Pry your stuffed shirt away from your body, examine the show, then give us your usual intelligent comments concerning it.

Where were those islands again?

In any event, I like this kind of stuff when I'm driving through Kansas at 3 a.m. listening to the Art Bell Show. (I guess Art doesn't do the show anymore, but that's beside the point.) I do, however, admit a preference for time travelers coming back to tell us about the benevolence of the grey aliens and the malevolence of the Reptilians (or vice versa).

Overall, one oddball showing up on channel 6 is no big deal, but it seems that there is something of a Counter Enlightenment afoot in the world -- to a greater extent with conservative Islamic fundamentalists using terror in an effort to bring back some never-existent religious Golden Age -- but also to a lesser extent with conservative Christian fundamentalists doing things like trying to jam their Bible stories into science classes.

From the RTV6 web page:

"RTV6 Chief Meteorologist Kevin Gregory will examine meteorological explanations for events that are described in the Bible"

That hardly sounds controversial. The History channel does Bible-related shows all the time. If anything, you might have fundamentalists objecting to natural explanations for Biblical accounts considered to be miracles.

It's possible the RTV6 segment will have a creationist slant, but we'll find that out tonight. (Those of you in the Indy viewing area, let me know.) In the meantime, I'm not really interested in putting DeYoung under a microscope.

conservative Christian fundamentalists doing things like trying to jam their Bible stories into science classes

I'll start getting worked up about that when the secular humanists, feminists, pro-homosexual activists, "Western culture is evil" believers, etc., stop jamming their beliefs into the rest of the curriculum. But give me a call when Adam and Eve get written into a public school science textbook.

give me a call when Adam and Eve get written into a public school science textbook.

Tsk, tsk. You can't please one group without offending the other, I know, but that's just ridiculous.

Without even touching on the generality of your comment - should they be mentioned in the Newtonian chapters of a Physics textbook? On the 8th day, did He say, "let acceleration due to gravity be 9.8m/s^2"? - the real point here is that not everyone agrees on Christianity while practically everyone but the most hardcore fundamentalists (of any religion) agree on the basic tenets of science.

And really, the same goes for even the less-basic stuff. For example, a significant portion of Christians (I don't have a percentage, but it must be high) actually believe evolution occurs/occured and is perfectly consistent with the Bible; as long as you don't interpret whichever shoddy translation of the Bible to use literally, then you shouldn't have a problem seeing this. We shouldn't be teaching the Bible as truth simply because an overwhelming plurality of US society quite reasonably doesn't think it is.

My pre-emptive responses: (1) If you think the Bible is so true that it should be taught as truth in school, well, you're free to send your child to one of the many private schools that do so, free to homeschool your child, or even free to leave this country for one that readily affirms your comprehensive doctrine, if the other options aren't good enough. (And heck, I even support school vouchers, meaning that I'd still be footing the bill for your kid to learn the way you want him to!) (2) There's no argument here about the truth of the Bible - although I'm sure you know what my opinion on that is - but there is an argument here about what public schools should properly teach, given a pluralistic society. (Which, of course, is why I think full privatization is a great idea in theory.) (3) Would you seriously want your kid learning that DeYoung's theories, that seem a stretch even for a creation scientist? Would you seriously want to hinder your child (not to mention the children of others!) in that way?

"a significant portion of Christians (I don't have a percentage, but it must be high) actually believe evolution occurs/occured and is perfectly consistent with the Bible"

Well, there's Catholics....

As for how goofy "science" has become you can't beat Crichton's speech circa 2002 to Cal Tech.

Nick, I think you missed my point. I was saying that I haven't actually seen any "Bible stories" in science textbooks as Doug claims that "conservative Christian fundamentalists" (as opposed to liberal Christian fundamentalists, I suppose) are trying to put there.

Oh come on Nick...you have to know as well as I do that God couldn't have said let g=9.8 m/s^2...He'd have to have said let G = 6.673 × 10^-11 m^3/kg s and then set the mass and density structure of the earth.

Balta, there you go with your Deist heresies again. Your science of "laws" and "equations" leaves no room for God to create Stone Mountain in Georgia.

I used to follow Christian apologetics for Intelligent Design pretty closely, and in fact was a defender of the notion.

However, ID folks keep letting me down by publishing bad science, suspicious statistics and "experiments", and sometimes outright misleading.

I have totally checked out of the creation/evolution debate. I think, scientifically speaking, abiogenesis is utter fantasy. Also, the evolutionary fossil record is non-existent. However, the ID movement looks like a bunch of buffoons most of the time, so I just stopped caring.

I'd rather defend Open Theism. Much more fun.

"the evolutionary fossil record is non-existent."

I can head downstairs in this building and pretty much prove you wrong. Although...given how many rocks are down there, it might take me some time.

Balta -

Well, it is my understanding that we have virtually no transitional forms which is why they had to concoct punctuated equilibrium.

However, I am so disillusioned with my team's science ability that I'm willing to entertain the idea that I've simply been lied to.

Phil Aldridge:

Well, it is my understanding that we have virtually no transitional forms which is why they had to concoct punctuated equilibrium.

However, I am so disillusioned with my team's science ability that I'm willing to entertain the idea that I've simply been lied to.

You have indeed been lied to. This is the standard creationist understanding of PE and it is completely offbase, and if any of them had actually bothered to read Gould, Eldredge, Stanley and the others who developed PE, they would know that. PE was not developed in order to explain the lack of transitional fossils (of which there are many examples throughout the fossil record, particularly between higher taxa), it was developed to apply what we knew from population genetics to make predictions about what we should find in the fossil record. They took the relative frequency of allopatric speciation and asked, if that is the case, what patterns would we expect to find in terms of the successional order of appearance of species in the fossil record? Well, we would expect stasis and punctuation because speciation will tend to take place in small, isolated subgroups of a larger population and most of our fossils, simply by virtue of probability, are going to come from the larger, more genetically stable and more spread out ancestral population. One side effect of this very reasonable theory is that it would predict that transitional forms would be found fairly rarely as a result of simple probability - since speciation will usually take place within a peripheral isolate that is A) only a small part of a much larger population and B) confined to a much smaller geographical area than the larger population, the odds are that we'll find many samples of the larger population rather than even a single sample of the sub-population that is undergoing the transition. All of this is very good science. The population genetics premise is based upon a solid foundation of observational data and experimental work, and the predictive inferences are entirely logical and confirmed by the fossil data over and over again. The fact that creationists must resort to a crude caricature of it in order to defeat it should really tell you all you need to know.

Ed,

The explanation of PE you describe is very reasonable, but I don't think there's any escaping the fact that the PE model was developed after the observations it attempts to provide a model for. The lack of transitional forms (Darwin would have expected the entire fossil record to be one continual transition, no?) had been noted well before PE was postulated.

So, while PE might not be a mere "concoction" to excuse the fossil record, I think it's equally insincere to claim that it wasn't at least a part of the motivation for developing that model.

Eric Seymour wrote:

The explanation of PE you describe is very reasonable, but I don't think there's any escaping the fact that the PE model was developed after the observations it attempts to provide a model for.

Well yes, as a general rule models and theories are developed to explain observations after the observations are made. This is by necessity, of course, because one could hardly attempt to explain patterns they had not yet observed. But in this case, PE was not developed to explain the observation of a lack of transitional forms at all. PE was developed to explain several pervasive trends in the fossil record and the relative rarity of transitional forms was not really one of them.

The lack of transitional forms (Darwin would have expected the entire fossil record to be one continual transition, no?) had been noted well before PE was postulated.

No, not the lack of transitional forms, but the relative rarity of transitional forms. There is an enormous difference between the two. Transitional forms between higher taxa are found quite frequently, it's the transitions between closely related species that are relatively rare. But again, PE was not developed to explain that fact, it was developed to explain several other trends in the fossil record. Among those patterns are the characteristic stability in the morphology of widespread species, the differences in morphology between ancestral and daughter species, and the patterns of succession found when ancestral species go extinct and are replaced by a closely related daughter species.

So, while PE might not be a mere "concoction" to excuse the fossil record, I think it's equally insincere to claim that it wasn't at least a part of the motivation for developing that model.

If it was a part of the motivation for developing it, then by all means someone needs to show some evidence for that assertion. There is none that I am aware of. The question they sought to answer by developing PE was whether the pervasive trends in the fossil record were an artifact of the imperfection of the fossil record, or whether those patterns of stasis and punctuation instead are predictable consequences of how speciation occurs in the wild. The relative rarity of transitional forms, if was any consideration at all, was well down on the list. Yet we hear constantly from creationists that PE was developed to cover up some embarrassing lack of transitional forms. Gould himself became quite furious at this distortion, writing at one point:

Faced with these facts of evolution and the philosophical bankruptcy of their own position, creationists rely upon distortion and innuendo to buttress their rhetorical claim. If I sound sharp or bitter, indeed I am—for I have become a major target of these practices.

I count myself among the evolutionists who argue for a jerky, or episodic, rather than a smoothly gradual, pace of change. In 1972 my colleague Niles Eldredge and I developed the theory of punctuated equilibrium. We argued that two outstanding facts of the fossil record—geologically "sudden" origin of new species and failure to change thereafter (stasis)—reflect the predictions of evolutionary theory, not the imperfections of the fossil record. In most theories, small isolated populations are the source of new species, and the process of speciation takes thousands or tens of thousands of years. This amount of time, so long when measured against our lives, is a geological microsecond. It represents much less than 1 per cent of the average life-span for a fossil invertebrate species—more than ten million years. Large, widespread, and well established species, on the other hand, are not expected to change very much. We believe that the inertia of large populations explains the stasis of most fossil species over millions of years.

We proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium largely to provide a different explanation for pervasive trends in the fossil record. Trends, we argued, cannot be attributed to gradual transformation within lineages, but must arise from the different success of certain kinds of species. A trend, we argued, is more like climbing a flight of stairs (punctuated and stasis) than rolling up an inclined plane.

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists—whether through design or stupidity, I do not know—as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups. Yet a pamphlet entitled "Harvard Scientists Agree Evolution Is a Hoax" states: "The facts of punctuated equilibrium which Gould and Eldredge…are forcing Darwinists to swallow fit the picture that Bryan insisted on, and which God has revealed to us in the Bible."

He also was quite angry by those same creationists who tried to equate PE with Goldschmidt's "hopeful monster" notion, and justifiably so. And it's frustrating to me that I still hear these arguments from people, decades after they've been debunked thoroughly (I've had them on my own blog arguing this nonsense). It is astonishing to me that people who know absolutely nothing about biology believe that they know enough to overthrow one of the most successful theories in all of science with such absurd arguments, without bothering to study it in even a cursory manner.

No, not the lack of transitional forms, but the relative rarity of transitional forms.

On a pedantic note, Dictonary.com defines lack as either the *deficiency* or absence of something. I assure you I was using the word in the former sense.

We proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium largely to provide a different explanation for pervasive trends in the fossil record.... Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level

I'm really not trying to misquote Gould here, but this does sound like he's saying PE was developed to explain the relative rarity of transitional forms, i.e. the stasis and punctuation in the fossil record. Some creationists may deliberately distort the facts here (claiming "no transitional forms" rather than "relative rarity," or portraying PE as a fig leaf for an "embarrassing" aspect of the fossil record), but there does seem to be an issue here that needed explaining.

This is one of the problems I have with people claiming (macro)evolution is a fact in the same way that we know facts in the fields of physics, chemistry, etc. The only experiments done are "thought experiments." When observations come along that are problematic for the prevailing view, evolutionists come up with a new hypothesis to explain it and as long as everyone agrees that it's logical--voila!--evolution marches on.

Eric Seymour wrote:

I'm really not trying to misquote Gould here, but this does sound like he's saying PE was developed to explain the relative rarity of transitional forms, i.e. the stasis and punctuation in the fossil record. Some creationists may deliberately distort the facts here (claiming "no transitional forms" rather than "relative rarity," or portraying PE as a fig leaf for an "embarrassing" aspect of the fossil record), but there does seem to be an issue here that needed explaining.

But Eric, you did misquote Gould here, whether you meant to or not. Look at what you left out between those elipses. Your quote of him:

We proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium largely to provide a different explanation for pervasive trends in the fossil record....Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level

And here is what was left out:

We proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium largely to provide a different explanation for pervasive trends in the fossil record. Trends, we argued, cannot be attributed to gradual transformation within lineages, but must arise from the different success of certain kinds of species. A trend, we argued, is more like climbing a flight of stairs (punctuated and stasis) than rolling up an inclined plane.

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists - whether through design or stupidity, I do not know - as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.

And this is in an article where he is explaining why it is false to say that they created PE to explain the rarity of transitional forms. It's false for several reasons. First, because they detailed the specific patterns in the fossil record that they were attempting to explain and the lack or rarity of transitional forms was not among those patterns. And it wasn't among those patterns because in fact transitional forms are rife between higher level taxa and only relatively rare at the species level. Perhaps you think that the rarity of transitional forms at the species level is a fact that requires some explanation, but that still doesn't mean that PE was created in order to explain that, and it certainly wasn't created in order to explain it away.

I would also note that PE is not necessary to explain why we have so many examples of transitional forms above the species level and so few at the species level. Higher level transitions generally involve much more obvious transitions in traits that we use to distinguish between major groups. The traits that we use to distinguish, say, mammals and birds (higher level taxa), are much easier to find and document than the difference between closely related species within the same genus.

This is one of the problems I have with people claiming (macro)evolution is a fact in the same way that we know facts in the fields of physics, chemistry, etc. The only experiments done are "thought experiments." When observations come along that are problematic for the prevailing view, evolutionists come up with a new hypothesis to explain it and as long as everyone agrees that it's logical--voila!--evolution marches on.

This is a very crude caricature of how evolutionary theory works. In reality, the transitions that we're talking about are often found in the real world, not in "thought experiments", based upon predictions made in advance. The evolution of whales is a great example of this. Creationists used to mock the notion that whales evolved from land mammals, using cartoons of cows drowning in the ocean and having a good laugh at how silly the whole idea was. But given the nature of the anatomical and fossil evidence at the time, Phil Gingerich was able to predict what a transitional form must have looked like, what age and type of strata it would be found in, and then went looking in strata of the correct age and deposition. And he hit pay dirt, finding Pakicetus in 1979, followed by the discovery of several other primitive whales showing an incredible anatomical and temporal sequence of adaptations not only of legs in the early marine mammals but also in the breathing apparatus, the ears, the dentition, the tail fluke, the spine and many other features.

What on earth is the alternative to an evolutionary explanation for such evidence? Did God tinker with the design over the course of 15 million years, each new species looking less like a tetropod and more like a whale to mimic this transition? For what purpose, to fool us? And why is this same pattern there in every other lineage as well? Did he create the first birds to look just like feathered theropods and then gradually create new species that looked successively less theropod-like and more like modern birds over the course of some 100 million years just to throw us off the track?

But given the nature of the anatomical and fossil evidence at the time, Phil Gingerich was able to predict what a transitional form must have looked like, what age and type of strata it would be found in, and then went looking in strata of the correct age and deposition.

This is exactly the right sort of stuff to point out, to refute the charges of ad-hoccery that I think are behind Eric's last few comments. Namely, you don't just confirm your proposals with thought-experiments, but by making real predictions, and then going out and testing them. If you either fail to make predictions at all -- or make the predictions, and they all flop -- but you still hold to the proposal, then you could be accused of ad-hoccery. But that's just not the case with the science in question.

Ed,

Please keep in mind that I'm not a young-earth creationist. (You're relatively new to this blog, so I'll excuse the fact that you seem to assume this.) I find evolution to be a very compelling theory of the history of life on earth--if one starts from the premises that A) there is a huge diversity of life on Earth and B) we must have an explanation for it that does not involve a transcendent actor. For various reasons, however, I find it highly implausible that the whole process could actually have succeeded without the involvement of such a transcendent force.

The fact that evolution is not as rigorously experimental as physics or chemistry is not the fault of the evolutionists. You can't conduct experiments on processes that are considered to take millions of years as readily as on processes that take days, hours, or microseconds to complete. I'm just saying there should be a recognition of this--a humility, if you will, by people on all sides of "origins" debates.

Now, to get back to Gould and PE, I honestly don't see where I left out anything in my quote that contradicted what I quoted. Maybe you can help me out, though... What are these "patterns" that Gould is talking about, if they are not some sort of discontinuity in the fossil record? And isn't it true that any sort of discontinuity presents a problem to classic Darwinism, which held that all life everywhere is in a continual process of evolution?

As I said before, PE seems to "solve" this "problem" reasonably enough. What I find a tad suspect is your assertion that Gould, in trying to solve some rather more obscure problem, just happened to stumble across a solution that explained a much more prominent puzzle that had dogged evolutionists for decades.

Eric wrote:

Now, to get back to Gould and PE, I honestly don't see where I left out anything in my quote that contradicted what I quoted. Maybe you can help me out, though... What are these "patterns" that Gould is talking about, if they are not some sort of discontinuity in the fossil record? And isn't it true that any sort of discontinuity presents a problem to classic Darwinism, which held that all life everywhere is in a continual process of evolution?

I listed several of the patterns that PE was intended to explain in my previous response:

But again, PE was not developed to explain that fact, it was developed to explain several other trends in the fossil record. Among those patterns are the characteristic stability in the morphology of widespread species, the differences in morphology between ancestral and daughter species, and the patterns of succession found when ancestral species go extinct and are replaced by a closely related daughter species.

There are other patterns as well. And the whole point of PE was that those patterns are in fact not "discontinuities" (such as gaps in the fossil record caused by uneven preservation or radical changes brought about by saltation), but are what would be predicted if we apply what we know of population genetics (especially Mayr's groundbreaking work on allopatric speciation) to what we would expect to see in the fossil record. All of this can be found simply by reading the 1972 Gould and Eldredge paper that first announced this model, or the 1977 article that expanded on it, or even any number of popular treatments of the subject, rather than by reading the distortions of it that are found in so many creationist writings.

I know you're not a young earth creationist, but the argument you're making here is based upon, or at least consonant with, the misrepresentations that so many creationists have made for the last 30 years. If you haven't read any of the relevant papers, you should. It's always better to judge an idea by going to the original source rather than to someone else's interpretation.

Ed's comment should be the last word in this thread on the science, and I have attempted several times in comments on these pages to defend not only the evolutionary synthesis built up since Darwin but the very idea of biological evolution itself. One might assume in today's world that this should no longer be necessary in the country that has given birth or asylum to the majority of researchers in this field, but, alas, it is. All I will add is that it is a strange spectacle to see religious people clawing at the structure of evolutionary theory in a sorry attempt to bolster their faith. To any scientist with deistic or theological sympathies, God is revealed in or even synonymous with the lawfulness of nature, and the creationist's resort to explaining complex natural phenomena by saying "God did it" undermines the whole concept of a majestically ordered and perfect cosmos. Would a perfect being need to intervene periodically in his creation? The "theory" of intelligent design says more about the poverty of the human mind than nature or God. It assumes that God violates his own laws. Such thinking is lazy or even sacrilegious.

Chuck-

You make several excellent points and they are echoed by many of my friends. I think the main reason why so many people reject evolution is not because they understand the science, as they clearly do not, but because they believe that evolution is synonymous with atheism. It is atheism that they object to, and they see bringing down evolution as a means of defending theism itself. Groups like the Discovery Institute admit as much when they lump biological evolution in with cosmological evolution. But evolution is not atheism. Unlike ID and creationism, evolution can accomodate a wide range of views on the question of God and it does so. Evolution is simply the theory that all modern life forms are derived from a common ancestor through descent with modification. It says nothing about the big bang, the creation of the planet or the universe, or the cause of existence itself. Yet it is routinely lumped in with those other things because the real enemy is atheism, not evolution. The focus is on evolution because, like any complex set of theories, there are areas we do not understand well yet and many questions yet to be answered, despite the incredible success it has in explaining and predicting the data in a dozen fields of inquiry. So it affords a perfect opportunity to play the god of the gaps game - hey, here's something evolution hasn't explained yet, that must be where God jumped in. But your argument sums up perfectly the theistic answer to that, which is shared by many pro-evolution scientists. My colleague Howard Van Till, for instance, argues that God made a "fully gifted creation" - a world capable of bringing forth biological diversity and eventually humans capable of recognizing him and worshipping him - and he did such a good job that he didn't have to keep tinkering with it in the process. Ken Miller argues much the same thing, as does Keith Miller, and as do many others.