This weekend, while most of the people my age were out getting drunk and having sex, I was doing something completely uncharacteristic of my generation.  For even though I too was out getting drunk and having sex, I also attended a lecture given by a Young Earth Creationist on Friday and Saturday night.  I’m still unsure whether the drinking, sex, or the lecture was more depraved, though the lecture has definitely caused the most shameful guilt.  Thankfully, I was seated with like-minded members of the St. Louis Atheist Meetup Group, particularly Ziztur and Flimsy, who blog at Atheism Is Freedom. (Here is Ziztur’s first post on the lecture, and she even has a commenter from the church because she’s crazy enough to hand out business cards for her blog!)

The title of the lecture was based on a National Geographic article of the same name: “Was Darwin Wrong?”  Of course, the first page of the National Geographic article answered that question with a resounding “NO,” complete with supersized font and bold lettering.  The lecture, of course, did not come to so reasonable a conclusion, much to my chagrin.

The speaker was Young Earth Creationist Dr. Brad Harrub.  Surprisingly, he is a real doctor with a PhD in neurobiology from a legitimate university, unlike the countless other creationists who routinely receive their doctoral degrees from university mills and various other unaccredited religious institutions.  For whatever reason, he chooses to sully his academic credentials in biology with not just creationism, but young Earth creationism, which is essentially creationism’s slower, drooling, semi-retarded cousin.  Intelligent Design proponents are willing to give some ground to scientific consensus outside of biology at least, but the Young Earth Creationist movement rejects not only the unifying theories of modern biology but also those of geology, astronomy, physics, and countless other disciplines.

Like Genesis, Dr. Harrub started his lecture in the beginning, addressing the origins of the universe and attempting to discredit the Big Bang theory.  He tried to argue that the Big Bang theory violates the second law of thermodynamics, as the universe becomes ordered from disorder, but this only betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the proper interpretation and application of the law.  If Dr. Harrub’s interpretation of the second law were correct, for instance, it would also imply that embryonic development is impossible, as the growth of a zygote into an embryo requires no guiding force, and yet the early development of a single-celled zygote into a multicellular embryo can be fully observed to create more and more complexity.  Clearly, Dr. Harrub’s toy conception of thermodynamics that naively maintains that the creation of order from disorder is impossible is wholly wrong given only a cursory examination.  The laws of thermodynamics basically only tell us about heat’s tendency toward equilibrium in closed systems.

Following the digression into Big Bang cosmology, Dr. Harrub finally began to address evolution.  He gave a brief overview of Darwin’s life, explicitly implying that the theory of evolution was the result of Darwin’s personal tragedies, namely the loss of his daughter and his subsequent rejection of God.  Of course, this ramshackle attempt at psychoanalyzing Darwin tells us nothing concerning the truth or falsity of his theory, as ultimately the theory of evolution was accepted on the merits of the evidence in its favor, and not the personal biography of Darwin himself.

Not content to portray Darwin as biased after losing his faith, the lecturer then claimed that the theory of evolution is racist.  The only support ventured for this argument was to call attention to the subtitle of The Origin of Species, which is “Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.”  Dr. Harrub argued that the use of the words “Favoured Races” betrays racist undertones of the classic book. Of course, anyone who has ever read The Origin of Species would find this remark quite unfounded. Even a cursory glance at the table of contents would quickly reveal that Darwin did not expound upon human evolution, much less explicitly detail a theory concerning racial characteristics within its pages. In fact, it is quite well-known that Darwin was reluctant to publish his theory of evolution owing to its implications regarding man’s place in the cosmos, and this is specifically why he didn’t publish The Origin of Species until Wallace had almost scooped him; incidentally, this is also why he refrained from mentioning human evolution at all within its pages, preferring instead to focus on birds, beetles, and plants.  So to claim that the subtitle’s use of the phrase ”Favoured Races” refers to a theory of racial classification is irresponsibly disingenuous.  Darwin did not espouse the so-called “Social Darwinism” of the 19th century that sought to justify inequity through piss-poor biology.  The theory of evolution does not tell us how we ought to behave or prescribe value judgments; it is not an ethical theory.  It merely describes reality as it is.  In fact, any sort of hierarchical value-laden model of evolution that seeks to rank organisms from “best” to “worst” or as “more evolved” is purified claptrap.  With a proper understanding of evolution, to argue that a particular race or species is “more evolved” is simply meaningless.  It makes no sense, for instance, to say that a bird is more evolved than a beetle.  Both have evolved to fill a particular ecological niche, and both can reproduce and survive.  Evolution only describes the changes in their allele frequencies over time.

One particular argument I found surprising was Dr. Harrub’s attempt to portray Darwin as endorsing Lamarckian evolution, or the inheritance of acquired characteristics.  In support of this view, he quotes Darwin as saying the following in The Origin of Species:  “I think there can be little doubt that use in our domestic animals strengthens and enlarges certain parts, and disuse diminishes them; and that such modifications are inherited.”[1]  At first blush, it does seem as if Darwin is endorsing Lamarckian evolution here.  Dr. Harrub, of course, rightly mocks this as nonsense, noting that should a parent lose a limb before procreating, the offspring will not be born with a missing limb.  Of course, I instantly knew that this quote from Darwin had to be taken completely out of context, as it was so completely out of character with the rest of the book.  And sure enough, Dr. Harrub had merely quote-mined Darwin in an attempt to associate him with the failed evolutionary framework of Lamarckian evolution.  But what made Darwin’s theory of evolution so successful was the fact that he identified two plausible mechanisms for evolutionary change that had nothing to do with Lamarck’s proposed mechanism: natural selection and sexual selection.  When Darwin is talking of use and disuse modifying parts, he is not speaking of individual animals and therefore Lamarckian evolution.  Darwin was ahead of his time in viewing change in terms of populations.  Thus, he is not claiming that a dog that loses its limb will give rise to offspring with missing limbs, but that a population of, say, birds who lose the power of flight with disuse over successive generations will pass this on to their offspring.  This is not Lamarckian evolution, but well within the purview of natural selection.  In the case of flightless birds, for instance, flight is not necessary if there are no predators and ample food can be found by foraging on the ground.  Thus, because flight requires lots of caloric intake to maintain, and flight is not necessary in environments with ample food and no predators, the disuse leads to flightless creatures.  This is not Lamarckianism, wherein a single bird breaks a wing and produces offspring with broken wings, but the product of a long succession of selection pressures against the caloric intake necessary to maintain flight.  But I will quote Darwin himself to show that he does not endorse Lamarckian evolution:  “There is not sufficient evidence to induce us to believe that mutilations are ever inherited; and I should prefer explaining the entire absence of the anterior tarsi in Ateuchus [...] by the long-continued effects of disuse in their progenitors.”[1, emphasis mine]  Darwin’s own example of natural selection favoring the disuse of certain characteristics was set out in his observations of beetles being favored by natural selection for vestigial, nonfunctional wings because those with functional wings were easily caught in the wind and blown out to sea to drown.  As can be seen, only a very careless reading of The Origin of Species could lead one to conclude that Darwin was endorsing the view that acquired characteristics can be inherited.

Dr. Harrub’s lecture was quite lengthy, so I shall stop here and continue my dissection of his claims in a later post.  Here I’ve tried to tackle the introduction and Dr. Harrub’s continual misunderstandings concerning The Origin of Species, a book that I’ve had the pleasure of reading and actually understanding.  I do not know if Dr. Harrub has read this book, but I will presume that he has not or that he has at least forgotten it or misinterpreted it, because the only other alternative is that he is being willfully deceptive when he argues that it makes racist claims and espouses Lamarckian evolution.

[1]. Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species.  New York: Bantam Books, 1999.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 12:48 AM and is filed under Science, Skepticism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.