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Capture the Flag, A Four-Day Weekend, and Sea Urchins Debating on-line is one of my favorite pastimes. Sure, it's fun watching reruns of The X-Files and new episodes of The Shield (who else can't wait till January 7th?), or arguing with your friends about whether or not Capture the Flag really is a sport (1), but there's just something about sitting at your desk, sending out e-mails criticizing common descent, making a couple mistakes but generally keeping up with a group no doubt predominantly evolutionist in thought. Getting sidetracked here, but ever notice how the ARN boards are largely populated with evolutionists? The same goes for the Creationism board on AOL and several e-mail lists on YahooGroups. What's going on here? Where are we? Granted, some of the discussions can get just a tad repetitive, and granted, the evolutionists can be very hostile, and granted, they more often than not choose not to follow-up on references we give them, and granted, they keep attacking Creationists even if we don't identify ourselves with any particular theory, and…ah, well, I guess I see why now. Nevermind. But seriously, folks, what could be more fun? I'm on Day Three of a four-day weekend (Friday was a staff development day). I've been staying up late at night delving into the Forum Archives of the message boards at Access Research Network (www.arn.org). It's striking how many of the topics discussed on an e-mail list I've joined (and rejoined) have already been addressed by the intellectual heavyweights over there. Now, I'm mostly a lurker on ARN, and most of the discussions I've been reading are many, many, many months old, but that doesn't mean that they're not entertaining and not educational. So for what it's worth, I'd highly recommend browsing the archives. There are a few issues to keep in mind when debating over e-mail. First, there is a lot of Creationism-bashing that we just have to learn to deal with. I'm a relative newcomer to this debate, of course, but just from what I've experienced many of the defenses of neo-Darwinism are centered on a basic strategy: knockdown Creationism. In the minds of those who employ this strategy, showing that Creationism is ridiculous is tantamount to proving common ancestry. Paul Nelson once wrote: “It is widely held that evolutionary theory partakes necessarily of methodological naturalism, according to which one cannot in scientific reasoning refer to ‘God.' ‘the Creator,' ‘creation' (understood as the act of a divine intelligence), or other theological concepts,” but at the same time “the arguments for evolution that we shall consider are formulated in theological terms, usually explicitly so – a practice plainly inconsistent with methodological naturalism.” (2) The two arguments Nelson dealt with were “imperfection arguments” and “homology arguments.” In other words, why would a designer use homologous structures over and over again? And why do we see “suboptimal” structures, like the panda's pseudothumb, in nature? The theological roots of those questions are obvious and are summed in one sentence: God wouldn't do it that way. Second, just questioning evolution automatically makes us “Creationists.” That's our label, at least most of the time. Declining to state whether or not you're a “Creationist” or an “Intelligent Design theorist” will cripple many of the evolutionists' arguments because their arguments are generally geared towards Creationists, as explained above. Challenging them to make their case for evolution based on solid science is something many are not prepared to do. They're pretty good at bashing the designer, but not too good at laying out what exactly the scientific evidence is for evolution. We should capitalize on this. Third, we should most definitely rely on the scientific literature. Most evolutionists tend not to be impressed when we refer them to a book, for they can just dismiss the book as Creationist nonsense without even reading it. Citing a specific paper in a well-respected scientific journal can have a couple different effects. First, those evolutionists (the ones we want to be discussing with anyway) can at least take us seriously. Second, many lightweights will simply drop out of sight, refusing to look up the cited papers. Of course, we should read every paper we cite (I found this one out the hard way). In a very recent series of discussions on one particular e-mail group, some of the topics were the “twin-nested hierarchy,” Haeckel's embryos, and the lack of beneficial, heritable variation at the early stages of development. Interestingly, all three of these issues were addressed on the ARN boards. The twin-nested hierarchy refers to the alleged congruence between morphological and molecular phylogenies. It has been hailed as powerful evidence for common ancestry. Unfortunately for those who hail it so, there is often incongruence between morphological and molecular phylogenies. Morphological trees themselves often contradict each other. There are many examples of such incongruence in the ARN archives, and many papers documenting it were listed in the Discovery Institute's Ohio bibliography. In 1999, Michael S. Y. Lee wrote that “morphological and molecular systematics might have more in common than previously assumed. Concerted homoplasy, a major confounding factor in phylogenetic construction, can contaminate both types of data because of functional adaptation and developmental or mechanistic constraints. By increasingly recognizing and addressing these problems, molecular biology now appears to face similar challenge to those of traditional morphological systematics." (3) But the bibliography by no means listed all the examples. Matthew Wills wrote in 2002, for example: “Despite increasing methodological sophistication, phylogenies derived from morphology, and those inferred from different molecules, are not always converging on a consensus.” (4) So much for the twin-nested hierarchy. Now, you may be asking, how can anyone still be talking about Haeckel's embryos? Apparently some people just don't keep up to date, and the topic continues to surface! The ARN boards offered a few pointers for literature references, but weren't needed (and would've been too difficult to get hold of anyway). The famous Richardson paper (5) serves well, of course, but so do a few others. Rudolf Raff wrote in 2001 that “Richardson et al. (1997) showed that Haeckel falsified the degree of external appearance of these embryos to exaggerate similarity of phylotypic stage....Clearly Haeckel did a dishonest thing with his drawing." (6) I should add that Raff's article was noticeably hostile to Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the Center for Science & Culture at the Discovery Institute. In addition, Ken Miller's website notes “that Haeckel had fudged his drawings to make the early stages of embryos appear more alike than they actually are!” (7) Nic Tamzek at Talk.Origins confirms this, writing in his rebuttal to Icons of Evolution: “In the interests of forthrightness, one point must be conceded straight out: Haeckel's embryo drawings have no place in textbooks except as an example of how erroneous ideas can get tacked onto important truths and perpetuated even after being debunked.” (8) So much for Haeckel. Now, I've already written about developmental variation, working the argument from a poster written by Paul Nelson and Jonathan Wells (9). Still, a brief recap is in order. Basically, we see that early in development there are “striking differences” among the animals, and since all animals must (according to common descent) share a common ancestor, that suggests “that early development evolves relatively easily.” Unfortunately, heritable “variations in early development are not observed.” Nelson and Wells thus conclude that “we may be justified in questioning basic assumptions.” This idea was brought up on the e-mail list and discussed at length. As a challenge to it, two Rudolf Raff papers were cited. The first paper does not meet the criteria required for a successful counter. It states in its abstract: “Radical differences in early developmental processes can evolve rapidly between closely related forms.” (10) But it does not offer a demonstrable mechanism for those “radical differences.” Rather, the reasoning is that because those differences exist, that means such evolution must be possible. The second paper detailed how hybrids of two different species of urchins were produced. These hybrids exhibited an ontogeny “distinct from either parental species.” (11) From just what we have here, it certainly looks like it refutes the Nelson and Wells poster. Fortunately for us, though, giving it a closer look reveals that it does not meet the criteria. Interestingly enough, this same sea urchin hybrids example was discussed on the ARN boards. There it was revealed that the hybrids did not reproduce, and thus the variation wasn't heritable. No other examples to challenge Nelson and Wells were brought forth. I guess there are none. Well then, I guess that's a rap. Twin-nested hierarchy? No. Embryos? No. Sea urchins? No. As the “best” evidence for common descent is repeatedly tossed out the window, maybe, just maybe, some evolutionists will open their minds. Wait, hold on a second…it's the blind, religiously-motivated design theorists that have the closed minds, right? Notes & Sources: 1. For the record, I think it is. Comments? Contact Tristan Abbey at tabbey@idurc.org. Copyright 2002 idurc.org. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. |
