Pixie vs ID

A Global Flood? Yeah, right...

2009-01-23T22:18:00.000Z

Some people believe in a flood that covered the entire world, something like 4500 years ago, based on a literal interpration of the Bible. I think this serves to illustrate how far people will ignore evidence - and indeed common sense - when it happens to conflict with their personal beliefs.

My apologies for mixing metric and Imperial units; I used what I could find.

Life before the Flood
There is not much that we can know about the antediluvian world, but there are a couple of points to note. The first is that there is no reason to suppose animals were distributed as they are today; zebras need not have lived in Africa, pandas need not have lived in China, etc. Indeed, Africa and China may not have existed at all as we know them.

The second point is that there were mountains. The BIble specifically says that the flood covered the mountains, and so if we assume a literal interpration of the Bible, then there must have been mountains. This is important; if the flood had to cover the mountains, there must have been vastly more water than a flood on a world as smooth as a snooker ball.

Where did the Water Come from?
I have seen a number of possibilities offered. Here are a selection.

A Comet
The water could have come from a comet... Except that as things fall to Earth they gain energy, getting hotter and hotter. A comet of water at absolute zero (-273degC) in space will get up to over boiling point by the time it reaches the surface. The people and animals of the ark are just not going to be able to survive on a sea of boiling water.

Any one seriously entertaining this idea should read about the Tungaska event, when something only a few tens of meters across fell to Earth over Siberia.

Underground Caves
Walt Brown suggests superheated water ejected from huge underground caverns. The problem with superheated water is that it is very, very hot (well above the boiling point), and again, Noah at al. will not survive. Curiously, Brown suggests that this superheated water will cause flash-freezing of mammoths.

Water Canopy
The water canopy theory posits a mist of water before the flood.

Go 10 m under water and pressure increases two fold. This is, of course, due to the weight of water over you. If you have that water in a mist form, it still weighs the same. A mist that contains enough water to increase sea level by 10 m will be so heavy it will cause an identical two-fold increase in pressure. This flood was high enough to cover the highest mountains, so was considerably more than 10 m deep, so the antediluvian pressure must have been huge.

What changed so that at one time the atmosphere could hold oceans of water as a mist, but now it cannot?

Numbers on the Ark
How many animals were on the ark? Answers vary, this site says 145,400. This would mean packing the animals in like battery chickens. Each human would have to look after 18,000 animals each. Say a cage needs mucking out once a week, he will be mucking out 2600 cages a day, or 2.7 cages every minute (leaving him six hours a day to sleep, eat, feed all the other thousands of animals he is responsible for.

At the other end of the scale (I have not researched this properly; there may well be higher or lower estimates out there), we have 16,000 animals (here). In this scenario, the humans have a leisurely 12 to 13 minutes to muck out each cage... For 16 hours a day, for a year. Who was it getting punished again? In this hypothesis, we get to the 145,400 species by a process of (I assume) hypermutation, with new species appearing at the rate of nearly 29 new species appearing each year (these are mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians).

http://www.biblestudy.org/basicart/sizeark.html

The Canidae (canine) family includes about 14 genera of dog like animals. These include the coyote, dog, wolf, jackal, etc.

This is the average rate, one would expect the rate to be proportion to the number of existing species (10,000 species will produce less new species a year than 100,000 species will), so should be much higher today, than in Noah's time. I do not believe there is any evidence of new species appearing at that rate; why has hypermutation stopped?

Whatever figure you have for the number of animals on the ark, you have a comprise between hyperevolution and packing in ridiculous numbers of animals.

Some people have suggested that some animals were carried as eggs, but I am not aware of any animal that has an incubation time of greater than a year, and once the eggs hatch, you have the problems of feeding and mucking out. A newly hatched bird will require a lot of attention. Furthermore, growing animals need a lot of food, and it is especially important that they get the right nutrition (I know, I have kids). It has also been suggested that the animals hibernated, but the number of hibernating animals is not large, and it tends to be the smaller ones anyway.

I seem to remember a claim that the animals could be trained to "do their business" in a convenient place (bucket, etc.). It will take some considerable time (I would guess many years) to toilet train 16,000 animals, and this will preclude taking juveniles (there just is no time to train before the journey). The humans still need to haul the poo up onto deck (the majority of animals have to be below the water line to keep the boat from capsizing).

Dinosaurs and the Ark
Do the above numbers include dinosaurs? The Bible says every kind, so dinosaurs (and other extinct animals) must be present. Who gets the job of feeding the T.Rex? Put in a couple of apatosaurus, a pair of brachiosaurus, two tyranosaurus, two deinosuchus, two stegasaurus, two triceratops, two anklosaurus, two indricotherium, two velociraptors, two smilodons and a couple of pteradactyls and you are quickly filling the ark (and there are plenty more kinds of dinosaurs and other large extinct animals). And after all that, the whole lot of them go extinct a few years later!

Space on the Ark
Given a cubit that is 18", this gives an ark that is 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high (see here).

Say we go with hyperevolution, and only 16,000 animals on the ark, this gives each animal 100 cubic feet each, or 200 for the pair. Think about a box, 3 foot high, 6 foot wide and 10 foot long. And you need to keep a year's supply of food for two animals (or longer) in that space too. Also, you need to allow access for the keeper, so part of that space will be the passageway the keeper uses to get at the box.

Obviously animals are different sizes, and you would put the elephants and apatosaurus in bigger boxes, while your mice and sparrows go in smaller ones. Still, it sounds a bit squashed to me.

Life on the Global Ocean
How big were the waves during the flood? How hot was it?

From here:
http://www.biblestudy.org/basicart/sizeark.html

The ark was built on a 1:6 ratio (50 cubits:300 cubits). The science of naval architecture reveals that the most stable ratio for an ocean going vessel is 1:6. All modern day ocean going vessels use this same length to width ratio. It is estimated that the ark could easily have survived even the largest of ocean waves. If the ark were equipped with a dragging stone anchor, it would have been properly positioned to meet any size ocean wave. The design of the ark would have made it almost impossible to turn over.

Apparently they can tell that the ark would be "almost impossible to turn over" from the ratio of the length to width. I bet the designers of the ATLANTIC CARTIER are kicking themselves (length 250 m, width 32.26 m, ratio 1:7.7).

Provisions
As well as packing the animals on the ark, you also need food and water for them. A man needs to drink at least 2 litres of water a day (see here), so let us suppose that all the animals on average need 1 litre each day. If we allow hyperevolution again, and 16,000 animals, then Noah will need 5840000 litres, or nearly 6 thousand tonnes of water! I wonder what he stored it in - ceramic pots? The good news is that it would be easy to collect, just collect rainwater for the first forty days (unless this was water that came out of the subterranean caverns, in which case it will be rather dirty).

A sheep will eat 7 to 10 pounds of hay a day (see here), say about 3000 pounds in a year. An average value across all the animals might be about 500 kg of food for the year, so 8 thousand tonnes of food for the 16,000.

A lion will get through 5500 pounds of meat in a year (according to here, and may not be too happy at eating meat that has been hanging around for a year. But your troubles do not end there. Noah cannot just let his lions go off and find food as the ark lands. The first prey they bring down will be one species extinct. And lions kill about five times a week, I think. Noah will have to keep feeding the carnivores until the prey species have got sufficiently established that they can (as a species) survive being hunted. How long will that take for zebras, for example? I would guess decades.

Biodistribution
Given 4500 years how far can one animal species spread? How do they get across large stretches of water? Let us think about the koala, and its 7000 mile journey to Australia. Okay, only a couple of miles each year, but that assumes they have some kind of homing instinct, and head that way directly. Bear in mind they have to find food, sleep (and koalas spend a lot of time sleeping), and raise a family. And all the time, they are heading for this promised land.

Why did so many marsupials go to Australia, and so few placentals (only bats, dingoes and humans)? What drove kangaroos, thylacines and wombats so hard that none were left along the way, but no rats or horses went there before Europeans arrived?

Dinosaur Remains
How come there are no remains left today on top of the geological column of dinosaurs. These things had seriously big bones; did no one think to save a single one? Did no one fashion a necklace from the teeth of a T. Rex, or boots from the skin of a deinosuchus, or use the horn from a monoclonius to drink from?

History
From this YEC site: "Perhaps it is seen most of all in this very Border Sacrifice which the Emperor performed twice a year. This ceremony, which goes back at least to 2230 B.C. was continued in China for over four thousand years." This would suggest that Chinese culture was already well established by 2230 BC. How does that fit with a global flood?

Here is a timeline for Egyptian rulers, going back to Menes (3414 BC). Hieroglyphs data from about 3000 BC. See also the Wiki entry, which says that the Sahara desert formed around 2500 BC.

Archaeologists have found Egyptian remains from as far back as 8000 BC. Could these be from communities living before the flood? The answer is no, because these remains are found at the top of the geological column. Any pre-flood remains would have to be at the bottom, buried under all the sediment laid down during the flood.

Who are the Closet Creationists?

2009-01-16T20:24:00.001Z

There are plenty of people who are creationists and proud of it. The people at "Answers in Genesis" and "Institute for Creation Research" are fine examples. What is of more interest to me are the IDists who are also creationists. There is nothing inconsistent about being both an IDist and a creationist, however this does give us some insight into why they might want to promote ID, and why they reject modern evolutionary theory.

Dembski claims here that many IDists are ex-Darwinists, rather than fundamentalists wanting to promote creationism. However, I have yet to see anything resembling decent argument against common descent, other than reference to a holy book, so I take his words with a pinch of salt:

In my own case, I was raised in a home where my father had a D.Sc. in biology (from the University of Erlangen in Germany), taught evolutionary biology at the college level, and never questioned Darwinian orthodoxy during my years growing up. My story is not atypical. Biologists Michael Behe, Jonathan Wells, and Dean Kenyon all started out adhering to Darwinism and felt no religious pull to renounce it. In Behe’s case, as a Roman Catholic, there was simply no religious reason to question Darwin. In so many of our cases, what led us out of Darwinism was its inadequacies as a scientific theory as well as the prospect of making design scientifically tractable.

Michael Denton and Michael Behe both accept universal common descent; they are not creationists. Denton is actually a very interest case, because originally he rejected common descent. To his credit, when the flaws in his argument were pointed out, he changed his position.

I want to be quite clear about what I am claiming here. In previous posts I have discussed the evidence for and against common desent - and it is overwhelmly for. The only reason for rejecting common descent that I have found is that it contradicts a very narrow interpration of your holy book (though there are some rationalisations for that on the web). My thesis, then, is that any IDist who rejects common descent, does so for religious reasons, and that therefore they reject modern evolutionay theory for that reason. Thus, I believe that they promote ID for religious reasons, not scientific reasons, whatever they might pretend.

So who are these closet creationist?

Jonathan Wells
http://www.iconsofevolution.com/embedJonsArticles.php3?id=607

The problem with universal common descent is not that it conflicts with ID, but that it conflicts with the evidence. In fact, it blatantly distorts the evidence to serve naturalistic philosophy.

Dembski
http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/ayalas-potemkin-village-review-of-francisco-ayalas-darwins-gift/#comment-139047

For the record: I personally don’t believe in common descent though I think there are lines of evidence that suggest considerable evolutionary change. At the same time, there are lines of evidence that suggest considerable discontinuity among organisms. Check out chapter 5 of my forthcoming book with Jonathan Wells titled THE DESIGN OF LIFE (publication date keeps being delayed, but I think it’ll be out in November).

Stephen Meyer
The Disovery Institute states that Meyer is a member of staff of Palm Beach Atlantic University, however all members at the university are to believe "that man was directly created by God".
http://www.discovery.org/a/2251

Ratliff claims falsely that Dr. Stephen Meyer, director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, teaches in the School of Ministry at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Instead Dr. Meyer is an at-large University Professor in the Conceptual Foundations of Science, who reports directly to the provost.

http://www.pba.edu/aboutpba/pbadifference/guiding-principles.cfm

To assure the perpetuation of these basic concepts of its founders, it is resolved that all those who become associated with Palm Beach Atlantic University as trustees, officers, members of the faculty or of the staff, must believe in the divine inspiration of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments; that man was directly created by God; that Jesus Christ was born of a virgin; that He is the Son of God, our Lord and Savior; that He died for the sins of all men and thereafter arose from the grave; that by repentance and the acceptance of and belief in Him, by the grace of God, the individual is saved from eternal damnation and receives eternal life in the presence of God; and it is further resolved that the ultimate teachings in this University shall always be consistent with these principles.

Phillip E. Johnson
http://www.discovery.org/a/3914

Nowadays I rarely see any attempt to prove that the Darwinian mechanism actually has the power to create major new biological innovations. Instead, the museums and magazines prefer just to tell the story of common descent, assuming that random variation with natural selection (differential reproduction) must have been adequate to perform whatever designing had to be done. At the same time, mainstream science, although guided by Darwinian assumptions, keeps providing more and more evidence of the enormous information content of living structures. Even the core assumption that genetic similarities are necessarily inherited from common ancestors is contradicted almost daily by invocations of something called “lateral gene transfer” to explain genetic similarities between organisms which are not believed to share a recent common ancestor.

Michael Egnor
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/11/is_pz_myers_attending_a_confer.html

Fairy tales about the origin of illnesses and adaptations are worthless to medicine. The materialistic philosophical basis for Darwinism and the inference that humans evolved by natural selection have been catastrophic to medicine. Any genuine insight claimed by Darwinists, such as the dynamics of antibiotic resistance or of heterozygote advantage in such diseases as sickle cell anemia and malaria, is really gained by the relevant basic sciences (molecular genetics, microbiology, epidemiology), with no need for Darwinian just-so stories. For the past century, Darwin's only legacy to medicine has been eugenics. Darwinists are hoping that the salient modern human evolutionary adaptation is amnesia.

Casey Luskin
This whole web page, titled Design vs Descent: A Contest of Predictions, is arguing for design, and against common descent:
http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/846

Jonathan Witt
http://www.idthefuture.com/2006/03/percival_lowell_mars_and_intel.html

And Darwinists point to instances of non-controversial microevolution to defend the poorly supported view that all life evolved by random mutation and common descent from an original ancestor cell. Both Earth's relative smallness and microevolution are true, and both are insufficient to stem the growing tide of evidence against the larger models they are used to defend.

Paul Nelson
Dembski says of Nelson (here): "Nelson’s young earth creationism has been a matter of public record since the mid eighties."
http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/2005/09/yec-id-supporter-paul-nelson-defends.html

I became a fellow at Discovery in 1996, and published a chapter defending YEC with John Mark Reynolds (in the Zondervan volume Three Views on Creation and Evolution) in 1999. In fact, the submission of my chapter MS was delayed, much to the consternation of the Zondervan editors, because Discovery colleagues were urging me to drop out of the book. I've never made any effort to hide my YEC convictions, which are mainly theological in origin.

Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon
David and Kenyon were the main authors of the text book, Of Pandas and People. Early drafts of this used the term "creationism" instead of "intelligent design" (etc.), and included this statement:

The basic metabolic pathways of nearly all organisms are the same. Is this because of descent from a common ancestor, or because only these pathways (and their variations) can sustain life? Evolutionists think the former is correct; creationists because of all the evidence discussed in this book, conclude the latter is correct

After the creationists lost the Edwards vs Aguillard court case, all references to crationis were removed in the book. Nevertheless this seems adequate evidence that Davis and Kenyon are themselves creationists.

Common Descent (Part 3 of 3)

2009-01-13T23:15:00.002Z

Parts 1 and 2 can be read here and here.

Arguments Against
When looking at creationist web sites for arguments against common descent, the first thing that becomes apparent is that creationists conflate common descent with evolution. For example, from here:

Common Descent (Darwinism)–Science or Pseudoscience?

And...

REVIEW HOW COMMON DESCENT (MACROEVOLUTION) HOLDS UP WHEN USING THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD OF TESTING AN HYPOTHESIS

As far as these people are concerned, common descent, macroevolution and Darwinism all mean the same thing!

http://www.arn.org/docs/meyer/sm_methodological.htm

Several of the criteria said to distinguish the scientific status of naturalistic evolutionary theories (hereafter "descent") from admittedly nonnaturalistic theories of creation or design (hereafter "design") will be examined.

This example was written by a philospher of science (Stephen Meyer), who really should know better. But, then again, he is a creationist...

Many of the arguments presented against common descent are really arguments against something else, such as abiogenesis. I am not going to discuss them here.

Uncertainty in the Tree of Life
A common argument is that scientists disagree on how organisms are related, or they change their minds about where the organism should be placed in the tree of life. Why this counts as evidence against common descent is beyond me. It is like deciding that the Roman Empire never existed because historians have uncovered new evidence that changes the accepted date of birth of Julius Caesar.

Gaps in the Fossil Record
Another argument is that there are gaps in the fossil record. Fossilisation is very rare, and the amount of ground dug up is tiny (think about how much of the land around your home has been excavated for fossils). In fact, on the basis of common descent, Darwin predicted that a transitional between reptiles and birds would be discovered, and indeed, before his death, the fossil of archaeopteryx was discovered. Of course, many creationists refuse to admit archaeopteryx is a transitional, insisting it is a reptile; the rest refuse to admit it is a transitional, and insist it is a bird. Such is the creationist way of dealing with transitionals.
This argument is becoming ever more silly as more transitional fossils are appearing. See here for some articles at Panda's Thumb on that:
http://pandasthumb.org/archives/evolution/transitional-fossils/

Here is a great example of Duane Gish's deceptions about triceratops being exposed:
http://ncseweb.org/cej/3/3/dilemma-horned-dinosaurs

Common Design
Creationists and IDists often put up "common design" as a viable alternative to common descent. According to the common design hypothesis, all mammals share the same features because they were designed to be similar, just as all cars share a bunch of similar features, while aeroplanes share a different set of features.

At first glance, this seems quite reasonable, but scratch below the surface, and it all looks a bit dodgy. Things that are really designed, like cars and aeroplanes, share a lot of common features, and those features do not follow the same pattern as common descent. Modern cars and aeroplanes use microprocessors, but 50 years ago neither did. The design of cars and aeroplanes does not form a nested hierarchy. New technology is added to both cars and aeroplanes. In contrast, new "designs" in evolution appear only sporadically.

The chimera was a creature from Greek mythology, part goat, part lion and part snake. However, the term has come to be used more generally to mean a creature made up of part of other creatures. Surely the "common design" hypothesis would lead us to expect such chimeras? Why is the desiner restricted to only picking mammal features for certain species of animals? Why should he not use some snake features together with some lion features? There is no reason I see why he might constrain himself like that.

Answers in Genesis give their reason why we see no chimeras. However, the important point here is that common descent predicts there will be no chimeras. Common design does not; it merely rationalises the fact after the event.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v16/i1/chimeras.asp

Summary
To my mind the evidence for common descent is conclusive. There is just too much of it out there and it fits together too well. In all my discussions with IDists and creationists, the only real argument against it I have come across is that the Bible says otherwise. Nevertheless, most Christians accept common descent.

By the way, there is a strange phenomenun on discussion boards with IDists; if you are arguing about common descent, the IDists who accept common descent are strangely quiet. Why is that, I wonder?

Common Descent (Part 2 of 3)

2009-01-12T22:45:00.003Z

Parts 1 and 3 can be read here and here.

What Does Common Descent Explain?
A scientific claim needs to make testable predictions, but it also needs to be useful, to help explain the world we see.

The Distribution of Eyes
There are various sorts of eyes in the natural world, such as the compound eye of the insect, the camera eye of vertebrates eye and the alternative camera eye of octopi and squids. According to common descent, the eyes that a creature gets depends on their ancestry. If you are descended from the first organism to evolve a rudimentary compound eye, you get a compound eye. Thus, while fish and squid live in the same environments, fish have retinas wired one way, squid have retina wired the other. One is, presumably, better in that environment, but who gets what is determined by their evolutionary history, not their current needs.

See here:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/11/the_eye_as_a_contingent_divers.php

Creationists sometimes say that the designer equipped each "kind" with the eye most suited to its environment. The squid, the shark and the whale "kinds" need eyes that work well in water, so we would predict them to have the same eyes. Advocates of common design might argue that one type of eye is advantages in a more specific niche, perhaps for predators at great depths. That is a reasonable argument, as long as they follow it though. The creationist scientist should be able to state what niches a certain eye type is best suited for; not just the two camera eyes, but the compound eye and all other eyes. He should be able to give some reasoning as to why the eye works best in that niche. And then he can show how the "kinds" in that niche (or at least originally in that niche when created) have the optimum eyes.

As far as I am aware, no one has ever attempted that. Why not? Because creationist scientists know that creation science fails the prediction.

Vitamin C Pseudogene
Most mammals can synthesise their own vitamin C, so cats, for instance, survive very well on a diet that excludes fruit. This is not true of humans, and two centuries ago sailors would regularly die a very painful death of scurvy (over half the crew might die on a long voyage). Curiously, humans do have the gene that codes for vitamin C synthesis, but it is broken (it is therefore described as a pseudogene). This same pseudogene has been found in chimpanzees, orangutans, and macaques, as well as guinea pigs. The common descent explanation is that a common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees, orangutans, and macaques had a mutation that destroyed the functionality of the gene, but as this ancestor ate so much fruit, it made no odds to the ancestor, and spread through the species. Thus today, all four species have the same error in the pseudogene. This happened independantly for the guinea pig.

More here:
http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones/cmnctsry.html#vtmncpsdgn

How does creationism explain this?

Vestigialism
Certain features can be identified as having a primary use in one species and not in another. The wings of an ostrich are useless for flying, but are clearly still wings. Sure, they have some other purpose, but not a purpose you need wings for. The cassowary has virtually nothing in the ways of wings, not enough to be useful for anything - but there is something there still. Some cave dwelling animals have the vestiges of eyes, but skin grows over them, preventing light, should there be any, from actually getting to the eye.

Common descent says that in the ancestor, these were fully functional features - the ancestor of the osrich could fly, the ancestors of the cave dwellers lived on the surface, and found the eyes to be useful. The modern organism lives in an environment or manner that makes the feature useless, but it still remains.

Atavism

Occasionally humans are born with tails, whales and snakes with legs. Common descent says this is a throw back to our respective ancestors. If humans were created without tails, where do these tails come from?

More...
There is plenty more evidence, and much of it is presented on Talk.Origins. The interested reader may like to read this exchange between Talk.Origins and True.Origins:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/
http://www.trueorigin.org/theobald1a.asp
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/camp.html
http://www.trueorigin.org/ca_ac_01.asp

Here are other interesting sites:
http://home.planet.nl/~gkorthof/korthof84.htm
http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones/cmnctsry.html

Common Descent (Part 1 of 3)

2009-01-11T20:59:00.002Z

Parts 2 and 3 can be read here and here.

Pretty much everyone accepts some degree of common descent; creationists generally believe that all canines (the dog "kind") evolved from a single species. However, I am talking here about universal common descent, the claim that all living things are related, and are descended from a common ancestor. When I say common descent on this blog, I mean universal common descent, rather than limited common descent.

Let me say up front that there are questions in science revolving around that common ancestor. It may be that there was actually a whole bunch of ancestors that appeared independantly, and subsequently exchanged genes. It was a very long time ago, and the evidence available today is scant. So the argument can be summarised as the claim by mainstream science that humans and (say) bananas share a common ancestor, and the claim by creations that they do not (and indeed, usually that even humans and chimps do not share a common ancestor).

Common descent is consistent with several ID scenarios, such as front-loading. It is also consistent with theistic evolution, and, of course, with modern evolutionary theory. It is not consistent with the creationist claim that God produced the various "kinds" of organisms separately.

Common descent is a fascinating issue in the evolution debate for a number of reasons as we shall see...

Michael Denton and Common Descent
Michael Denton is an IDist who wrote a book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, published in 1985. In the book he spent a lot of time arguing against common descent. However, he subsequently abandoned his claims. In his later book, Nature's Destiny, he embraces common descent. The fact that the author of these arguments now accepts they are flawed does not concern the creationist one jot. Their faith informs then common descent is wrong, and so they accept any argument against it, without bothering to actually think.

Here are two examples of creationists doing just that:
http://www.teleological.org/?p=228
http://intelligentreasoning.blogspot.com/2006/12/calling-zachriels-bluff-nested.html

Here is what Denton has actually said (from here):

It is important to emphasize at the outset that the argument presented here is entirely consistent with the basic naturalistic assumption of modern science - that the cosmos is a seamless unity which can be comprehended ultimately in its entirety by human reason and in which all phenomena, including life and evolution and the origin of man, are ultimately explicable in terms of natural processes. This is an assumption which is entirely opposed to that of the so-called "special creationist school". According to special creationism, living organisms are not natural forms, whose origin and design were built into the laws of nature from the beginning, but rather contingent forms analogous in essence to human artifacts, the result of a series of supernatural acts, involving the suspension of natural law. Contrary to the creationist position, the whole argument presented here is critically dependent on the presumption of the unbroken continuity of the organic world - that is, on the reality of organic evolution and on the presumption that all living organisms on earth are natural forms in the profoundest sense of the word, no less natural than salt crystals, atoms, waterfalls, or galaxies. (Nature's Destiny, pages xvii-xviii).

Dave Scot and Common Descent
Dave Scot is an IDist who runs the Uncommon Descent blog site for William Dembski. Here is what he says of objections to common descent (ironic, given the name of the blog):

You certainly don’t have to agree here with descent with modification from a common ancestor but I’m going to start clamping down on anyone positively arguing against it. It’s simply counter-productive to our goals and reinforces the idea that ID is religion because nothing but religion argues against descent with modification from a common ancestor.

This was the thread he said it on:
http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/744

Uncommon Descent have a revisionist attitute to history, and Scot's thread has since been deleted (perhaps by Dembski, who rejects common descent, which does explain the name of the web site). The thread is preserved here:
http://immunoblogging.blogspot.com/2006/01/intelligent-design-has-new-party-line.html

Predictions from Common Descent
Common descent is a scientific claim. That means that certain prediction follow inevitably if it is true, and those predictions can be tested. If common descent is true, then certain features of the biological world have to be true. If they are not, then common descent is refuted.

A Nested Hierarchy
Common descent involves a "tree of life" in which, over billions of years, species branch off, evolve and die out. If you can reconstruct that tree, and point to any node in it, it necessarily follows that all the organisms that are descended from the organism at that node are closer related than those not (for example all mammals are descended from a common ancestor, and so are much more alike than those animals that are not). Follow the branch down (i.e., back in time), and pick another node somewhere along it. Now you have a larger set of organisms descended from an older ancestor, which includes the first node, and must necessarily include all the organisms that branched from the first node - just as your grandson's children must necessarily be related to you (so the mammals are all nested inside the vertebrates, because the common ancestor of the mammals was itself a descendant of te common ancestor of all vertebrates). The organisms from the first node are necessarily nested inside the organisms from the second node (your grandson's descendants are nested inside the grouping of your descendants). Thus a nested hierarchy has to be the case if common descent is true.

Curiously, the nested hierarchy was first shown by a creationist, Linnaeus.

It should be noted that the discovery of the nested hierarchy actually predates Darwin's theory of evolution. Predictions in science do not have to be made before the event, they just have to be a necessary consequence of the theory (the orbit of Mercury was well known before Einstein used relativity to predict it, for instance).

A Common Fundamental Chemistry
If all life is descended from a single ancestor, you would expect some of the basic biochemistry of that ancestory to survive in every organism today, at a bare minimum, the mechanism of inheritance. All life on this planet uses DNA/RNA to handle genetic code, and it all codes for amino acids in the same way. The relationship between the three nucleotide codon mapping to a certain amino acid is pretty much universal across all living things.

Codons are discussed here:
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/C/Codons.html

Molecular Relatedness Closely Fits Phenotype Relatedness
The prediction is that if two species are similar, and are near each other in the tree of life, then this is because they are closely related, and a necessary consequence of common descent is that their biochemistry is also closely related.

It turns out that proteins can vary quite a lot. The famous one here is cytochrome-c, which is about 100 amino acids long, 30 of which are specific, the other 70 can vary somewhat, without having any impact on functionality. The prediction from common descent, then, is that the variation in cytochrome-c is large for organisms a long apart in the tree of life, and small for closely related organisms. And this is what we find.

For more, go here:
http://www.rtis.com/nat/user/elsberry/evobio/evc/argresp/sequence.html

In fact, we find this with all proteins. In some cases the protein is only present in one branch of the tree, so can only be tested for in a small group of organisms. Also you can reach a saturation point with some proteins; the variation is too great to get meaningful results for more distantly related organism. Neither of issues refute common descent; they are what you would expect.

Defining Creationism and Evolution

2009-01-05T22:30:00.000Z

In my first post, I define what I mean by Intelligent Design. Now it is the turn of creationism and evolution.

People have their own definitions for many terms in this debate (and in some cases people have several definitions that they use as the mood suits them). I want to be quite clear what I am talking about, but hopefully my terms reflect common usage.

So what is Creationism?
As far as I am concerned, creationism is the belief that each "kind" of animal or plant was created separately. This stands against universal common descent, which claims that all animals and plants are related. If you reject universal common descent, that would make you a creationist.

There are various "kinds" of creationist. Biblical creationists use the Bible to support their ideas (as far as I know all creationists base their beliefs on their holy book, but there are plenty of non-Christian creationisst). Young Earth creationism (YEC) is the belief that God created the Earth just a few thousand years ago (typically 6000 years ago). They usually take the Bible (or Koran) as literally true, and believe in a global flood in which Noah rescued two of evey "kind". Old Earth creationism (OEC) is the belief the Earth is about 4 billion years ago (as science tells us), but that God created each "kind" progressively during that time, so Adam and Eve were created 2 million years ago.

One of the important features of creationism is that mankind is not related to the other apes. The only reason for believing this appears to be religious.

Is Intelligent Design the Same as Creationism?
Certainly not! Intelligent Design (ID) encompasses many diverse origins theories, includes the belief that life on Earth was created by space aliens (for example, the beliefs of the Raelians). Some IDists accept common descent (Michael Behe, Mike Gene and Michael Denton for three), and so are not creationists.

Some creationists like to distance themselves from ID, but I would suggest that this is from the ID movement, rather than from ID theory.

So what is Evolution?
Evolution means species changing over time. Pretty much everyone accepts evolution nowadays; there is just too much evidence to ignore it. Indeed, YECers are pretty much obliged to accept hyper-evolution, to account for the rich diversity of life on the planet today from the relatively small number of "kinds" of animals on the ark just a few thousand years ago.

Where it gets contentious is what creationists like to label "macro-evolution", in which new "kinds" evolve.

So what is Modern Evolutionary Theory?
Modern Evolutionary Theory (MET) is a term characterised at a web site forum called ARN a few years ago. It is not an official term, but it is one that I will use. Unlike ID, MET is a specific origins theory. It posits that simple, single-celled life appeared on Earth around 4 billion years ago, and and that all the diverse species around today are descended from that first life through a process of inheritance, variation and selection. It must be emphasised that that is just a quick summary of the theory that has slowly developed over more than a century from the original theory proposed by Darwin.

What is Intelligent Design?

2009-01-04T20:56:00.000Z

First post in my new blog about Intelligent Design (ID). Although I have titled the blog "Pixie vs ID", this will also be about ID's almost idential twin, creationism. Creationists and IDist get quite riled when you use the terms interchangeably - and will often assume you are doing so even when you carefully pick the right one too. It seems appropriate, then, to kick off this blog by saying what I understand these things to be. For today, I will just do Intelligent Design.

So what is Intelligent Design?
Now here is a term that changes its meaning often. Mike Gene (author of The Design Matrix says (here):

For me, ID begins exactly as William Dembski said it begins – with a question:
"Intelligent design begins with a seemingly innocuous question: Can objects, even if nothing is known about how they arose, exhibit features that reliably signal the action of an intelligent cause?"
The first thing to note about the question is that you don’t have to be a religious fundamentalist to ask it. You don’t have to be a religious fundamentalist to consider it. In fact, you don’t even have to be a religious fundamentalist to answer it.
The question is a good one, as it stems from the fact that certain things do exist in our reality only because they were brought into existence by an intelligent cause. If human beings did not exist, for example, Mount Rushmore would not exist. Thus, Mount Rushmore’s existence is dependent on intelligent causation. So one begins to wonder if there are other aspects of our reality that are likewise dependent on intelligent causation. If so, can we detect them? If so, just how reliable is our detection?
This, in my opinion, is the very foundation of ID. It’s not a position or socio-political movement or a system of belief. It is a question and expression of curiosity.

I find that definition disingenuous. If ID is merely the claim that we can detect design, who in their right mind would argue against it? Archaeologists and forensic scientists suddenly become IDists! Sorry, Mike, but the point about ID, the thing that characterises it, that makes it contraversal, is that it is looking for non-human design.

The second definition is that ID is the claim that some intelligent agent is responsible for life as we know it on Earth. However, theistic evolutionists accept the mainstream understanding of evolution, but also believe in God. Ken Miller, a Christian biology professor at Brown University is an excellent example of a theistic evolutionist who is very much against ID.

Dembski is also keen to draw the battlelines (from here):

The answer to this question is quite simple: Design theorists are no friends of theistic evolution. As far as design theorists are concerned, theistic evolution is American evangelicalism's ill-conceived accommodation to Darwinism. What theistic evolution does is take the Darwinian picture of the biological world and baptize it, identifying this picture with the way God created life. When boiled down to its scientific content, theistic evolution is no different from atheistic evolution, accepting as it does only purposeless, naturalistic, material processes for the origin and development of life.

Any definition of ID that encompasses theistic evolutionists is clearly wrong, and should be rejected.

So what is ID? Here is the definition from the IDEA Center:

The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. Through the study and analysis of a system's components, a design theorist is able to determine whether various natural structures are the product of chance, natural law, intelligent design, or some combination thereof.

And here is Dembski (at ARN):

What is Intelligent Design?
Intelligent Design is the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the result of intelligence.
Design theory - also called design or the design argument - is the view that nature shows tangible signs of having been designed by a preexisting intelligence. It has been around, in one form or another, since the time of ancient Greece.

So ID makes two claims:

life was designed; and
there is evidence for that that can be studied by science.

Of course, Dembski did also say (see here):

"Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory."

However, the party line is that ID is nothing to do with religion (honest), and we can put this quote down to a Freudian slip.

Denton's ID
For completeness, I have to point out that biochemist Michael Denton describes himself as an IDist, but does not fall under my definition above. While Denton originally rejected common descent, he now accepts it, and claims that the universe was created by an intelligent agent in such a way that life was certain to start through abiogenesis, and mankind was later destined to evolve (as described in his book Nature's Destiny); the creator had no further involvement in the universe. For me, that puts him closer to an atheist's view than theistic evolutionist, well outside the ID camp.

Cosmological ID
I also want to mention cosmological ID, to make clear the difference between this and the standard, biological ID. Cosmological ID holds that:

the universe was designed; and
there is evidence for that that can be studied by science.

There is no reason to suppose that if one is true, then the other must be as well. For example, Denton's scenario fits cosmological ID, but not biological ID. The Raellian theory fits biological ID, but not cosmological ID.