Some creationist ads were appearing on ScienceBlogs.com advertising a free creationist booklet. PZ Myers suggested readers order some and write refutations. It sounded like fun and I haven’t blogged too much on creationism, so I thought why not? If you’re feeling masochistic, you can download the booklet PDF here.
There was so much nonsense, I thought I best focus on conceptual errors rather than going point-by-point. There was so much nonsense, I thought I best focus on just a single chapter — the one on the fossil record. Also it’s about the 3rd chapter and I’m assuming most of the others who blog about it won’t be able to take more than a few pages so this should minimise overlap! Now, I don’t know enough about the paleontological details; but I can at least try to spot the conceptual holes.
The chapter contains three major tricks:
Trick 1: Transitional Fossils are Defined Out of Existence
There’s a philosophical problem related to fossil evidence as seen through creationist eyes. Consider this typical dialogue between a creationist (C) and an evolutionary scientist (ES) about the fossil record:
C: There has never been a single transitional fossil found
ES: What about archaeopteryx? This is a transition between reptiles and birds.
C: archaeopteryx can’t be a transition. It’s simply a bird because it has [say] clearly-marked feathers.
The creationist here effectively defines transitional fossils out of existence. Since archaeopteryx is a transition between reptiles and birds, it contains some bird and some reptile features. The creationist technique is to examine archaeopteryx after the fact and declare it solely a bird (or solely a reptile, it doesn’t matter). We’re extremely unlikely to find a transitional fossil between reptiles and birds that was exactly a 50-50 feature split (in fact such a split makes no sense). This lets a creationist simply declare any transitional fossil to be “solely” of the family that they believe it’s closest to. Under this criteria, it’s simply impossible to have a transitional form.
The creationist attack on transitional fossils is based on a platonism of species: they think there are these clean, mathematically things out in the world called species. And they don’t overlap (the creationist conception of a “bird” is completely separate from “reptile”). Of course it is this very assumption that evolutionary theory has challenged. The creationist attack on fossils is therefore a case of circular reasoning.
Trick 2: A Strawman on Living Fossils and Evolutionary Trees
Much of the chapter is dedicated to refuting strawmen of evolutionary theory. For instance, evolution is supposed to have a ladder-like structure, with “lower” forms magically turning into “higher” forms over times. Because the fossil record doesn’t show this (but suggests a branching tree structure), evolution must be false! Riiight.
The booklet gleefully mentions the coelacanth, a fish believed to have been extinct for tens of millions of years before it was discovered to be a living species in 1938. They try to make it a troublesome discovery for evolution — since this was supposedly the candidate species of fish that “crawled out” of the water. Now, let’s grant for the sake of argument that this was believed. Since speciation is usually a branching process, this does not preclude the ceolacanth continuing to exist unchanged up to the present day.
If anything, the discovery of the coelacanth is a problem for creationists! The chapter has a section called “fossil record no longer incomplete”. Their claim is something like this: Darwin originally explained the lack of transitional fossils by the poverty of the geologic record. But now that we’ve had over a century of digging, it’s fairly complete, and shows no transitions. Therefore evolution is false. But this same chapter mentions that the coelacanth was alive all this time, unknown to those evil biologists!
So the fossil record is so unbelievably poor that we haven’t found one fossil coelacanth from the last 70 million years even though tens of millions of them must have died — and yet it’s so unbelievably rich that we can confidently say there were no transitional forms…To quote the classics, I don’t think the discovery of the coelacanth means what you think it means.
Trick 3: Sleight of Hand on Punctuated Equilibrium vs Gradualism
The most salient of their tricks is this: they take a specific debate within evolutionary science (between proponents of punctuated equilibrium and the more traditional “gradualists”) and present it as if it was a debate between evolution and some other alternatives. For this purpose, they identify gradualism with “evolution” — pretending criticisms of gradualism by, say, Stephen J Gould are criticisms of evolution.
Unlike the tricks 1 and 2, this one is I think most likely to be simple dishonesty. The most astounding example outside the PDF is when Rabbi Boteach debated Christopher Hitchens and had the chutzpah to say “Stephen J Gould did not believe in evolution, he believed in punctuated equilibrium!” It’s hard to see how something like this can be an “honest” mistake.
When someone like Gould speaks of a lack of transitional forms, what I think he means is that it’s extremely hard to get fossils that show the process of speciation as it’s happening. Because speciation takes up a comparatively small band of evolutionary time, this isn’t too unexpected. And it has nothing to do with the question of whether the fossil evidence for common descent exists.
The cherry on top is when the booklet says “supporters of evolution have had to back down from the claims of Darwin and others” about speciation. Oh no! The scientific theory — IT’S MUTATING! It’s undergoing change based on new evidence and insights! To see this as a bad thing shows tremendous intellectual poverty.
What Does It All Mean?
What these three tricks have in common is they show a very rigid, top-down, authoritarian thinking. The booklet believes in the immutability of species simply by the definition of “species”, a definition handed down from on high, one that makes it impossible to accept a genuine transitional fossil. The booklet believes in the rigidity of a species within an evolutionary tree, thereby genuinely being unable to see that something could have in principle branched off from the coelacanth. The booklet even believes in a rigid authoritarian theory of evolution: that which was Handed Down by Darwin — and therefore sees any improvements to the theory as “backing down” from “Darwinism”. (The Darwinism label is very important for creationist literature for this very reason.)
Alas, it’s the combination of genuine misunderstanding, willful ignorance and at times direct deception that makes it so hard to untangle literature like this booklet. But by the FSM, we should keep trying.
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