Creationists chase red herrings. That is to say, they seize
upon irrelevant points. Numerous examples could be given,
but here we will deal with only three, two classic, and one new: living fossils, Piltdown Man, and the newly-dicovered fossil primate contemporary with the dinosaurs.
Creationists make much of certain "living fossils," such
as the coelocanth, or the supposed plesiosaur carcass
(actually a basking shark). The coelocanth, they say, proves
that amphibians could not have evolved from lobe-finned fishes,
for lobe-finned fishes still exist. Actually, this claim
is easily dismissed. I am the offspring of my father,
but my father still exists; my brother is also the offspring of my father, and he is different from me. Similarly, evolutionary scientists
recognize that the amphibians arose as an offshoot
of the lobe-finned fishes. Not every lobe-finned fish
moved onto the land; many stayed in the ocean and evolved
into the modern coelocanths. This is why evolutionary sequences
are drawn in shapes resembling family trees: my father is
the "common ancestor" of me, my brothers, and my sisters,
and each of us will continue our separate bloodlines. Some
of us are more like our father than others, but we are
all equally descended from him. And so it is with species--
the modern coelocanths are more like their ancestors than
are the amphibians, but that does not disprove the family tie.
And of course, even this schema is too simple. Most obviously, coelocanths are marine fishes, whereas amphibians live in freshwater. A more likely ancestor of amphibians is a different lobe-finned fish, Tiktaalik roseae, which came from shallow streams and swamps -- much the same habitat associated with amphibians today. The lobe-finned fishes, or sarcopterygians, were a multi-branched family, of which coelocanths were one branch, Tiktaalik roseae another.
As for the basking shark carcass misidentified (not
by scientists) as a plesiosaur, it, too, is a living fossil. The irony is, sharks have swum the earth's oceans since the Ordovician, long before there were any reptiles -- hence, long before plesiosaurs. A basking shark is more of a living fossil than a plesiosaur; but this just goes to show the lack of knowledge of most Creationists, that they do not know this. If living fossils were at all proof of Creation, a basking shark would be even better proof than a plesiosaur would be. But again, not all cartilaginous fishes evolved bony skeletons;
some remained cartilaginous and lived alongside their bony bretheren. Among the basal lineages of bony fishes, there are even those which lost their bony skeletons and returned to the cartilaginous version. And even a living plesiosaur would not be a threat to evolution; it would simply be a species mistakenly thought extinct,
as many others have been before.
Another favorite of Creationists is Piltdown Man. Many
Creationists are grossly misinformed, believing that Piltdown
Man is still taught as fact. Probably, this is because many of those who say it were in school during the time when it was taught as fact -- they are going by their memories. In fact, Piltdown Man is
rarely mentioned in teaching about evolution--why should
he be, since everyone knows he is a fake? The fact that,
for a time, scientists believed in the Piltdown hoax is
taken by Creationists to mean that evolutioary scientists
are gullible. What they do not point out is that those
who exposed and discredited the hoax were also evolutionary
scientists. Why did it take so long to expose the hoax? It is simply that, for most of Piltdown Man's history, only casts of the fossils were made available to researchers (a common practice, intended to preseve irreplaceable originals from damage); when, years later, a select group was allowed to examine the originals, they quickly saw that the cranium and jawbone did not go together. This particular red herring is a prime example of the Creationists' basic misunderstanding of how science
works. Science is a painstaking process of sorting through
observations and evidence and attempting to make sense of
it all; if someone deliberately introduces false evidence--like the
Piltdown fossils--it, too, must be examined and sorted
through until its falsehood is uncovered. Once its falsehood is known,
into the wastebin it goes, where it belongs. What I still
do not understand is why Creationists fault scientists for
this; after all, if scientists knew everything in advance,
they would not need to do science.
Recently, a new discovery was announced: a fossil primate who lived at the same time as the dinosaurs. Of course, when most people think of primates, they think of apes and monkeys. The Creationist propaganda sensationalized the story, even going so far as to ridicule the idea that there were no humans at the time of dinosaurs. Fortunately, they also showed the facts: the fossil was of a tiny creature resembling a dwarf lemur, and estimated to have weighed about one pound. So what we have is not an advanced primate like an anthropoid ape, or even a monkey, but an early prosimian. Prosimians today are represented by such primates as tree-shrews, bushbabies, and lorises, whose intelligence and behavior differs but little from many other small mammals. Small mammals have long been known to have coexisted with dinosaurs; the only difference now is, we now know that some of those small mammals happened to be prosimians. Look at the picture. It is true that the color and pattern of the fur come from the artist's imagination; but the body structure can be reconstructed from the bones. Now, who in their right mind would say that a creature like this tells us anything about whether there were humans around?
Both living fossils and Piltdown Man are claimed by Creationists
to cast doubt on evolution, when in fact, they do not. In harping on
these, Creationists only reveal their own misunderstandings
about evolution and science. But red herrings are not
the only problem.
Creationists also whip dead horses. That is to say, they
continually raise questions that have already been answered.
Again, though many examples could be given, two will suffice:
the alleged plesiosaur carcass, and transitional fossils.
Some Creationists like to claim that a dead and decaying
plesiosaur was caught by a Japanese fishing boat in 1977.
Even if it was, it would be no threat to evolution, as already
noted; but in fact, it was not a plesiosaur but a basking shark.
Marine biologists who have studied basking sharks have documented
well the fact that they often decay into plesiosaur-like
forms: the jaw and gill arches tend to fall away, leaving a remnant of the shark's head that is easily mistaken for the head and neck of a plesiosaur-like creature. The carcass caught by the Japanese fit the description
of one of these decayed sharks. By contrast, its proportions
and skeletal structure were radically unlike those of any known
plesiosaur fossil: all known plesiosaurs had necks longer than their bodies; whereas the Japan carcass has a "neck" much shorter than its body. Yet some Creationists refuse to believe
this. I know of at least one who read the excellent explanation
of this in the talk.origins archives, then came back to the
newsgroup and said, that he simply did not believe it. He contradicted professional
marine biologists who had seen basking shark carcasses,
and palaeontologists who had seen plesiosaur fossils. One
can not help but wonder -- what did he actually know about either basking sharks or plesiosaurs? Certainly not that both are "living fossils," and that neither's existence would say anything about whether evolution is true.
A much more central issue, however, is that of transitional
fossils, or so-called "missing links." Many exist, but Creationists
insist they do not. Archaeopteryx is one excellent example--
a very good transition between reptiles and birds, which
Creationists say is not. They say it is just a bird. Indeed,
it is classified with the birds, simply because science
had to classify it somewhere, and it has feathers, a uniquely
avian feature. But its reptillian side cannot be denied
either. While some modern birds have serrated bills, none
have toothed jaws, as archaeopteryx has (although, one will
sometimes hear a Creationist claim that there are toothed birds today--
presumably referring to serrated bills; indeed the bill of the merganser duck, when examined in hand, does look as if it has teeth, but these are not true teeth set into sockets in a jawbone, but rather are protuberances of the bill itself). And no modern bird
has a chain of vertebrae extending the length of its tail,
as archaeopteryx and lizards have; birds' tails, no matter
how long, are only feathers connected to a mass of bone
called the pygostyle. Archaeopteryx's toothed jaws and tail
vertabrae are as undeniably reptilian as its feathers are
undeniably avian. But Creationists will not accept this,
and say it is only a bird. One wonders what Creation "science" will make of the recent dicoveries of large, feathered dinosaurs.
Archaeopteryx is but one case. The Ambulocetus, a whale that walked on land, is another; it shows that whales descended from hoofed mammals that became carnivorous -- not surprising when we consider the pig, halfway between herbivore and carnivore -- and then spent increasing amounts of time in the water. But, whenever any transitional form is mentioned or discovered, Creationists
can be counted on to pick this or that detail as "proof"
that it is not transitional at all. No matter how good a transitional
form may be, it will never be good enough for Creationists.
Reading On the Origin of Species was a real eye-opener. I saw that every single argument used by Creationists today, with the exception of the molecular one written about by Wilder-Smith and Behe, was already current in Darwin's time, and Darwin answered every one. If a science has had no new ideas in over a century, can we consider it a living science?
In my search for material to present to my professors,
I found nothing I could use. Every example and every argument
the Creationists used could be put in one of two categories:
either a red herring (no threat to evolution, though its proponents think it is),
or a dead horse (a question already answered, though its
proponents think it has not been). When I realized that this was
all "Scientific" Creationism had to offer, scientific integrity
required me to reject it. It is one thing to say that faith is the evidence of things not seen; but in the case of evolution, as in so many other matters, I find people wanting faith to be against the evidence of things seen. There is no way to answer such a contention; but my quarrel is with those who claim to be "scientific"
about it, when they are really only chasing red herrings
and whipping dead horses.
Some will undoubtedly be surprised that my accepting evolution
did not destroy my faith. Despite the Creationist rhetoric,
evolutionary science is not an attempt to deny responsibility
to God; atheists can do that with much less time and effort.
The question is, why do some find evolution a threat? After
all, knowing the brain chemistry responsible for feelings of love
does not cause us to stop loving God. Being descendants of apes need not remove us from a relationship with God either. The real reason isn't really about science or its implications. The real reason is much simpler than that: it is that Young Earth Creationists have so structured their understanding of Scriptures that they have to take all of Genesis literally. They will say things like, "if plain sense makes sense, don't look for another sense." But if so many intellectual games are necessary, so much distortion of science and misrepresentation of fact, in order to make plain sense make sense, then clearly it does not. These are often the same people who take prophecy literally, so that, for example, they look forward to a day when Ezekiel's temple will really be built as described, rather than understand Ezekiel to have been speaking in symbolic metaphors about the rise of Christianity as a new "temple," better than the old. Some people seem to think the Bible was written by idiots who would fail a Rorschach test; as if the Bible writers knew nothing of simile, metaphor, allegory, or poetic imagery. One of the best exegeses of the Creation story I ever read was written by Stephen Jay Gould -- the six days of creation reflect the Hebrew cosmology, the universe made up of dichotomous opposites: light and dark, water and land, life and non-life, and the occurrence of these in discrete bodies. This is a far richer understanding than the frankly philistine insistence on a literal historical narrative. But of course, allowing such an understanding would interfere with the REAL agenda of Young Earth Creationism: controlling people through legalism.
