Creationist makes nearly ALL the common mistakes

If you would like to practise spotting almost all the common mistakes that creationists make when the are speaking about evolution, I recommend you to listen skeptically to an episode of the Discovery Institute's podcast, ID The Future.  On 11th June 2012** there was an interview interview with Dr Ben Carson who kindly provided a lesson in the recitation of persistently regurgitated and easily answered bunkum.

The show notes give some background:


On this episode of ID the Future, host David Boze speaks with Dr. Ben Carson, renowned paediatric neurosurgeon and Darwin doubter. Dr. Carson was recently invited to deliver the commencement speech at Emory University. Unfortunately, upon uncovering his non-allegiance to Darwinian ideology, 500 faculty members and students alike signed a letter in protest of his welcome. Listen in to hear Dr. Carson discuss this ill treatment and why his acute knowledge of the brain has led him to reject Darwinism. Dr. Ben Carson is the Director of the Division of Paediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. An internationally renowned physician, Dr. Carson has authored over 100 neurosurgical publications, along with three best-selling books, and has been awarded 38 honorary doctorate degrees and dozens of national merit citations. 


Dr Carson might indeed be a renowned neurosurgeon and in that capacity he has my admiration.  However, I think he should also now become renowned for his misunderstanding of the Theory of Evolution, which he pejoratively refers to as 'Darwinism'.

To take a few of them with my comments in small text:

• Darwinians are so closed minded.  Yes that's always an argument that convinces people.
• In the history of science, people have come up with some 'pretty outlandish things' that have turned out to be wrong.  True but only the evidence will tell us whether evolution is one of them.  I wouldn't put money on it myself.
• Evolution does not explain the origin of life.  That's true, and well spotted!  his is classic error number one.  It is just as relevant to say that the Theory of Gravitation does not explain the origin of life either.  Evolution doesn't claim to be able to do that.
• How does anything come out of nothing and how does life evolve from non-life.  Just saying that we don't yet know makes the existence of a designer no more likely.  For example - we do know about self-replicating proteins, called prions, that are not alive themselves but they do replicate.
• Although 'fully accepting the concept of natural selection' he thinks that it is taking it a little bit too far to claim that it is the foundational pillar of proof that evolution occurs.  Yes - and what does that mean?  This is not an unusual claim.  I think it means that they don't think natural selection goes as far as speciation, so one wonders what use it is after all..
• Evolutionists [not Darwinists in this case] look at similarities between life forms and infer that they are related, but wouldn't a designer use the same designs if they were successful?  He then uses an analogy - and all analogies are wrong - different models of cars from the same manufacturer share common components.  He says that they have not evolved from each other - which is clearly not true anyway.
• The human genome is a complex sophisticated coding mechanism.   He then makes an analogy to computer programming with 4 digits instead of 2, which he claims is twice as complex.  In fact it is 4!/2! = 12 times more complex - but hey!  What is a factor of six between friends?  It still explains nothing about the need for a designer - this is the argument from personal incredulity.  [The 4! symbology indicates a factorial = 4x3x2x1]
• Complexity of the brain is amazing.  To say that it came about randomly doesn't make sense.  Shades of Michael Behe's 747 from a junkyard here - often rebutted.  Randomness is involved, but it is absolutely not the key to natural selection.  Survival is the key.
• Apparently there are no intermediate species.  No-one has ever found them.  Actually ALL species are intermediate, including our own.  See this Dawkins video for a lovely explanation.
• A single neuron in the human brain can process 50K interactions per second.  If true, that's a very impressive thing that evolution has developed isn't it.
• His message to the young scientists in his field is to 'be wise'.  [i.e. don't tell them until you get tenure?]  Is this just 'lying for Jesus'? He was rather careful not to go as far as actually recommending this though.

All in all this interview is remarkable, even compared with the Discovery Institute's usual fair.  The God of the Gaps argument/fallacy is thinly disguised, but visible to anyone who looks at it.

** Beware that the Discovery Institute tends to recycle its podcasts, so you might have heard this a few times before if you enjoy the masochistic experience of listening to ID The future.  It is good practise!

The gorilla's genome says . . .

The full genome of the last of the great ape species has been sequenced at last, and the results have been the cause of great excitement among the 'Intelligent Design' community. The gorilla genome is about the 50th to be completed, and it turns out that it has taken quite a while, partly because it is a great deal larger than our own.

The surprise is the finding that about 15% of the genes of gorillas are shared with humans and a different 15% with chimpanzees.  On the face of it, ID's proponents would appear to have a good point when they claim that this calls the family tree of the great apes/hominids into question.   They claim (e.g. here if you can read the words of Casey Luskin without imagining his whining voice) that 'neo-Darwinian evolution' has now been shown to have failed - yet again!

Just a few observations about Luskin's technique before attempting any analysis of the science.  In only the second paragraph he had to launch into an 'ad hominem' attack on Eugenie Scott.  Given that his argument might have had some face-value scientific merit, I think I can be forgiven for finding this approach to be unnecessarily confrontational and defensive.  But evidently he thought that it strengthened his argument.  I don't agree but I'm interested (and proud) to see that Eugenie has got him on the run like that.

I am much more interested in his 'reasoning'.  He says:

"The standard evolutionary phylogeny of primates holds that humans and chimps are more closely related to one-another than to other great apes like gorillas. In practice, all that really means is that when we sequence human, chimp, and gorilla genes, human and chimp genes have a DNA sequence that is more similar to one-another's genes than to the gorilla's genes."

Indeed that is what we might have expected, but the fact that the data seem to show something different is interesting isn't it?  I would also have expected Luskin to 'muddy the waters' for a non-specialist audience by using words like 'phylogeny'.  Why use a small word when a big one can be used instead.

I like to hone my arguments by listening to this sort of rhetorical tosh and trying to spot the logical fallacies.  My first thought on the topic was that the process of speciation must have been slow enough to allow a degree of gene transfer between the sub-species that later divided into the current completely separate species. We know that Neanderthals interbred with our ancestors to some degree.

Indeed, it turns out that this has been offered as an argument, but being a relatively weak one, this was the one that Luskin proceeded to attack.

"Called incomplete lineage sorting, it provides a convenient after-the-fact explanation for why different genes carry different phylogenetic signals. Of course, this is merely an ad hoc hypothesis invoked to explain away inconvenient data which contradicts the standard phylogeny."

That sounds reasonable until you discover that 'incomplete lineage sorting' is not quite what he describes.  Fortunately, proper specialists in genetics have come to the rescue.

In his slightly technical but manageable post Chimps are our closest relatives… but not for all of our genes, David Winter describes much more clearly how different variants of genes (called alleles) can be spread exactly as has been observed.  It turns out that it is perfectly understandable how the gene tree can be different from the species tree.

The gene tree can be different from the species tree. 
From an excellent article by David Winter

As David Winter says:

"For recent or repeated and rapid speciation processes there might not be time for the genetic lineages to sort. The gene tree can be different from the species tree"

and he then goes on to explain that this very observation can probably tell science something useful:

"Although we’ve always known this problem existed, we’ve only recently been able to extend population genetics theory to actually infer the history of species for gene trees even when those gene trees are unsorted."

So now you can decide for yourself who to side with - since we are 'teaching the controversy' as the ID community likes to say.  Do we believe a real geneticist who has a real explanation (or was it only an ad hoc hypothesis that we have always known about?).  Or do we believe someone who goes for ad hominem attacks on respectable and rational scientists, then uses 2 dimensional analogies that fail to prove anything because of their simplistic nature and merely rhetorical value?

I would still go for a strong adherence to the belief that chimps are our nearest cousins (speaking as a species of course).

ID might still be one of the strongest lines of evidence for the existence of a god, but let's face it, it doesn't have much competition!  Nor does it imply which of the current catalogue of 3000+ gods might have been responsible for the design, or why he did such a poor job of it.

Small note: Of course this very post could be said to be an 'ad hominem' attack but I trust you to judge that for yourself.

Paley's Watch was not ticking

For the last couple of hundred years 'Creationists' have used variants on the theme of 'the argument from incredulity' to explain how the complexity of life demonstrates the existence of a god.  Or should I say usually it is the 'God'?  William Paley's famous watch is at the heart of one of the best known versions of this story.  (Read about it here in the unlikely event that you are not familiar with it.)

Of course the idea is an analogy, and I strongly hold that all analogies are wrong  when it comes down to it.  They can be useful to teach real learning, but they can also be used to propagate nonsense in a plausible way. But setting that aside here is a question.

When Paley found his mythical watch, was it still ticking?

I think it would make a difference.  After all, the same analogy applies to the world around us in some ways.

If his watch was ticking, then it might imply that it had a designer, but it would also imply that it had a winder.  Within the previous day or so, somebody must have intervened in the existence of the watch and wound it up.  Without that intervention the watch would have stopped.

If his watch was no longer ticking then the conclusion about the designer is unchanged (and incidentally it is still wrong, being only an analogy).  But it would suggest that the designer had gone away and left his invention to fend for itself.

This is the type of world that we live in.  The designer might have made the world - although there is not a jot of evidence to support this idea.  He might seem still to be involved, but actually the designer no longer gets involved in it.  We all know that the studies of the effectiveness of intercessory prayer have demonstrated no value, or even a slightly negative correlation in the outcome of those prayers.  (See here for an example that shows no significant effect.)

God doesn't answer prayers, but the people who are praying still find ways to claim, without convincing evidence other than 'testimony', that it has made a difference to their lives.

Isn't the mind a wonderful thing?  It can make up credible explanations for uncaused non-events.

Irreducible complexity explained with a mousetrap

This nice short video explains one of the faults in the concept of irreducible complexity - a concept used by creationists to 'explain' why evolution doesn't work.



The idea that the mousetrap is no use with any single one of its parts missing is examined.  Creationists often use the mousetrap as an example of a machine that must have been designed as a complete machine - not evolved from a simpler machine.  Of course it was designed that way!  Its a machine!

This is an analogy of course, and as I explained recently, analogies are useful teaching aids but they do not really explain anything about the truth.

However, extending this particular analogy as a tool for real learning, the truth is that a mousetrap-like device has other uses. 

Evolution cares little for intentions and cares a lot about opportunity.  The mousetrap idea explains perfectly how seemingly impossible features arise from one useful feature which accidentally becomes useful in another way.

Hoisted by your own petard?