Translate

Tuesday 19 March 2024

A Refutation of God-Directed Evolution, the Bible and the BASF - Part 3

A Refutation of God-Directed Evolution, the Bible and the BASF - 3 

The Evolution of Information – Even More Creationist Errors

 

     While CVA’s article is replete with gross misunderstandings of evolution, their assertion that “no one has ever observed an information-increasing genetic change of one type of organism to another, let alone the whole process of microbes-to-man evolution over millions of years” does warrant a complete takedown as it ably demonstrates just how poorly-researched CVA’s attack on evolution is, something that is sadly characteristic of every Christadelphian anti-evolution article I have encountered.

      That evolutionary processed can generate new information is entirely uncontroversial. A frequently quoted article by Thomas Schneider, a molecular biologist with expertise in information theory looks at information gain in a computer model of evolution that began with zero information and showed the generation of evolution by evolutionary processes. Speaking specifically to creationist objections, Schneider notes that

contrary to probabilistic arguments by [creationist] Spetner, the ev program also clearly demonstrates that biological information, measured in the strict Shannon sense, can rapidly appear in genetic control systems subjected to replication, mutation and selection.[1]

Monday 18 March 2024

A Refutation of God-Directed Evolution, the Bible and the BASF - Part 2

 A Refutation of God-Directed Evolution, the Bible and the BASF - 2

Historical Science Makes Accurate Predictions

 

 

In the section “Normal Operational Science Vs. Historic Science”, CVA expands on their argument asserting that

The study of microbes-to-man evolution is a “historic” form of science that is very different to normal “operational” science which is done in the present and involves observation, experimentation and can be repeated.  Man’s achievements in the operational scientific fields gives us confidence to board an aeroplane, or undertake a MRI scan to see what maybe wrong with us.  Thousands if not millions of people have done it before, and everyone has confidence that the science works because we can all witness it happening over and over again with our own eyes.

But historic science – what happened so long ago when no one was around to observe, test and repeat – is a completely different type of science. The problem for microbes-to-man evolution (along with cosmic, chemical, stellar and organic evolution) is that there is no way that anyone today can do an experiment, let alone a repeatable one, to prove microbes-to-man evolution, because we cannot directly observe the past, nor can we repeat it (as an experiment would require).    Assumptions and interpretations always have to be made based on the limited evidence available (e.g. the fossil record), and consequently there is room for a significant amount of doubt.  If the input assumptions are wrong then the derived conclusions will be wrong.

As CVA’s assertion that historical science is inferior to experimental science has already been shown to be incorrect[1] there is no need to engage in a lengthy refutation. One cannot repeat events in the past under laboratory conditions, but we are able to observe distant starlight, geological strata, fossils, and geological formations, create hypotheses and determine which is the most likely – either via the consilience of evidence or the presence of a ‘smoking gun’. CVAs argument is based on the fallacious YEC belief that the only reputable form of science is a caricature of experimental science.

Friday 15 March 2024

A Refutation of God-Directed Evolution, the Bible and the BASF - Part 1

 

A Refutation of God-Directed Evolution, the Bible and the BASF - I

 

Introduction

 

Young earth creationists attempt to dismiss evolutionary biology, cosmology, and geology by asserting they are somehow inferior to experimental sciences, or by pitting them against “operational science” which they claim is ontologically superior to the historical sciences. As such, it is a slightly less risible version of Ken Ham’s “were you there?” chant which he teaches to children as a way of refuting evolution. Needless to say, credible philosophers of science do not accept the YEC distortion of historical science or its invention of “operational science”, and given this such YEC arguments can be dismissed. Therefore, an anonymous fundamentalist Christadelphian article[1] on “God-Directed Evolution”[2] and why it is allegedly incompatible with Christadelphian theology that makes use of this YEC distortion of the epistemological basis of science is built on unstable ground and can be summarily dismissed.

Occasionally, I will search the internet to see if there are any new Christadelphian anti-evolution arguments, and while I may discover new video presentations or papers, I see no argument that I have not already considered and dismissed many times before. Recently, someone alerted me to a 2016 paper that has been republished at a Christadelphian website that hosts videos on fundamentalist interpretations of prophecy among other subjects. Its entire strategy was to begin with a particular fundamentalist interpretation of Christadelphian theology, extrapolate from that the anthropological positions that this fundamentalist theological position demands – in this case monogenism – and effectively declare heretical any attempt to honestly engage with the considerable body of scientific evidence that confirms the reality of human evolution. Unsurprisingly given the lack of relevant scientific acumen among Christadelphian evolution denialists, no substantive attempt was made to engage with the scientific data other than to fret about the naturalistic basis of science and how it does not look for supernatural causes for natural events (a bizarre claim which shows the author to be profoundly misinformed on the philosophy of science), and to invoke the bogus YEC distortion of historical science and invention of “operational science”. Another red flag was the uncritical citation of YEC sources as authoritative. Given these, the appropriate response is to brand the entire paper as nonsense, and move on. However, there are times where ritual flogging of dead horses may have some pedagogical value.

Tuesday 10 October 2023

Beyond Reasonable Doubt - Answering Christadelphian Answers on Common Descent

A few years ago, I referred to a fundamentalist Christadelphian website Christadelphian Answers which had made the regrettable mistake of linking the admirable goal of providing a Christadelphian apologetics site with evolution denialism. I hadn't thought of it for some time until looking at an old post on a Christadelphian forum ostensibly dedicated to evolution denialism that referenced a Christadelphian Answers article that claimed to provide a case against common descent. When I tried to look up that post, I found the link dead; evidently, Christadelphian Answers is no more. One of course must temper the sadness at a loss of a Christadelphian-specific apologetic site with the relief that another anti-evolution forum is no more.

The Internet Archive of course ensures that nothing is really lost, so it didn't take me long to find the offending article which began boldly:

Anyone familiar with evolutionary biology will of course be sadly shaking their heads at the bold assertion that "common descent is an unworkable hypothesis". Just the convergence of morphological and molecular phylogenies alone made the case for common descent, and this was recognised nearly sixty years ago as Linus Pauling and Emil Zuckerkandl who observed:

"It will be determined to what extent the phylogenetic tree, as derived from molecular data in complete independence from the results of organismal biology, coincides with the phylogenetic tree constructed on the basis of organismal biology. If the two phylogenetic trees are mostly in agreement with respect to the topology of branching, the best available single proof of the reality of macro-evolution would be furnished. Indeed, only the theory of evolution, combined with the realization that events at any supramolecular level are consistent with molecular events, could reasonably account for such a congruence between lines of evidence obtained independently, namely amino acid sequences of homologous polypeptide chains on the one hand, and the finds of organismal taxonomy and paleontology on the other hand. Besides offering an intellectual satisfaction to some, the advertising of such evidence would of course amount to beating a dead horse. Some beating of dead horses may be ethical, when here and there they display unexpected twitches that look like life." [1]

One of my main criticisms of Christadelphian anti-evolutionary arguments is that they are poorly-researched, ignoring readily-available material available at the time those arguments were written that would show these anti-evolutionary arguments to be wrong. The Christadelphian Answers article was published in 2015, two years after a fascinating paper PLoS One article "Beyond Reasonable Doubt: Evolution from DNA sequences" by W. Timothy J. White, Bojian Zhong, and David Penny which made a comprehensive case for common descent:

We demonstrate quantitatively that, as predicted by evolutionary theory, sequences of homologous proteins from different species converge as we go further and further back in time. The converse, a non-evolutionary model can be expressed as probabilities, and the test works for chloroplast, nuclear and mitochondrial sequences, as well as for sequences that diverged at different time depths. Even on our conservative test, the probability that chance could produce the observed levels of ancestral convergence for just one of the eight datasets of 51 proteins is ≈1×10−19 and combined over 8 datasets is ≈1×10−132. By comparison, there are about 1080 protons in the universe, hence the probability that the sequences could have been produced by a process involving unrelated ancestral sequences is about 1050 lower than picking, among all protons, the same proton at random twice in a row. A non-evolutionary control model shows no convergence, and only a small number of parameters are required to account for the observations. It is time that that researchers insisted that doubters put up testable alternatives to evolution. [2] (Emphasis mine)

Those odds alone should have prompted the author of that Christadelphian Answers article to reconsider the folly of writing an article boldly declaring that common descent was an "unworkable hypothesis" but given the PLoS One article nowhere features in the Christadelphian Answers article, I suspect the author wasn't even aware of it.

The PLoS One article is of course freely available, but for those wanting a commentary on it, there's a nice, accessible post on it at EvoGrad.


References

1. Zuckerkandl, E. and Pauling, L. (1965) "Evolutionary Divergence and Convergence in Proteins." in Evolving Genes and Proteins: a symposium held at the Institute of Microbiology of Rutgers, with support from the National Science Foundation. Eds Vernon Bryson and Henry J. Vogel. New York: Academic Press, 101

2. White WTJ, Zhong B, Penny D (2013) Beyond reasonable doubt: evolution from DNA sequences. PLoS ONE 8:e69924

Tuesday 4 April 2023

"By One Man" - A Selective and Misleading Review of Christadelphian Thinking on Adam

When By One Man, an anti-evolutionary screed by Colin Byrnes and Matt Jamieson was released a few years ago,  I made the conscious decision to avoid commenting on it, reasoning that letting it sink into oblivion rather than give it the oxygen of publicity was by far the best option to take. Health issues also played a factor in not reviewing it as the last thing my mental health needed was to wade through yet another factually-inaccurate tendentious anti-evolution rant. In addition, given that the lack of truly new anti-evolution arguments meant that I was posting only intermittently, I simply didn't see the point in giving a frankly decaying horse yet another beating.  Ultimately, it doesn't matter how many quotations from 19th and 20the century authors you can string together, if the science undermines your fundamental premise, universal human descent from two people, then your argument is dead in the water and as tenable as defending a flat earth.

Monday 3 October 2022

Ancient Israelite cosmology shows why the Bible is not a science textbook



Ancient Israelite Cosmogeography

 

Introduction

 

The recently released images of our universe captured by the James Webb space telescope bring home just how ancient and vast it is. Currently, the universe is believed to be 13.8 billion years old, and while we don’t know how large the entire universe is, the observable universe is estimated to be around 93 billion light years in diameter, and consists of around 200 billion galaxies.

The current view of the universe as an unimaginably vast expanse containing hundreds of billions of galaxies is a fairly recent view, dating back around 100 years. Prior to the early 20th century, astronomers believed the Milky Way composed the entire universe, and what we now know as galaxies were called spiral nebulae and believed to be located in the far reaches of the Milky Way. We know that the sun is not the centre of the universe, but that view only appeared in the late 18th to early 19th centuries following considerable astronomical observation and theorising. Heliocentric cosmology, which argues that the earth revolves around the Sun was famously advanced in 1543 by Nicolaus Copernicus, though was first proposed by the Greek philosopher Aristarchus of Samos in the 3rd century BC.  Belief in a spherical earth first appeared among a number of Pythagorean philosophers in the 5th century BC. Prior to then, ancient people believed that the earth was flat, covered by a solid dome, and lay at the centre of the universe.

Saturday 1 January 2022

How not to Prove All Things

A few days ago, I ran across a collection of Christadelphian fundamentalist essays on a somewhat eclectic range of subjects, whose main unifying theme appears to be areas where fundamentalist theology come into collision with the modern world. One long, rambling article attempted to cover evolution, but unsurprisingly failed to engage the scientific evidence for evolution, taking refuge in that old fundamentalist standby, the appeal to the "shifting sands of science" trope. Amusingly, the anonymous author used that exact phrase,

Science is changing all the time. What may be considered today to be scientific fact may turn out to be rejected in years to come. It is therefore very difficult to see how any faith can be placed in the shifting sands of current scientific thought.

telegraphing to any halfway informed observer that they were completely ignorant of the epistemological basis of science, and why the tentative, provisional nature of scientific truth, where things are held subject to potential falsification by new evidence is exactly why science is so powerful. Any attack on evolution that fails to examine the evidence, offers as justification a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of science, and spends most of its time on a long rambling fundamentalist distortion of the relevant Biblical texts is automatically wrong.
    That is however not what really caught my eye about this collection of articles. What caught my attention was an article on archaeology and the historical context of the Bible. While this subject is not one that I cover at the website, one paragraph in the essay caught my eye as it neatly encapsulated the poverty of thought and utter surrender to fideism that underlies the mindset of those who wrote this collection of fundamentalist essays:
We cannot learn anything useful from archaeology. If the evidence tells us something which supports what the Bible says, then we have learnt nothing – we already knew it to be true. If the evidence tells us something different to the Bible then again we have learnt nothing, since we must reject the evidence. If the evidence adds to the account of scripture in a complementary way then using it in our understanding is adding to scripture, an idea we have already rejected. Emphasis mine
We must reject the evidence. Fundamentalism in five words. If the evidence falsifies the worldview then you reject the evidence.  Replace 'archaeology' with 'science' and you have the same fideistic approach to the subject that characterises fundamentalist attacks on evolution. This is sadly not a parody of fundamentalist thought but the real thing. Inculcating impressionable young people with this material is simply priming them for a crisis of faith when one day they actually look at the evidence rather than blindly rejecting it and realise their fundamentalist faith is a house of cards that will fall at the slightest touch.
    The collection of essays bears the title Proving All Things, but all that is being proven here is that by starting with your conclusion and automatically excluding all the evidence that bears upon your subject, you can prove anything, and if you can prove anything you have really proven nothing.