Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Out of Africa

Every now and then, apostate Ed Babinski favors me with a core dump. I'm reposting my side of the correspondence:

Creationist admits at AIG website that humans (dispersing from Tower of Babel [sic]) began shorter and small brained (H. habilis and H. rudolfensis) BOOKZ

To answer this challenge specifically with humanlike animals (or ape-like humans) in mind, we must develop a new understanding of biological similarity, one that embraces common design and creation but that also explains the meaning of the similarities, which admittedly is a theological problem as much as a scientific one.

Gee, Ed, that's impressive!

While we're on the subject:

1. Asian-Americans are generally taller than native Asians. And since there's a rough correlation between brain size and body length (e.g. pygmies), it is evident that Asian-Americans evolved from protohuman hominids in 19C Japan, China, &c.

By the same token, Northern Europeans are generally taller than South Americans. Therefore, Northern Europeans evolved from South Americans.

2. Salamanders have fish-like properties and lizard-like properties. Therefore, salamanders evolved from fish–unless salamanders evolved from lizards, or lizards evolved from fish, or fish evolved from lizards.

By the same token, the Thylacine has lupine properties and marsupian properties. Therefore, the Thylacine evolved from wolves, unless wolves evolved from marsupials.

“You don't see Prof. Todd Wood of Bryan College as straining to accommodate data that clearly fits evolution?”

That begs the question by treating evolution as the standard of comparison.

“Evolution is not a theory in crisis. It is not teetering on the verge of collapse. It has not failed as a scientific explanation.”

Then why did we witness all that internecine warfare between Gould, Dawkins, Ruse, Piker, and John Maynard Smith? Looks like a fight to the death.

“There is evidence for evolution, gobs and gobs of it. It is not just speculation or a faith choice or an assumption or a religion. It is a productive framework for lots of biological research, and it has amazing explanatory power.”

That’s a nice string of assertions.

Of course macroevolution is speculation. At best, evolution is underdetermined by the evidence. It extrapolates from bits and pieces of trace evidence from the past, or extrapolates from the present into the distant past.

“There is no conspiracy to hide the truth about the failure of evolution.”

Then why do Eugenie Scott et al. turn to the courts to censure dissent in the classroom?

“Behe at the Discovery Institute also has come out in favor of common ancestry based on the genomic evidence, including not just overall similarity but based on shared non-functioning genes (for creating vitamin C for example, that are still there but no longer functioning in both chimps and humans), and shared non-functioning genes from retroviruses that have inserted themselves into the same regions of human and chimpanzee genomes.”

Thanks for telling me something I already know. I can always count on you to arrive right after closing time.

I own Behe’s book, in which he says that. (I also own Collins’ book in which he makes the same claim.)

As a matter of fact I emailed Behe and asked him about an alternative explanation, and he agreed with me.

I notice that you don’t interact with the arguments of Dembski and Wells to the contrary (in The Design of Life).

“As with most YEC treatments of this issue, Wood fails to explain why, as one goes back in time (stratigraphically lower) the less like us the most advanced hominds look.”

Of course, on a YEC timescale, “going back in time” would be going back a few thousand years. So what does more or less “advanced” mean within that tight chronological framework?

The commenter seems to be subconsciously superimposing his own timescales onto YEC, then attempting to generate a problem. But, of course, that’s incoherent. It conflates some elements of an internal critique with some elements of an external critique. But that’s for documenting the incompetence of the opposition.

“Neither the ‘common designer’ argument nor Flood geology begins to account for this, or the similar patterns for countless other animal and plant groups.”

Since YECs don’t generally view “less advanced” hominids as precursors to modern man in the first place, they don’t view this as a more primitive stage of the same hominid line. So what is there to account for?

“YECs also fail to grasp that debating whether ‘humans’ are descended from ‘apes’ is largely moot in view of the fact that biologically and taxonomically we _are_ apes. Humans are members of the family hominidae (great apes) which includes gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and several extinct genera.”

Of course, these taxonomies are merely human constructs.

There are different ways to group various biological organisms, depending on which features you wish to single out (to the exclusion of other features).

“Then there is the contradiction between YECs denying evolution (at least macro-evolution), and their suggestion that major genetic changes (including the creation of new allelles--essentially ‘new information’ ) took place since the Ark landed a few thousand years ago. That would require more rapid and dramatic evolution than even mainstream scientists allow, but they pretend to not notice these glaring inconsistencies, as they talk out of both sides of their mouth.”

Of course, that objection confuses macroevolution with accelerated microevolution.

8 comments:

  1. Of course Dr. Wood is being taken out of context in this exchange. Wood's position, it seems to me, is that definitions of science are elastic, and not exactly identifiable. He said that there is gobs of evidence for evolution, but in the next series of posts pointed out that there is a lot of evidence for creation also.

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  2. One more point about Dr. Wood. Dr. Wood is of the frame of mind that there is no use in critiquing an existing framework unless you have something constructive to put in its place. Most of his blog is made up of his thoughts on building a creationist model of the sciences (Paul Garner has a blog along these lines also thenewcreationism.wordpress.com). Wood sees ID as problematic because they are not offering anything in place of the standard Evolutionary paradigm. See his current post on this.

    Wood points out a lot of faulty reasoning in creationist apoligetics, and wants a more rigorous form of science. I would fit him in the category of Kurt Wise, and others who are actually doing science.

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  3. Hi Steve,

    A friend commented on Dr. Wood's latest paper:

    Wood's baraminological test may put sediba into Homo, but if you put an africanus and sediba side by side, they'd look like twins compared to any modern human.

    Another friend commented:

    I think the most telling line in Wood's AiG research article was: "..the genetic similarity between humans and nonhumans is astonishingly high (Wood 2006) and the australopiths are surprisingly human in their appearance. Why should this be? It would be easy to attribute their similarities to a common designer, but such an attribution would be trivial."

    As with most YEC treatments of this issue, the authors also fail to explain why, as one goes back in time (stratigraphically lower) the less like us the most advanced hominds look. Neither the "common designer" argument nor Flood geology begins to account for this, or the similar patterns for countless other animal and plant groups. YECs also fail to grasp that debating whether "humans" are descended from "apes" is largely moot in view of the fact that biologically and taxonomically we _are_ apes. Humans are members of the family hominidae (great apes) which includes gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and several extinct genera. Then there is the contradiction between YECs denying evolution (at least macro-evolution), and their suggestion that major genetic changes (including the creation of new allelles--essentially "new information" ) took place since the Ark landed a few thousand years ago. That would require more rapid and dramatic evolution than even mainstream scientists allow, but they pretend to not notice these glaring inconsistencies, as they talk out of both sides of their mouth.

    And here is the link to some of Wood's other pieces. So far as young-earth creationists go, Wood seems to make even MORE admissions than Kurt Wise:

    http://www.skepticfriends.org/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=13180

    But not as many admissions as Behe, who DOES accept the genetic data as strong evidence for common ancestry.

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  4. I already commented on all of that, Ed. What's your problem? Are you incapable of thinking for yourself? Can you only copy/paste what others say, then repeat as needed?

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  5. Ed said:
    ---
    That would require more rapid and dramatic evolution than even mainstream scientists allow
    --

    About that...

    Have you seen the experiments on Drosophila by Waddington and Schmalhausen (separate experiments) that are sometimes hyped by the evo-devo crowd, which claim that the environment itself has impact on the phenotype, and further that these environmental changes in the phenotype (not mutation changes in the DNA) can be inherited? In other words, Waddington's experiment took flies that demonstrated some feature as a result of the fly itself living at an atypical extreme in the environment (that is, the changes were not genetic) and eventually was able to breed the flies such that that same change would manifest in offspring even when the environment was typical.

    Furthermore, experiments have shown that you can breed eyeless flies who have the recessive gene from both parents that keeps their eyes from developing. You can take pure stock of these flies who, because the gene is recessive, can be interbred with each other with the guarantee that their offspring will be blind too, as both parents can *only* provide that same recessive gene. However, within just a few generations, offspring will be born with eyes again. The odds of this occurring so quickly through random mutation are so low as to render Darwinian principals here implausible.

    So the evolution of the eye in Drosophila, at least, appears to take mere months and rather than thousands or millions of years.

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  6. "That would require more rapid and dramatic evolution than even mainstream scientists allow, but they pretend to not notice these glaring inconsistencies, as they talk out of both sides of their mouth. "

    Ed you know that is dishonest. Wood talks about the rapid rate of change after the flood on his blog often. He ties it to lateral gene transfer.

    Paul Garner who wrote the book "The New Creationism" also notes the problem, but grapples with it. So no one is ignoring the issue, you just don't like their explanations.

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  7. "Then there is the contradiction between YECs denying evolution (at least macro-evolution), and their suggestion that major genetic changes (including the creation of new allelles--essentially "new information" ) took place since the Ark landed a few thousand years ago. That would require more rapid and dramatic evolution than even mainstream scientists allow, but they pretend to not notice these glaring inconsistencies, as they talk out of both sides of their mouth."

    First, This is dumb. Ed, Creationists do not speak with one voice. As Dr. Wood has noted in many of his blog posts there is a wide range of opinions in creationism concerning the very issue of biological change. For you to say otherwise is a lie, or ignorance. Take your pick.

    Second, there is nothing that logically necessitates denying big changes in the created kinds. As long as the theory follows good exegesis, and does not contradict the meaning of the text there is no problem.

    You also speak as if Creationism is monolithic, which like non-Christian science is not the case. It is similar to saying "Science" says, but "Science" doesn't say anything, only individual scientists do.

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