The Clever Badger One lab accident away from being a super villain

How Not to Write a Doctoral Dissertation

(I first learned of this from James McGrath's site, so the HT goes to him.)

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.