know it is really a complex computer simulation, we are nothing other than subprograms within the simulation, and the illusion of our free will is an artifact of our programming. The apparent ages of everything are just parameters of the simulation.

To me, the first option seems to be the most reasonable.

My Sunday School class is on hiatus this weekend, else we'd be participating.  As it is, I'll just bring the topic up next week.

At risk of bringing up the topic of accomodationism, I think the CLP and Evolution Weekend are valuable and relevant efforts to help get people to realize that accepting the evidence for evolution doesn't automatically require them to reject their religious convictions.

More later.

-Jay

(I included the video here, just for completeness.)

The video segues into biologist Richard Dawkins giving an eloquent and easy to follow explanation of why Baldwin's question is so far off the mark that it's not even wrong. Briefly:

1. Evolution doesn't claim that man came from apes.
2. Evolution does assert that humans share a common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos.
3. Evolution does assert that the group (humans + chimpanzees + bonobos) shares a common ancestor with gorillas.
4. Evolution does assert that the group (humans + chimpanzees + bonobos + gorillas) shares a common ancestor with orangutans.

Note that none of the assertions requires any population of modern apes to transform into modern humans.  Baldwin's rhetoric proceeds from a misinterpretation of evolution, so it's broken from the very start.  It may be helpful to consider a typical human extended family:

1. You share common ancestors with your first cousins.²
2. The group (you + your first cousins) shares common ancestors with your second cousins.
3. The group (you + your first cousins + your second cousins) shares common ancestors with your third cousins.

None of these relationships require any of your cousins to transform into you, nor do they require your grandparents (or great grandparents, or great great grandparents...) to transform into you.

I'm not going to spend any more time picking on Baldwin - Dawkins³ does it better in the video - but I am going to spend a little time looking more closely at the question itself.

The basic question "if man evolved from apes, then why are there still apes?" can take on numerous derivative forms (one particularly interesting one I've seen goes something like "if evolution says that chimps are the closest relatives of humans, then why is <some gene> in chickens almost identical to a human gene?"), but they all collapse into a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of common descent.

Absent some background in biology in general and evolution in particular, it isn't really a stupid question at all - it's a very natural one.⁴

One reason that this is the case, I suspect, is because our practical experience is that organisms don't seem to change from generation to generation - our cats always have kittens, so to speak.  The kittens may have some odd markings in their fur, or an extra toe on each paw, but they're fundamentally still cats, and nobody makes much of it because everyone knows that there is a considerable amount of variation present in cats.  When you look at things like lions and tigers, it's fairly obvious to most people that those animals are essentially much larger versions of housecats, and if you see a reconstruction of a sabre-toothed cat in a museum, it's cat-like enough to pass muster.  There is enough essential cat-ness to these animals that their relatedness is readily apparent.⁵

What aren't as readily apparent to the average person are the minute differences between individuals - a slightly thicker coat, slightly longer legs, and so forth - that selection pressures can act on over many, many generations.

It can be a bit difficult to accept the idea that minute, almost imperceptible differences can accumulate over time to the extent that one branch of descent could lead to chimpanzees and one branch to humans, but if you really think it through it makes a lot of sense.⁶

The point here is that questions like Baldwin's aren't intrinsically stupid questions.  If they're asked sincerely by someone who is genuinely curious, they're very useful questions, because they can lead to informative, constructive dialog.⁷

I think that in the end, that's what works best.

-Jay

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¹Baldwin's words were slightly different, but went to the same point.

²Those ancestors are your grandparents, just in case that isn't obvious.

³I may as well throw this in here. There are a lot of folks who dismiss Dawkins out of hand because he is, among other things, a vocal atheist. Big deal. He also happens to be one of the most gifted science writers on the planet.  Dismissing Dawkins qua science writer because of his position on religion makes no more sense than dismissing him because he wears glasses.

⁴That said, when high-profile creationist personalities continue to toss this question out even after they've been offered repeated explanations and clarifications, one begins to wonder what their motivation really is...

⁵I do not intend to suggest by this example that domestic cats are descended from tigers. Or smilodons.

⁶It's a bit like those word puzzles where you start with one word, and with each step you change one letter (subject to the constraint that each step is, itself, a valid word), you end up with a much different word than the one you started with.

⁷Personally, I'd rather talk through the concept of common descent a hundred times with someone who really wants to understand it than talk through it once with someone who is content simply to parrot arguments that they read in a Ray Comfort book.

One of the more well-known names in Young-Earth Creationist circles is Kent Hovind.¹

Hovind, also known as Dr. Dino, ran a "theme park" in Florida called Dinosaur Adventure Land (which is now closed, the land earmarked to satisfy Hovind's tax obligations) that can be thought of as a low-budget precursor of Ken Ham's Creation Museum here in Kentucky.

Hovind has drawn criticism from other Young-Earth Creationists (in addition to the usual cadre of Old-Earth Creationists and non-creationists) for using long-discredited arguments and poorly representing the YEC viewpoint.²

Anyway, Hovind has always made a big deal about the "Dr." in front of his name.  His "degree", as it turns out, is from a place called Patriot University in Colorado.  Patriot University (now known as Patriot Bible University) is nothing more than a diploma mill.³

Normally, doctoral dissertations are published. Hovind's wasn't, and both Hovind and Patriot refused numerous requests to make his dissertation available.  Well, recently that particular piece of "academic" work turned up on WikiLeaks, where it can be perused in all of its glory.  (Ed Brayton, at Dispatches from the Culture Wars has a post providing details of the provenance of the document.)

And what glory it is.  Reading the paper, one would be tempted to conclude that it isn't authentic, but it's reported to match a known copy of Hovind's dissertation in the possession of the NCSE offices.   

Any dissertation that begins with "Hello, my name is Kent Hovind"  is starting at a disadvantage, and it doesn't get any better from here.  What we have with this document is a 102 page screed against evolution that wastes no time in trying to declare evolutionary theory to be a tool of Satan.

On page one of his paper (after the three page dedication), Hovind writes:

In the twentieth century the major attack Satan has launched has been against the first eleven chapters of Genesis.  He knows that the entire Bible stands or falls on the validity of these chapters.  I believe that the Bible is the infallible, inerrant, inspired perfect Word of God.  I believe that the Bible needs to be read and believed as it stands.   

Now, while Hovind certainly has every right to his own beliefs, he's effectively declared that any evidence that contradicts his beliefs is automatically wrong.  (It's also worth pointing out that his claim of believing the Bible "as it stands" is at odds with many of the twisted interpretations that he makes in this document and elsewhere, and that claims of infallibility and inerrancy are extremely difficult to support.  Very telling is his next sentence:  "Christians are often guilty of neglecting or twisting the Bible to fit their lifestyle or their preconceived ideas."  Pot.  Kettle.  Black.)

I have a strong suspicion that Hovind began writing this piece with the intention of publishing it in book form - he refers to his dissertaion internally as a "book" several times, starting on page two.  Hovind also claims 16 chapters in the document, but he ends with chapter four. 

His chapter descriptions are all pretty much standard material - claims that evolution is a religion and not science (ch. 2), "effects" of evolution in the world (ch. 3), the age of the earth (ch. 4 - the last one in the dissertation as it stands now), dating methods, the conflicts between the first and second chapters of Genesis.⁴

His first chapter deals with the "history of evolution", wherein he gets straight to the business of misunderstanding the first and second laws of thermodynamics:

The first and second laws of thermodynamics are well established scientific laws that have never been observed in the universe to be broken.  The first law says that matter cannot be created nor destroyed by ordinary means. 

Ummm.  No.  The first law of thermodynamics doesn't say that.  The first law of thermodynamics deals with energy conservation and the transformation of energy between forms. 

He spends some time ranting about evolution being a response to people wanting to avoid God (which is contradicted in Darwin's own writings), and makes the claim that there is no evidence to back up "macro-evolution" (though he acknowledges that "micro-evolution" occurs, he does not appear to understand that the only difference between the two is the timescale⁵) before taking a backhanded swipe at the second law of thermodynamics:

The idea that  evolutionists try to get across today is that there is a continual upward progression.  They claim that everything is getting better, improving, all by itself as if there is an inner-drive toward more perfection and order.  This is totally opposite of the first and second law of thermodynamics.

There is so much wrong here that it's hard to know where to begin.  Evolution does not require "upward" progress in any conventional sense of the term.  Evolution, to put it extremely simply, requires change.  Change that might be considered "upward" with respect to one environment might be quite detrimental in another.  Any sense of "perfection" is heavily dependant on an organism's context.  Hovind is also implicitly using a flawed version of the second law of thermodynamics.  At the heart of his claim, even though he doesn't explicitly state it, is an assumption that the second law says that everything tends towards disorder.  The main flaws in this assumption are that the second law deals with isolated  systems, and the Earth is not an isolated system (there's a big ball of burning hydrogen 93 million miles away that provides energy to the Earth), and the word "disorder" as it is commonly understood is not equivalent to "increase in entropy".⁶   

A large amount of text is spent attempting to claim that Satan was responsible for evolutionary thought.   Hovind has a thing against pride (there goes another irony meter), and weaves his bizarre history of evolution with various Biblical stories where God punishes humanity for their pride.  I won't argue that there aren't a number of stories where pride leads to punishment, but it seems to be a stretch to cite Genesis 9:22 as somehow encapsulating evolutionary ideas.  He continues with a discussion of how different "branches" of evolution...well...evolved in the Eastern and Western parts of the world, careening off of  Thales, Pythagoras, Socrates, Democrates, and Alexander the Great (among others), at each step identifying connections between those individuals and either evolution, atheism, or both (in Hovind's mind the two are almost indistinguishable.)  He takes shots at Hinduism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism (he conflates the religion with Zoroaster the man), Buddhism, and Taoism, and eventually goes after any flavor of Christianity different from his own. 

In due course, at page 29, he manages to get to Charles Darwin, by way of his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (who, as we are informed by Hovind, was "so fat they had to cut a curve in the dining room table so that he could get up to the table").  He drags in Communism.  He makes the bizarre claim that "religion has not evolved".  He claims that evolution is a religion (and shows that he doesn't understand either very well),

And so it goes.  Page after page of irrelevant ad hominem,  mischaracterizations and misunderstandings of various sciences (such as geology). 

Hovind trots out an impressive number of typically bad arguments, very few of which have anything at all to do with the science of evolution:

1. He displays no obvious understanding of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
2. Around page 40, he runs afoul of Godwin's Law when he plays the Hitler card.
3. He quotemines scientists like the late Stephen Jay Gould, and in doing so completely fails to grasp Gould's explanation of punctuated equilibrium.
4. He comes back to the absurd "evolution is a religion" argument numerous times.  Perhaps he thought that if he repeated that claim often enough, it would become true.

At page 60, Hovind re-establishes that he actually knows very little about evolution with an example about canaries on an island (a not-particularly-subtle swipe at Darwin's finches):

Let's suppose we let loose five hundred canaries on an island.  The only food for the canaries to eat on that island are nuts with a relatively tough shell around them.  Only the canaries that had a tough beak would be able to eat the nuts and survive.  The others would starve to death.  Therefore, those that had tougher beaks would be able to reproduce the next generation.

So far, so good...

If we came back to that island in about two hundred years, we would find that all of the canaries on the island have tough beaks.  That is not evolution.  That is simply variation.  You would still have canaries.

When one FAIL is not enough

And away we go, off the rails and careening down into the canyon.  Sorry, Kent.  This is precisely what evolution is.  Come back in another few hundred years or so with some of your orignal canaries and see what happens.  You'd have evolution and perhaps speciation to look at.  Hovind continues:

The trait of having a tough beak was in the genetic structure to begin with.  Nothing new has been added.  We have only selected a certain portion of the population to survive.  That is variation, not evolution.

OK.  The variation in this example is the continuum of beaks present in the original population.  The selection pressure is the availability of nothing but hard-shelled nuts.  The selection pressure favors birds with sturdy beaks, so sturdy beaks become more prevalent in the population.  That's evolution.   Concepts like this are introduced to elementary students by the fifth grade.  Hovind wraps up this particular example of misunderstanding with the following:

Those canaries will never, given all the time you want, will never change into elephants, or dinosaurs, or trees, or tomatoes.  If they did, that would be macro-evolution.   Micro-evolution is small little variations between the species that have been in the genetic structure by [sic].  It has nothing whatsoever to do with the terms that are used today about evolution.  

I need a three-facepalm picture.  Micro- and macro-evolution are terms that creationist authors like to throw around a lot, but they don't quite mean what Hovind wants them to mean.  Micro-evolution is usually used to refer to small changes within a population over a few generations.  By this definition, the shift in distribution of beak types in Hovind's hypothetical canaries would be micro-evolution.  Macro-evolution is essentially micro-evolution over many generations.  The same mechanisms are in play, with the key difference being time.⁷ 

The remaining material in Hovind's paper is more of the same, with a liberal seasoning of quotemines and wrapping up with a chapter on the age of the earth.  Hovind claims that the earth is merely "six or seven thousand years old", not several billion.  This is why he can accept "micro-evolution", but can't get a handle on "macro-evolution" - there isn't enough time in his worldview.  He spends quite a bit of time giving what I can only describe as a rambling, incoherent monologue about the nature of time, which culminates in a poem.  Much of his argumentation is of the form "evolutionists⁸ believe something but I believe something else, and I can't explain why I believe it, I just do, so there!"

Hovind isn't much of a factor in the creationist camp these days - it's difficult to work from jail - but the arguments used in his dissertation are fairly standard.  The interesting thing about Hovind's paper isn't its originality.  The interesting thing is the audacity.  By investing a small amount of money and apparently a smaller amount of time, one can essentially purchase a Ph.D. degree from a place like Patriot.  One can then use that otherwise worthless degree to lend oneself an air of authority.  Many people, perhaps most people, assume that someone with a Ph.D. after their name is credible and knowledgable, and that's just not the case. 

Charlatans like Hovind depend on people not investigating their claims.  They depend on readers and listeners accepting their words at face value.  And they depend on people being frightened by the prospect of looking into things for themselves.

They depend on ignorance. 

Jay

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¹Maybe not so well-known now, since he's been in Federal prison for the last few years after being convicted of tax fraud (among other things).

²Hovind also adds an element of tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory to the mix...

³For those unfamiliar with the term, a diploma mill is basically a non-accredited institution that will award a degree to pretty much anyone willing to pay the price. Sometimes there is some rudimentary coursework involved.

⁴The disagreements between Gen. 1 and Gen. 2 are numerous and significant. There are major discrepancies in both the order and timing of creation events, and it's impossible to harmonize the two without either dismantling one of the stories or introducing fanciful explanations that aren't supported by the texts. When understood as foundational myths, they work pretty well and the two stories give different perspectives. When understanding them as literal historical accounts, they simply don't hold together.

⁵He also tries to define macro-evolution as "changing into a different kind of animal", which seems to evoke the old canard of a cat giving birth to a dog. Seriously - if you're going to claim that evolution is wrong, at least do yourself the favor of actually understanding it.

⁶Which has higher entropy - a cookie or the set of ingredients arranged on the table? Which seems more "disorderly"?

⁷There is a certain probably unintentional humor to Hovind's comment about canaries changing into dinosaurs.

⁸Or atheists. Hovind seems to be of the opinion that anyone who accepts evolution is an atheist.

http://www.zazzle.com/darwin2009

I mentioned in passing a while back that Ray Comfort's organization is publishing a "special edition" of Darwin's Origin of Species, complete with an introduction by Comfort himself.  Comfort has planned to  give away copies of this edition at a number of colleges and universities around the U.S. and Canada over the next week.   

NCSE's Genie Scott recently engaged Ray in a debate of sorts in the God & Country blog at U.S. News , where she expressed criticisms of Comfort's project.  (She was writing in response to his article, here.  The second round of the exchange can be found here and here.)

Comfort's original printing of his edition left out several key chapters from Darwin's original work.  Scott rightfully called him out on this, and evidently there has been a second print run that restores those chapters (but, oddly, left some other things out.)

The "introduction" that Comfort assembled is full of misrepresentations, distortions, plagiarism, and (since he can't refute evolution on scientific grounds) religious appeals.¹ It's reasonably clear that Comfort doesn't expect to convert anyone who already accepts evolution, so the only logical reasons for his "introduction" are to preemptively ensnare readers who aren't familiar with the topic or to reinforce the existing misconceptions of readers who aren't likely to fact check him.²

Enter NCSE's Don't Diss Darwin Institute.  This site functions as an excellent one-stop shop for anyone interested in taking a closer look at the claims made in Comfort's "introduction". 

Among the useful contents at the site are:

• An analysis/synopsis of Comfort's introduction highlighting many of his errors and misrepresentations.
• A resource page which includes a printable flyer and bookmark discussing some of Comfort's broad category errors.
• A flyer by Kenneth Miller of Brown University that fact-checks Comfort.
• A links page with an excellent assortment of informational links and references, including a link to Comfort's introduction on his own site.

There is also a link to perhaps the most useful resource of all - the complete works of Darwin on-line.  You can read Origin on-line, free of charge, and also take a look at Darwin's personal letters and writings that give a tremendous amount of insight into his personal beliefs.

If you happen to find yourself in possession of Comfort's "special edition" of Origin, read it.  But do your homework and don't let Comfort's dishonest, misleading introduction and shady editing fool you.  Better yet, read the book on-line and completely intact, and take the time to understand what Darwin was really writing about.

 (HT to Greg Laden and the folks at SkepChick, and any others that I forgot.)

Jay

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¹While reading his intro, I was reminded of his earlier book, Evolution: A Fairy Tale for Grownups. I have a copy of this insipid little piece of dreck, and I had started a detailed review of it that I think I'll dig out and complete.

²Given the sheer amount of incorrect information in his introduction, I'm inclined to say that Comfort is counting on his readers not bothering to verify his claims.  Moreover, he's implying that if his readers do check into his assertions, they're bad Christians.  In other words, he's backing up his assumption of intellectual laziness on the part of his readers with scare tactics.

NPR has an interesting video showing how a virus infects a cell and hijacks the cellular machinery to reproduce.

Revere at Effect Measure has a post discussing the notion of "swine flu parties" to deliberately expose children to the virus.  (After the mold of "chickenpox parties").

Revere also has a post discussing the recently confirmed transmission of H1N1 between humans and cats.  That's unsettling. 

The CDC has an information-rich page about many things H1N1, including information on the supply of vaccine. 

It's well worth the time it takes to understand the situation with H1N1, and to speak with your physician about it.  Much of what turns up on the nightly news and in the papers is distilled down to sound bites, and may not give you all the information you need to make the best decisions.  Your family, friends, coworkers (and pets) will appreciate your efforts to stay healthy.

Jay

Anyway, yesterday James had a couple of posts up that help to illustrate some of the things I was trying to highlight in the last woodpecker post.

In the first article, Taking Darwin on Faith? , James has some comments on a recent Indianapolis Star article by Russ Pulliam titled Taking Darwin on Faith.  One of my comments in the last woodpecker article was that creationist authors often refer to the "faith of evolutionists".   Without even reading past the title of Pulliam's article, I could predict almost the exact content of it.  Generally, Pulliam attempts to make the case that biologists who accept evolution (which is to say pretty much every working biologist in the world) are doing so based on faith.  Or that's what he seems to be trying to do.  His article is really plate of word salad, and he dresses it with a lot of quotes from Richard Holdeman, a Presbyterian pastor and lecturer at Indiana University.   Holdeman doesn't seem to have any problem with evolution per se, but has some concerns with how some "followers of Darwin have taken his work and turned it into a theological treatise about the origins and purpose of the universe" (apparently Pulliam's words, not Holdeman's).¹

Now, those particular concerns are at the heart of the whole accommodationist issue that occasionally flares up, and they're legitimate points of discussion, but they really have very little to do with what you'd think Pulliam seems to be trying to stress based on the title of his article.

To see what Pulliam is struggling to get at, we need to unpack a few of his comments.

Scientists have taken the occasion to lament the scientific ignorance of Americans. Surveys suggest that more than half the country believes in special creation by God, as opposed to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

The occasion he's referring to is the 150^th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's Origin.  There are a lot of surveys that Pulliam could be talking about, but he's more or less correct in reporting that they consistently show that a disturbingly large percentage of Americans reject evolution.  Pulliam somewhat distorts the result because the surveys ask the question in a variety of ways, and it's not always easy to sort out whether all of the people who reject evolution do so because they believe in creationism or because they don't know enough about evolution to decide either way.  The real problem with his statement here is the term "Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection", and the reason it's a problem is that modern evolutionary theory encompasses a lot more than classical Darwinian natural selection.  It's fundamentally incorrect to equate evolutionary theory circa 2009 with evolutionary theory circa 1859, yet the vast majority of anti-evolution writers do precisely that.²

Pulliam then serves up this slice of rhetorical head cheese (emphases mine):

There certainly is ignorance about science. Some of us did better in math, English and history than in chemistry or biology. It's easy then to miss the distinction between observable data and speculation and opinion.

Yet in the debate between evolution and creation, those on the Darwinian side of the discussion often make the same error that they see in their opponents. They observe nature and evolution within species, or adaptation. From there came Darwin's evolutionary hypothesis that humans evolved from the amoebas.

Many scientists contend that the theory has been proven, or rendered undeniable, by so much research. Yet there's a leap of faith involved in Darwinian theory.

Pulliam throws in the first highlighted comment for a good reason.  The Answers In Genesis crowd likes to play this "same evidence, different conclusions" game, where they claim that looking at the evidence of the fossil record (for example) through a Biblical lens leads one to the conclusion that the flood myth is true.  The first problem is that they aren't looking at the same evidence - they'll show (again, for example) an in-situ fossil of a dinosaur, and propose a simplistic explanation of how it got there during Noah's flood a few thousand years ago.  In doing this, they completely ignore the broader geological context of the find, including the strata above and below it, as well as the chain of evidence that dates the rocks surrounding the find to millions of years old.  The fact of the matter is that AIG is doing precisely what they claim that biologists are doing - AIG is presupposing that the Biblical account is true and accurate, and then attemtping to force-fit a very narrow subset of the available data into a framework to prove their presupposition.  Pulliam is attempting the same stunt here, insinuating that "followers of Darwin" are using their presuppositions and biases to arrive at unwarranted conclusions based on improper interpretation of the data.  Really, Russ?  Really?  It couldn't possibly be that the data from geology and physics and chemistry and biology and astronomy and history and archaeology and pretty much every other -ology support an evolutionary interpretation of the data and not a literal Biblical one?

He then repeats a very common mis-statement of the concept of descent with modification.  Darwin didn't propose that "humans evolved from the amoebas".  Sorry, Russ.  That's just bullshit.  Darwin made the connection that modern organisms are modified descendants of earlier organisms.  There are bajillions of steps between amoebas and humans.  Think of it like this.  If you stand next to your biological mother, you're very similar but there are minor differences.  Nobody will accuse you of being of a different species than your mother, but neither will anyone accuse you of being her identical twin.  Now, put her mother next to her.  Same thing.  Keep going back, say, twenty generations or so.  If you were to stand next to your twenty-greats grandmother, it's unlikely that there will be very much resemblance.  Go back a hundred thousand generations.  Your hundred-thousand greats grandmother won't look anything like you at all.  But it took an extremely long time to get from her to you, and the difference between consecutive generations is very slight.  If you're going to go on against evolution, at least present evolution accurately so that others who might read your work can make intellectually honest informed decisions.³

Pulliam's last little nugget here is intended to put acceptance of evolution in the same box with religious faith, which (again) simply isn't the case.  Religious faith has a large (perhaps dominant) component of belief in a lot of intangibles.  The "leap of faith" required to accept evolutionary theory (I'm going to paraphrase James here, since I really like the way he characterizes it) is the faith necessary to trust in our ability to observe the world around us and draw logical conclusions from those observations.  If you don't have that, you've got no science at all.  (I've said before and I'll probably say many more times that biology is applied chemistry which in turn is applied physics which in turn is applied mathematics.)  You don't have medicine.  Or computers.  Or cars.  Or high definition TVs.

Pulliam makes one last comment that I want to address:

Part of the problem is defining science, which is traditionally limited to observation and experimentation.

Um.  OK.  So, Pulliam wants us to redefine science?  Observation and experimentation are pretty much the things that underpin the whole concept of science.  Certainly some experiments are designed to obtain observations, and some experiments are designed to test predictions from frameworks developed from previous observations, but to a first order we can consider science to be an iterative process of observation and experiment.  If you get too far away from that, you aren't doing science any more.  You're doing some sort of philosophy.  Pulliam doesn't make clear how he would redefine science, but based on the way he uses quotes from Richard Holdeman, he seems to want to add religious presuppositions to science, which is, frankly, wrongheaded.

That's all I want to say about Pulliam.

Now, James had another post that is probably the single most honest statement by a creationist author that I've ever seen.  He quotes a blogger by name of Todd Wood (I'm not familiar with Todd myself), who makes the following statement in a post at his place (emphasis in original):

Evolution is not a theory in crisis. It is not teetering on the verge of collapse. It has not failed as a scientific explanation. There is evidence for evolution, gobs and gobs of it. It is not just speculation or a faith choice or an assumption or a religion. It is a productive framework for lots of biological research, and it has amazing explanatory power. There is no conspiracy to hide the truth about the failure of evolution. There has really been no failure of evolution as a scientific theory. It works, and it works well.

He goes on to say that he rejects evolution because of his own faith and not because of any intrinsic scientific failing with evolution.  While I completely disagree with his conclusion, I have to respect his candor in making the statement above.

I think that's about enough on this topic for tonight.

Jay

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¹Rev. Ouabache at ChaoSkeptic has an excellent deconstruction of Pulliam's article that is well worth the read.  He deals more with the Holdeman quotes than I'm going to here.

²Darwin didn't know genetics. There are many very subtle and complex processes that go on at the molecular level that make genetics much more involved than the simple dominant/recessive trait experiments that we all saw in high school. These processes have a profound impact on evolution that Darwin simply didn't have the tools to understand.

³This reminds me of the little stunt that Ray Comfort and Mike Seaver Kirk Cameron are gearing up for - they've taken a (significantly edited) version of Darwin's Origin, slapped a badly written diatribe on the front of it essentially claiming that evolution leads to everything bad (including the Holocaust...), and are planning to give it away free on college campuses. I'm not going to spend much time on this right now beyond saying that based on Comfort's track record misrepresenting evolution at every chance he gets, despite having been corrected ad nauseum, he's nothing more than an ignorant liar. Cristina has a good video rebuttal here.   She's harsh, but she makes a lot of good points.

This is somewhat interesting in and of itself, mainly because we're used to thinking of tongues in terms of our own, which lack the bony structure.

However, the reason I've spent as many words on this as I have is because the woodpecker's tongue has been co-opted by creationists in an attempt to undermine the Theory of Evolution.  The way this works is that a creationist author latches on to an unusual feature of some organism (the woodpecker's tongue, in this case).  He then comes up with a description of that feature (which is often just flat incorrect), asserts that the Theory of Evolution can't possibly explain the feature, and then makes the unwarranted logical leap that if Evolution can't explain the feature, then the only other alternative is that the creationist position is correct.

The creationist article that was cited in the original Mental Floss article that I started from will serve as an adequate example.  It's fairly representative.  Let's take a look.

Who Designed Woodpeckers? was written by someone named Thomas F. Heinze.  Mr.  Heinze isn't known to me as one of the more common creationist writers, but apparently he has several books in print through Chick Publications.

Heinze bases his article on some observations by a design engineer named Luther Sunderland.  A key idea here seems to be that as a design engineer, Sunderland would know a designed feature if he saw one.  The article is prefaced with this introduction:

Dr. Luther Sunderland, a scientist who is an expert in design engineering, was fascinated by the skeleton of a woodpecker that he found which had recently died out in the woods. Its bones had been perfectly cleaned off by insects. As he examined the skeleton, he noticed a very strange thing: Small flexible bones exited from the woodpecker's right nostril, circled around behind its head and neck, and went into its beak on the other side of its head. What were these strange bones? Quite a number of animals have bones that that stiffen the base of the tongue, and this is essentially the purpose of these bones in the woodpecker's tongue (called hyoid bones). In the woodpecker, however, the fact that the tongue starts out backward and circles around behind the head is exceptional!

What is described here is the anatomy of an adult woodpecker.  The description starts to go off track, though, when it claims that the tongue starts out in the nostril and grows all the way around the head before exiting the mouth.  Sunderland may be a design engineer, but he's a very poor (and apparently not very curious) anatomist.  The question that Sunderland apparently failed to ask is "how does the woodpecker's tongue develop as the bird grows from a chick  into adulthood?"

This is a basic question, and if Sunderalnd (or Heinze) had taken the time to investigate, it would become clear that the tongue develops just like it does in any other bird - the hyoid grows from the throat, and the horns grow from the throat/neck region around the back of the head.  At no point in the bird's development does it have a tongue that "starts out backwards".  There are precisely two reasons for making an error like this - laziness or dishonesty.  Once we understand how the adult bird's tongue develops from the juvenile configuration by simply continuing to grow into adulthood, the argument that it's too unusual to have evolved goes out the window.  (I'll grant that if the tongue actually did start in the nasal cavity, grow up around the eye socket, back down the rear of the skull, fork to go around the structures of the throat, rejoin in the front and the grow on forward into the beak, then we would have a very unusual situation on our hands, although I'm not prepared to concede that it couldn't have evolved that way.  But the fact that we can observe the development of the tongue structures as the bird matures from embryo to adult moots that point.  It simply doesn't happen the way that Heinze and Sunderland claim, and once you recognize that, the rest of Heinze's article collapses.)

Maybe this is why Heinze very quickly shifts into the mode of painting evolution with the atheist/Godless brush.  He has to in order to make it unpalatable to his target audience.  He also sets up a very flimsy strawman of evolutionary theory that he can then take shots at, starting with the false claim that almost all mutations are inherently harmful, which is misleading.  True, some mutations are harmful, but some are beneficial and many are in and of themselves neutral.¹ Heinze (or Sunderland - it's difficult to sort out where Heinze is expounding upon Sunderland from where he's just paraphrasing him) then tries to claim that evolution would propose that the tongue would just suddenly appear in the birds:

Why not claim that a big cluster of mutations affected the bone, muscle, nerves, etc. all at once? Because almost all mutations are harmful. If you got a cluster of a thousand mutations, and one of them was helpful, hundreds of them would cause genetic diseases, that would wipe out the organism.

He's sneaky with this. He introduces it as a hypothetical question, then shifts it a little to imply that biologists actually claim that the tongue arose through a "big cluster" of changes that happened "all at once". No working biologist would claim such a thing. Biologists would (and do) claim that gradual, minute changes in the structures already present accumulated over many, many generations to produce the tongue configuration that adult woodpeckers have today. There's no merit at all to the suggestion that biologists claim that the tongue was poofed into existence all at once as a result of a large number of simultaneous mutations, and to suggest otherwise is an insult to working biologists.

Next, he introduces this howler (emphasis mine):

Evolutionists surmise that the woodpecker must have evolved from some other bird with a normal tongue that went straight out of the beak. The mutation scenario, however, could never have evolved a normal bird's tongue into woodpecker's tongue. Why? After a normal bird's tongue had turned around and started growing under the skin toward the back of its head, the tongue would have been completely useless until it had completed the entire circle. Only the last step in the evolution of the woodpecker's tongue, when it came back out of the front of the beak again would have had survival value.

Oh, please.  How much mileage does he expect to get out of this absurd notion that the tonge grows around backwards?  Maybe he thinks that if he repeats it enough it'll become true.  He certainly doesn't expect his readers to do any investigation of their own.

He can't even keep his own story straight.  He goes from the tongue originating in the nostril, to the tongue turning around and growing backwards, to this piece of work which almost starts to try to get it right:²

This evolutionary speculation claims that the woodpecker's tongue evolved from that of a normal bird: rooted back in its throat and extending straight out through the beak like that of other birds. Then, not the point end of the tongue, but the root end little by little uprooted itself from its normal attachment in the back of the throat, gradually rerooting itself step by tiny step out through the back of the opening of the bill, and taking root ever farther around the back of the head.

So, Mr. Heinze - just exactly how do biologists claim the woodpecker's tongue evolved?  You've given us three examples so far...

Heinze spends several more paragraphs blathering on about how the woodpecker's tongue would be useless once it moved around the back of its head until it could then grow long enough in the other direction to come back out of the beak.  He's crossed completely into fantasy here.  It doesn't appear to occur to him (or if it does occur, he doesn't think it's possible) that when the hyoid horns grow backwards, the part of the tongue that remains in the beak doesn't have to grow much if at all. This makes sense when we recall that the mechanism of tongue extension is that muscles take up the slack of the hyoid horns, which is translated into forward thrusting of the end of the tongue.

So in the end, what do we have here?  We have an article that grossly misrepresents not only the anatomy but the development and mechanism of an unusual feature (the woodpecker's tongue), then uses that blatantly false model to claim that an equally misrepresented Theory of Evolution can't explain it.  Implicit in the article is the expectation that the reader will not bother to check into either the model of evolution presented or the details of the bird's tongue.  The errors that he makes are not inconsequential.  If one examines the real woodpecker's tongue within the framework of real evolutionary theory, one sees a very straightforward and unsurprising modification of a bit of anatomy present in all birds, not a bizarre, inexplicable enigma that cries out for direct divine intervention.  To be blunt, Heinze is lying to his readers and counting on the likelihood that they won't notice.

The sad thing is that this approach is typical of creationist sources, from Duane Gish's Institute for Creation Research to the Discovery Institute to Answers in Genesis.  Convince your readers that evolution is some evil atheist conspiracy, present a caricature of evolution that nobody working in the field would recognize, concoct some scenario that the strawman version of evolution can't explain, and declare victory.

There is one other thing that they do, almost invariably.  The creationist authors almost always make some reference to the "faith of evolutionists", as if the only thing biologists have on their side in favor of evolution is a strong desire for it to be true, and nothing could be further from the case.  Evolution is supported by literally crushing mountains of evidence from the fossil record to analysis of conserved DNA sequences.  The long stretches of time that evolution operates with are attested from sources as varied as the geologic record to analysis of the light from distant stars, and all of the evidence is consilient with life on Earth gradually evolving over several billion years.  It's manifestly not a case of biologists grasping at a few tenuous threads of ambiguous evidence.  The creationist writers don't want their readers to recognize that, so they resort to dishonest tactics and fear mongering to discourage their readers from investigating on their own.

There's no excuse for that.

To close, I recommend the following short video from QualiaSoup:

For the reader who wants a further trustworthy introduction to what the Theory of Evolution really involves, I highly recommend the following websites:

The National Center for Science Education.

The TalkOrigins Archive.

The Panda's Thumb.

Any one of these would be an excellent place to start, and they all can help you dig as far into the subject as you care to.

Jay

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¹I need to make a very brief digression here. For purposes of this article, we need to consider that sequences of DNA make up genes, and genes get translated by cellular machinery into proteins. The amino acid sequence of the resulting protein determines the shape of the protein, and the shape of the protein plays a huge role in how it functions. Changes to the DNA (and thus the gene) ultimately alter the amino acid sequence of the resulting protein. Such alterations may change the shape of the protein enough to alter its function. If the change doesn't alter the functionality, it's a neutral change. Beneficial and harmful changes are more difficult to characterize, since we have to consider not only the function of the resulting gene products but when and how they influence the development of the organism.
²He's got the entire apparatus moving backwards, which of course isn't the case. The fork of the hyoid is never anywhere other than in the front of the throat. If Heinze had just said that the horns grew backwards, he'd have been more or less correct. But if he did that, he'd have turned what he wants to be a bizarre, one-of-a-kind structure into nothing more than a slight variation on an existing theme which is exactly what he doesn't want to do.