Tag Archives: Creationism

So I was on a panel discussion about micro vs. macroevolution…

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Several weeks back I get an email from Phil Calderone, a member of one of the local atheist/agnostic/freethought groups (I.E.A.A.), asking if I would like to act as a fill in on a (then) upcoming “believers vs. non-believers” panel discussion on the subject of micro vs. macroevolution. Apparently, one of the persons originally invited was not going to be able to participate and he needed a fill in and was pointed towards me by Dr. Brad Hughes, who many years ago I had helped (along with others) prepare for a debate with “Dr.” Kent Hovind.

After some trepidation—due to having never done any public speaking before—I agreed to participate as long as it was understood that I was unlettered and neither a paleontologist or biologist but rather a mere amateur naturalist who has had a bit of experience in the creation/evolution debate. 

The format of the discussion was meant to be a relatively informal back and forth between four people with two on each side. One the “believers” side there was a gentleman named Kelly Clemensen, of something called the Areopagus Project, and Dr. Paul Giem of Loma Linda University (see also Giem’s web page here). On the non-believers side was myself and Phil Calderone who was to moderate but had to fill in the second non-believers chair for another person who couldn’t make it.

I will not go into any more description of the event as it was recorded on video and you can watch the proceedings for yourself below. However, truth and honesty before all I will be addressing at least two places where I know I screwed up in the discussion below the video.

Please feel free to point out any other mistakes I made, or address the many points made by the creationists that went unaddressed by either Phil or me during the discussion. I know there are whole bunches of things that our opponents said that was missed or deserved more in depth dissection.

Now that you have, hopefully, watched the video there are two places that I realized I messed up pretty much right after the debate. One was minor memory failure, misattribution about punctuated equilibrium. The other was a more significant—at least in my opinion—point were I brought up a group of fossil organisms that was really something of a red-herring—though I committed the fallacy out of partial ignorance—and should have known better from other statements I myself had made at other points in the same discussion!

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Is “The Imminent Demise of Evolution” still imminent?

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Ten years ago, in 2006, intelligent design creationist William Dembski predicted that in a decade evolution would be toast:

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) – To William Dembski, all the debate in this country over evolution won’t matter in a decade.

By then, he says, the theory of evolution put forth by Charles Darwin 150 years ago will be “dead.”

Yeah, well…

Meanwhile I stumbled upon this today (dated 11-17-2016) from young Earth creationist Richard William Nelson:

Despite a flood of challenges since the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 by Charles Darwin and more than 150 years of unprecedented scientific efforts in the history of mankind to prove otherwise, the evidence examined in nature tooled with unprecedented technology continues to be compatible with the Genesis record written by Moses…

…Evolution, once a theory in crisis, is now in crisis without even a cohesive unifying theory.

Biological evolution exists only as a philosophy, not a science.

For a long list of creationists predicting the death of evolution see this following:

The Imminent Demise of Evolution: The Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism by Glen Morton

ICR blocked me on Facebook

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So, the Institute for Creation Research put up a link on their Facebook page to one of their latest Acts & Facts articles on the whole Ernst Haeckel/vertebrate embryos thing and since the sort of stuff creationists write about this subject is a pet peeve of mine (as readers of this blog will no doubt have gathered) I decided to post a quick comment on the following quote from the article:

Guliuzza: Shouldn’t students be skeptical when they’re told that evolutionists can simply look at folds in embryos and see gill slits? The truth is that these are only folds of tissue in the pharynx region of vertebrates during the pharyngula stage of development. For mammals, birds, and reptiles, they never develop into a structure that is in any way like fish gills.

I wrote that this statement was not true as would be known to anyone who had cracked an embryology textbook and asked if Dr. Guliuzza (the author of the article) was therefore incompetent in this area or if he was being deliberately misleading. Further I provided a link to my blog post on the subject of “gill slits” so that anyone interested could look at the evidence for themselves.

I also corrected one of their other commenters on what Thomas Huxley and Charles Lyell’s professions and religious perspectives were. I also noted to the commenter that all science, not just evolutionary biology, leaves God and other supernatural agents out of its explanations.

I used no harsh language, I did not call anyone any names and I engaged in no mockery (unless you count my pointed question about Guliuzza competency/honesty) and yet the end result was that my link and all my comments have been deleted and I am apparently now blocked from commenting on ICR’s FB page.

I’ll leave the reader to decide what this says about ICR and the robustness of their scholarship.

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Jack Chick is dead…

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image_1477796812_44571917I can’t believe I hadn’t heard about this already but apparently the infamous Jack Chick, author of those vile little sooo bad they’re almost good cartoon religious tacts that you would sometimes find stucked under a windshield wiper on your car, or laying in a parking lot after someone pulled it out from under their windshield wiper and threw it on the ground… Yeah those, died last Sunday (10-23-2016) at the age of 92.

There were so many “great” tracts, like Dark Dungeons that attacked the game Dungeons and Dragons and in which Chick claimed that D&D could lead you to practicing actual, for reals, black magic.

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But of course for me the pièce de résistance was his antievolution tract, Big Daddy, wherein we read the story of an intrepid young creationist student who schools his teacher on how foolish and wrong evolution is, concluding with the teacher leaving head hung low in disgrace. Hilarious!prof-quits

Ah well, bye Jack, Big Daddy will always hold a special place in my… in my… ah, well, bye Jack and my condolences to his loved ones.

Creationism Nit: Archaeoraptor?

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So the other day I found myself near one of the local Bible book stores and since I had the time wandered in to see what creationist fare they might have in their apologetics section. As it turned out not a lot, however in the homeschooling section they did have this little tome titled, Exploring the world of biology: From mushrooms to complex life forms (2009) by a John Hudson Tiner and published by Master Books (which as far as I know is still a subsidiary of the Institute for Creation Research):

the-world-of-biology-tiner

I am not sure why Mr. Tiner—who is apparently a math teacher—chose to start with mushrooms in his “exploration” but even leaving out simpler organisms makes his exploration a tall order when he only has 160 pages to work with.

Regardless, I am not here to critique the entire book, or even the section from which I have drawn my nit (I couldn’t do so in good faith anyway, as I only flipped through the book and took a couple quick photos). I am only here for the nit, nit, nit!

And the nit is this from page 133:

archaeoraptorHere we have a black and white photo of a fossil which is labeled Archaeoraptor liaoningensis.

Huh, yeah, it is just that the problem is the picture is not of that notorious fraudulent fossil. See for yourself; compare the picture above with following illustration of the actual Archaeoraptor: 

(Pickrell 2015)

You don’t have to have a degree in comparative anatomy to tell these two specimens apart.

What Tines has done is publish what is clearly a cropped photograph of the Berlin specimen of Archaeopteryx siemensii —perhaps the single more famous and recognizable fossil in the world—and mistakenly labeled it as Archaeoraptor.

Archaeopteryx siemensii

The Berlin specimen of Archaeopteryx siemensii

So, yeah, “oops!” Mr. Tines may want to familiarize himself with Archaeopteryx before he opines on the state of the fossil evidence for the evolution of birds from other dinosaurs (let alone starts writing books that might fall into the hands of impressionable children). 

For more info on the Archaeoraptor story see:

“Archaeoraptor Fossil Trail” By Lewis M. Simons from the October 2000, National Geographic magazine

Archaeoraptor illustration source:

Pickrell, John (2015) The great dinosaur fossil hoax, Cosmos (website).

Playing Chess with Pigeons on Facebook

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While I have had a link to my personal Facebook page in the sidebar for some time, I don’t know if I have ever mentioned here that Playing Chess with Pigeons has its own Facebook page… Well, now I have.

I generally post cartoons and news stories directly related to CvE as well as links to science news stories that I think are interesting and/or obliquely related to the CvE debate.

Anyway, have a look, like, subscribe, share…

And now a little poorly concealed bragging

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hopwood_haeckel_book

Last weekend while I was awaiting delivery of my copy of Cambridge University historian of science Nick Hopwood‘s new book Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (2015) on 19th century biologist Ernst Haeckel and his (in)famous embryo illustrations, (which I have written about a few times here an PCWP and elsewhere), I got a Facebook notification that I had been “tagged” in a post by my friend (in real life, not just Facebook) and colleague Dr. Nick Matzke. The somewhat cryptic post said the following:

Hey look who’s in the acknowledgements – Troy Britain

Attached to this comment was the following picture:

hopwood_page

Thereafter the comments conversation between Nick M. and I went like this:

Me: Wait, wait, wait, this isn’t Hopwood’s new book is it (my copy is in route)?!

Nick: Yep it is!!

Me: Holy crap!

Nick: Immortality!

Apparently Professor Hopwood was kind enough to mention me (and Nick Matzke as well) in the acknowledgements section of his new book (page 304).

 The relevant section reads as follows:

For crucial pieces of advice, I thank Thomas Brandstetter, Troy Britain, Solveig Jülich, Ron Ladouceur, Nick Matzke, Signe Nipper Nielsen, Ron Numbers, Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, and Constance Sommerey…

Quite an honor! All the more given the company of people like Nick Matzke, Ron Numbers and the rest.

Thank you Prof. Hopwood, you are too kind! And thank you for writing this book! It needed to be done and I look forward to reading it (or rather the rest of it, I’m up to chap. 3 already)!

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Creationism Nit: Archaeocete legs

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This will be a departure from my typical novel length dissection of a creationist article and will instead be a short look at a single creationist gaffe. Perhaps I will make this into a series, we’ll see. Anyway, today’s nit will be picked with young Earth creationist Dr Carl Werner (a medical doctor).

I recently acquired a copy, of what I believe is the 1st edition, of his book Evolution: The grand experiment (2007, 2nd printing 2009, coauthored with his wife Debbie Werner) and while skimming through it I noticed a little error on page 57, which is chapter 5 of the book and is apparently meant as a refutation of the evidence for evolution from comparative anatomy. In this particular case he is discussing the homology of various tetrapod forelimbs (yellow highlighting mine):Werner_whale

The “nit” in this case is his illustration of the forelimbs of a whale in the dark blue circle above. When I saw it I immediately  recognized that it was not in fact the forelimbs of a whale but rather the hind limbs of one. In this case those of an extinct archaeocete, most likely those of Dorudon (image source).

The skeleton of Dorudon.

And these are the hind legs of Dorudon (image source):

Dorudon hind legs at the Smithsonian Museum

For comparison here are a couple modern whale forelimbs:

Blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus).

Pacific white-sided dolphin (Lagenorhynchus obliquidens).

Clearly what Dr. Werner has pictured are not the forelimbs of a modern whale, rather my money is on them being the hind limbs of Dorudon. Is it a huge deal? No. It is just another example of sloppy creationist research (I mean if a printing press operator recognizes archaeocete legs when he sees them, come on).

Nit. Picked.

Relevant Links

Memories of Peking Man at the American Museum of Natural History

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Jon and I outside The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia of Drexel University, PA (photo by Don Frack).

While looking through some old photographs, for something else I am working on, I came across some snap shots I took back in 1998 when my friend Don Frack and myself flew back to the East coast to attend the DinoFest 98 symposium (a combination dinosaur fossil exhibition and gathering of dinosaur paleontologists) in Philadelphia, PA.

We figured that to make going really worth our while (and our money), we would make a couple of side trips. We planned to arrive a couple days early, rent a car and drive up to New York for a day and go to the American Museum of Natural History (we were joined on this leg of our journey by our friend Jonathan Woolf who we knew from back in the CompuServe forum CvE debates). We would then

A Triceratops skull and myself at The Academy of Natural Sciences, in Philadelphia, PA (photo by Jon Wolff).

A Triceratops skull and myself at The Academy of Natural Sciences, in Philadelphia, PA (photo by Jon Woolf).

return to Philadelphia and attend the three day symposium, after which Don and I would drive down to Washington D.C., go to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and fly home from there.

It was at once a fun, fascinating and frustrating trip, which I won’t get too much into now. Let’s just say the both of us a life-long Californians experienced a combination of a bit of culture and geography shock.

Anyway, since we were going to go to the American Museum, Don thought he might contact a couple of the scientists who worked there to see if we could go behind the scenes and get a closer look at some of the material in their collection. In this case material that is of particular interest to those of us involved in the creation/evolution debate, namely their casts of the original “Peking Man” (a.k.a. Sinanthropus pekinensis but now recognized as Homo erectus) material. The fossils represented a number of individual H. erectus‘, unearthed in China at a site known as Zhoukoudian (or Choukoutien) near Beijing in the late 1920’s and early 30’s.

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Pigeons don’t play by your “rulez” man!

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pigeons_drinking_saltwaterThey’re not bound by the dogmas of so-called “scientists” who say that drinking salt water is bad for them. That’s like, just a theory man!