I haven’t been closely following the twin brouhahas in Florida and Texas, where fundamentalist school board members are pushing to add Intelligent Creationism-In-Disguise Design to the science curriculum, and science-minded folks and supporters of church-state separation are fighting tooth and nail against it. I have, however, skimmed a little of the IDers’ propaganda and seen a number of their most common arguments posted various places around the net.
I’d like to address this post directly to the CreationIDsm supporters out there and offer some helpful advice that will help to keep you from sounding like morons in front of anyone with an open mind who paid attention in their high school biology classes. The crux of that advice would be the following:
Attack science all you want. Science is a big boy, it can handle the teasing. The advancement of science progresses when rational, intelligent people find flaws in our understanding of the universe and point them out and try to find better explanations. Believe me, if any of you really do at some point come up with a valid, testable alternative or addendum to the theory of evolution, eager scientists will flock to your door.
Here’s where you seem to have the biggest problem, though. You only get to attack actual science. Arguments against assertions that scientists have never made will only fly among people who are just as willfully ignorant as you have decided to be. You don’t get to make up your own phony straw-man scientific theory and disprove that.
Let’s take a look at some of the creationist arguments I’ve come across and how they distort some of the basic premises and evidence for evolutionary theory.
“Nobody’s ever seen one kind of animal turn into another!”
I’ll wager nobody’s ever seen anyone outside of religious circles claim that this is what Darwin’s theory predicts. I guarantee there is no scientific journal that ever published a prediction that a goat and a lemur would tap limbs together, shout “Wonder twin powers, activate!”, and turn into a food processor and a racehorse. Evolution, for those people who for some reason haven’t figured this out yet, is caused by the accumulation of minor changes in each new generation of a species over time.
“If we come from apes, then why are there still apes?”
There are still apes (including ourselves – see below) because we haven’t managed to make the surface of the planet unlivable just yet. The modern creatures we refer to as apes simply share a common ancestor with us, but have evolved differently to suit the environments where they’ve lived.
“No way do I come from an ape!”
Yes you do. Your mother is an ape. Dad too. So are you, and George Bush, and me, and Angelina Jolie, and everyone you’ve ever met. Big brains and less body hair do not a Get Out Of Hominidae Free card make. If this is merely a clumsy way to argue that you can’t possibly be related to anything that can’t read a holy book, your DNA begs to differ.
“There are no transitional fossils!”
Bullshit. Every fossil is a transitional fossil. I can spend an afternoon digging with my hands along the C&D Canal and bring home fifty transitional fossils. Just because we haven’t found preserved specimens of every single life form from the earliest glop of protein up to, say, John Travolta (yeah, I know some evolutionary leaps are smaller than others), doesn’t mean they never existed. Stuffing God into those gaps is akin to me watching your favorite Veggie Tales movie with you, and when it skips a few frames from a scratch on the DVD, shouting, “See! I told you this was a drama about Hispanic street gangs in 1930s Chicago!”
“Believing that something as complex as a human could come about randomly is like believing that a tornado in a junkyard could assemble a 747!”
There is a certain amount of randomness to mutations themselves, but the evolutionary process itself is anything but random. The phrase “Natural Selection” should be a dead giveaway.
In order for your 747 analogy to work, the junkyard would have to have all the basic building blocks of the 747 in great number. Further, those parts would have to be inclined to naturally link up with the correct matching parts whenever they come in contact, the way the substances that make up living things are inclined to chemically bind with one another. Lastly, and here’s the really important part: whenever correct parts link together they stay together. Survival of the fittest. Now spin your tornado for 4.5 billion years, give or take. Maybe, given all those conditions, your – uh… no, never mind, it’s still a stupid analogy.
How about if we try it this way: If the tornado selects for characteristics that allowed flight and two airborne pieces of scrap metal could share a special kind of hug, nine months later you’d have a swarm of little baby gliders, and their great, great grandchildren might develop little propellers, and on, and on.
The point here being that the construction process of a 747 is significantly different from the development of a life form – even the observable, single-generation process of a child forming in the womb – so comparisons of the two just don’t work even if you do have some clue about evolution.
“No one has ever seen one species evolve into another!”
Well, despite the fact that evolution is a process slow enough that it seldom happens at a rate where major changes accrue over a time span so sort as a human lifetime, speciation has been observed.
“I accept microevolution – small changes from one generation to the next – but not macroevolution, or large changes.”
Macroevolution is nothing more than the cumulative effects of micro. Pretty simple and straightforward.
“The [eye, bacterial flagellum] is too complicated to have evolved by chance!”
There you go with that ‘chance’ thing again. Natural selection. Selection selection selection.
In the specific case of the eye, scientists actually have a pretty good idea of its evolution from the simplest of photosensitive cells – perhaps enabling an organism to find sunlight for warmth, or to warn it of movement nearby – to the complex (but flawed – your creator is a lousy engineer) mechanisms I’m using to help me proofread this before I hit the ‘Publish’ button. As for the flagellum, I think the Dover, PA court battle brought to light that its “irreducible complexity” was in fact very reducible, as each and every one of its component parts was found to serve a purpose independent of the flagellum assembly as a whole.
There, I hope I’ve given you a good starting point. Now scamper off and work on coming up with some new arguments, this time against a non-hallucinatory target.
