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Commentary on Creation/Evolution Headlines

Note:  News and commentary from previous years has been moved to the news archive pages  

August 22, 2008

In this long article --which consists of discontinuous excerpts from a book, or an even longer article--author Peter Bebergal comments on AIG's creation museum, as well as more generally on the creation evolution controversy.  As is usual among the wannabe cognoscenti, he has a very negative view of creationists.  But, perhaps because he is a Jew and not a Christian, he is very clear-eyed about the consequences of Darwinism for Christianity:

If evolution is true, the specialness of human beings is called into question. For Christians this is particularly profound. If man evolved from lower forms then there couldn’t be the historical people known as Adam and Eve, created by God and given dominion over the earth. If they didn’t exist then they didn’t eat the forbidden fruit. If they didn’t eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil then there would be no original sin. And if there is no original sin, then redemption by Jesus is unnecessary.

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But Darwinism and modern approaches to religion (literary criticism, archeology) were threats to the very core of Christian theology: the centrality of man in God’s creation, his ultimate fall and original sin, and his redemption by Jesus Christ.. 

I wish most Christians understood the implications of Darwinism for their faith as well as this Jew does.  

Australian Creationist Tas Walker reports that the prominent Calvinist pastor and theologian R.C. Sproul now believes in creation in six literal days, so perhaps this will start a trend back to a conservative view of Genesis.

Here is an April 2008 interview with dinosaur expert Bob Bakker.  He describes be recognized as the "dino-guy" by young children "the second to fifth-grade cohort" in public places like grocery stores and airports.  One of the most interesting things about the article is where Bakker expresses his respect for early 19th Century ichnologist Edward Hitchcock, president of Amhurst University, who studied the dinosaur tracks fo the Connecticut River valley.    

I do have one hero among the early bone-hunters: Edward Hitchcock, President of Amherst and first Director of the Massachusetts Geological Survey. I met him early in my Freshman year, in 1963. I was sitting in the cozy sanctuary at the base of Harkness tower, the Romanesque building that houses the carillon. Carved into the hardwood bas-relief was the unmistakable form of a dinosaur footprint - what was called Grallator by the Reverend in 1836-42.

I knew that Hitchcock was a comic character, so said my dinosaur books. He had "mistaken" dinosaur tracks for those of great prehistoric birds - tee hee! Supposedly he had been deluded by his orthodox Congregationalist beliefs......but...

I got Hitchcock's original books, his great monograph on Triassic-Jurassic tracks, and I found that his reputation had been twisted. Hitchcock was the first footprint experimentalist for the Jurassic. He ran all manner of beasts, furry, scaly and feathery, over fresh mud to examine their tracks. He scoured the zoo-podiatrical literature, collating all the data on the feet of extant species. No pun intended here - but by 1840, the Reverend knew more about the sole in organic Creation than any other scholar.

Hitchcock was never, ever "mistaken" about dino-tracks. He didn't assume that the Jurassic footprints were those of birds. He proved that they were birds. Without a single set of fossil foot bones, Hitchcock worked out the number of toes and the number of toe bones and the manner of locomotion among early dinosaurs. His key animal was Anomoepus. Not a theropod predator, but what we now call an herbivorous ornithopod dinosaur, a small, fleet-footed species close in design to that of Hypsilophodon and our Drinker from Como Bluff.

Hitchcock's diagram of toe joints in Jurassic dinos was computed from the cushiony pads that supported each joint. Each pad marked where two toe bones came together. The number of toe bones, going from inside to outside in the hind foot, was: 2,3,4,5,0. That toe-bone formula marks one and only one Class today: the Aves. Birds.

Hitchcock was the first to show that dinosaurs had small hands with clawed fingers (Anomoepus). And that dinosaurs ran around with high average speed, often in packs. And that the posture was like that of birds - ankles off the ground.

The Reverend never used the word "dinosaur" for his track-makers because the ruling paradigm of the time was that dinosaurs were flat-footed quadrupeds, with rhino-bear-lizard posture. But Hitchcock's reconstruction in fact matched the real nature of the dino skeleton.

This is interesting to me because I begin my chapter on the physiology of dinosaurs by discussing Edward Hitchcock and his findings.  It is certainly nice that Bakker, one of the five or six leading dinosaur experts in the entire world, appreciates Hitchcock's work.  

Also of interest is the fact that Bakker dislikes the militant atheists more than he dislikes the creationists:

Question:  Finally, as someone who works with the "bones of contention" and the fossil record, what do you think about the current controversy surrounding evolution in the United States? How can we do a better job of communicating science to the public?

Anwser [Bakker]: We dino-scientists have a great responsibility: our subject matter attracts kids better than any other, except rocket-science. What's the greatest enemy of science education in the U.S.?

Militant Creationism?

No way. It's the loud, strident, elitist anti-creationists. The likes of Richard Dawkins and his colleagues.

These shrill uber-Darwinists come across as insultingly dismissive of any and all religious traditions. If you're not an atheist, then you must be illiterate or stupid and, possibly, a danger to yourself and others.

As many commentators have noted, in televised debates, these Darwinists seem devoid of joy or humor, except a haughty delight in looking down their noses. Dawkinsian screeds are sermons to the choir; the message pleases only those already convinced. Dawkins wins no converts from the majority of U.S. parents who still honor a Biblical tradition. Hitchcock is a far better model. He had his battles with skepticism. He did worry that the discovery of Deep Time would upset the good people of his congregation. But Hitchcock could view three thousand years of scriptural tradition and see much of value - and much concordance with Jurassic geology.

Read his "Religion of Geology". It's a lovely contemplation of how Old Testament and New deal with the beauty in Nature. And the horror. Why is there pain and death among deer and lions? Why is there pain among humans? These questions are of little interest for the Dawkinsians, but trouble most Americans. Hitchcock found no easy answers. But he saw a Plan nevertheless. Millions of years of geological time, with waves after waves of predator and prey, punctuated by extinctions, were recorded in the sedimentary annals.

It is interesting to see a world-famous paleontologist take this position.

February 26, 2008

A new study indicates that the famous Burgess Shale of Canada was formed very rapidly and catastrophically. 

"Scientists analyzed the shales millimeter by millimeter, and found that . . . a thick slurry powered down a steep slope and instantly buried the animals to a depth where normal decay couldn't occur."

This is yet another instance where uniformity has been rejected in favor of catastrophism.  Charles Lyell, call your office.  

 
 

February 18, 2008

 

Here is an interesting article about how scientists have found a fossil horseshoe crab in the Ordovician (notional age 445 million years ago).  And, of course, it looks pretty much like a modern horseshoe crab:

Seemingly unchanged since [long, long] before the age of dinosaurs, these venerable sea creatures can now claim a history that reaches back almost half-a-billion years.

Another report on the same find notes that:

The ancient animals were remarkably similar to modern horseshoe crabs, the discovery team noted.  Horseshoe crabs have long been known as "living fossils" because they have survived since [extremely] ancient times with little change in physical form, and they have no close modern relatives.

They also note that horseshoe crabs will probabaly be found in the Cambrian, since the one they found in the Ordovician was obviously not the first one. 

As to why the basic body plan never changes:

It's a fortuitous blend of evolutionary and ecological factors that permits long-term survivorship of certain body plans, Rudkin said. 

So, if a body plan stays the same for half a billion years, its because of evolution, but if it changed into something else (and admittedly we don't find this in the fossil record) that would also be explained by evolution.  Heads I win, tails you lose.

An hypothesis that can explain everything and its opposite is scientifically useless.  Evolution is obviously more in the nature of ideology or religion than of science.  

January 29, 2008

 Here is an editorial critiquing the theory that Americans reject evolution not because it conflicts with the Bible but because people have a built-in revulsion toward apes.  The author, while quite properly deriding this notion, is too kind to mention that even in Darwinian theory, we are not descended from apes, but rather apes and humans share a common ancestor, which may or may not have looked like modern apes.

January 22, 2008 

The December issue of National Geographic features a story by John Updike on "extreme dinosaurs," in which he notes how new species of dinosaurs keep being found, and how many of the species can only be described as bizarre.  There is also an excellent photo gallery of both bones and artists' conceptions of the living animals.  There is also an interesting retrospective of artists' conceptions through the years, with an audio commentary on how the older dino art represents scientific opinion that has since been discarded.

Updike begins by trying to imagine the utility for some of the bizarre dinosaurian anatomy, but soon acknowledges the futility of such an exercise:

But what do we make of such apparently inutile extremes of morphology as the elaborate skull frills of ceratopsians like Styracosaurus or the horizontally protruding front teeth of Masiakasaurus knopfleri, a late Cretaceous oddity recently uncovered in Madagascar by excavators who named the beast after Mark Knopfler, the lead singer of the group Dire Straits, their favorite music to dig by?

*  *  *

Throughout their long day on Earth, there was an intensification of boniness and spikiness, as if the struggle for survival became grimmer. And yet the defensive or attacking advantage of skull frills and back plates is not self-evident. The solid-domed skull of Pachycephalosaurus, the largest of the bone-headed dinosaurs, seems made for butting—but for butting what? The skull would do little good against a big predator like Tyrannosaurus rex, which had the whole rest of Pachycephalosaurus's unprotected body to bite down on. Butting matches amid males of the same species were unlikely, since the bone, though ten inches (25.4 centimeters) thick, was not shock-absorbent. The skulls of some pachycephalosaurs, moreover, were flat and thin, and some tall and ridged—bad designs for contact sport. Maybe they were just used for discreet pushing. Or to make a daunting impression.

An even more impractical design shaped the skull of the pachycephalosaurid Dracorex hogwartsia—an intricate sunburst of spiky horns and knobs, without a dome. Only one such skull has been unearthed; it is on display, with the playful name derived from Harry Potter's school of witchcraft and wizardry, in Indianapolis's Children's Museum. Duck-billed Parasaurolophus walkeri, another late Cretaceous plant-eater, sported a spectacular pipelike structure, sweeping back from its skull, that was once theorized to act as a snorkel in swimming. But the tubular crest had no hole for gathering air. It may have served as a trumpeting noisemaker, for herd communication, or supported a bright flap of skin beguiling to a Parasaurolophus of the opposite gender. Sexual success and herd acceptance perpetuate genes as much as combative prowess and food-gathering ability.

Dinosaurs have always presented adaptive puzzles.

Yes, they have.  Because they do not look as though they were "adapted" to anything.  Their designs are not practical; in fact, many are flamboyantly lacking in utility.  Dinosaurian forms, in their whimsical experimentation and in the extreme ugliness that often resulted, do not look like anything that would have evolved as a result of natural selection, nor do they look like anything God would have created.  Accordingly, I don't believe that they evolved, nor that God created them.

 January 4, 2008

 The average person reading my blog for commentary on creation/evolution headlines probably does not want to be subjected to my rants on Islam, terrorism, honor killings, the Iraq war, or related topics.  Accordingly, I have transferred all Islam-related posts to a separate page (last button on the left) and the "News" page will be exclusively devoted to origins issues.

  January 1, 2008

Access Research Network, an Intelligent Design website, has published its list of the 10 most significant origins-related stories.  The most surprising one was a paper published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology postulating that the appendix functions as a sort of safe harbor for beneficial bacteria "providing support for bacterial growth and potentially facilitating re-inoculation of the colon in the event that the contents of the intestinal tract are purged following exposure to a pathogen."  In other words, "Diseases such as cholera or amoebic dysentery would clear the gut of useful bacteria. The appendix's job is to reboot the digestive system in that case."

It was surprising to me because I thought the function of the appendix had long been ascertained.  Apparently not, but it has been a long time since any respectable Darwinist argued that the appendix was a function-less relic of evolution. 

ARN also has a list of top ten resources (books).