Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (28 page)

12. Something cannot be created out of nothing, say scientists. Therefore, from where did the material for the Big Bang come? From where did the first life forms that provided the raw material for evolution originate? Stanley Miller's creation of amino acids out of an inorganic "soup" and other biogenic molecules is not the creation of life.

Science may not be equipped to answer certain "ultimate"-type questions, such as what there was before the beginning of the universe or what time it was before time began or where the matter for the Big Bang came from. So far these have been philosophical or religious questions, not scientific ones, and therefore have not been a part of science. (Recently, Stephen Hawking and other cosmologists have made some attempts at scientific speculations on these questions.) Evolutionary theory attempts to understand the causality of change
after
time and matter were "created" (whatever that means). As for the origin of life, biochemists do have a very rational and scientific explanation for the evolution from inorganic to organic compounds, the creation of amino acids and the construction of protein chains, the first crude cells, the creation of photosynthesis, the invention of sexual reproduction, and so on. Stanley Miller never claimed to have created life, just some of its building blocks. While these theories are by no means robust and are still subject to lively scientific debate, there is a reasonable explanation for how you get from the Big Bang to the Big Brain in the known universe using the known laws of nature.

Scientifically Based Arguments and Answers

13. Population statistics demonstrate that if we extrapolate backward from the present population using the current rate of population growth, there were only two people living approximately 6,300 years before the present (4300 B.C.E.). This proves that humans and civilization are quite young. If the Earth were old—say, one million years—over the course of 25,000 generations at a 0.5 percent rate of population growth and an average of 2.5 children per family, the present population would be 10 to the power of 2,100 people, which is impossible since there are only 10 to the power of 130 electrons in the known universe.

If you want to play the numbers game, how about this? Applying their model, we find that in 2600 B.C.E. the total population on Earth would have been around 600 people. We know with a high degree of certainty that in 2600 B.C.E. there were flourishing civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus River Valley, and China. If we give Egypt an extremely generous one-sixth of the world's population, then 100 people built the pyramids, not to mention all the other architectural monuments—they most certainly needed a miracle or two ... or perhaps the assistance of ancient astronauts!

The fact is that populations do not grow in a steady manner. There are booms and busts, and the history of the human population before the Industrial Revolution is one of prosperity and growth, followed by famine and decline, and punctuated by disaster. In Europe, for instance, about half of the population was killed by a plague during the sixth century, and in the fourteenth century the bubonic plague wiped out about one-third of the population in three years. As humans struggled for millennia to fend off extinction, the population curve was one of peaks and valleys as it climbed uncertainly but steadily upward. It is only since the nineteenth century that the rate of increase has been steadily accelerating.

14. Natural selection can never account for anything other than minor changes within species—microevolution. Mutations used by evolutionists to explain macroevolution are always harmful, rare, and random, and cannot be the driving force of evolutionary change.

I shall never forget the four words pounded into the brains of the students of evolutionary biologist Bayard Brattstrom at California State University, Fullerton: "Mutants are not monsters." His point was that the public perception of mutants— two-headed cows and the like at the county fair
—
is not the sort of mutants evolutionists are discussing. Most mutations are small genetic or chromosomal aberrations that have small effects—slightly keener hearing, a new shade of fur. Some of these small effects may provide benefits to an organism in an ever-changing environment.

Moreover, Ernst Mayr's (1970) theory of
allopatric speciation
seems to demonstrate precisely how natural selection, in conjunction with other forces and contingencies of nature, can and does produce new species. Whether they agree or disagree with the theory of allopatric speciation and punctuated equilibrium, scientists all agree that natural selection can produce significant change. The debate is over how much change, how rapid a change, and what other forces of nature act in conjunction with or contrary to natural selection. No one, and I mean
no one,
working in the field is debating whether natural selection is the driving force behind evolution, much less whether evolution happened or not.

15. There are no transitional forms in the fossil record, anywhere, including and especially humans. The whole fossil record is an embarrassment to evolutionists. Neanderthal specimens, for example, are diseased skeletons distorted by arthritis, rickets, and other diseases that create the bowed legs, brow ridge, and larger skeletal structure.
Homo erectus
and
Australopithecus
are just apes.

Creationists always quote Darwin's famous passage in the
Origin of Species
in which he asks, "Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the gravest objection which can be urged against my theory" (1859, p. 310). Creationists end the quote there and ignore the rest of Darwin's chapter, in which he addresses the problem.

One answer is that plenty of examples of transitional forms have been discovered since Darwin's time. Just look in any paleontology text. The fossil
Archeopteryx
—part reptile, part bird—is a classic example of a transitional form. In my debate with Duane Gish, I presented a slide of the newly discovered
Ambulocetus nutans
—a beautiful example of a transitional form from land mammal to whale (see
Science,
January 14, 1994, p. 180). And the charges about the Neanderthals and
Homo erectus
are simply absurd. We now have a treasure trove of human transitional forms.

A second answer is a rhetorical one. Creationists demand just one transitional fossil. When you give it to them, they then claim there is a gap between these two fossils and ask you to present a transitional form between these two. If you do, there are now two more gaps in the fossil record, and so on ad infinitum. Simply pointing this out refutes the argument. You can do it with cups on a table, showing how each time the gap is filled with a cup it creates two gaps, which when each is filled with a cup creates four gaps, and so on. The absurdity of the argument is visually striking.

A third answer was provided in 1972 by Eldredge and Gould, when they argued that gaps in the fossil record do not indicate missing data of slow and stately change; rather, "missing" fossils are evidence of rapid and episodic change (punctuated equilibrium). Using Mayr's allopatric specia-tion, where small and unstable "founder" populations are isolated at the periphery of the larger population's range, Eldredge and Gould showed that the relatively rapid change in this smaller gene pool creates new species but leaves behind few, if any, fossils. The process of fossilization is rare and infrequent anyway, but it is almost nonexistent during these times of rapid speciation because the number of individuals is small and the change is swift. A lack of fossils may be evidence for rapid change, not missing evidence for gradual evolution.

16. The Second Law of Thermodynamics proves that evolution cannot be true since evolutionists state that the universe and life move from chaos to order and simple to complex, the exact opposite of the entropy predicted by the Second Law.

First of all, on any scale other than the grandest of all—the 600-million-year history of life on Earth—species do not evolve from simple to complex, and nature does not simply move from chaos to order. The history of life is checkered with false starts, failed experiments, local and mass extinctions, and chaotic restarts. It is anything but a neat Time/Life-book fold-out from single cells to humans. Even in the big picture, the Second Law allows for such change because the Earth is in a system that has a constant input of energy from the Sun. As long as the Sun is burning, life may continue thriving and evolving, automobiles may be prevented from rusting, burgers can be heated in ovens, and all manner of other things in apparent violation of the Second Law may continue. But as soon as the Sun burns out, entropy will take over and life will cease and chaos come again. The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to closed, isolated systems. Since the Earth receives a constant input of energy from the Sun, entropy may decrease and order increase (although the Sun itself is running down in the process). Thus, because the Earth is not strictly a closed system, life may evolve without violating natural laws. In addition, recent research in chaos theory suggests that order can and does spontaneously generate out of apparent chaos, all without violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics (see Kauffman 1993). Evolution no more breaks the Second Law of Thermodynamics than one breaks the law of gravity by jumping up.

17. Even the simplest of life forms are too complex to have come together by random chance. Take a simple organism consisting of merely 100 parts. Mathematically there are 10 to the power of 158 possible ways for the parts to link up. There are not enough molecules in the universe, or time since the beginning, to allow for these possible ways to come together in even this simple life form, let alone to produce human beings. The human eye alone defies explanation by the randomness of evolution. It is the equivalent of the monkey typing
Hamlet,
or even "To be or not to be." It will not happen by random chance.

Natural selection is not random, nor does it operate by chance. Natural selection preserves the gains and eradicates the mistakes. The eye evolved from a single, light-sensitive cell into the complex eye of today through hundreds if not thousands of intermediate steps, many of which still exist in nature (see Dawkins 1986). In order for the monkey to type the thirteen letters opening Hamlet's soliloquy by chance, it would take 26 to the power of 13 trials for success. This is sixteen times as great as the total number of seconds that have elapsed in the lifetime of our solar system. But if each correct letter is preserved and each incorrect letter eradicated,

the process operates much faster. How much faster? Richard Hardison (1988) wrote a computer program in which letters were "selected" for or against, and it took an average of only 335.2 trials to produce the sequence of letters TOBEORNOTTOBE. It takes the computer less than ninety seconds. The entire play can be done in about 4.5 days.

18. Hydrodynamic sorting during the Flood explains the apparent progression of fossils in geological strata. The simple, ignorant organisms died in the sea and are on the bottom layers, while more complex, smarter, and faster organisms died higher up.

Not one trilobite floated upward to a higher stratum? Not one dumb horse was on the beach and drowned in a lower stratum? Not one flying pterodactyl made it above the Cretaceous layer? Not one moronic human did not come in out of the rain? And what about the evidence provided by other dating techniques such as radiometry?

19. The dating techniques of evolutionists are inconsistent, unreliable, and wrong. They give false impressions of an old Earth, when in fact it is no older than ten thousand years, as proven by Dr. Thomas Barnes from the University of Texas at El Paso when he demonstrated that the half-life of the Earth's magnetic field is 1,400 years.

First of all, Barnes's magnetic field argument assumes that the decay of the magnetic field is linear when geophysics has demonstrated that it fluctuates through time. He is working from a false premise. Second, not only are the various dating techniques quite reliable on their own but there
is considerable independent corroboration between them. For example, radiometric dates for different elements from the same rock will all converge on the same date. Finally, how can creationists dismiss all dating techniques with a sweep of the hand except those that purportedly support their position?

20. Classification of organisms above the species level is arbitrary and man-made. Taxonomy proves nothing, especially because so many of the links between species are missing.

The science of classification is indeed man-made, like all sciences, and of course it cannot prove anything about the evolution of organisms absolutely. But its grouping of organisms is anything but arbitrary, even though there is an element of subjectivity to it. An interesting cross-cultural test of taxonomy is the fact that Western-trained biologists and native peoples from New Guinea identify the same types of birds as separate species (see Mayr 1988). Such groupings really do exist in nature. Moreover, the goal of modern cladistics—the science of classification through nested hierarchies of similarities—is to make taxonomy less subjective, and it successfully uses inferred evolutionary relationships
to
arrange taxa in a branching hierarchy such that all members of a given taxon have the same ancestors.

21. If evolution is gradual, there should be no gaps between species.

Evolution is not always gradual. It is often quite sporadic. And evolutionists never said there should not be gaps. Finally, gaps do not prove creation any more than blank spots in human history prove that all civilizations were spontaneously created.

22. "Living fossils" like the coelacanth and horseshoe crab prove that all life was created at once.