The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism

Specifications

Eldredge, Niles, The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism, 2000, W. H. Freeman and Company, New York.

Reading

I read this book from about November 25, 2007, to November 30, 2007. The book is from the Central Resource Library, and is showing signs of having been copied a lot.

Review

This book is, as its title indicates, a book about how evolution is true and Creationism is not.

There are many reasons given, and I hesitate to even attempt to include all of them here. Primarily, they amount to, first, the fossil record tends to support evolution. That is, the Creationist will cite missing links, but, while these arguments might have held water in the nineteenth century, they don't hold water today. Most of the links have, in fact, been found.

The author further talks about the fact that Creationist will claim the ages of items were fudged. It turns out that the "ages" of the fossils were first noticed even before Darwin. That is, some farmers thought they would categorize the fossils found on their land. They began to realize that the fossils always occurred in a certain order. That is, if you found fossil A, then fossil B would always be a little further down, while fossil C would be a little higher up. The order appears world wide (with a few minor exceptions).

Some of the rocks the fossils were with could be dated due to radioactive decay. That is, once a rock is formed, the radioactive elements begin to decay, so by measuring the radioactive isotopes that are left, one can determine the ages of some rocks (not all). This type of measurement indicated the fossils to be very old, in fact, microscopic fossils can be found with rocks that measure as old as 4 billion years.

The book gives a very good explanation of the age of fossils, much better than I can in this review.

The author, justifiably in my opinion, complained about Creationist lying to support there point of view. The case in point is where a Creationist probably misquoted the author to say the author supported Creationism. For a further discussion of my view on this, see my article at http://www.bill.baldwincs.com/writings/politics/DoverRuling.html,

The primary reason I would recommend this book to the reader is the final chapter. In this chapter the author is, in fact, very positive. He complains, for example, about other scientist who claim that their research shows there is no God. The complaint stems both from the fact that none of the research show this, and, as the author puts it, we can't be worrying about this just now. (It might be well to review my article at http://www.bill.baldwincs.com/writings/religion/Evolution.html at this time.)

The author then goes to show that misuse of the environment is getting to the point that life (including human life) may not be able to survive on this planet much longer if we don't do something to stop the destruction of the ecosystem. (This almost sounds like its coming from church headquarters.) He is hopeful in that at least some younger Christians are beginning to see the call in Genesis to "have dominion" over the Earth is a call to stewardship rather than a call to wanton waste. (I have heard this - that is, I remember being told that some Christian churches are beginning to follow the church's call to stewardship.)

The primary positive point I see in this last chapter, that I've not seen in many other books on the subject, is that the author is willing to acknowledge the church, and work with the church to help solve the problems of the World, rather than treating religion as if religion and science are at odds with each other.

And I will agree with the author, that we need to consider our ecosystem, and how we can preserve it. About the only complaint would be that the author fails to bring up the idea that we need to end war as a human activity before we can make peace with our environment.

Comments

While I agree with the author, and even with his logic on most instances, I did find some rather minor errors in the book. Most do not really involve science, and the ones that do might only represent a minor difference of opinion. Certainly none of them invalidate the arguments given in the book.

While I was reading I kept a list of the problems, and I present them here (edited, I hope, to correct spelling and grammar.) I have to emphasis that none of these points are really significant.

For example, I would bet that most people who call themselves Christian, even Fundamentalists, would state that Noah was on the waters of the flood for forty days, but they would be wrong.

Facts

I disagree with the definition of facts vis-a-vis theories. This does not mean I support the idea that Creationism is a theory, but rather my working definition of these words differ slightly from what is presented in the book.

The book treats "facts" as if they are super-theories that are agree to be correct. I think a theory should never be passed off as a fact.

A fact is something that can be observed directly. That is, if I have a ball in my hand, and I hold the ball away from me, and release it, it will fall toward the ground. That is a fact. This fact is explained by the theory of gravity. The theory of gravity has widespread acceptance, and most people would accept this as fact, but I will still call it a theory.

General Relativity does not treat gravity as a force. I'm not going to get into that now, however. The point is that I observe the ball drop, and therefore, the ball dropping is a fact.

If I have a helium filled balloon, then I observe another fact, which contradicts gravity. That is, I drop the balloon, and it doesn't fall down, it falls up. The theory of gravity is so widely accepted, however, that other explanations are given. That is, the buoyancy caused by the air is greater than the weight caused by gravity, etc. The theory of gravity is, therefore, altered slightly to take into account the buoyancy of air.

But even this definition of fact is not without its flaws. That is, I never observe a ball dropping. What I observe is photons that bounce off the ball, and hit my eye. I observe feedback from my hand that notes the resistance of motion of the fingers through the ball, etc. Some people have a different theory for what is going on, but we call them insane, or certainly pronounce that they have a mental problem.

On the other hand, when people are running a radio telescope, they have lots of gauges, and screens to tell they what's out there. It is more convenient to talk about what the accepted theory says causes the needles to move, or the images to appear on the screen than it is to talk about the specific observations made.

In some instances, I've seen it pointed out that some "facts" cannot be supported because there is no way to observe the facts. For me, the idea that some races are more intelligent than others falls in this category. (Having had intelligence test that have "proved" my IQ to be anything from a low of 116 to a high that may be as high as 175. That is, the "noise" is too high to prove anything.) Many ideas put forth by psychiatrist fall in this category.

To an extent this is an important distinction. The reason is that theories can be challenged, whereas facts cannot. Therefore, Newton's theory could account for all observations prior to about 1830. Then is was observed that light didn't obey Newton's theory, so Maxwell's theory was developed to explain light. When Mickelson and Morley did their experiment in the 1880's, they made an observation which could not be explained by either theory, nor could it be explained by combining them. This lead directly to Relativity theory.

If facts were simply widely accepted theories, then Newton's theory could not have been challenged, since it was accepted as fact in 1830.

This discussion of "fact" tends to, in my opinion, underline the fact that people calling evolution a theory does not demean the theory at all. It only says that reputable challenges are allowed. (As I've seen pointed out, if Creationism were a reputable challenge to evolution, it would be published in the literature.) (When facts are challenged, quite often some scientist reputation is challenged as well. This is called generating data to fit a theory, and scientist who do this see their reputation drop like a rock.)

Columbus

Page 23 of the book says, "[speaking of Eratosthenes measurement of the circumference of the Earth] Columbus was aware of this and of later calculations, and he used them in his navigation." Columbus may have been aware of the measurement of Earth's size, and that the ancient Egyptians that measure the size, but I've seen several references to the fact that Columbus thought the Earth was much smaller. Therefore, he told people that Asia was just over the horizon. This is why he thought he was in India when, in fact, he was in the Caribbean. I've seen mention that Columbus believed this to his dying day.

He was probably also aware of Leif Ericson's discovery, which may have been the basis for his saying the Earth was so much smaller. That is, he may have concluded that Leif landed in Asia, so the spice islands should be just over the horizon.

Scanners

On page 28, it is implied that scanners make the errors in copying that scribes make obsolete. Actually not. If someone copies a document on a copier many times, each one will cause some change in the document - often a change in size, but also little specs that might be on the scanner are copied along with the document, so the degradation over time happens the same way.

Digital scanning, however, will put an end to the errors, because once something is digitally scanned, exact copies can be made.

Plants

Page 30. "All plants photosynthesize." When I took biology, it was noted that the defining characteristic of plants is that they have a cell wall, which animals don't have. Therefore, many plants, in particular yeast, mushrooms, and others, do not photosynthesize.

But, then, I'm not a biologist, and maybe the definition of "plant" has changed since I was young.

Interesting Points

(This is not a problem.) People are more closely related to rats than to cows. (Page 31.)

The primate family is one of the oldest mammalian groups. (page 56)

Noah

(Page 100) There is an error in that it says Noah had a 40 day deluge. This is wrong, in that the Bible says it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, but the water was on the Earth for a long time - at least 150 days, and probably more like 300.

Personally I have always held that the Babylonian version of this story is correct. That is, there was a local flood, which was bad (a 1000 year flood) which floated Noah and his group out to sea, beyond the sight of land.

Occam's Razor

On page 123 the formulation of Occam's Razor as given in the movie Contact is used, that is, "given two scientific ideas, the simplest one is probably right." This book uses the term "favored" rather than "probably right," which somewhat mutes the objection, but doesn't remove it in my book.

The reason is that given two ideas such as Creationism (here I have to assume for this argument only that Creationism is a science) and evolution, the better one is not the one that is simpler, but rather the one that produces the most correct predictions. If Creationism produced more correct predictions than evolution, then it would have to be used over evolution regardless of how complex it is. Just like Einstein's Theory of Relativity is preferred to Newton's Theory even though Newton's theory is much simpler. (In fact, Newton's Theory is still taught because it is so much simpler than Relativity, and for most practical uses, the differences between the predictions of the two theories is negligible.)

Occam's Razor is important, however, in understanding the difference between Creationism and Evolution in that it disposes of the argument that Evolution assumes there is no God. One can say that is not true, but if there is a God, he is eliminated because of Occam's Razor.

Here, I'm using Occam's Razor as I noted it defined most commonly on Internet (including several Universities) when I first became interested in this issue after watching Contact. That is, as presented, Occam's Razor is a call to not do good science if it leads to more complex solutions to the problems at hand, whatever they happen to be. The definition given after my study is, "If a fact is not required to explain an observation, then it should be left out." In this case, the existence of God is not required, for the equations to work, so God is eliminated, even if people prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he exists.

Having discussed this, I'm inclined to add two observations from my past that more or less deal with this subject. The first is from my undergraduate summer "job" with Dr. Metzler at Iowa State University. At that time he was doing research pushing his method of classifying ultra-violet spectra. That is, at that time scientists were using four parameters to specify the spectra, and he had developed a different theory that only required three. He was publishing articles on it as well, and had some hope it would be accepted.

This is applicable to a discussion of Occam's Razor because in this case he had developed a theory which could explain the existing spectra with fewer parameters, and therefore he expected it to be accepted. This differs from the Creationism-Evolution debate, however, in that his formulas would predict the spectra just as well as the more complicated theory. In the Evolution-Creationism debate, however, that is not the case.

The second observation concerns the entire debate. In 1970-71 I was a graduate student at Iowa State University in the Mathematics department. I had a good friend at that time who was a graduate student in the Physics department. One day he took me by the physics library, and showed me an article in a prominent physics journal, written by a prominent physicist. The article was titled something like, "An Open Letter to the Flat Earth Society." This article pointed out that as a physicist, he had no quarrel with the Flat Earth Society. The point he made is that if the Earth is, in fact, flat, so be it, no problem. However, from his perspective, he would still consider the Earth round, even knowing he's wrong, because all the equations are simpler.

This is at the heart of the Creationism-Evolution debate. That is, an "Evolutionist" could accept that the Earth was created in six days, say that in church, and even believe that its true, but still go through the week making observations under the assumption that the Earth is very old. The reason is that considering the Earth to be old makes explaining the observations much easier.

(I have to, once again, point out that I don't believe the Earth was created in six days for religious reasons. See http://www.bill.baldwincs.com/writings/religion/Evolution.html. I don't think the Bible says that, even.)

Stewardship

(page 167) I am somewhat at a loss. This makes the statement that, "...no religious traditions independently mirroring the relatively recent scientific understanding of the problem [overuse of the environment] have yet emerged."

I have been taught at church since I was very young that preservation of the environment was important. Now, the particular issues were not mentioned, but the Church (Community of Christ) has taught that people are stewards over Gods creation almost since the church began (1830). Looking at the official writings of the church, I see a statement dated 1964, "Repression of unnecessary wants is in harmony with the law of stewardship and becomes my people." As this hints, there are earlier calls to stewardship. That is, the members have always viewed themselves as stewards over the portion of his creation over which we have control.

As I said, I suspect that the origin of this idea is very early in church history, although I don't want to have so look through the whole of church history to see when it originally started, As early as 1834 there are references to man being responsible to God for their stewardship over his Earth.

I must say that not all members are good members, and some get caught up with the "Keeping up with the Jones" atmosphere which exists in society, and therefore don't make good stewards, But some have.

I have heard in recent years the church leadership being very happy because some other churches have begun to think of themselves as stewards over the Earth. That is, the church is no longer such a lone voice.

God

I find the view expressed of God interesting, and perhaps not that different from mine. That is, I think all religions of the World (including Christianity, and the Community of Christ {which is, technically, not Christian]) have a view of the truth, which is a view of God. While I'm not sure the church has any official position on this, if is noteworthy that the church has started a inter-religion dialog in Canada. That is, the church has started a center in Canada, in which a person can learn about all the religions that they have access to, including having leaders in those religions explain them, and visiting services, etc.

The church is moving in the direction of recognizing all religions as having their place.

Part of the movement in this direction is the rejection of the idea that the church needs to "save" other peoples. That is, the church doesn't go into other nations to "save" the people, but to learn from them of their experiences with God.

And, of course, part of the purpose of the church is environmentalism.

Something missing from this discussion that I notice after reading what the church has to say on this issue is the problem of peace. If people cannot live with people, then there will always be destruction of the environments. This is also a teaching of the church.