Jeffrey K. McKee & Duane T. Gish
WOSU Open Line 2/13/01
Bob Singleton: Welcome back to Open Line, 820 WOSU am. I’m Bob
Singleton, in for Fred Andrle. Let me give you the rundown on today’s
shows. One o’clock, author Maggie Phillips, Looking Within the Body to
Find the Energy to Heal. This hour, a dialogue on Charles Darwin’s theory
of evolution. We’re discussing Darwin because yesterday was his birthday.
He was born February 12th, 1809, 192 years ago. Happy birthday, Charles
Darwin. Our guests, Dr. Duane Gish. Dr. Gish has a Ph.D. in
biochemistry from the University of California at Berkley. He joins us by
telephone from the California-based Center for Creation Research, where he is
senior vice president. Welcome to Open Line, Dr. Gish.
Duane Gish: Well thank you very much, Bob. My pleasure.
BS: With me in the studio from the Ohio State University Dr. Jeffrey
McKee, associate professor of anthropology and author of a new book, The
Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence and Chaos in Human Evolution.
Welcome guests.
Jeffrey McKee: Thanks. Good to be here again.
BS: And welcome callers. We’re taking your calls, 292-8513.
Dr. McKee, you’ve got the home court advantage. You call Darwin’s theory
the “cornerstone of modern biological science, comprising principles no less
verifiable than those of physics.” What’s your best argument to support
this position, and I’ll give you three minutes.
JM: Okay. Well, evolution is a theory that has been tested and
tested again. Now, so far, we have lots of lines of evidence to support
the theory. We have data from the fossil record, from genetics, from
comparative anatomy, comparative physiology, biochemistry, and so on. And
my line of research deals with fossils. We have 3 ½ billions years worth
of fossils, showing a clear evolutionary sequence, and evolutionary theory
explains that sequence better than any other system of believe, or system of
description of the natural world. So we have these tests of the theory
and, so far, the theory has held up. But like any theory, it could be
proven incorrect. So far there is no disproof of evolution that we have
found. But like any theory in physics, or a theory of gravity, it’s
always testable and always open for debate. But what evolution(ary) has
beyond that it that it has explanatory value for the world we live in
today. Now, each week, if you open up the pages of Science, the premier
scientific journal of the United States, or Nature, it’s equivalent in the UK,
you’ll find not only new fossils and new evidence for evolution, but you’ll
also find many research papers which use evolutionary theory toward
advancements in our study of genetics, or medicine, ecology, and so on.
Now one of my particular interests is in ecology, and there’s no way we can
understand complex ecological systems without a firm grounding in evolutionary
theory. If we can’t understand how ecosystems evolved, then we stand
little chance of figuring out how best to conserve our ecological
systems. So evolutionary theory has the explanatory value for a
biological world, and that’s what makes it the cornerstone of biology.
Now, before I go on, I’d like to thank Duane Gish for agreeing to participate
in the program today. Now whereas Dr. Gish and I clearly disagree on many
issues, I have enjoyed reading his entertaining books over the years and I
admire his tenacity in debating scientists over the past few decades. Dr.
Gish has been a strong voice for those who believe in a special creation and a
young age for the earth. Now, I choose the world ‘believe’ carefully,
because what I want to get across today is that creationism is much more of a
belief system than it is a scientific alternative to evolutionary theory.
That belief is based largely on particular interpretations of Holy Texts, and I
respect those beliefs from a variety of religions. That is not an issue,
at least not with me. What I do object to….
BS: Got about 15 seconds…
JM: Okay. What I do object to is the way such creationists use the
pretense of science to promulgate their belief system. And therein lies
the debate, if you want to call it the debate, is what is a belief system and
what is science, and, like I’ve said, I hold that evolutionary theory is very
good science.
BS: Thank you Dr. McKee. Dr. Gish, I was on the internet and looked
up your organization. I was looking through the tenants of scientific
creationism. One of the tenants states in part that biological life did
not develop by natural processes but was specially and supernaturally created
by the Creator. What’s your best argument to support this position, and I
will give you three minutes as well.
DG: Well, Dr. McKee has said that the fossil record supports
evolution. Actually, the fossil record is the deathnell of evolution, and
I’ll give two examples. There’s a vast array of very complex
invertebrates – clams, snails, trilobites – a great variety of very complex
invertebrates that abruptly appear in the fossil record without a trace of an
ancestor, and no intermediates connecting one kind to another. That is
well known, evolutionists have said it is true, they call it the Cambrian
Explosion, this vast array of complex invertebrates. They’ve never found
a single ancestor for a single one of these things: none for the trilobites,
none for the clams, none for the snails, none for brachiopods. That is
not only contradictory to evolutionary theory, that is incompatible. Now
furthermore, evolution would require that one of these invertebrates evolved
into the fishes, the vertebrates, and it would take tens of millions of
years. We have billions times billions of fossils of those complex
invertebrates, we have billions and billions and billions of fossil fishes, but
one thing we do not have is a single transitional form between an invertebrate
and the fish. Every major kind of fish that we know anything about
appears fully formed, with no trace of ancestors and certainly no connecting
forms, no transitional forms, linking them to a common ancestor. Now,
again, that is known by evolutionists, and that is not only contradictory to
evolutionary theory, that is incompatible. You cannot have tens of
millions of years of evolution converting an invertebrate, and worm or a clam
or a snail, into a fish and not leave a trace. On the other hand, this is
precisely what the creationists would expect. We would predict that these
basic kinds of creatures would appear fully formed with no trace of ancestors.
That’s true of the flying reptiles, it’s true of the marine reptiles, it’s true
of every major kind of creature. Now, Dr. McKee has said that evolution
explains so much. One problem is – it explains everything. No
matter what the data are, you can use evolutionary theory to explain it.
It’s simply a non-falsifiable theory. Dr. Sean Lovetrup is a famous
Swedish scientist, he is definitely is an evolutionists, and the neo-Darwinian
theory, the modern theory of evolution – this is what I’m sure Dr. McKee holds
to, and the vast majority of evolutionists hold to this – this evolutionist,
this well-known biologist has said this is the greatest deceit in the history
of science. He calls this the Darwinian myth, he says it’s the greatest
deceit in the history of science.
BS: Ten seconds.
DG: He did not accept it. And there’s so much else, from the laws
of thermodynamics that demonstrates beyond doubt the universe could not have
created itself, life could never have arisen from non-life. That is a myth,
it’s nothing but a myth, and has no scientific support whatsoever. And
there’s so much else….
BS: You’ve run out of your three minutes Dr. Gish. And I have to
tell you, when you start talking about trilobites, you’re getting serious,
because it turns out, I believe, the trilobite, in the state of Ohio, is our
official state fossil. So, trilobites are a big deal in the Buckeye
State. Well, what do you think, Dr. McKee? Gentlemen, you’ve just
heard each other. Where do we go from here?
JM: Okay. Well, one thing that Dr. Gish always harps on is that
fossils appear fully formed, and that’s one of the main tenants of
creationism. Well, yes, fossils do appear fully formed, but I know of no
living organism that is not fully formed. Bacterium is fully formed, but
it is not a multicellular creature. A sponge is fully formed, but it is
not a worm. A worm is fully formed, but is not a fish or an insect.
A fish is fully formed, but it is not an amphibian. Will we ever find an
organism that is not fully formed? No, and we should not. The
question is, are there transitional forms, and you betcha there are. Dr.
Gish has just stated that fish appear fully formed. Well, yes, they’re
fully formed, but the first fish we see are not the fish of today. The
earliest fish in the fossil record still have an armor-like coating, they still
have no jaws – that is something that evolves later in the evolutionary
redeployment of a gill slit into a jaw – something which we carry in our own
development today. The earliest fish still have a notochord, rather than
a segmented vertebral column like modern fishes. So yes, we do see
transitional forms. The jawed fish come later, the first segmented
vertebral columns come later. We don’t see all of the transitions, that
is true; the fossil record is incomplete. But we do have a clear sequence
starting 3 ½ billion years ago, with the single cells being around for the
first 2 billion years, then more complex cells for the next billion
years. Only in the last 560 million years or so do we have these more
complex life forms that appear. But they don’t appear suddenly; they
appeared after 3 billion years of evolution to get to that stage.
Moreover…
BS: Dr. Gish, I think it’s Dr. Gish’s turn. I want to remind our
viewers we’re taking calls.
DG: What I would like to ask Dr. McKee, if that’s true, why don’t we have
some transitional forms between the microscopic single-cell organisms and these
very complex invertebrates? You have never found a single ancestor or
transitional form for a trilobite or clam or a snail or a brachiopod or a
sponge, and when I say they appear fully formed, of course they should not,
there should be transitional forms. There should be intermediates,
showing a gradual transition of one into the other. There should be a
vast number, billions time billions of fossils of these intermediates between
an invertebrate and a fish. And there are none. Now, you see, you
can start talking about fishes, but you’re talking about fishes. You’re
not talking about a transitional form between an invertebrate and a fish.
There simply are none, and there must be if evolution is true. There’s
got to be, and they simply do not exist.
BS: We have a caller. I’m going to take a call from the
audience. You’re on the air.
Caller: Hi there. I guess one of the things that always concerns me
about the conclusions that both evolution and creationism make, scientifically,
is that it seems to me that an awful lot of what we would need to know is lost
to the fossil record. That is, we don’t know anything about the soft
tissue, transitions that might be made, and of course we can’t know anything
about how prehistoric animals, animals that we’ve never met, behave, how their
brains work or anything like that. And I’d like to hear how each of the
guests see that in their line of research. Thanks.
BS: Thank you Beth. You mean soft tissue evidence….well, she’s
gone. Soft tissue – a clam, I suppose would disappear. You wouldn’t
have much evidence of an invertebrate, would you. What about that,
gentlemen? Dr. Gish?
DG: Well, we do find fossils of worms and jellyfish and many other
soft-bodied creatures. They’re not real common, of course, but they
certainly had to be buried abruptly, catastrophically, to leave any sort of a
fossil record at all. It’s true that most of the soft tissues are not
preserved, of course, in the fossil record. Only the bones and other
tissues of that kind are preserved. But there are, actually, fossils of
jellyfish and worms and, actually, the paleontologists claim that they have
found fossils of microscopic, single-celled, soft-bodied bacteria and
algae. I certainly believe that if we can find fossils of creatures like
that we can find the ancestors, the transitional forms, leading up to the
complex invertebrates, and also between the invertebrates and the fishes.
BS: Dr. McKee?
JM: Well, the evolutionists have a number of ways to research evolution;
it’s not just the fossil record. I’m going to stick with your question,
Beth, before I get back to Dr. Gish. One of the ways we study evolution
is by doing comparative studies of, say, mammals, for example, and compare
morphology and genetics, biochemistry, physiology, all these things, and see
how similar various animals are. This gives us some indication as to how
these soft tissues arose, how the genetics arose. Now, we’re at a very
exciting time in evolutionary studies with the human genome being published
this week. That is one step toward getting closer to understanding how
the genetics work behind not only the bones that we dig up in the fossil record
but behind the soft tissues as well. What we found so far is that, much
to our surprise, there’s only about 30 thousand human genes, and if that figure
is correct that really shows how much closer we are to the rest of life; we
don’t have that many more genes, it’s more in the way these genes
interact. So, by looking at modern living organisms and comparing them,
we can start to deduce more about the process of evolution, and find the unity
of life.
DG: Well, you know, what the human genome is going to reveal, right now
we only know say 5% of the genes that are there, the other 95% has yet to be
discovered, and we’ve got to find out what these genes are, what they’re doing,
why they’re doing what they’re doing. And what that’s going to show, I
would predict right now, the incredible complexity, the interactions, the
dependence of one gene upon many other genes, the system’s going to be so
incredibly complex that to just, to imagine that that evolved by some random
chance mechanism, I think is going to appear ridiculous on the face of
it. We’re going to show that this complexity and the way it’s
interrelated, one part depends upon another part - we know some of this already
– to imagine that that evolved, I think is going to seem ridiculous. Like
the flagella of a bacterium, the flagella of the e-coli bacterium, which has
rotors, stators, and roto-robarians [?], that has an electric motor that turns
those flagella and makes that little bacterium move, to imagine that this
incredibly complex system, somehow, through a series of random genetic errors
over time, could gradually accumulate, I think is ridiculous on the face of
it. You’ve got to have the thing, you’ve got to be complete, all the
parts must be there and functioning before it works at all.
BS: We have a caller, Walter, who has a comment on DNA.
Walter: Yeah, I’m sure that both of your guests are aware that in the
past few years that DNA has been traced backwards by a group of scientists
showing that we descended from one Mediteranean female, and, apparantly, one
Mediterranean male, which is of course in compliance with what we’re taught
from the Bible, which is of course what most people base creation on. And
I also had a question about… since the majority of things – or a great many of
things, perhaps not a majority – but a great many things are based on a measure
of radiation and what is contained in an existing fossil, what would have
happened if at one time there had been a canopy around the earth to keep
certain radiation out and other radiations in, when that canopy disappeared,
would that cause the radiation measures to change and would that throw the
measures that are up off? And one final thing and then I’ll listen off
the phone….
BS: Wait, what kind of canopy around the earth?
W: Well, the Bible describes a canopy around the earth, they call it the
firmament, which disappeared at the time of the flood, the deluge. And
so, in my mind, there would have been certain radiations that escape from the
earth now that would have been kept in by this canopy. And there would
have been certain radiations coming from space that would have been kept out by
this canopy. Now when the canopy disappeared, that should have created a
difference in radiation which would give a different reading from that point in
time backwards that we get from the point in time forwards.
BS: So this would be a way of explaining why the process of, what is it,
carbon dating, might suggest that the earth is older than the creationists
would say it is?
DG: Well, one thing….
W: And I’d like to say one thing, and then I’ll listen off the
phone. Darwin himself stated at one time that if there was not enough
evidence collected within a hundred years then the theory should be
abandoned. And, we have to take a real good look at what is actual
evidence, and what is theory, and what is falsified evidence of which we know
there has been some of that over time too. And these are things that
everyone must consider when considering the accuracy of it. It’s an
important issue, especially if you have faith, because our eternal life is
based on this. Thank you.
BS: Thank you Walter. We’re going to break for some news.
We’ve got about 30 seconds, Dr. Gish. Did you have something?
DG: Well, I was just going to say that we find fossils of dinosaurs above
the arctic circle near the north pole, we find fossils of dinosaurs in
Antarctica, and fossils at every latitude, some of which now live only in the
tropics, which indicates that the climate on this earth was drastically
different in the past. The evolutionary geologists do not know how to
explain that fact.
BS: Well, we’ll find out more about that when we come back. We’re
going to pause for 2 minutes of news on 820, WOSU am, Columbus, your source for
NPR news, intelligent talk.
BS: Welcome back to Open Line. I’m Bob Singleton in for Fred
Andrle. Taking your calls this hour on the Charles Darwin theory of
evolution. We’re speaking with Dr. Duane Gish in California, senior vice
president of the California-based Center for Creation Research. Here in
the studio, Dr. Jeffrey McKee, associate professor of anthropology at the Ohio
State University, author of the new book, The Riddled Chain: Chance,
Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution. And we were speaking before
the break about, I guess, ways that might explain the difference. We were
talking about a canopy around the earth that might explain the difference in
carbon dating, which would suggest that the earth is billions of years old, and
creation theory, which suggests that it’s a lot younger, maybe ten thousand
years I think. What would you have to say about that, Dr. McKee?
JM: I really don’t know much about the canopy hypothesis that Walter has
put forth. I’m not a physicists, so I really can’t comment on that.
But I would like to address Walter’s other questions, about the genetics
tracing us back to a Mediterranean female. Now, that analysis was done
using a part of our genetic code known as mitochondrial DNA, and it looks at
differences among human populations. And one interpretation of
variability in modern human mitochondrial DNA is that that variability can be
traced back to someone who would’ve lived in Africa about 100,000 years
ago. Now, 100,000 years ago is ten times as old as what Dr. Gish and
creationists would allow for the age of the earth, and we’re just looking at
the origin of modern humans in that respect. Now, Dr. Gish has stated
that it’s ridiculous to assume that anything comes from mutations and on; it’s
actually mutations we’re measuring in the mitochondrial DNA to look at these
differences. Both Walter, you and Duane Gish seem to claim that we come
from a single pair of humans, Adam and Eve. One cannot possibly account
for all of human variation on the basis of those two individuals. Now, in
Dr. Gish’s book, he states on page 43, and I quote, “as far as I have been able
to determine from my studies, all mutations, without exception, are bad.”
But we have a lot of variability on the earth today, among humans, and some of
that variability must have come from mutations from the original Adam and
Eve. So, if we put this in scientific terms, your hypothesis is that all
mutations are bad. Are you then able to hypothesize why some groups of
humans are so well biologically adapted to their environment, be it by skin
color in high solar, ultra-violet radiation zones, or say respiratory functions
of those who live in high altitudes. A lot of humans which have varied
from the original Adam and Eve are very well adapted. That must have come
from mutations. So, can you tell us which human variants are bad, under
your rule that ‘all mutations are bad,’ or can you account for the adaptations
that modern humans have?
DG: Well, of course, Lord Zuckerman, in his research, as he reported in
one of his books, he reported the fact that when a woman is born she has 2
million eggs in her ovaries. And her husband would have equal genetic
variability. Two people, genetic mix, could potentially – and others have
said the same thing, Ernst Mayr, a famous evolutionist, said the same thing –
two people with a genetic mix could have trillions of children, none of whom
would be genetically the same. You start with a genetic mix, you can have
a tremendous variety of people with different genetic traits, just as we have
started with a wild dog, a mongrel dog, and we have derived over two hundred
varieties, from the 4 pound Chihuahua to the 180 pound great Dane. Now no
mutations were necessary, all those genes were there, present in the wild
population. They had been sorted out and isolated, and kept isolated, and
they produced these many varieties of dog. Now the same could be from,
even from two people, you could do that very easily. And, as a matter of
fact, I know that Theodosius Dobzhansky some years ago, he said this astounding
thing, now as an evolutionist, he said this, this astounding thing, that here
we are, 100 years after Darwin and we still cannot explain the origin of
races. I think that’s an astounding thing that the evolutionists can’t
even explain that, which is very elemental and we have all that genetic
material to study, and they cannot explain it. The problem is, that this
doesn’t fit their theory of evolution. Yes, you could explain these
varieties very easily with the genetic mix to begin with. Now, of course,
the human population would have to be split up into small groups, it would have
to be kept isolated from each other by language, by migration, and so forth and
so on, and you could derive these races that we have today, beginning with,
even just two people.
BS: All right. Our phones are full, but I wanted to take some calls
while we pause here for just a second. Well, we’ve got Milton, a
physicist with an evolution question. Milton?
M: Yes. I’m a physicist that has looked at the radioactive dating
methods that geologists use, and it’s my understanding that the fossils are
never dated directly, they’re dated by the rock in which they are found.
So, when the evolutionist quotes these ages of billions of years, it goes back
to the credibility of these dating methods. And I am dismayed when I look
at all of the assumptions that are made in this dating process. It
appears to me that all the assumptions are designed to lead to these very old
ages. I wondered if either of you could please comment on this.
Thank you.
BS: Dr. McKee.
JM: Yes. It’s not altogether true that not all fossils are dated
directly; there are a couple of techniques which can date fossils, such as
electron spin resonance or something, and other techniques, which we have used
on our fossils in South Africa, to take us back, to verify fossils that, at one
of the sites I work at, are about 2 million years old. Now, the radiometric
techniques that physicists use to date the sediments and rocks that we find
fossils in are not infallible, but they have been tested and cross-tested by
each other using sound principles of physics in order to come up with these
dates. Now, when errors are made, and the creationists love to point out
when an error is made in one of these radiometric techniques, the errors never
come out on the scale of 10,000 years. Now, for example, in East Africa
we have some fossils which were originally dated to 2 million years and then
got redated to 1.75 million years. That shows that these techniques are
not infallible, but, once again, that’s a far cry from the 10,000 years needed
for a young-earth creationist to explain the geological record.
BS: Dr. Gish?
DG: Yes. The radiometric dating systems have a number of
assumptions. First of all, you have to assume the decay rates have always
been constant. That might be true, but we don’t know that; nobody was
back there millions of years ago to measure those decay rates, we just have to
assume they’ve always been the same. That’s the first assumption.
The second assumption is: if you date a rock and it turns out to 750 million
years old, say by uranium-lead method, you must assume, if that date is correct,
that that rock sat in the ground for 750 million years with nothing entering
the rock and nothing leaving the rock. That’s highly improbable, because
uranium salts, potassium salts, rubidium salts, or solvent water could be
leached out which would increase the apparent age. Lead and other things
can migrate in and out, and if it migrates in that increases the apparent age,
but they must assume either that it was a closed system, that nothing happened
in those millions of years. And thirdly, when molten material comes up
through the mantle of the earth it brings these lead isotopes, Lead 206, 207,
and 208, which are decay products, they bring that right up with that molten
material, and when it crystallizes, when it solidifies and forms a rock, it could
have an apparent age of millions and even billions of years to begin
with. And finally, what these radiochronologists do, any date that
doesn’t agree with what they assume to be correct they simply discard it, they
simply throw it away. Now, we just don’t do that in science otherwise; we
have to accept all the data. And, let me say this, our scientists are
working on this problem. They’ve taken rock from the Grand Canyon, lava
extruded over the top of the canyon, obviously younger than the canyon, and no
evolutionary geologist would believe that the canyon is more than a few million
years old, and these rocks sent to two radiometric dating labs. One got
an age to between 2 and 3 billion years, the other lab got a date of 1.3
billion years. Obviously, enormously incorrect. Our scientists took
rock from Mt. St. Helen’s, which formed in 1980, sent them to a radiometric
dating lab and, using potassium argon they got an age of 300,000 years.
BS: Dr. McKee, what about that suggestion, that the mere process of
moving through the earth’s surface, through the magma, the crystallization, the
great heat and the cooling, could somehow have an affect on how carbon dating
might read the age of a rock?
JM: Well, radiometric dating in general is subject to those sorts of
things. And, I have an example from the fossil site where I worked.
Now, most of the fossil fauna, the extinct species that come from the site of
Taung, where I work, indicate that the site is probably on the order of 2 ½
million years old. But we dated the rock that formed the caves in which
these fossils were found and came up with a date of only 1 million years
old. Well, what happened was, they dated the limestone and, as Dr. Gish
noted, things come into systems, limestone’s porous, there’s more water that
could come in, and as the water filtered in it brought in sediments which were
more recent, and that’s what gave us the million year mark. If you take
into account that limestone is porous and is still forming long after the cave
has closed up, then you can pretty much toss out that 1 million year
date. What that 1 million year date tells us is that the water and
whatnot stopped filtering in a million years ago. So we have a minimum
date of a million years for that site, where we have some of these transitional
forms that Dr. Gish says don’t exist, but a minimum of a million years.
Now, even if you take that minimum date, it’s still far beyond the 10,000 years
that Dr. Gish allows for creation.
BS: I want to take a caller. Rick, you had some questions for Dr.
Gish?
R: Yeah, and a comment about a previous creationist proponent that had
been on the show. They often… the last guy that was on the show, which
was a couple months ago, they seem to tend to slip into just being critical of evolutionary
theorists, and then they start to get insulting. The last guy had ….
BS: Let’s talk about this time.
R: Well, okay, then I’ll get to this guy. He started out talking
about how evolutionary theory is ridiculous and we had to listen to that a half
dozen times, and then he wanted to accuse it of being a myth.
Creationists seem to want a package that explains everything immediately, and
science doesn’t present those kind of packages. Science presents
theories, and they have weaknesses and strengths. Creationists are
starting with an assumption that there is a God. I’d like to hear what
evidence he has to present that there is a God, and then let him go and defend
creationist theory. Thank you.
BS: Okay, thank you, Rick. Dr. Gish?
DG: Well, he said we start with the assumption of creation; evolutionists
start with the assumption of evolution. Evolution is their basic dogma,
they assume that that is true, and all the data is interpreted within this
concept. That’s their paradigm, that’s their method of looking at things.
R: Doctor, I’d like to hear you defend creationism and not attack
evolution…. You’re putting an attack on evolution and not a defense of
creationism.
BS: Rick, we’re letting Dr. Gish respond.
DG: Douglas Futuyma is a well-know evolutionary biologist. He made
the point that there’s only two possibilities, creation and evolution.
And he said this: evidence against one is evidence for the other, and vice
versa. Not only am I attacking evolution, but when I point out the fact
that these fossils, the Cambrian animals and fishes all appear fully formed
with no intermediates, no transitional forms, no ancestors, that’s positive
evidence for creation. …… positive evidence for creations.
R: I would suggest that science does not present either/or alternatives,
that there will be many theories. Disproving one does not prove the
other.
DG: Oh, listen .. In this case, where there’s only two
possibilities. As Futuyma pointed out, he said, either organisms arose
from some preceding organism, in which case evolution is true, or they appeared
fully formed, in that case he said they must have been created by some prior
intelligent agent. Now that’s the possibility. Now, we have
enormous positive evidence for creation. The evidence for design and
purpose, and I described the flagellum of a little bacterium, as you described
the metamorphosis of a butterfly, going from a caterpillar to a chrysalis, and
a mass of green jelly-like material changing into a butterfly. There’s absolutely
no way that any evolutionary process can explain converting a caterpillar into
this incredible instrument we call a chrysalis, and then change that jelly-like
material into a butterfly.
R: Doctor, you’re asserting that there is no way…..
DG: There’s no way that evolution could do that, and that’s positive
evidence for creation, the evidence for design, the evidence for purpose.
The chrysalis has a purpose, and a design for a purpose.
BS: Doctor, I want to get…
DG: You see incredible evidence for an intelligent agent.
BS: Doctor, I wanted… Dr. Gish, I want to get Dr. McKee into this.
JM: Yes. Dr. Gish has stated that evolution is an assumption that
is not testable. No, evolution is a theory, I stated that very clearly at
the beginning, I state that in my book. It is testable. Now, I
always give my students a rather fanciful way that evolution could be
disproved. I always suggest that if you were digging in a Jurassic
deposit and you found some burnt dinosaur bones next to a prehistoric
equivalent of a Weber grill, then you’d have disproof of evolution. That
would be disproof in the fossil record. Gaps in the fossil record don’t
disprove evolution, but things way out of place – if you found a zebra in the
fossil record long before reptiles had evolved, you would have disproved
evolution. He also said that it’s not disprovable, but there are so many
creationists out there, Michael Behe, Phillip Johnson, Duane Gish, all saying
that they have disproved evolution. Now, so first they say it’s not
falsifiable, and then they say that they can disprove it. So obviously it
is disprovable, it’s just, no one has had sufficient evidence to disprove it
yet.
DG: No…..
JM: I want to go on to Dr. Gish’s comment about the butterfly as
well. He’s asking how a caterpillar can evolve into a butterfly.
But, when he asks that question he’s actually asking two questions, and if you
do have an evolutionary paradigm, you can break that question down and ask it
in a different way that makes it much more explicable biologically. The
first question has to do with the evolution of the flight of insects.
What we do know is that primitive insects appear in the fossil record as a
branch of the arthropods some time around 400 million years ago. Those first insects
were wingless. From developmental and fossil data it appears that the
first wings evolved from a gill-like apparatus, so it’s not clear whether the
first wings functioned in respiration or locomotion or both, but when wings
evolved they couldn’t be folded back, sort of like a modern-day
dragonfly. So, step by step, we got to winged insects, like those of
today, of which the butterfly is one. Now, the second question then has
to do with the caterpillar. Now, many insects have a larval stage and, in
the case of the butterfly the larval stage is the caterpillar. Thus, the
second question is more about the evolution of the caterpillar than of the
butterfly. What the caterpillar is an elaboration, an extension of the
larval stage. And that is not unusual in the evolutionary world.
One thing that makes humans so special is the extension of the fetal and
childhood stages. So it wasn’t human adults that evolved so much as it
was the growth process that evolved. The same thing is happening in the
butterfly. You have an extension of that larval stage which allows the
magnificent butterfly to come out at the end, because that caterpillar has
eaten so much food and consumed so much energy for that developmental process
to continue. So I fail to see any difficult with butterfly evolution
… there’s nothing irreducibly complex about it, and moreover Dr. Gish has
no scientific theory to explain butterfly metamorphism, whereas evolutionists
do have ways to explain it. If Dr. Gish could come up with a falsifiable
hypothesis or any theory whatsoever, the scientific community would stand up
and listen, but all he does is say no, it’s impossible; he tosses his hands in
the air…..
DG: Let me get in there and say this. We fossils of non-flying
insects, and we have many many fossils of flying insects. But I’ll tell
you one thing we do not have: one single fossil showing something on a
non-flying insect becoming wings. Not one single such fossil has ever
been found, and this has been brought up by other scientists. Now,
furthermore, when you talk about the butterfly, the caterpillar changing to
chrysalis, you didn’t explain one single thing. You did not explain how
random genetic errors could change a caterpillar into a chrysalis, which is an
incredibly marvelous engineering marvel. You did not explain how genetic
errors, you know, evolution has no goal, no plan, no purpose.
JM: That’s correct.
DG: Evolution could not plan to look ahead and say ‘we need a chrysalis
for this intermediate stage.’ It just happened by, you’d have to have
thousands of genetic mistakes, genetic errors or mutations, to occur, and it’d
be a step by step by step….
JM: That is correct.
DG: But that change from the caterpillar to a chrysalis occurs in less
than three minutes. Then you’ve got to change that material inside the
chrysalis into a butterfly within eight or nine days. And how would
evolution, through as series of genetic errors, program that jelly-like
material to become a butterfly? Nobody’s every seen a butterfly, nobody
knows what a butterfly looks like, you’ve gotta have wings, you’ve gotta have
mouthparts for sucking nectar, you’ve gotta have all these things that are
totally different than a caterpillar or a chrysalis. You didn’t explain
one single thing how that happened. And …
JM: And do you have a scientific theory to explain it?
DG: … no evolutionist can do it. I’ve given that challenge even to
experts on butterflies, Dr. Arthur Shapiro at the University of California,
Davis, and he just said, we just can’t explain in. He said he could not
explain it. And nobody’s even…. Nobody can explain that, and I say that
that would require an intelligent agent vastly more intelligent than any of us
to device a process like that and to produce it. That blind, uncaring,
random, genetic processes, genetic errors, could bring about this incredible
process, that’s not science, that’s pure religion, that’s religious
faith. Just as Dr. Michael Ruse has finally admitted, a philosopher of
science, he’s a Darwinian Scientist, he said that evolution is religion.
BS: Doctor, is there any room for compromise here? What about the
theory that evolution occurred but it all followed a process, a design, that
came from God?
DG: Well, you see, there’s two things. Either evolution is
evolution, whether it’s an atheistic evolutionist or a theistic
evolutionist. If God did it, what did he do? You see,
evolutionists…. The modern theory of evolution absolutely excludes God, it says
it’s a totally naturalistic process, God’s not necessary, God was not involved,
no supernatural agent of any kind was involved, it was a totally natural
process.
BS: Is that the case Dr. McKee? It excludes God?
JM: The case is that we look at natural processes without inflicting
God. It does not exclude God by any stretch of the imagination.
Probably most of the people I know believe in God and accept evolutionary
theory. There’s no conflict between the two.
DG: There’s great conflict, of course. If …. A guy named Bozart [?]
published an article many years ago in American Atheist, and he said this: he
said you do away with Adam and Eve and the original sin, and that’s what
evolution means, then Christianity is nothing. And I think that’s true;
it certainly is. And Michael Ruse, this famous philosopher of science,
today, is now saying that evolution, evolutionary biology is a religion, and is
posed as a direct contradiction to Christianity. And he is not a
creationist, he is still a Darwinian evolutionist, but he has finally realized,
and he has documented the fact, that evolutionary theory, and he says it is a
religion.
BS: Dr. McKee?
JM: Yeah. I think it would be worthwhile figuring out what is
religion and what is faith and what is science. Now, since there are many
people of various faiths listening today, I’m going to use an example which has
nothing to do with religion. But I have an undying faith, I believe with
all my heart, that before I die the Cleveland Indians will win the World
Series. Now, it has not happened yet in my lifetime, and I’m afraid all
of the evidence in the world is against that proposition. But I believe
it! I don’t care about the evidence, I believe it, and that, my friend,
is faith. Science doesn’t work that way. Yes, I accept evolution as
a well-supported theory. But that is not a matter of faith, it is a
matter of the evidence. If something were to come along tomorrow and
disprove evolution, then as a scientist I would have to abandon my acceptance
of the theory, and I would. I would pack up all my evolution books as
historical curios and I would move on. But no scientific theory has come
up to replace evolution. No evidence has come up to deny evolution.
DG: Let me make it very clear: we have scientific theories, and then we
have what we call science. Now, one could say science is merely what a
scientist is doing when he’s thinking. Science can be about
anything. But a scientific theory must fulfill certain criteria, it must
be based on repeatable observations, there must be some way you can test the
theory, you can construct an experiment to test the theory, you make
predictions and see if the predictions are satisfied by your experiment.
That is not possible in evolution and creation because there were no human
witnesses to the origin of the universe, there were no human witnesses to the
origin of life.
JM: There were fossil witnesses.
DG: … no human witnesses to the origin of a single living thing.
JM: The fossil witnesses are our tests.
DG: The creation and evolution are theories about history, and they are
inferences based upon circumstantial evidence. The fossil record is
circumstantial evidence, and I believe…
BS: We’ve been over this…. We’ve been around this corner before. I
want to take a caller. I want to take Doug. You had a question
about a comment about thermodynamics.
D: Yes. Very interesting conversation, very important topic.
I just wanted to say that, speaking of the American Atheist, there’s an article
in the Winter 2000-2001 on this subject, “The ABCs of Non-Theistic Evolution”
by Gary Sloan. And early on, probably about half an hour ago, Dr. Gish
said something about the evolutionary theory contradicting thermodynamics, and
there’s a paragraph on that. It says that creationists say evolution
violates the second law of thermodynamics, which holds that as a system loses
energy they degrade to a state of increasing disorder. They exhibit
entropy. Evolution moves in the other direction, from disorder to order,
gaining instead of losing energy. Here is an anti-evolutionists…. Here
the anti-evolutionists leave their flank exposed. The second law as sited
applies only to isolated system, one in which energy from the outside cannot
enter nor, energy from within exit, like the universe is a whole but the earth
is not an isolated system.
DG: Let me respond to that.
BS: Go ahead.
DG: The universe in the evolutionary view is an isolated system, nobody
did any work on it, or nobody on the outside did any work on it.
D: Yes, but the earth is not.
DG: Nothing coming from the outside. And yet, they say that the
universe started with the chaos and disorder of the big bang, the simplicity of
hydrogen gas, and transformed itself into the universe we have today.
That is a clear violation of the second law of thermodynamics. Now,
secondly, just having an open system, and energy coming in from the outside is
not the answer to the problem. If we didn’t have that layer of ozone
surrounding the earth today, life would not be possible, because that deadly,
destructive ultraviolet light from the sun would come right down to the surface
of the earth and destroy everything. The only reason life is possible on
the earth is because we have that ozone layer, which could not have been there
in the beginning according to evolution, and the fact that, not only do we have
this layer of ozone, which filters out the ultraviolet light allowing only the
visible light to come through, but we have living plants, organisms that have
this incredibly complex photosynthetic system, and of course everything else in
the plant that can take that visible light and convert it into chemical energy.
BS: Caller, thank you. I have….
DG: You’ve got to have that, you just can’t have energy coming in from
outside converting simple gases into….
BS: I have to interrupt, we’ve got less than a minute to go. Dr.
McKee, I’ll give you about 20 seconds to sum up here.
JM: That’s very hard to sum up all this. But, since we’re on the
second law of thermodynamics, I would just ask anybody in the listening audience
to go into any physics department at a university in Ohio and ask a physicist
“does evolution violate the second law of thermodynamics? Does the origin
of life violate the second law of thermodynamics?”
BS: All right, Dr. Gish. You’ve got about 20 seconds, I’m sorry
sir.
DG: Well, if that’s true, why is the universe running down? Why is
it going to so-called “heat death?”
Caller: It’s not true…
BS: Good question. We’ve got to run. Thank you very much for being
with us. We’ll be back after five minutes of news, on 820, WOSU am,
Columbus. Your source for NPR news, intelligent talk.