“Evolution from a common ancestor, via DNA changes, is very well supported” (p. 12).
“[O]ne leg of Darwinʼs theory—common descent—is correct” (p. 65).
The debate can be viewed here.
There were stronger responses to I.D. that were not mentioned. I am including them below along with highlighted links to their sources.
Look at the way a river becomes thousands of separate tributaries as it nears the sea, a neat visual analogy for complexity—a single river that breaks off into multiple branches without direct application of intelligence being involved because thatʼs what water and land do together. That is an increase in complexity that illustrates how basic and inherent in nature complexity is.
Lena River Delta, Russia
The island complex at the north end of Spring Lake, Pool 2, in the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area shows a variety of floodplain forests, wetlands, and aquatic vegetation
The Yukon River Delta, Alaska
Changes in the connectivity of the channel network structure on the Wax Lake Delta reflect its growth. The Wax Lake Delta is the only portion of the greater Mississippi River Delta complex that is growing over time.
Mathematical models have been produced to help explain the formation of such complex intricate formations on earth. There are models based on detailed computational fluid dynamics as well as competing models such as rule-based cellular morphodynamic models. As we will see, the formation of such complex intricate non-living formations does not lend distinction to the ideas of Intelligent Design advocates at the Discovery Institute.
To understand how complexity arises from relative simplicity, letʼs start at the beginning…
Our cosmos had to cool down for the first sub-atomic particles to congeal out of the unbelievably high energies and temperatures at our cosmosʼs birth. As it began to cool the first subatomic particles congealed into atoms, and then due to the force of gravity (the basic attraction of masses to other masses) those simple atoms congealed into stars. The pressure of gravity pushed those simple atoms together until atoms with more protons and electrons began to arise. Then many stars eventually exploded and heavier even more complex atoms were formed by the force of such explosions including carbon, nitrogen, oxygen up to uranium and beyond. Then as planets and asteroids cooled down, along with the insides of comets, the carbon and other atoms in space began to bond together forming longer chains of atoms.
Simply by virtue of the process of the cosmos Cooling Down, and also by virtue of Masses Attracting Other Masses, complexity arose.
The earliest most violent energies of the cosmos cooled down and congealed into subatomic particles that congealed into simple atoms that were attracted to one another by gravity that formed stars that formed the whole range of more complex atoms that began to congeal into molecules, some of which congealed into longer self replicating molecules.
So the second law of thermodynamics and the attraction of mass to other masses brought forth ever more complexity.
Consider this further analogy, you take a bottle of ink and throw it at a wall. Smash! The ink spreads forth. In the middle, itʼs dense. But out on the edge, little droplets of ink get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns. In the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. You and I, sitting here in this room, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the little curlicues on the furthest edges of the ink. So we define ourselves as being only that… as one very complicated little curlicue, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. But billions of years ago is when everything including “you” began. You donʼt feel that youʼre still the big bang. But you are… Youʼre not just something thatʼs a result of the big bang. Youʼre not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are a moving embodiment of a process that has remained in motion since the big bang.
But weʼve learned to define ourselves as separate from it. Some people even view the intelligibility of the cosmos and humanityʼs intellect as something separate from the cosmos. But we are the cosmos, embodied, which is why it is perfectly reasonable that it is intelligible to us.
But getting back to the river and all those tributaries that multiply and divide and subdivide in increasing complexity, the river of life appears to function in a similar fashion, and involves genes that get duplicated and mutated, which happens all the time. And whatever proteins these genes code for donʼt have to be 100 efficient. As more genes get duplicated they get added to ever growing cascades full of similar gene and hence similar protein complexes. Lifeʼs Ratchet and similar works listed here, here explain how the development of ever more complex processes proceeds by one process building on another, branches continuing to form, like all those tributaries of the river I mentioned. Each step in gene mutation and new protein formation leads to both new possibilities as well as new restrictions as to where future mutated branches as a whole may lead. This is not a sign of organisms being directed with a vast amount of forethought, but it is evidence that complexity is a natural ratcheting process inherent to the cosmos.
As for what nature and the cosmos is in essence, that remains a mystery about which all one can say is that the cosmos is constantly in motion and the evolution of life goes hand in hand with death and extinction. We live in a cosmos as fine-tuned for rainbows and sunny days as it is for floods, droughts—as fine-tuned for the evolution of replicating life forms as it is for their death and extinction—as fine-tuned for zygotes as it is for tumors—as fine-tuned for predators as it is for prey—and as fine-tuned for parasites as it is for parasites that live on those parasites that live on those parasites that live on those parasites, etc., up to five levels deep according to the latest examples known, right down to strands of genomic material parasitizing other strands of genomic material—see, “The Dexter of Parasites” here.
Speaking of the cosmos as a whole, nobody knows exactly what the cosmos is in essence, nor how it functions on every level. It functions in locally observable instances via feedback of one part to another—but feedback is inherent in nature, the simplest sort being the mutual attraction of two masses for one another, and later the way whole molecules attracted other molecules, and later, the way some larger molecules attracted smaller molecules and started replicating themselves (as even a single strand of RNA can do in a test tube with raw materials, or as a strand of viral RNA does inside a living cell, or as other strands of parasitical genomic material do inside living cells).
On some level physicists argue that the cosmos as a whole might even function via feedback from all parts to all parts, without centralized sovereignty, like the Internet, which is to say it is not necessary to imagine the cosmos as having to function in the style of a human despot, an American corporation, or Christian theology. It may function via decentralized intelligence, rich in circular-causal feedback, both local and universal feedback loops. That is also how the brain-mind system appears to function, via a constant feedback process.
How does the human ability to develop and use mathematical equations fit into the picture? Humans are pattern seekers, and when a mathematical equation can be used to model the curve of some observable measurable squiggly line in nature, we take note, just as we take note when a cloud looks like a human face.
As for purely theoretical mathematics, it is a vast enterprise with many different schools, and most of it does not resemble anything in nature, but it follows the axioms of whatever school of mathematics it is related to, and axiomatically speaking 1 = 1, which is no great mystery. Rats, pigeons, raccoons, and chimpanzees—can perform simple mathematical calculations, and human infants also have a rudimentary number sense.
But, do mathematical models equal reality? How can they, when it is plain that no word equals the thing in itself, no map equals the territory in itself, and no model of reality equals reality in itself, not even mathematical models.
Math is a model of reality, not reality itself. Newtonian equations define gravity at one level, via one perspective, but you need different, Einsteinian light-bending equations to model the effects of gravity on vaster levels. As soon as we discover new interactions that bend energies in new directions we need more equations to model those reactions. But reality itself is beyond math.
Some wonder if there is a mathematical basis to the cosmos that is nearer the essence of the cosmos than anything else we see, hear, or feel. But as I said, no word equals the thing in itself, no map equals the territory in itself, and even mathematical models are models of reality, not reality itself in its multi-faceted fullness.
Each field of mathematics is like the game Candyland. You accept certain axioms to begin with. You have a pre-set board and pieces, then you shuffle the cards and deal them out one by one following the directions on each card according to the rules of the game, but the game is determined by the axiomatic rules you agreed to start with, and it unfolds as you play it and move in different directions, whereby you discover your path through Candyland. In similar fashion each field of math unfolds based on the axiomatic rules one starts with, so new “discoveries” in math are not necessarily of things that exist in some Platonic realm of perfect math, nor “in the mind of God the mathematician.” Instead, mathematical discoveries unfold as you play each game by the axiomatic rules you agreed to start with in the first place.
Speaking of axioms, how do we know that 1 is not 2, or as in the case of symbolic logic, A is not B? Well, animals, even single-celled animals such as amoeba can tell the differences between things. They can detect and chase prey, they can tell when things are different and when they are similar, and they learn to react according. In similar fashion, mathematicians and poets with far more than just the single-celled capabilities of an amoeba, but instead with 100 billion cells in their brains connected via a trillion electro-chemical synapses, tend to notice far more astutely than your average amoeba when things are different or when they are similar or analogous to one another, such as when clouds look like faces or mathematical equations look like curves measured in nature, hence the faculty of noticing “differences” and “sameness” is rife in nature, and obviously comes in handy whenever equations from different fields of math or physics resemble one another or contain elements that overlap with one another.
So, on the topic of the discoverability of the cosmos, discoverability is inherent in us because we are children of the cosmos. We did not come into this cosmos, we came out of it. As for the essence of what a “cosmos” is, that remains a great question — we only have limited hypotheses concerning this cosmosʼs origin, as well as limitations concerning our knowledge of its size since telescopes can only see so far, and if the cosmos expanded faster than the speed-of-light early on then most of it still remains invisible to our telescopes since the light from those most distant parts has not yet even reached our telescopes. Even if our telescopes could see to the end of our cosmos this might not be the only cosmos there could be cosmoses outside our own. This cosmos might also begin anew or sprout other cosmoses. Our knowledge in all such cases consists of multiple possible hypotheses, along with our limited knowledge of the cosmoses smallest and largest dimensions, or even the number of dimensions in our cosmos. What IS a cosmos, what can it or canʼt it do?
As for the claim that the cosmos is “fine-tuned,” one can only ask, “fine-tuned” for what exactly? Fine-tuned such that life and evolution are merely in equilibrium with death and extinction?
We see a cosmos that is fine-tuned merely to the extent that there is
And our speciesʼ hard won knowledge and wisdom (that took ages to acquire) is merely in equilibrium with ignorance and easily acquired cultural prejudices picked up by each newborn.
Civilization seems to evolve like organisms do, via a lengthy ratchet process, acquiring knowledge slowly and painfully, generation after generation, and the ratcheting isnʼt guaranteed as one can see from historyʼs many pratfalls along the way, kind of like the way so many subspecies or cousin species become extinct for every species that flourishes.
One also cannot help but notice that there are hermit species and social species, herbivores and carnivores, animals that mate for life, others that live to mate… and some that eat their mates. In nature thereʼs also mothers who eat their sons and daughters, fathers who kill other fatherʼs children, daughters who eat their mothers, sons that mate with their mothers, and brothers and sisters who kill and/or devour each other in the womb. For examples see here.
Nature is basically one big buffet. Sometimes they eat you to death, or weaken you to death, sometimes they live off your juices just a little and are relatively benign, and sometimes they produce juices you can eat too (i.e., symbiosis — like the way we breathe the farts of algae and trees). But basically nature is constantly grinding up old organisms and spitting out new ones. Not sure what kind of weird ass Designer or Tinkerer came up with such a scheme.
ADDENDUM BY LANCE EMIL
Ed wrote, “Feedback is inherent in nature, the simplest sort being the mutual attraction of two masses for one another.”
In all factuality there are probably a great many more subtle things going on beneath that attraction than you or I or maybe any human will ever know (re. Higgs field which gives mass to things, search for gravitons, etc); when one studies matter and the universe at a quantum level weird things start to happen: the universe seems to be studying you (or at the very least, interacting strangely with you - like it “wants” what you expect it to do while youʼre watching, but when you look away, not so much; hand-in-the-cookie-jar style).
I think the problem with looking for “intelligent design” in anything is semantic: I know dolphins speak, but their language is beyond my comprehension; dolphins know something I DONʼT AND PERHAPS NEVER WILL. And for the present, they donʼt seem all that inclined to teach me how. If there is an “intelligence” reflected in the way the universe acts with respect to me, and I donʼt have the intellectual fortitude to understand the language of a species of mammal living on my own planet, how am I supposed to understand that intelligenceʼs language? As you so succinctly point out above, complexity becomes form seemingly all on its own. To me - trying hard to avoid purely mystical thinking along the way - this sure looks “intelligent.” But then, so do dolphins.
Snowflakes, sand dunes, tornadoes, stalactites, graded river beds, and lightning are just a few examples of order coming from disorder in nature; none require an intelligent program to achieve that order. In any nontrivial system with lots of energy flowing through it, you are almost certain to find order arising somewhere in the system. If order from disorder is supposed to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, why is it ubiquitous in nature?
From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.
Englandʼs theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his interpretation — that his formula represents the driving force behind a class of phenomena in nature that includes life — that remains unproven. But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in the lab.
“Heʼs trying something radically different,” said Mara Prentiss, a professor of physics at Harvard who is contemplating such an experiment after learning about Englandʼs work. “As an organizing lens, I think he has a fabulous idea. Right or wrong, itʼs going to be very much worth the investigation.” Click here for more info.
The pro-Intelligent Design book, Science and Human Origins, Endorses a Literal Adam and Eve.
Including responses from ID advocates
“Darwinist hero of the hour”: the ID crowd sort of respond
Intelligent Designʼs leading institution published a book advocating a literal “Adam and Eve”
In Chapter 1, Gauger introduces human evolution in the context of lamenting that Christians are losing faith in a literal Adam and Eve.
But Gauger needs to explain where all the variation in modern human populations came from in the time since the alleged Adam and Eve bottleneck [what time exactly does she place this bottleneck?]. Failing that she has nothing more than some hyper-selective skepticism. She certainly doesnʼt have Adam and Eve.
Gauger argues that there are five major haplotypes but only three of the haplotypes are “ancient.” Since up to four haplotypes could be inherited from two people, this leaves the door open for a bottleneck involving a single pair of humans. But even if we accept all parts of her argument up to here, the IDist book is not internally consistent, because Gauger does not dispute mainstream opinion that the last two major haplotypes out of the five arose five 4 to 6 million years ago. But this means that all five haplotypes arose in pre-humans, since Luskin in his chapter denies that true humans existed 4 to 6 million years ago (he says that true humans began with H. erectus, 1.8 million yrs ago). Therefore 4 million years ago when the last of the HLA-DR haplotypes originated, our closest relatives were still non-humans, i.e., Australopithecines. So ALL FIVE major haplotypes of HLA-DR pre-date human-ness by the IDistsʼ own admissions, which looks like added evidence of a continuity between Australopithecines and later hominids including modern day humans. Also, if Adam and Eve with their five major halotypes arose over 1.8 million years ago they were non-human.
IDʼist authors in the book criticize fields in which they lack expertise. A lawyer challenges the worldʼs palaeoanthropologists and geneticists. Should he be trying to take them all on at once? Accusations that the entire field of palaeoanthropology is driven by personal disputes and that Francis Collins is a bad Christian are simply not compelling reading in a book that is putatively about scientific argument. In reality the overwhelming majority of scientists in each of the fields addressed in this book share a broad consensus that is at odds with what the authors claim. And, despite the breathless accusations of a Darwinian conspiracy, mainstream scientists are a diverse bunch. Like Francis Collins and Francisco Ayala, who are both singled out in this book, many are themselves Christian yet accept the balance of evidence for our evolutionary past.
The problem for IDʼist like Luskin is that there is a progression in the fossil record between us and early Homo. There is no evidence of a major discontinuity at the point where humans are most likely to have acquired our truly modern humanness… A paper by Schultz, Nelson and Dunbar elegantly summarizes the evidence for cognitive evolution, showing a series of changes that culminate in the emergence of modern human language within the last 100,000 years. Brain size/cranial evolution over more than 3 million years also shows a progression from the cranium sizes of ancient apes and hominids to more modern species of homo.
The thrust of the ID book is to claim human exceptionalism, disprove our common descent with apes, and search for a real-life Adam and Eve. None of this is part of a program to genuinely investigate the world. This is particularly clear because the authors are happy to create doubt about what they call Darwinism, rather than create positive cases for an alternative to it.
I have heard quite a few people now asking for an honest and frank discussion between, for example, Casey Luskin and Behe on common descent. If they were undertaking a real scientific program, there would be no need for people to request it - open comment and debate are a normal part of science, and it seems to me that common descent under ID should be a non-trivial matter for such discussion.
—Paul McBride July 14, 2012Michael Behe told us his hypothesis a few years ago. We both took part in a week-long lecture series on the intelligent design debate at Hillsdale College. After Michael Beheʼs lecture, some of us pressed him to explain exactly how “irreducibly complex” mechanisms arose—mechanisms that cannot, according to Behe, be explained as products of evolution by natural selection. He repeatedly refused to answer. But after a long night of drinking he finally answered: “A puff of smoke!” A physicist in the group asked, Do you mean a suspension of the laws of physics? Yes, Behe answered. Not very persuasive as a scientific answer.
—RBH July 9, 2012Reminds me of what Berlinski wrote: “Before the Cambrian era, a brief 600 million years ago, very little is inscribed in the fossil record; but then, signaled by what I imagine as a spectral puff of smoke and a deafening ta-da!, an astonishing number of novel biological structures come into creation, and they come into creation at once.— [Berlinski, “The Deniable Darwin” (June 1996), Commentary magazine.]
Berlinski added to Beheʼs explanation by adding the word “Ta da.”
Extremism
Stephen Meyer tutored Howard Ahmanson, Jr. son in science and was asked by Ahmanson, “What could you do if you had some financial backing?” In the 1970s multimillionaire Howard Ahmanson became a Calvinist and joined Rushdoonyʼs Christian Reconstructionist movement. Ahmanson served as a board member of Rushdoonyʼs Chalcedon Foundation for approximately 15 years before resigning in 1996. Ahmanson said he had left the Chalcedon board and “does not embrace all of Rushdoonyʼs teachings” which include young-earth creationism, biblical inerrancy, abandoning the Constitution and placing the US directly under “Biblical law” — including state punishment for religious offenses such as blasphemy or violating the Sabbath, and the use of Biblical forms of punishment such as stoning.
The same year Ahmanson lost interest in working with Chalcedon he seems to have gained interest in supporting “intelligent design.” In 1996 a representative of Ahmanson promised $750,000 over three years to fund the Instituteʼs Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture which went on to form the motive force behind the intelligent design movement. By far the biggest backers of the intelligent design efforts continue to be the Ahmansons, who have provided 35 percent of the science centerʼs $9.3 million since its inception and now underwrite A quarter of its $1.3 million annual operations. Mr. Ahmanson sits on Discoveryʼs board. In 2002 some politicians returned money given them by Ahmanson after learning how far right his views were, so Ahmanson opened himself up to some interviews, but could not bring himself to repudiate his former Chalcedonian views, stating for instance, “I think what upsets people is that Rushdoony seemed to think - and Iʼm not sure about this - that a godly society would stone people. I no longer consider that essential. It would still be a little hard to say that if one stumbled on a country that was doing that, that it is inherently immoral, to stone people for these things.”
The Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture also recʼd a founding grant of $450,000 from the conservative Maclellan Foundation (Calvinist, reconstructionist, dominionist, and most probably YECʼs) “We give for religious purposes,” said Thomas H. McCallie III, executive director of the Maclellan Foundation. “This is not about science, and Darwin wasnʼt about science. Darwin was about a metaphysical view of the world.”
The Discovery Institute supports more than one issue or project and has gained support from some secular groups like the Verizon Foundation and the Gates Foundation, which gave $1 million in 2000 and pledged $9.35 million over 10 years in 2003. But Greg Shaw, a grant maker at the Gates Foundation, said the money was “exclusive to the Cascadia project” on regional transportation which has nothing to do with the Discovery Instituteʼs views on “intelligent design.”
But the Discovery Instituteʼs science branch has cost it the support of the Bullitt Foundation, which gave $10,000 in 2001 for transportation related projects, as well as cost it the support of the John Templeton Foundation in Pennsylvania which supports “new insights between theology and science,” but found the DI to be less focused on interacting with modern science and scientists and more interested in public persuasion. Denis Hayes, director of the Bullitt Foundation, described Discovery in an e-mail message as “the institutional love child of Ayn Rand and Jerry Falwell,” saying, “I can think of no circumstances in which the Bullitt Foundation would fund anything at Discovery today.” Charles L. Harper Jr., the senior vice president of the Templeton Foundation, said he had rejected the instituteʼs entreaties since providing $75,000 in 1999 for a conference in which intelligent design proponents confronted critics. “Theyʼre political - that for us is problematic,” Mr. Harper said. While the DI has “always claimed to be focused on the science,” he added, “what I see is much more focused on public policy, on public persuasion, on educational advocacy and so forth.”
Not surprisingly, the Discovery Institute defended the right of Bryan College trustees to fire any professors who question or doubt that “Adam and Eve” were directly created.
And the DI book, Science and Human Origins, seems to have been composed in order to argue that we all descended from a literal first couple, “Adam and Eve,” starting with chapter 1 in which Ann Gauger introduces human evolution in the context of Christians losing faith in a literal Adam and Eve, lamenting Christians who accept the scientific evidence for evolution.
Meanwhile, Phil Johnson dedicated his book “Defeating Darwinism” to “Howard and Roberta” —Ahmanson and his wife. I donʼt know if Ahmnson had a direct hand in funding the publication of Johnsonʼs book, but it is not impossible, since his fellow Reconstructionist guru, Rushdooney, helped fund the publication of Henry Morrisʼs first book, The Genesis Flood, that advocates young-earth creationism. Johnson has also admitted that his distaste for evolutionary biology is based on religious convictions.
One wonders just what developments could possibly make Johnson make up his mind about the age of the Earth. Is he holding out for some new and improved radiometric dating technique? Waiting for new ice core results? I doubt it. Heʼs probably referring to political, not scientific, developments. The scientific case for an old Earth is overwhelming. But Johnsonʼs “Big Tent” strategy requires him to do the exact opposite of what he pretentiously claims to be doing, which is following the evidence wherever it leads. Instead, he simply sweeps the evidence for something as firmly supported as the age of the earth under the rug in favor of far more nebulous topics like the precise means by which this or that feature evolved or not.
Many D.I. members are like Johnson, saying “it doesnʼt matter how old or how young the earth is,” so it doesnʼt matter whether animals popped into existence whole a couple thousand years ago, or whether they share a common ancestry billions of years in the making. I guess astronomers, geologists, physicists, and biologists have no idea how old the earth is, or whether organisms are related via common ancestry. But if one was to arrange the following scientific propositions based on how relatively secure each proposition is, the worldʼs scientists would agree that an old age of the earth and cosmos is most secure, common ancestry second, and the question of the precise mechanisms that lay behind each evolutionary change, third. But the DI is funded by many who would like to challenge all three propositions but realize that the third is the only one in which they can currently hope to muddy the waters.
The ID movement is more extreme than say, “fine-tuners,” who see the view the “design” as front-loaded at the Big Bang (via six cosmological constants), and view everything that as naturally unfolding since then.
The Discovery Institute is naturally hesitant to reveal its creationist and extremist roots.
Look up the CVs of its members. We already discussed Ahmanson, who now says, as of 2014, “I am not a young-earth creationist,” though I bet he once was if he was ever on the board of the Chalcedon Foundation. I wonder when and why he changed his mind, or even if he did really change it and is claiming he is old-earth to add a bit more luster to the Institute he founded? And I wonder what he might say if asked about Adam and Eve?
Stephen C. Meyerʼs info on the DI site does not include Meyerʼs time at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Instead they only mention Meyer working at Whitworth, which they say Meyer left in 2002 to work full time on DI related projects.
But in Meyerʼs CV it says says that he surrendered his tenured (!) position at Whitworth in 2002 so he could work from 2002-2005 at a creationist Christian college whose “Guiding Principles,” include, “All those who become associated with Palm Beach Atlantic as trustees, officers, members of the faculty or of the staff, must believe in the divine inspiration of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments; that man was directly created by God;…”
Dembski worked for a young-earth creationist Southern Baptist Theological Seminary from 2005-2013, where YECʼism is de rigeur, and Dembskiʼs boss forced him to restate his views on the age of the earth the the Flood of Noah to make them more amenable to the universityʼs views.
Dembski now works full time for DI.
Paul Nelson is a young-earth creationist, and Jonathan Wells, like Johnson, wonʼt say how old the earth is. For instance at the Kansas Evolution Hearings, Wells was asked,
Q. Doctor Wells, do you have a personal opinion as to how old the earth is?
A. I think the earth is probably four-and-a-half billion or so years old. But Iʼll tell you this, I used to— I would have said, a few years ago, Iʼm convinced itʼs four-and-a-half billion years old. But the truth is I have not looked at the evidence. And I have become increasingly suspicious of the evidence that is presented to me and thatʼs why at this point I would say probably itʼs four-and-a-half billion years old, but I havenʼt looked at the evidence.
The Unification Church of which Wells is a member has a website that says, “Scientists calculate the age of the earth to be some thousand million years,” or one billion years old, (reference) but on a different page they say, “The age of the earth is calculated to be several billion years.”
The pretension that these IDʼists support, that the age of the earth isnʼt really an issue, ignores the fact that it is, because one broad definition of evolution is change over time, and species change and spread out over time, leaving many of those offshoot species to die out in the process, such countless deaths are the price paid until some branch of a species spreads into places where it flourishes or where it can survive with some degree of greater stability and adaptability than before.
The DI reminds me of the Christian Coalitionʼs advice to all their “stealth” candidates try and pass “under the radar” but never telling people they are Evangelical Christians who believe in creationism and that the Lord is coming soon, or never let on that they are Calvinist supporters of biblical law, nor let on how extreme their personal opinions might be on a range of issues.
How different were organisms from one another in the pre-Cambrian?
Viewing the organisms of each phyla at the beginning of the Cambrian “explosion” it looks like bilaterian worms had been radiating into more complex and diverse worms (and early slug-like organisms had been radiating into more complex and diverse invertebrates), because in general the earliest Cambrian relatives of the living phyla tend to be a lot more wormlike (or sluglike in the case of invertebrate phyla) than most modern day representatives of such phyla. Even many living phyla are basically still worms (or slugs). In short, early representatives or relatives of the chordates are rather more wormlike than their better–known modern representatives.
In the Cambrian the earliest members of the “chordate” phylum (out of which humans eventually evolved) resembled filter–feeding worms that happened to swim. They didnʼt have jaws, scales, a bony skeleton, or anything else that most readers would even associate with a “fish!” They looked like the first two pics on the right:
And the process of their development from the Cambrian onward, before they had evolved jaws, included nothing but rounded sucking mouths. See the third and fourth pics down on the right:
What about those trilobites you ask, i.e., animals with hinged exo-skeletons, the cousins to modern day crabs and insects? Didn't they burst onto the scene in the Cambrian seemingly from nowhere? Their appearance was preceded by millions to tens of millions of years of small shelly fossils (see pic down on right), which provides evidence of evolution and diversification of hinged exo-skeleton organisms prior to the Trilobite deposits in the Cambrian. The small shelly fossils in Chenjiang feature dozens and dozens of trilobite–like and arthropod–like organisms that preceded the Cambrian "explosion," but which fall cladistically outside of these respective clades—these are transitional forms! How can Meyer have ignored the plain evidence that the Cambrian “explosion” did not come out of nowhere?
Additional evidence that Meyer brushes aside supports the view that pre-Cambrian organisms developed in stages, from single–celled organisms up to the worms, slugs and little shellies that preceded the Cambrian Explosion:
Before 700 million years ago, maybe well before: Single–celled eukaryotes (acritarchs), which are not to be confused with the smaller simpler prokayotes (bacteria) for which we have some very rare and early fossil evidence.
Earlier Ediacaran: Multicellular animal eukaryotes, but simple, SPONGE–grade organisms (Sponges consist of communities of single–celled eukaryotes, and a sponge run through a sieve that disconnects all of its cells can re–assemble into a sponge again).
Later Ediacaran: Multicellular animal eukaryotes with more complexity, i.e. cnidarian–grade organisms
Very late Ediacaran: Simple SLUG–grade/WORM–grade organisms (at least their tracks and burrows) – the first ones only making surface tracks and lacking burrowing ability. Making tracks suggests that the organisms have at least a front end and a back end, a mouth, anus, and gut connecting them. These are almost certainly bilaterians.
Very late Ediacaran: The very first biomineralized “skeletons”, e.g. Cloudina, basically a WORM secreting a tube, as well as the first evidence of predatory boring. Cloudina gets no mention at all in Meyerʼs book.
At the beginning of the Cambrian, we start to see more complex burrowing – e.g., vertical burrowing through sediment, clearly indicating WORM–grade organization and an internal fluid skeleton, i.e. a coelom. The burrows gradually increase in complexity over 10 million years.
SMALL SHELLY fauna: The shells, which started very small and very simple, gradually diversify and get more complex, radiating especially in the Tommotian. By the end of the Tommotion, some of the “small shellies” can be identified as parts of larger, “classic” Cambrian animals. The Tommotian is an utterly key period for any serious discussion of the Cambrian explosion. Unfortunately, the word “Tommotian”, or any equivalent terminology does not even appear in the book! The Small Shelly Fauna (SSF) gets just one (one!) mention in the book, buried in endnote 27 of Chapter 4.)
All of the above evolution-like stages of increasing complexity preceded the Cambrian "explosion."
Maybe an I.D.ist can explain why we need 33–40 phyla when merely 9 of those phyla constitute about 95% of all animal life? The remaining 26–31 phyla have fewer than about 2,000 known members—the rarest with just three members (Cycliophora: odd sacs represented by Symbion pandora), two members (Xenoturbellida: strange flatworm) or one species (Micrognathozoa: tiny jawed animal, and Placozoa, an animal that resembles a multicellular amoeba). Most are simple marine organisms, often referred to as worms or nanoplankton.
Also, how about an I.D.ist explaining why, among multi–cellular organisms, beetles and mites proliferate so much, producing hundreds of thousands of species, while other phyla produce far fewer? The number of species of mites might even reach 1 million according to some estimates, as more beetles and mites continue being discovered all the time. Wow, the Designer or Natureʼs innate design abilities really seem focused on mites.
ALSO…
13 phyla of multi–cellular animals appear during the Cambrian explosion.
BUT…
20 phyla of multi–cellular animals appear AFTER the Cambrian. Neither is the number of phyla into which all the worldʼs species can be divided agreed upon among systematicists. Under the most frequently used classification scheme there are 38 animal phyla, but some systematicists claim there are between 35 and 40 phyla. Three new phyla were discovered in the last century, the most recent in 1993.
Meyer idolizes Agassiz, a creationist who opposed even the evolutionary idea of common descent. Here is how Agassiz argued for creationism in his day [SOURCE: Agassiz, Evolution and Permanence of Type, The Atlantic Monthly, 1874, pages 92–101]:
“…the earliest known Vertebrates” [from the fossil record when Agassiz was writing] “…are Selachians (sharks and their allies) and Ganoids (garpikes and the like), the highest of all living fishes, structurally speaking.”
“It shall be answered that these belong to the Silurian and Devonian periods, and that it is believed [by evolutionists] that Vertebrates may have existed before that time. It will also be argued that Myzonts, namely Amphioxus, Myxinoids [Hagfish], and Lamper–eels [Lampreys], have no hard parts and could not have been preserved on that account. I will grant both these points, though the fact is that the Myzonts do possess solid parts, in the jaws, as capable of preservation as any bone, and that these solid parts, if ever found, even singly, would be as significant, for a zoologist, as the whole skeleton.”
In other words Agassiz was mocking evolutionists for not finding fossil evidence of the earliest jawless eel–like vertebrates in the fossil record prior to the Devonian. He was also mocking them for not finding fossil evidence of Amphioxus (or Amphioxus–like organisms) with a mere notochord and eyespot that existed prior to jawless eel–like vertebrates in the fossil record.But fossil evidence of both have since been found, and they were found in the places where the Evolutionists expected them to be found.
Agassiz also wrote loads that argued in favor of the idea that different races of humanity were each created separately and could be classified on the basis of specific climatic zones (just as he viewed the separate creations of animal and plant species), and that the different races of humanity were accordingly endowed with unequal attributes by their Creator. Nor was it unusual for Agassiz to have been a zealous defender of creationism since he came from a line of ministers, and during his natural science studies he favored Cuvier the creationist over Lamarck the transformationalist/evolutionist.
A specialist in the Cambrian debated Meyer on a radio program and pointed out to Meyer the development of various organisms before the Cambrian explosion as seen in “little shellies” formations. After which Meyer backed away from the idea that the lack of abundant fossils prior to the Cambrian explosion provided evidence for I.D. Instead, Meyer admitted that enough pre–Cambrian fossils existed to provide evidence of changes in organisms occurring prior to the Cambrian.
Meyer should also be embarrassed concerning how closely his charts of the major phyla resemble the charts creationists used in the 1980s when they tried to argue that each phyla was created independently. He should have used more detailed charts such as these.
Meyer also needs to consider that species have to spread widely in order to increase their chances of even being fossilized. Some species are going to be far more successful at reproducing and invading new environments and they are going to spread widely and have a much greater chance of being fossilized. While branches of those species, their “cousins” so to speak, may go extinct far sooner, with little chance of the remains of such extinct cousins being fossilized at all. To suggest an analogy, the fossil record resembles a car park garage buried sometimes slowly, and sometimes by a catastrophe (thatʼs what todayʼs geologists believe about the fossil record, their view is called Actualism, which leaves room for both Uniformitarianism and local Catastrophic burying events). There are cars on each level of the parking garage, but the cars undergoing transitions are on the ramps between levels and havenʼt reached the point where their descendants cover a large part of any one level of the car park garage yet. So when the garage is buried the cars on the ramps are naturally less numerous. (And many of those side ramps simply lead off a cliff, leaving little to no remains, i.e., all those cousin species that go extinct for each species that makes it to a different level of the car park garage and expands its brood there, and increases its chances of leaving fossils behind. If you donʼt know where to look for the ramps, your odds of finding transitional fossils are minimal.
Paleontologists dig up transitional fossils by traveling to exactly those places on earth where the strata is dated to the time period where such transitions most likely existed, and finding an outcropping there that is exposed and that is also known to contain fossils. That is exactly how the discovery of the first mammal–like reptile fossil was made. Some brave paleontolgists traveled way up north to a particular outcropping that was dated to a particular time period between reptiles and mammals and known to contain fossils, and they found the first mammal–like reptile fossils (with double–jaw joints and other transitional features). Some of those intrepid paleontologists also died as a result of the harsh weather they experienced during their digs up there. A more recent case was the discovery of the amphibian–like fish, Tiktaalik. The paleontologist leader of the expedition knew the geologic record and where such transitions would had taken place and obtained funding to visit particular strata from that period that was exposed and known to be fossiliferous. In other words they trekked to the “ramp of the parking garage” and found on that ramp the remains of Tiktaalik, a fish with an amphibian–like skull, eyes on the top, a distinct neck, finger bones, and other amphibian–like characteristics, but in a fish. They also got lucky in that it was near the time when they would have had to retreat because winter was coming and the ground was beginning to refreeze and would have remained frozen most of the year too.
Does Meyer mention how important it is to look in the right places, geologically speaking, for transitional fossils? Does he mention that that is exactly how transitional species have been successfully discovered? Does he mention that the “Pre–Cambrian” is not really a geologic period at all due to the enormous upheavals that took place during that period? Itʼs simply rock that has no name for a period all its own, other than being “pre”Cambrian, like a heavily erased black board that you hope to discover some scribbles on that nature has not yet erased.
Also, paleontologists realized after more fossils of each species were discovered that if there was a “design” to the way organisms continued to change and spread out on the earth, that design was not straightforward. It began to look more like nature was trying everything, experimenting, trial and error–wise, tinkering, and failing a huge amount of the time. The discovery of an increasing number of ancient horse–like species led to them co–existing at different intervals and most dying out like leaves on a bushy tree when autumn comes, not following a straight path that might imply an intended plan of “design.” The fact that most species simply go extinct doesnʼt exactly cry out “intelligent design.” Vast numbers of cousin species simply go extinct, often leaving behind Nothing But A Wide Diversity Of Teeth (enamel is one of the hardest of natural substances). Meyer in his book mentions such things as the Permian extinction, which was the largest known mass extinction event. Was the Designer shaking his etch–i–sketch?
I read that the most complete T. Rex is only about 85%. Most evidence for T. Rex was quite fragmentary until that special fossil was finally found. The same is true of fossils of other species from horses to hominids to cetacea. Often only the teeth have survived and been discovered that bear silent witness to the existence of endless cousin species that once existed but exist no more. To quote Carl Zimmer in his book At the Waterʼs Edge, on cetacean evolution and the fossils of ancient cetaceans that we possess:
“Itʼs tempting to build this story like a totem pole, with trotting Pakicetus at the base, Ambulocetus laying its humming jaw on top of it, and Rodhocetus, the earliest whale to swim like a whale, sitting above the two. It seems like such a smooth progression toward todayʼs cetaceans that it must be right. But such a version would only be a vertical slice of the story. Life doesnʼt proceed from one point to another — it forks and radiates like the cladograms that represent it. Paleontologists have found many other whale bones in Eocene rocks of Pakistan and India. Mostly They Are Teeth — the rock surrenders A Few skulls as well — but even teeth clearly show that their owners were Not Clones of Pakicetus or the other better–known whales. Ambulocetus kept to brackish deltas and coastal water, but Thewissen has found whale teeth from about the same age in what at the time was the open ocean. Gingerich has found at least three contemporaries of Rodhocetus a few million years younger than Ambulocetus: Takracetus, with a wide, flat head; Gavinocetus, with a slender skull and loose hips; and Dalanistes, a whale with a head as long and narrows as a heronʼs set on a long neck, with hips cemented firmly enough to its spine to walk on land. If this is a confusing picture, it should be. As time passed, certain whale species emerged that were more and more adapted to life in the water, but other species simultaneously branched away in many directions. Walking and swimming whales lived side by side, or in some cases traded homes as the buckling birth of the Himalayas shuffled their habitats. Some were only a minor variation on a theme that would carry through to modern whales, but others — heron–headed Dalamistes, for example — belonged to strange branches unlike anything alive today.”
As I said concerning the parking garage analogy, tons of cousin species went extinct, and species that had not succeeded to the point of spreading far and wide have far less chance of being fossilized.
If I.D. is the assertion that some unknown intelligence used unknown means to instantaneously create biological structures then any discussion of I.D. will be relatively short and unsatisfying. Behe explained his view as “A puff of smoke!” A suspension of the laws of physics. Not very satisfying as a scientific answer. [Google this search string: Behe and puff of smoke] And the I.D.ist Berlinski wrote: “Before the Cambrian era, a brief 600 million years ago, very little is inscribed in the fossil record; but then, signaled by what I imagine as a spectral puff of smoke and a deafening ta–da!, an astonishing number of novel biological structures come into creation, and they come into creation at once.” Berlinski added the word “ta–da.” Of course Berlinski also seems ignorant of the “little shellies” in the pre–Cambrian, as well as the fact that early Cambrian phyla resemble variants of worms and slugs with far more “novel” species and biological structures coming into existence over geological time.
More to the point is how did “intelligence” do it? Via what stages and via what particular acts of intervention was each change in biological structures accomplished? Did the “Designer” utilize chemicals that already exist inside each cell, chemicals that naturally induce mutations, and move them telekinetically toward the right spots in the DNA chain to effect this or that point mutation? Or did the Designer effect a "whole genome duplication" event in some cases and whittle things down from there? Did God bend and focus mutation–causing cosmic rays so that they penetrated the nucleus of a particular egg or sperm or zygote, and thereby effected the right mutations? And if the Designer could make all of those miraculous changes one by one, then why not just pop whole new species into existence instead of all that wrangling with the tiny stuff over eons to make it look like species evolved? And why not keep popping new species into existence today so people can see it happening? After all, we have instruments that can detect micro–particles popping into existence today, but wouldn't it be great if more people could see a whole species pop into existence? Or even if scientists could see whole chromosomes appear instantaneously out of thin air while examining cells under microscopes?
And if the Designer accomplished his purposes via endless tiny mutation events over eons of time did the Designer also have to keep a watchful eye on DNA Heʼd just changed, to ensure no more mutation-causing chemicals or cosmic rays touched this or that part of the DNA to reverse each change, or to ensure the zygote/embryo/fetus was carried safely to term and thus ensure the passing along of each new genetic change the Designer had just instituted? Did The Designer also have to monitor each animal born with such new mutations to ensure it was not taken out of the gene pool by random contact with a deadly microorganism, or random contact with some nearby predator or natural disaster, so that the newly instituted genetic changes would survive and the organism reach the age of sexual reproduction and pass along such changes?
My point is that curious scientists continue to search for connections in nature, how things are related to one another, not how they are discontinuous from one another as I.D.ists seem to be concluding rather impatiently. Most scientists are not impatient when it comes to continuing to asking questions concerning how things in nature are connected to one another, how they all fit together. Questions like…
How does something in the biological world work? How does it currently function. That's merely the beginning of examining questions pertaining to relationships in nature.
What are all the known analogues in the biological world that resemble how that one thing works?
What are a few hypothetical natural changes/alterations this one thing or its earliest ancestor might have undergone?
Also, how many possible paths to genetic, behavioral and morphological changes are there? Only after knowing that can we begin to whittle down the most probable natural changes/alterations this one thing or its earliest ancestors might have undergone.
It takes a lot of patient effort and analysis in other words, to discover how things in nature are connected. But we have discovered plenty of connections throughout nature.
I.D.ists like Behe simply regurgitate in their books the very first question above, listing what scientists have discovered about how something in nature works (like the flagellum) and continue to harp on how it all fits together. Yes it does. But did it always fit together exactly like that over the billions of years in the past when the earth was filled with nothing but single–celled life forms? The flagellum most probably arose at a time when bacteria were exchanging DNA actively–and also absorbing any DNA they came across passively–for probably over a billion years. To trace all possible changes in the DNA of such ancient bacteria over that length of time is impossible at present. There are nearly no fossils of ancient bacteria, nothing like the fossils we possess of the bones of ancient vertebrates and how their modes of transportation changed over time, i.e., from fins to limbs among vertebrates. Nor do fossils of ancient bacteria reveal their inner cellular structure. So there's much information we are missing. And many questions remain concerning what happened during the billion years when the earth was filled with only single–celled organisms.
