Answers in Genesis, not in Apes (Part 1)

Darius and Karin Viet, apparent newcomers to Answers in Genesis, have an article on that website titled "Why Did God Create Apes with Human Features?"  The article is in response to a question from an Australian reader: "If God knew that apes and the like would be used so passionately by evolutionists to support their theory, why did he create them?"   The authors give the answer that God did so to demonstrate His creative power, though this doesn't really address the question of why God didn't demonstrate his power by creating something that wouldn't fit so well a theory of common ancestry of humans and other species (well, in the end they do address that question: "because He wanted to;" creationism has often been cited as a science-stopper, but the Viets seem content to let it be a theology-stopper too.

The authors do hint at another possible divine motive: "belief in man as a highly-evolved ape may become a sign of judgment when man honors the creature rather than the Creator."  God created apes, in other words, so that if we were minded to reject or question His revelation in the Bible, we would have something to pin our evolutionary hopes on.  Or perhaps God made apes to teach us to trust his word rather than our own judgment on the evidence.  On the other hand, the authors don't seem to think (or at least, don't concede) that evolution has anything significant to do with evidence in the first place.

Third, God focused on the disease (sin) instead of the symptom (evolution). Since the all-knowing God knew evolution would deceive many people, why did He create creatures like apes, which evolutionists would use to support their dogma? If God had not created apes, however, evolutionists would just find another “common ancestor.” The problem is not the evidence, but sinful man’s faulty interpretation of the evidence made in a futile attempt to avoid recognizing the Creator, Law Giver, and Judge. Instead of not creating things Satan would warp for evil, God sent the remedy for the deadly disease of sin: the Lord Jesus Christ.

The authors may be new, but they seem very familiar with the Answers in Genesis mantra: evidence by itself proves nothing; it all depends on the "presuppositions" you bring to the evidence.   Now, this comports rather ill with the fact that many Christians, even evangelical Christians, nonetheless find the evidence compelling, even when their presuppositions include the idea that Jesus Christ is Lord.

The authors assert that "similarities between organisms" do not constitute evidence for evolution.  They speak of "the evolutionary idea of homology," although homologies were named by the anti-Darwinist comparative anatomist Richard Owen, and were recognized earlier: Pierre Belon du Mans identified homologies between a bird skeleton and a human skeleton in the 16th century, and such (still unnamed) homologies formed the basis by which Carolus Linnaeus, in the 18th century, classed whales with mammals rather than fish, and arranged thousands of species in the nested hierarchy that Darwin and later evolutionists were to use as the principal line of evidence for common ancestry.

"Homologies" are not just similarities: they are similarities that are not required for similarity in function.  The evidence for evolution is not just that apes and monkeys are, in their faces and hands and bodies, eerily reminiscent of human beings, but in that there's no obvious reason that they ought to be.  Why, e.g. should humans (most of us, anyway) have a plantaris tendon, corresponding to the tendon that in apes and monkeys clenches the feet into a fist, but which in humans does not even connect to the foot bones?  There's even less reason, other than common ancestry, why, e.g. humans should have more genetic similarities to chimpanzees  than gorillas do, or why humans and other old world anthropoids should share identically-disabled GULO pseudogenes.

Appearance of Age versus Appearance of History

Dr. Tommy Mitchell of Answers in Genesis has a new article on an argument creationists shouldn't use: the idea that "God created things to look old" or the "appearance of age" argument.  Instead, Mitchell counsels, creationists should say that things were created "mature" and ready to function.  Adam, for example, did not look, say, twenty years old; in those original days in the Garden of Eden, Adam would have no idea how long it took human beings to grow up or any idea that he looked any older than the few days he could remember (one might raise the objection that as Adam grew older and raised sons and daughters, it would have occurred to him that he didn't recall ever being a boy, nor had Eve ever been  a girl.  Mitchell seems here to be arguing that something has not been created with the "appearance of age" unless the observer at the time it is first observed has a sense of how long it should "normally" take to achieve that appearance or level of maturity.  He goes on, of course, to dispute mainstream scientific ideas about "fallible dating methods," although he does not go into details, and to suggest that we have no idea what a young universe or Earth should look like, and hence no reason to assert that this one looks old.

Now, why some creationists have argued for an "appearance of age," it should be noted that an "appearance of age" is really an "appearance of history."  Even a radiometrically dated rock is dated by inferring a history: many of the initial radioactive atoms have decayed, and we have measurements telling how long that would take.  An omnipotent Creator could, one would suppose, create rocks containing radioactive isotopes without creating large amounts of their decay products with them.  He could create trees without multiple rings showing of alternating breadth, hinting at nonexistent dry and wet years.  He could create Adam without, e.g. half-digested food already in his stomach, or healed fractures and scars from the childhood Adam never had.  And really, if you accept that Adam and Eden were literal and real, and that a global flood is not only possible but can alter dozens of radioactive decay rates in perfect synchrony, then perhaps God did do so.

But there are, in nature, many other indicators of history.  There are distant galaxies whose distorted shapes match computer models of what would happen if galaxies collided -- and galaxies, being the size they are and the speeds at which they move, take millions of years to collide.  Answers in Genesis has tried to get around this by suggesting that time might move faster the further away from Earth one is, so that distant galaxies might indeed be billions of years old while the Earth is only thousands (this is a rather unparsimonious suggestion, as well as unbacked by any evidence beyond the need to somehow reconcile a literal-inerrantist reading of Genesis with astronomy, but it does implicitly acknowledge that the universe appears to have a history because it does have one).

The implicit history in fossils and strata is dealt with, of course, by attributing most of them to Noah's Flood (and by dealing as little as possible with angular unconformities in the strata, and faunal segregation and succession in those same strata).  But there are yet other indicators of history.  Was Adam created with a functional GULO gene, that somehow became identically-disabled to match the GULO pseudogenes that either "micro-evolved" or were created in other old world primate species?  Was he created with 24 pairs of chromosomes, two of which fused to leave his descendants with 23 pairs?  How does Mitchell propose to explain the host of apparent relics of history in our genome, from disabled copies of the cytochrome-c gene (shared, again, with other primates at the same loci), pseudogenes homologous to genes used in other species for a sense of smell rather more discriminating than our own, etc.?  The pseudogenes by themselves imply either creation with an appearance of history (pseudogenes implying ancestors in which they were functional) or a truly astonishing amount of genetic history to pack into the few hundred generations that Answers in Genesis allows for our species, even without considering how much of that history is apparently shared with other species.

Does Intelligent Design Explain and Unify Scientific Data?

In the spirit of not trying to lure readers in by creating artificial suspense, the answer to the title question is "no."

In the spirit of getting something posted on the blog, though, I'm responding to the latest post by Casey Luskin on the Evolution News & Views blog.  Luskin is unhappy with with the suggestion that "intelligent design" is based on mystery -- unsolved questions in biology and other sciences, to be met with a "god  of the gaps" argument. Luskin argues that in fact, there is a positive argument to be made for ID.  ID proponents infer design, he claims, because they find in nature the same sort of features which result, in our day to day experience, only from design: things like:  "A vast amount of information encoded in a biochemical language; a computer-like system of commands and codes that processes the information in order to produce molecular machines and multi-machine systems."

But this is confusing drawing an analogy with actually finding the thing used as an analogy.  The genetic code can be compared to a a language; it is not actually a language, but a set of chemical reactions.  The genome and gene expression can be compared to a computer program, but a gene that regulates another gene isn't really a command line that calls up a subroutine.  And organic molecular systems can be analogized to machines, but calling them machines begs the question that Luskin purports to raise.

In many respects, biological design does not resemble human design; these respects (e.g. the consistent nested hierarchy of homologies, the use of dissimilar structures for similar functions (analogy) or similar structures for dissimilar functions (parahomology).  These dissimilarities have long been cited as phenomena that common descent can explain and that common design cannot (granted, as Luskin has previously noted, "ID ... does not intrinsically challenge common ancestry," but one wonders why, if a Designer is constantly intervening over the course of evolution, He refrains so consistently from copying design elements across lineages).  And then, of course, there are designs that work towards contrary ends: e.g. the keen eyes of predators and the camoflage of prey, or the infectious abilities of pathogens and the capabilities of hosts' immune systems.  These would imply, at least, either a multiplicity of designers or a Designer working for a multiplicity of clients.  To argue for design in the face of so many features that differ from the way known designers work requires that ID abjure and denounce any hypotheses about the motives, methods, and design philosophy of the Designer, which in turn means that they cannot find confirmations of such testable hypotheses about the designer, which means, in turn, that they are indeed reduced to "god of the gaps" arguments: "non-intelligent causes cannot, so far as we know, do this."

Luskin goes on to list various ways in which ID supposedly illuminates a broad range of scientific fields (basically, by encouraging us to marvel at the "design" in all of them).  But he also makes some specific arguments about the scientific testability of intelligent design arguments.

ID begins with the observation that intelligent agents produce complex and specified information (CSI). Design theorists hypothesize that if a natural object was designed, it will contain high levels of CSI. Scientists then perform experimental tests upon natural objects to determine if they contain complex and specified information. One form of CSI is irreducible complexity, which can be tested for by experimentally reverse-engineering biological structures through genetic knockout experiments to determine if they require all of their parts to function. When experimental work uncovers irreducible complexity in biology, researchers conclude that such structures were designed.

This is really awe-inspiringly confused.  "Complex and specified information" is not notably well-defined, which makes it difficult to say whether it has really been observed or not.  Dembski's most famous criterion for identifying it, the "explanatory filter," tries to find it by ruling out regularities of nature, then ruling out contingent combinations of regularities of nature and random chance, and identifying anything that can't be so explained as "CSI" and hence designed.  And this procedure would work very well, if we already knew every law of nature in the universe, and all the possible ways they could interact under all possible conditions.  But one would suppose that were we possessed of such near-omniscience, we wouldn't actually need the explanatory filter.

But assuming that it can be defined and is found to exist and is not defined simply as "complexity produced by intelligence and not by non-intelligent causes," then identifying it doesn't, in fact, rule out the possibility that non-intelligent causes could produce it.  Conversely, it is perfectly possible for a designer to seek simplicity, or complexity that serves no particular function except to look interesting.  So even a designed artifact will not necessarily contain "high levels of CSI" (note that it was William Dembski who first raised this point).

But in any case, "irreducible complexity" as Behe defined it, does not rule out explanations in terms of mutation and natural selection.  This was first shown, years before Behe was born, by the geneticist Hermann Muller, who used the term "interlocking complexity" for systems in which mutations had first built up and then eliminated redundancy.  Given that mutations can alter the functions of components of molecular systems (e.g. making them better at one function while robbing them of another) or delete them, it does not follow that a system that can be rendered nonfunctional by removing one component could not have been built up by mutations and natural selection.

In practice, testing of the ID hypothesis still comes down to arguments from personal incredulity and god of the gaps arguments.

Did Dinosaurs Eat Your Ancestors?

The "Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution" (abbreviated "KTR") refers to the appearance of many modern groups of plants in the Cretaceous period.  Marsupials show up then, as do the first eutherian mammals (though there is no fossil evidence yet that true placental mammals existed during the Cretaceous -- though some estimates for the diversification of mammalian orders suggests that they must have existed at least as far back as ninety million years ago).  Flowering plants appeared and diversified rapidly.  Grass seems to have been present; at least, phytoliths (mineral inclusions in plants) similar to those in the grass family have shown up in coprolites (fossilized dung) from the late Cretaceous.  Birds of course were diversifying and taking on fairly modern appearances, as were many modern orders of insects such as wasps, ants, butterflies, etc.  But a study performed at the University of Bristol suggests that dinosaurs did not take part in this explosive diversification, and questions whether they exploited the new biological resources that were becoming available at this time (said resources including our tiny, shrew-like ancestors).

Their research involved trying to construct a cladogram of approximately 400 species of dinosaurs, as well as determining when the various species had branched off from earlier ancestors.  This was of course complicated by the notorious imperfection of the fossil record cited in previous posts: not only is fossilization rare, and not only are most fossils still undiscovered and undescribed, but some periods are better represented in accessible rock formations than others.  To compensate for this, researchers discarded data from the better-represented periods until they had samples from a similar volume of sediments for each era (they note that this method can be criticized, but it seemed more objective than inflating the number of species from poorly-sampled ages).  When this was done, dinosaur taxa seemed to radiate early on in their history and by the Cretaceous the production of new taxa had leveled off: the dinosaurs (birds presumably excepted) were no longer generating new species as fast as other groups like mammals, lizards, and insects.  The implication drawn was that they were holding their own but not innovating drastically.

Now, obviously, if those phytoliths mentioned above were really from grasses, and the coprolites containing them were in fact from dinosaurs (from their size and type, they were thought to be from titanosaur sauropods), then dinosaurs must have been at least occasionally exploiting some of the new resources.  And typically, carnivores are less choosy about their diet than herbivores; one must suspect that many of the maniraptoran theropods would not have turned down a chance to dine on early primates, if any were around in the late Cretaceous.    All we can be sure of was that if dinosaurs did eat any of our ancestors, it was after they had already reproduced, so thank a Troodon for its self-restraint.

Would Thomas Aquinas Have Been an Evolutionary Psychologist?

The question asked in the title was raised by a post by Jay W. Richards on the Evolution News & Views website.  His post was in response to Huffington Post article by Matt J. Rossano (head of the Psychology Department at Southeastern Louisiana University), who noted that many of Thomas' arguments anticipated "Darwinist" explanations for human behavior (e.g. the need among most humans for two parents to care for a child as a basis for marriage -- and even the analogy between the behavior of humans and birds in this matter).  The article also drew responses from one "vjtorley" and Joe Carter, the web editor for First Things.  You will perhaps not be astonished to learn that none of the above respondents found it likely that Aquinas would have endorsed evolutionary psychology, although Joe Carter grudgingly allows that Aquinas might have accepted common descent itself.

Now, the more I think about questions of this kind, the harder it is to figure out what the question actually means. If we ask, e.g. what Martin Luther King would have thought of the Tea Party movement if he were alive today, it's easy enough to imagine him still around at 81 years old and still holding much the views he held right before his death.  If we want to ask, though, what Martin Luther (the German religious reformer) would have thought about, say, gay rights (and the question has been asked, trust me), a problem arises.  Are we talking about Martin Luther somehow surviving and being a lucid and outspoken (and probably very fixed in his ways) 526-year-old?  Are we considering using a time machine to pluck him out of the sixteenth century, giving him a few months to acclimatize to the twenty-first, and then asking him (once he calmed down from the shock)?  Or are we asking what someone identical in traits and temperament to Martin Luther, but born, say, in 1960 in some heavily Roman Catholic region (i.e. not his native Eisleben, these days) of Germany?  I think those would be three very different questions and might have rather different answers.

By the same token, if we ask what a modern version of Thomas Aquinas would have thought, we need to ask "would he even be a theologian, or even a Christian, today?"  P.Z. Myers briefly argued this point in a post yesterday: in thirteenth century Italy, the brightest, most inquisitive people went into the church because it was pretty much the only intellectual game in town.  A Thomas of Aquino born seven centuries later might very well have become a scientist rather than a priest and monk, and might have been as casual about his theology as a lot of Italians are today.  Even had he gone into the church, his theology might well have been closer to Theodosius Dobzhansky's than, say, Christoph Shoenborn's.

If we're asking, rather, what would the original Thomas have thought about evolution, and evolutionary psychology, if he'd somehow been able to learn about them, that's hard to say.

It's easy for vjtorley to say, of course: as he sees it, four elements of Aquinas' theology militate against evolutionary psychology if not against common descent with modification altogether:

1. Thomas was an essentialist (Darwinism is radically anti-essentialist)
2. Thomas thought that God had made everything perfectly (no kludges or jerry-rigs).
3. Thomas thought that God had personally made nothing useless or redundant (no vestiges).
4. Thomas thought that God had made everything personally (no unguided causes).

In other words, if Thomas Aquinas had not changed any of his other views, he would not have abandoned creationism (given the number of assumptions about the nature, motives, and methods of the Designer in that list, though, could he have been an ID proponent?).   

Vjtorley goes on to argue that even a modern Thomist who accepted common ancestry could not reconcile that theological system with "Darwinism," though I'm not convinced by his arguments: the idea that, e.g. the world contains exactly the right amount of evil (necessitated by free will) would not depend on whether mindless evolutionary processes themselves could decide such things, but whether God in His wisdom could have decided that a "Darwinian" world would allow the optimal balance of freedom and necessity for all creation, including the non-human parts (as modern theologians such as John F. Haught have argued).

Thomas Aquinas also thought the sun orbited the Earth.  The question is, how many of these beliefs would  he have found reason to alter, as he learned of the advances of science over the succeeding seven centuries?   The "anti-essentialism" of evolutionary theory, after all, is not some random philosophical point; it is based on the actual observation of ubiquitous variation of living species in the field, on the observed mutability of domestic species, on the difficulty in many cases of deciding whether different populations (living or fossil) ought to be considered the same species or not.  Likewise, the idea that vestiges and kludges exist is based on comparative anatomy, not on a sense of what unguided natural evolution "ought" to do.  To argue that Thomas would not have abandoned it is to argue that Thomas would base his views on obstinacy rather than evidence and logic.  And as for the purely theological elements of his  thought, the very fact that the leading Catholic theologian dates from the 13th rather than, say, the 2nd, century, argues that theology can change and develop over time; its assumptions are themselves more mutable than the laws of the Medes and Persians were said to be.

It would be difficult to cast off the mental habits of his 13th century upbringing (not to mention abandoning positions he'd already staked out), but Rossano has a point: Thomas went somewhat beyond that upbringing already by incorporating so much of Aristotelian philosophy into his theology; it is reasonable to suppose that he would try to do likewise with later philosophy and science.  Evolution, and evolutionary psychology, would have been harder to accommodate than, say, heliocentrism or atomic physics, but not necessarily impossible.

Although vjtorley would, I think, want to think of it otherwise, he's basically arguing that Thomas Aquinas, even given access to modern scientific data and arguments, would reject evolutionary theory in favor of religious dogma as vjtorley has done.  Perhaps he would have (which does more to undercut the value of Thomas' opinions than it does to undercut evolutionary theory); this question, as I imply above, is interesting in part because there's no discernible way to definitively answer it.

Carter argues specifically against Thomas' ability to accept something as "dumb" as evolutionary psychology.  Now, here it's important to note that there is a difference between accepting that our minds have been shaped by evolution and accepting the views specifically labelled "evolutionary psychology," including: 

1. All our mental traits are adaptions (there are no mental "spandrels")
2. The mind comprises multiple specialized modules (no general intelligence).
3. Human mental evolution stopped on the African savanna 100,000 years ago.

And even accepting evolutionary psychology would not mean accepting every "just-so" story about various human behaviors.  One might well suppose that the Angelic Doctor would not subscribe to vulgarized and dogmatic forms of evo-psych (those which Carter regards as the entire field) and still suspect that he'd find much of interest and even value in it.  But then, perhaps a modern-day (or modernly-educated) Thomas Aquinas would be among the harshest and most trenchant critics of evolutionary psychology.  The point remains: what Thomas thought would not settle the question of whether evolutionary theory, or particular applications of it to human psychology, were true.  I'm not sure that it would even settle the question of whether it was compatible with some form of Christian theology (which has, after all, evolved in its own way quite a bit over nineteen centuries).

In the end, the argument has been interesting, but isn't really to the point -- at least not if Intelligent Design is really about the science and not about religious dogma.

The Obligatory Happy Birthday Earth Post

Today is, according to the chronology worked out by Bishop James Ussher (1581-1656), and not adjusted for the shift from Julian to Gregorian calendars, the sixth thousand thirteenth anniversary of Earth's creation.  Strictly speaking, according to Genesis, at the end of the day the Earth was still a chaotic, muddled, lifeless mess because all God had got around to doing was creating light, but frankly, haven't we all had days when it just seemed that we'd worked hard all day and got very little done (but at least we could see what we'd done)?

Tomorrow will mark the 6013th birthday of the creation of the sky, a fine accomplishment for all of you who enjoy breathing.  Monday, of course, will mark the birthday of the creation of dry land, Tuesday, of grass, trees, moss, algae, herbs, and presumably fungi of all types (for those of you who enjoy breathing oxygen, specifically).  On Wednesday, please remember to commemorate the creation of approximately 100 billion galaxies and all their myriads of myriads of stars, along with innumerable planets and moons (possibly but not necessarily including Gliese 581g).

Thursday will be the 6013th anniversary of the creation of fish, whales, sea urchins, marine molluscs, marine arthropods, marine everything else, birds, bats, and pterosaurs.  Presumably manatees and feathered dinosaurs rounded out the day.  And Friday, of course, is according to Ussher the 6013th anniversary of our own beloved species, along with Tyrannosaurus rex, Smilodon fatalis, and Dimetrodon macrospondylus.  According to Answers in Genesis (which is not celebrating this day, for some reason), all of these were vegetarians; I don't think the good bishop insisted on that.

Darwinian Assumptions and Extraterrestrial Life

Casey Luskin has a brief article on the ever-popular Evolution News & Views site.  It concerns a Fox News story about a possible (though thus far unconfirmed) somewhat Earthlike planet orbiting Gliese 581.  Steven Vogt, one of the astronomers who thinks they've discovered a planet there, said originally that he had "almost no doubt" that there was life there (and, rather confusingly, that he thought the chances of life on it were 100 percent; possibly that was rounded up to the nearest ten percent).

Anyway, Luskin promptly demonstrates a few things.  First, he does not quite grasp the meaning of "almost," declaring that Vogt had "no doubt" that there was life on Gliese 581g.  Granted, Vogt contributed to Luskin's confusion by giving the chances of life at 100%; still, the distinction between "no doubt" and "almost no doubt" approximates the distinction between almost falling off a cliff and actually falling off it.  

Second, he does not quite grasp Vogt's argument.  It is not, as Luskin puts it, "Dr. Vogt has "no doubt" that life evolves and exists elsewhere because he knows that it evolves and exists elsewhere."  Rather, Vogt assumes that because life is common and adapted to some rather extreme environments on this planet, it would arise on and thrive on any planet which had similar environments to those that harbored life on Earth (and while Gliese 581g is thought to be "Earthlike" in only a limited sense: three times Earth's and keeping one face to its sun at all times, it might indeed have niches not much more hostile than some that bear life on Earth) (assuming, again, that it meets one particular criterion that Earth does, actually existing).   Vogt doesn't actually explain why he thinks life is likely to arise on a suitable planet in the first place; I would guess that he reasons (as others have) that since life arose so early on Earth, abiogenesis is not, in fact, .very improbable (or else perhaps he thinks life arose in space and spread throughout the galaxy from wherever it started).

Third, Luskin seems to have some slight problem differentiating between the position of one "Darwinist" and another.  Accepting evolution doesn't involve accepting any particular idea about the probability of abiogenesis (except perhaps that it has to be at least as high as "once per universe," or at least, that however unlikely it happened at least once).  "Darwinism" does not depend on any particular idea of how or where life originally arose (strictly speaking, it does not depend even on the assumption that abiogenesis was a natural phenomenon).  As P.Z. Myers noted on his blog Pharyngula, we don't have any idea what value to assign to the chances of life arising on another planet -- and one might suppose that Luskin has both heard of Myers and regards him as a user of "Darwinian logic."   Vogt's reasoning is his own; it is not "Darwinian" to a greater extent than Myers'.

Of course, Luskin's incomprehension may well be tactical.  He wants to demonstrate that "Darwinists" make hasty, unexamined assumptions (about common ancestry, about the efficacy of nonmagical causes, about the likelihood of life in space), and picks an extreme example (which he then rather misrepresents) to make his case.

There is another point, though.  Luskin goes on to state that the theory of intelligent design (that would be "somewhere, sometime, somehow, Somebody did something, and furthermore, evolutionists are wrong about something or other") is compatible with life on other worlds.  He just wants to make sure that the problem is approached scientifically (which I would suppose means  that if we find extraterrestrial life, we declare that this is evidence for design, and if we don't, we declare that that is evidence for design).

I'm not sure whether he's hedging his bets against the chances that scientists actually will find extraterrestrial life, or whether he thinks that such a thing is to be expected.  After all, if you think that the universe was designed for a purpose, and that life was designed for a purpose, one might suppose that the Designer wanted to make a universe that had life in more than one out-of-the-way planet (and of course "life" is not the same as "intelligent life," and does not raise the same theological conundrums such as "why are extraterrestrials being punished for Adam's sin?").