Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Welcome to part four of our series
examining the article "Is Evolution Scientific,"
from Creation Ministries International.
This is NOT your father's creationist website...
'cause they redesigned it and changed the name.
Their fourth point, which is false, of course,
is that evolution is not open to criticism.
And what's their source?
That wonderful documentary that's sure to sweep the Oscars, the Golden Globes,
and Mrs. Golightly's Traveling Film Festival and Dry Cleaners:
They claim:
If you watch my lie-correcting subtitles for Expelled,
you'll see that not one single instance of this that they describe
actually happened that way.
Of the six people they claim were "expelled,"
five never lost their jobs or had their work prospects impeded in any way.
The only one who could be said to have lost her job was Caroline Crocker,
but she had just finished out her contract,
having only been hired on contingency to begin with.
The website mentions another person, Michael Reiss,
saying that he was "forced to resign" from the Royal Academy
for saying that creationism should have equal footing in science classes.
In reality, Reiss is anti-creationism,
and was suggesting that children be taught how to refute creationist arguments.
In his own blog posting, Reiss said,
The criticism he received from his position wasn't
that all discussion of creationism should be stifled,
but that directly countering creationism in the classroom
would result in classroom lectures becoming very heated,
as well as becoming the targets of religious protestors.
[Professor] But only one has survived
to become universally accepted by scientists today:
English scientist Charles Darwin
is considered to be the founder of modern evolutionary theory.
[students begin screeching like monkeys]
[Professor] Come on now, settle down.
[screeching continues loudly]
Much more so than they already are.
[Professor] What's wrong with y'all?
[students continue screeching like monkeys]
His position at the Royal Society was a part-time secondary position,
and he remains full-time professor of science education
at the Institute of Education at the University of London.
He resigned because he didn't want the Royal Society to be the target of a national controversy.
Far from forcing him out, other Society members were actually supportive of his position.
Lord Robert Winston said,
Dr. Roland Jackson called his resignation "a real loss" and said:
If anyone could be said to have "forced" Reiss to resign,
it's the creationists who attempted to claim him as one of theirs.
The truth is, scientists are very accepting both of criticism and of unorthadox ideas...
when they're supported by the evidence, that is.
Lynn Margulis is a scientist who, in 1966, published a paper
that shook the foundations of the scientific world.
It was called, "The Origin of Mitosing Eukaryotic Cells,"
and said that the mitochondria,
which house the non-nuclear DNA in eukaryotic organisms such as plants, animals, and fungi,
as well as some single-celled organisms such as the amoeba,
didn't evolve through mutation and natural selection as evolution predicts,
but were the result of bacterial invaders
which merged with the cells way back when they were first formed.
This new theory, dubbed "endosymbiotic theory,"
faced rejection from her peers and from scientific publications.
Margulis wasn't deterred.
She put the work into formulating a proper theory,
and testing it as well as she could,
publishing her findings in her 1970 book, Origin of Eukaryotic Cells.
The theory got a boost in the early 1980s
when the DNA structure of mitochondria and of chloroplasts was finally able to be analyzed.
As more scientists tested her theory, acceptance grew.
Marguls was elected into the National Academy of Science,
and was even praised by Richard Dawkins in 1995,
who called her theory "one of the great achievements of twentieth-century evolutionary biology."
Today, her theory is taught in textbooks.
Scientists welcome criticism,
and even accept alternative views when they follow the proper process, as Margulis did.
But the creationists and Intelligent Design advocates do not follow this procedure.
They keep attempting to circumvent every scientific procedure
and get their ideas put directly into textbooks and taught in classrooms as an alternative.
They don't do any of the work, and they want their idea on equal footing.
That's why they have to claim that scientists do not allow criticism of evolution.
But that's just false.
If that had been the case,
the latest breakthrough in our understanding of the development of life
would never have taken place.
It's called "evolutionary developmental biology," also known as "evo-devo."
Deviating from the older and more established theory of synthesis
(which combined Darwin's mutation and natural selection with Mendel's theory of heritable traits)
that the structures of genes are how novel features are produced,
evo-devo takes the developmental context into consideration.
For example, fruit flies (technically, as you recall from Part 1, drosophila)
have compound eyes. Lab mice have lens-type eyes.
They both share a gene telling their bodies to grow eyes, and where to grow them.
Scientific experiments have been done where this gene has been deactivated in drosophila
and replaced with the eye gene from a mouse, and vice-versa.
Under the old theory, you would expect the mouse to grow compound eyes
and the fly to grow mammalian eyes...but no.
They each grow their own eyes:
drosophila growing their normal compound eyes
and the lab mouse growing its own normal lens-type eye.
A gene telling the host to "grow an eye" does nothing to say how the eye is to be grown.
That's left to developmental factors, as the context in which the eye develops
is affected by the development of other parts of the animal,
spawning from their own genes but themselves developing
in the context of the other parts as well as of the environment.
The idea is that plants and animals have modular bodies.
There are distinct parts that are repeated over and over again, such as fingers or ribs.
An organism's body, rather than being a reflection of its component genes
as the modern synthesis would predict,
is instead determined by developmental factors as the organism grows.
Some of the findings of evo-devo include the surprising discovery
that genes can be turned on or off,
or made to work only in certain contexts
such as an environmental stimulus.
Also, there exist genes that do not produce any morphology of their own,
but that serve to switch other genes on and off.
Perhaps most surprising is the incredible similarity in the genomes
of wildly diverse organisms such as humans and drosophila.
These organisms share most of their genes,
differing mainly in which genes are turned on or off, and when.
For example, both humans and drosophila use the same genes for embryogenesis;
the only difference is in how the genes are regulated.
It is important here to understand the difference between genotype and phenotype.
The genotype is the actual genes themselves.
The phenotype is the morphology that results from the genotype
being expressed in context with the immediate environment.
One more note before we continue:
embryology is used extensively in evo-devo,
and much great research has been done into how the genes express themselves
as an embryo develops.
Creationists attempt to discredit this
by pointing to the fraudulent work of Ernst von Haeckel;
this claim will be covered in Part 5.
The main point here is that evo-devo represents a great departure from modern synthesis theory.
If what the creationists say were in any way true,
evo-devo would never have been allowed to take center stage,
or even hang around behind the curtain.
But because science is open to criticism, and is open to new ideas,
and evolution is no exception,
these and other discoveries have been able to propel our understanding
of biology and the development of life forward,
to the extent that Darwin himself would never even recognize it,
with many more such amazing discoveries doubtless to come.
Is evolution open to criticism?
Check.
In Part 5, we'll look at their criticism of the accuracy
of the information demonstrating evolution.