Creationism and the Misuse of Biology

This tape was very intermittent and parts of this account will seem disconnected and bitty. In addition, Gordon had some excellent slides and diagrams which obviously we can not reproduce here.

1. Characteristics of Creationist arguments.
2. Misquoting; especially of Stephen J.Gould, who might seem to be a creationist from his statements dragged out of context. They must know they are doing this as it is so very common; it is basically dishonest,
3. Evolution is not science as it is not amenable to experimental verification. But there is another kind of science, historical. Along with Cosmology and Geology Darwin introduced the study of Biology, in this way. There are three ways it works, Classifying, Comparing and Inaudible.
4. There are gaps in the fossil record, but there are bound to be. If there were none, classification would be impossible. There are plenty of examples of intermediates - intermediates within one organism, a bird with a gradation of feathers-intermediates between insects and worms, a segmented creature but with a trachea-Archaeopteryx (Creationists say it was a bird, they guessed wrong, they would have been much better to have said it was a reptile. Modern birds have no holes in the skull) as perfect an example of an intermediate as one could hope to find - the range of human predecessors, from Australopithecus onward.
5. The chance of protein evolving is negligible. here they quote the views of Fred Hoyle and Wickramsinghe (they do not mention that these worthies think that insects are more intelligent than humans and choose to hide their superiority). The calculation assumes that modern protein is simple and evolved in one go. With this assumption, Hoyle correctly calculates the chance as lin 1440, 000. However no one believes that this is what happened, the primitive protein, however inefficient, was able to evolve by natural selection to the more complex version we now have. Gordon here made a very important point about the average length of DNA that codes for protein before the stop code is about 600 units long. Also the length of introns are also 600 units long. Unfortunately, the tape here was very distorted and I have not got Gordon's point at all firmly. Gordon said that on the Creationist argument each of us could not exist; for, we all get one from each of the 23 pairs of our father's chromosomes, similarly we got one from each of our mother's 23 pairs. Hence the chance of us being us, is (one half) to the power of 23 x (one half) to the power of 23 and this is near enough equal of 10 to the power of minus 13.e) Creationists always bring up the second law of thermodynamics, which clearly they do not understand. They mention Entropy but forget Enthalpy, the energy needed to restore the degradation of order which occurs in all natural processes
6. Evidence that creationists ignore:
7. Gaps in the fossil record are a much greater problem for creationists than for Darwinians, for on their theory human fossils should be found at all layers in the geological strata. There are no human remains in what creationists say are ante-diluvian rocks. Creationists cite 22 cases where they say fossils have been found in the wrong layer (however, this should happen myriads of times on the creationists argument). In fact there are good reasons for each of these reversals, for example where trilobites are found too high in the fossil record they are always upside down, showing that there has been folding of the rocks.
8. The argument from homology; this is well known. A recent fine example is the discovery of haemoglobin in plants. When we compare the structure of this haemoglobin with that of animal haemoglobin there is a certain number of differences in the structure. If we make reasonable assumptions for the time for this number to have occurred by the standard processes of natural selection, we get the time of two billion years and this is exactly the time since we think plants and animals diverged. So far from being an example against evolution, it is seen to be another piece of confirmatory evidence.
9. Processes now going on, here the classic example is that of industrial melanism in moths. These have changed colour according to the degree of colouration of British trees. It is not generally realised that this has happened in over 80 species.
10. The age of the earth. Creationists make minor points about inaccuracies in the radioactive dating methods but are silent about the million fold difference between their age for the earth and the measured one.
11. Continental drift. The speed of the movement of the continents has now been measured using satellites and turns out to be about 2 cm per year ( the same rate of growth as that of our finger nails). This exactly matches the predictions from the dating of similar rocks in widely different continents.
12. Creationists still believe in a literal interpretation of the Ark myth. Gordon pointed out some of the many inconsistencies in the story. He noted that while there is enough room for the two elephants of the story. There is not enough space for their food. (Editor's note, it is fascinating to read, this week, that James Irwin has been detained in Turkey on a charge of spying. His excuse that he was looking for the remains of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat was obviously regarded as too fatuous, even for a spy.)

There were many questions at the end of Gordon's talk but they have been lost. There was evidence of warm applause at the end of the presentation.