As I detailed in Part 1 of “Was Darwin Wrong?”, I somehow found the fortitude to attend a lecture on evolution given by Young Earth Creationist Dr. Harrub last weekend.  The first post details his misunderstandings concerning cosmology and Darwin’s The Origin of Species.  The following synopsis of his introductory remarks, of course, reveals even more misunderstanding and ineptitude, although I suppose such a thing should be expected.

Now, perhaps the silliest aspect of the whole lecture was the fact that Dr. Harrub did not directly argue against evolution, but instead chose only a very few excerpts from a popular press article to rebut, as if an article printed in National Geographic constituted all of the evidence for evolution.  In the process, the speaker ignored countless other lines of evidence in favor of evolution and skillfully avoided discussing the countless articles presented in the peer-reviewed scientific literature on the subject.  This could be excusable on the grounds that his presentation was intended for an audience of laypeople, if not for the obvious fact that he deliberately chose to address only a popular-press article to try to cast doubt on the authority of those who defend evolution.  He chose, for instance, to call into doubt the credibility of the author of the article, David Quammen, by noting that his degree was in literature rather than science.  Of course, such an argument is laughably inane and thoroughly ironic given the fact that virtually all biologists and scientific organizations overwhelmingly accept evolution.  If Dr. Harrub wants to defend creationism solely on the basis of the education levels of its adherents, then he’s treading a dangerous path, as countless polls of scientists and laypeople overwhelmingly show a correlation between belief in evolution and levels of higher education, as evidenced by this particular graphic from a 2009 Gallup poll.  His argument here is also particularly hilarious in light of the fact that most of his scientific references were from sources that were nearly 30-40 years old.  However, I feel that I must disclose here that I, too, possess a degree with a focus in literature and grammar, which presumably disqualifies me from any comment on the subject in Dr. Harrub’s eyes, though I strangely seem to have a better grasp on the subject of evolution than he.

Dr. Harrub was full of an assortment of false analogies to make his point.  In one case, he compared the process of evolution to throwing dice and expecting the dice to somehow change as a result, exclaiming that chance does not change dice.  Perhaps the average church-going crowd may find this analogy compelling, but even the barest understanding of evolution demolishes the argument, as dice are clearly not analogous to evolution owing to the lack of mechanism for change (dice do not sexually reproduce or mutate) and the lacking selection pressure (Dr. Harrub expects the dice to change through chance alone).  I may as well refute God’s existence by claiming that rolling dice does not lead to the creation ex nihilo of the universe as documented in Genesis if Dr. Harrub finds these kinds of false analogies compelling.

He also argued at length that the provisional, evidence-based nature of the scientific method was somehow problematic.  For example, he remarked that many of the older folks in the audience were probably told that the Earth was 250 million years old, while the current accepted age of the Earth is 4.5 billion years, and he then implied that this extended age of the Earth is not based on any evidence but is merely an ad hoc attempt to give the Earth an age old enough to be compatible with extended periods of evolution, which is simply untrue.  The expanded age of the Earth resulted from more accurate dating techniques and geological theories that came to prominence before Darwin had even developed the theory of evolution.  Once the uniformitarian theory of geological change had been established and rough estimates of dating based on radioactivity had been established, the Earth was consistently dated as older and older.  These dates did not result from biologists trying to prove evolution, but from geologists in the case of the uniformitarian theory and physicists in the case of radiometric dating techniques.  Other than that, it was also untrue that the older folks in the audience were told that the Earth was merely a few hundred million years old, as radiometric dating had been developed in the early 1900s and soon after that the age of the Earth was routinely placed in the billion-year range by scientists.  So unless several 110-year-olds were present in the audience, it is unlikely anyone was told the Earth was only millions of years old in school.  But beyond that, to criticize science for modifying its theories on the basis of new evidence is simply silly.  People tend to naturally value consistency, but as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.  And to consistently believe something in the face of contrary evidence is indeed quite foolish.  It is unlikely that any creationist would prefer the care of a hospital that consistently believed that smacking someone with a trout would cure cancer over a more modern hospital that continually revised and changed its cancer treatment modalities on the basis of new studies and evidence and technology.  (Although my assumption could be quite wrong given the prominence of complementary and alternative medicine modalities, which is a digression I shall choose to ignore for now.)

Yet another misconception continually emphasized for the audience was the idea that science should be performed “in a laboratory” with “direct observation.”  Of course, this type of caricature of science widely prevails through our culture.  In reality, of course, science need not be performed in a lab and its theories need not be directly observable.  Science is a process of explanation through testing.  Theories are developed to explain certain occurrences or observations, and subsequent observations are accumulated to determine if the theory holds true.  If a forensic scientist is trying to determine whether a person was murdered or committed suicide, for instance, they gather evidence to determine which of the competing theories is best supported, and it does not matter that no one “directly observed” the event.  The evidence for large-scale evolution above the species level is similar in that it rests upon the evidence of homology, fossils, biogeography, and so on rather than direct observation of such events.  So long as a theory is supported by observable evidence and capable of refutation by contrary observations, it is scientific.  Labcoats and direct observation are not requirements.

As can be seen, many errors of fact were present in Dr. Harrub’s talk, and so far I have only covered the introduction.  In the following installments I will explore the meat of his argument (best described as rancid and decaying), which centered on criticism of various hominid fossils and a few arguments mirroring those presented by Jonathan Wells’ book Icons of Evolution.

And as always, be sure to check out Ziztur’s and Flimsy’s reviews of the talk at Atheism Is Freedom, although we tend to hammer on the same points owing to our sharing an omnibrain that we construced by uniting our three individual brains through lots of welding and a generous use of superglue.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 26th, 2009 at 9:05 PM and is filed under Science, Skepticism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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