DEBUNK IT

1. NOBLE MONKEYS: WHERE WE CAME FROM

In early February 2014, a debate was held between the popular scientific broadcaster Bill Nye—“The Science Guy”—and Ken Ham, founder and president of the Creationist organization Answers in Genesis (AiG). Among its other activities, AiG runs the Creation Museum in Kentucky—whose displays include humans consorting with dinosaurs—and is currently (late 2014) trying to raise money to build a full-size replica of Noah’s Ark. Inevitably, the debate was nicknamed “Ham on Nye”!

The topic of debate was: “Is creation a viable model of origins in today’s modern, scientific era?” Of course, in all the press buzz surrounding the debate, the actual topic tended to get forgotten, so the debate was essentially billed as one between evolution and Creationism.

At the debate, Matt Stopera of the website BuzzFeed “asked 22 self-identifying Creationists . . . to write a message/question/note to the other side.” The results ranged from the wacky to the bewildering. Here is a selection of the ones that caught my eye.:

1. Is it completely illogical that the earth was created mature? i.e. trees created with rings . . . Adam created as an adult . . .¹

2. Does not the Second law of thermodynamics disprove evolution?

3. If God did not create everything, how did the first single-celled organism originate? By chance?

4. Why do evolutionists / secularists / humanists / non-God believing people reject the idea of their being a creator God but embrace the concept of intelligent design from aliens or other extra-terrestrial sources?

5. Why have we found only 1 “Lucy”, when we have found more than one of everything else?

6. If Evolution is a theory (like creationism or the Bible) why then is Evolution taught as fact.

7. How can you look at the world and not believe Someone Created/thought of it? It’s Amazing!!!

8. Relating to the big bang theory . . . Where did the exploding star come from?

9. How do you explain a sunset if their is no God?

10. What about Noetics?

11. Does metamorphosis support evolution?

and, inevitably,

12. If we came from monkeys then why are there still monkeys?

What’s interesting about these comments is that, the wacky ones aside, they give a good overview of most of the main bits of bullshit that are leveled by today’s Creationists—again and again, no matter how often the misapprehensions are corrected—against evolution.

Let’s look at a few of these questions in a bit more detail.. First, though, a quick note on question #8: “Relating to the big bang theory . . . Where did the exploding star come from?”—What exploding star? If he meant to say “Where did the Big Bang come from?”—implying that everything must have a cause and so there must have been some entity that created the Big Bang—the next question we have to ask is: Where did that entity come from?

Just as importantly, what has the Big Bang got to do with the theory of evolution, which is concerned with living organisms on planet earth?¹

IF EVOLUTION IS A THEORY (LIKE CREATIONISM OR THE BIBLE) WHY THEN IS EVOLUTION TAUGHT AS FACT?

This is a typical semantics game used by dishonest people to fool ignorant ones, and consequently by ignorant people to fool themselves.

As we’ve seen before, the word “theory” has three quite distinct meanings.² In general conversation, when we say we have a theory, we mean little if anything more than an idea or hunch or point of view: “It’s my theory that children should be seen and not heard.”

Sometimes we use the word a bit more seriously to mean what we think is a plausible explanation for something. In scientific terms, this type of “theory” is more correctly called a hypothesis. The person who produced the question above is implying that the theory of evolution is only this kind of “theory”: something speculative for which there’s as yet only a scattering of evidence.

But that isn’t at all what the word “theory” means when we talk about the theory of evolution by natural selection—or the theory of Special Relativity, or the quantum theory, and so on. In the full scientific sense of the word, as we saw when talking about the Scientific Method (see page 66), an established scientific theory is as close to a cast-iron fact as you’re ever likely to find.

Beyond the definition of the word “theory,” there’s another sense in which the question is misguided. Evolution itself isn’t a theory; it’s an established fact. Not only can we see evolution in action, the interrelatedness of all living things has been demonstrated conclusively at the genetic level. The “theory” part is that evolution works because of natural selection. This was a theory first put forward in the nineteenth century by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in order to explain evolution. It has since been modified because of further scientific discovery, but is still fundamentally intact.

What did Darwin and Wallace mean by “natural selection”?

As life forms produce new generations, there will inevitably be small variations between one individual and another. In some cases, the difference will be big enough to be called a mutation—those two-headed calves you occasionally hear about represent quite extreme mutations. The basic idea of natural selection is that disadvantageous mutations tend to die out (the individuals involved may not live long enough to breed, for example) while advantageous ones are more likely to be preserved.

The modifications to Darwin’s theory are generally to the effect that natural selection is not the only process involved—that others make a contribution. Also, since Darwin couldn’t know anything about genetics, he had no idea how mutations could arise, and thus that, for example, the genes for disadvantageous traits can hang around within a species rather than die out, so long as the disadvantage isn’t too great. If circumstances change for the species, those traits can suddenly become useful.

An illustration of this occurred in the UK from the 1950s onward, when the authorities clamped down on the use of coal fires in homes. Before that, a species called the peppered moth had shown primarily dark-colored wings: Windowsills and other likely resting places were dark from soot, and so the moths were less likely to be noticed and eaten by passing birds. A few moth-generations after the clampdown, however, the prevalent form of the peppered moth now had pale wings, because resting surfaces were cleaner and birds were less likely to notice light-colored moths.

So evolution isn’t a theory, it’s a fact of life. And evolution by natural selection isn’t “just a theory”: It’s a theory.

HOW DID THE FIRST SINGLE-CELLED NOBLE MONKEYS: WHERE WE CAME FROM ORGANISM ORIGINATE? BY CHANCE?

This question actually has nothing to do with evolution. Evolution didn’t start until after that very first living organism came into being.¹ The science of evolution is about what happens to life forms, not about how life arose.

The confusion is probably because of the title of the book in which Charles Darwin laid out the hypothesis at which he and Alfred Russel Wallace had independently arrived: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859), usually called just Origin of Species. A lot of people think this means the book is about the origin of life. In fact it’s about why species originate—why there are millions of species of living creatures in the world, some more closely related than others.

So how did the first living organism emerge? It’s a good question, because all of us—people and bananas and bacteria and kangaroos and birds and mosquitoes alike—are descended from that primordial organism. The answer is that science doesn’t yet know for sure.

When this question was asked at the Ham/Nye debate, the questioner probably thought that, since science doesn’t know, the only possible answer must be that the primordial organism was created rather than developed through natural processes. This is the notorious god of the gaps argument again (see page 63).

The questioner’s also spinning the truth. Just because science doesn’t know how life did start, doesn’t mean science can’t think of any way how it could have started. The reality is that there are plenty of plausible hypotheses as to how it happened; it’s just that no one yet knows which if any of them is the right one!

No good scientist will tell you it’s impossible that the first organism was created. What any good scientist will tell you is that there’s zilch evidence in favor of that hypothesis.

DOESN’T THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS DISPROVE EVOLUTION?

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is popularly believed to say that everything tends—like your bedroom—to become more disorganized over time. So the argument goes that, since evolution is evidently a process of organization, it runs counter to the Second Law—in other words, it is impossible.

What the Second Law actually says is that, in an isolated (or closed) system, entropy (which means roughly the same as “disorganization”) will always increase. A closed system is one where there’s no energy coming in or going out.

The universe is a closed system, yet wherever we look there are examples of things that are more organized than they once were. Stars are more organized than the gas clouds from which they condensed. Inside stars, simple atomic nuclei are fused together to form more complicated—more organized—ones. When solar systems form, some planets are mainly rocky while others are mainly gaseous—in other words, there is a sorting process in play.

But these decreases in entropy are only part of the story. Those “organized” stars are at the same time converting matter into raw energy. If they’re large enough, toward the end of their lifetimes they’ll explode, throwing much of themselves out into space to join the disorganized interstellar gas while the rest collapses into a highly entropic black hole or a neutron star. All sorts of other processes act to increase entropy.

Overall, then, the universe’s entropy is increasing: There’s more disorganization going on than there is organization.

As a rule of thumb, the way to make anything less disorganized is to do work on it. It takes a lot more energy to sort out a bag of marbles into their different colors than it does simply to leave them in their disorganized state. A planet like the earth is more organized than all the floating rocks and dust and gas that came together to form it because of the work done by gravitational energy.

And the earth isn’t a closed system: there’s energy coming in from outside, and there’s energy going out again. Among other exchanges with the rest of the universe, the earth receives great amounts of sunlight. When this energy is eventually radiated back into space, it’s in the form of high-entropy heat. The sunlight is the fuel that powers organizational processes on earth, processes like life and evolution. Because our planet isn’t a closed system, the Second Law of Thermodynamics doesn’t apply.

IF WE EVOLVED FROM MONKEYS, WHY ARE THERE STILL MONKEYS?

Ask any evolutionary biologist and they’ll tell you this is the single most common question they get asked by creationists. No matter how often they answer it, it gets repeated again and again, like a dripping tap. It’s a question that reveals a lack of knowledge not just about how evolution works, but also about our own primate ancestry. Oddly, the people who ask it—the primate-change deniers—never think to ask themselves the question’s corollary: If we didn’t evolve from other primates, why are there other primates?

The first thing to be clear on is that no serious scientist says we evolved from modern monkeys. Monkeys and humans have about 93 percent of their DNA coding in common, which means we’re not all that distantly related to monkeys. On the other hand, we’re not all that closely related to them either. The primate species that both ourselves and monkeys evolved from—our common ancestor—lived about 25–30 million years ago. The earliest known monkeys (that is, mammals that were related to the monkeys we know today) date to about 15 million years ago.

Monkeys, like every other life form on the planet, are still evolving, of course. But what they’re evolving into is not humans, but different monkeys.

We’re far more closely related to chimps and gorillas, who are not monkeys but apes. We share more than 98 percent of our DNA coding with chimps. The common ancestor of chimps and humans lived perhaps 4.7 million years ago. That was long after the ape and monkey lineages had gone their separate ways.

Apes are still evolving, too . . . into different apes.

But there’s another huge misunderstanding in the question. The type of ape that chimps and ourselves evolved from is long extinct, as are the other types of apes that existed 4.7 million years ago. Newer types of apes have appeared as the older types died out. The array of ape species 4.7 million years ago was different from what’s around today.

Similarly, in a million years, if humans are still around, they will be very different from the way we are today. The idea that humans are still evolving is one that many people have difficulty grasping. The way we are today is just the way a particular strand of our planet’s evolving biosphere has ended up by the twenty-first century. All of the animals that frequent my back yard—bears, chipmunks, turkeys, hawks, foxes, squirrels, cardinals, gophers, lizards, and countless others—are as highly evolved as I am, and as you are. A fox is far better at being a fox than you or I would be.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN FROM OUTER SPACE?

There’s one last question to be answered from the list asked by Ken Ham’s supporters. It’s a longer one, so I’ll state it again:

Why do evolutionists / secularists / humanists / non-God believing people reject the idea of their [sic] being a creator God but embrace the concept of intelligent design from aliens or other extra-terrestrial sources?

The questioner seems to have gotten two things confused.

A few decades back, various amateur archaeologists—and that’s the polite description—started promoting the idea that alien astronauts visited the earth thousands of years ago, boosted the primitive human civilizations then in existence, and even tinkered with the brains of our ancestors to make them smarter. These theorists made a truckload of money writing books and making TV shows; they’re still making the TV shows, although the books aren’t as common. What they didn’t do was persuade many (if any!) reputable scientists, and particularly not professional archaeologists and anthropologists, who could find no trace of the supposed extraterrestrial interference.¹

The questioner has mixed this crankery up with the far more recent Intelligent Design (ID) movement.

During the nineteenth century, evolution was an idea that was very much discussed, and a number of naturalists, like the Chevalier de Lamarck (see page 110), put forward their own ideas about how it could work. Theologians, however, stuck to the notion of intelligent design, which posited that, since living creatures had multiple components and were generally suited to their mode of existence, it was “obvious” they must have been designed to be that way. As long ago as the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas presented this “obvious” influence of a Designer as one of his five irrefutable proofs of the existence of God.

What governed mainstream scientific opinion for most of the nineteenth century was the case in favor of intelligent design put forward by William Paley in his book Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802). In vivid fashion he argued that, if you find a functioning watch, you rationally assume there must be a watchmaker somewhere. Similarly, Paley said, if you come across a functioning life form or a functioning organ—like the human eye—you should rationally assume the existence of a designer.

Before Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace came along with their theory of evolution by natural selection, which quite comfortably explained (among much else) how organs like the human eye developed without supernatural intervention, there wasn’t much of a controversy between religious explanations of life and the ideas of naturalists. In his book God’s Own Scientists (1994), Christopher P. Toumey summed this up: “Evangelical Protestantism and science were so intellectually compatible in the United States that a naturalist and a minister could easily agree on what they believed about nature.” Even today, plenty of naturalists and plenty of ministers find they can still agree about nature,¹ but some still have more difficulty.

The modern ID movement was the brainchild not of a scientist but of a lawyer (evaluate your authorities!), Phillip Johnson, who made his case in a book called Darwin on Trial (1991). Johnson believed religion was steadily losing its status in the United States, and he blamed this on science education in public schools. The villain, in his mind, was the theory of evolution by natural selection. A whole series of court decisions had made it impossible for Creationism to be taught in science classrooms (it violates the First Amendment), and so Johnson realized he’d have to offer a “scientific” theory that, with luck, could get round the prohibition. Intelligent Design was the result.

ID accepts that the bulk of the changes that come about in life forms—such as separation into different species—are a result of evolution. However, it proposes that, at crucial moments, an unspecified supernatural being steps in to tweak the process a little. These extra little tweaks explain, the IDers claim, various developments that unguided evolution could not have achieved alone.

An important extra concept here is “irreducible complexity,” first proposed by the biochemist Michael Behe. Take a feature like the mammalian eye. It’s made up of a number of parts—lens, retina, and so on—that must work together if the eye is to function properly. Each of those parts wouldn’t be much use on its own. How could the lens, for example, survive as a mutation if it didn’t have the other components of the eye to go with it? And how could the fully formed eye simply spring into being from nowhere?

So Behe’s idea was that features like the eye are irreducibly complex. Because they can’t work unless all the bits are there, an Intelligent Designer must have intervened to bring them together in just the right way.

Often IDers seek to demonstrate this point by showing you the components of a mousetrap and asking you how effective you think they’d be at catching a mouse. As soon as you point out that they couldn’t—you’d have to assemble them first—you get told this is because the mousetrap is irreducibly complex. You need a Designer to assemble it . . . and, in the same way, you need a Designer to assemble something like the eye. Until the mousetrap/eye is assembled, what would be the point of its components having evolved separately?

What’s forgotten in discussions of irreducible complexity is that natural selection is very good at making opportunistic use of whatever happens to be lying around. In the case of the evolution of the eye, Darwin pointed out in Origin of Species how the various stages could have come about, starting off with just a light-sensitive cell. All of the progressively more complex stages that Darwin outlined have been observed in living creatures, so we know they’re possible. In fact, we now know that at various times in various creatures, over forty different types of eye have evolved, each independently of the others.

In a famous trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, in 2005 about the teaching of ID in the classroom, Michael Behe was called as a witness in favor of the case that ID had a scientific basis and therefore could legitimately be taught alongside evolution. He naturally presented his idea of irreducible complexity as a clincher. Unfortunately, under cross-examination he was forced to admit that all of the features he claimed as irreducibly complex have in fact been explained perfectly adequately by biologists without the need to resort to the intervention of the Designer. You could say this isn’t proof that a Designer didn’t play a part. True. But it’s also not proof that the Easter Bunny wasn’t involved, or the Man in the Moon. The general rule in science is, if there’s no evidence that something exists, then it almost certainly doesn’t. If somebody thinks it exists nevertheless, the burden’s on them to show it does, not on everyone else to show it doesn’t.

The vanguard of the ID movement is the Discovery Institute, founded in 1996 and based in Seattle. In 1999 this “think tank” set up an offshoot called the Center for the Renewal of Science & Culture; in 2002 this was renamed the Center for Science & Culture. It’s this offshoot, with its sciencey-sounding name, that does the main work of promoting ID.

One of its big embarrassments is that, for a supposed scientific institute, it doesn’t seem to do much if any scientific research. If you go to its website ¹ you can find a list of published scientific papers purportedly supporting ID. If you dig a little deeper, however, you discover that the “peer-reviewed” journals many of these papers appeared in are, shall we say, at a bit of a distance from the mainstream. Also, if you look closely at the papers, you’ll see there’s little or no research involved in them. You can find the generation of concepts like irreducible complexity, but these are really philosophical notions, not scientific hypotheses backed by experimental evidence. And there are plenty of attempts to find fault with mainstream evolutionary theory—attempts that are essentially worthless because biologists have confronted all of them many long ages ago.

The Discovery Institute is keen on calling ID a theory (see page 67). Without much if any research being done to test it or to gather data that might support or otherwise affect it, it’s hard to see how the word “theory” can be applied.

All in all, the Discovery Institute’s really in the same position, so far as scientific research goes, as that boring guy at the party (or, for that matter, on talk radio) who boasts that he knows more about biology than biologists do, more about medicine than doctors do, more about climate science than climate scientists do . . . all without having had to go to the trouble of doing any study!

A second big embarrassment for the Discovery Institute’s claims to be advancing the course of science is the existence of the Wedge Document. This was a strategy cooked up in the Center for the Renewal of Science & Culture sometime in the late 1990s. Soon after, it leaked to the web. What’s clear on reading the document is that the ID movement’s questioning of the rationale of Darwinism is intended solely as an opening salvo—the thin end of a wedge whose thick end is the replacement of science (“materialism”) by theology.

In 2001 the Discovery Institute released a document grandly called A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism, signed by several hundred scientists. The July 2013 update of that statement contained (if I counted right) the names of 841 scientists from all over the world who query the theory of evolution by natural selection. If you look down the list you find that, while many of the signatories work in the field of biology, many don’t—there are plenty of engineers and surgeons there. Wow: 841! That seems a very large number until you realize that in the US alone there are perhaps 3,500,000 working scientists and engineers—and that doesn’t include physicians. When you put 841 alongside 3,500,000 you realize what a small number it actually is.

Back to the original question: When the questioner stated that evolutionary scientists “embrace the concept of intelligent design from aliens or other extra-terrestrial sources,” we can only guess that no one has ever told him that natural selection works without the need for external tinkering. Having learned that scientists reject the idea that a supernatural being tweaks the system from time to time, he’s jumped to the conclusion that they must instead believe in crackpot ideas about ancient astronauts.

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MICRO-EVOLUTION AND MACRO-EVOLUTION?

Creationists often say they can accept the idea of micro-evolution but not that of macro-evolution. What do these terms mean?

Micro-evolution is change within a species. You can get an idea of what micro-evolution is about by looking at dogs. You get dogs of every shape and size, but they’re all still dogs—they all belong to the same species. No matter how different they might appear, any type of dog can breed with any other, as you can tell by a quick visit to the local pound. (There might be practical difficulties with dogs of vastly different sizes, but theoretically it’s possible.) You can think of the different breeds having arisen through micro-evolution; even though the different breeds of dogs have arisen almost entirely due to artificial selection (deliberate breeding) rather than natural selection, the principle’s the same. Micro-evolution is change within a species.

Macro-evolution involves the emergence of new species. You can mate a terrier with a spaniel, for example, to produce viable puppies, and you can even mate a dog with a wolf (they’re both members of the species Canis lupus), but you can’t mate a dog with a cat. Dogs and cats share a common ancestor, but that common ancestor lived upward of 40 million years ago. Today dogs and cats aren’t just in different species, they’re in different genera and families.¹

It’s obviously difficult to deny micro-evolution, because we can see it going on, but most Creationists balk at the idea that new species can emerge from old ones.

Of course, this causes the Creationists problems if, as many do, they believe in the Flood, and that Noah took two of every type of non-aquatic animal aboard the Ark. With so many millions of species in the world today, how could this have been possible? It becomes even more difficult once you start counting in the extinct species, like mammoths and velociraptors. Some of those animals were huge.

A tactic that’s used by many Creationists, such as Ken Ham, is to claim that Noah took aboard only two of each “kind” of the animals and that, after the Flood, the offspring of these pairs gave rise to the multitudinous species we see today. So the idea is that evolution within a “kind” is feasible (micro-evolution), but not the generation of a new “kind” (macro-evolution). Unfortunately, no one else can work out what this spanky new animal classification—the “kind”—actually is.

From the viewpoint of orthodox biology, rather than Creationist biology, it’s obvious enough that, in simplest terms, macro-evolution is merely micro-evolution writ large. If you’re prepared to accept that the micro happens, you have no rational grounds for rejecting the macro.

WHAT ABOUT THE CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION?

The fossil record shows that about 540 million years ago there was a sudden proliferation of complex lifeforms. This was the so-called Cambrian explosion, and a lot of creationists and especially IDers point to it as something that can’t be explained through the slow processes of natural selection. Surely, they argue, there must have been some outside agency at work. Books like Stephen C. Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design (2013) back this up—as you’d expect, since Meyer was a co-founder of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture (see page 100).

Mainstream biologists are less impressed.

For a start, how sudden was this “sudden” explosion? It’s difficult to estimate a timespan when people disagree about the start and stop points of the event but, at a very minimum, the “explosion” lasted about five million years and, according to some, as long as 40 million years. Even five million years marks an event not quite so “sudden” as you might have been led to believe.

And, although the Cambrian explosion was a period of relatively rapid evolution and a significant event in the history of life, it wasn’t so pivotal as it’s often portrayed:

• There’s evidence of complex lifeforms from long beforehand, so the ones that now appeared were far from unprecedented.

• While some of the major animal groups can trace their origins to the Cambrian explosion, most don’t: Mammals, reptiles, and insects were long in the future, and even more so birds, which are of reptilian descent. There were fishes, but their resemblances to modern fishes were scant. The first land plants didn’t happen along until about 450 million years ago—that’s nearly 100 million years after the “explosion”—and the first flowers probably not until about 130 million years ago.

No one knows for sure why the Cambrian explosion happened, but this doesn’t mean it’s a glaring anomaly in terms of evolution. There are plenty of alternative explanations that don’t require the intervention of an Intelligent Designer. A couple of possibilities are:

• The first evolution of eyes. Eyes would allow predators to become far more efficient, so prey animals had to become better at escaping or otherwise avoiding getting eaten. This could certainly have spurred adaptation.

• The first appearance of the ozone layer. This layer high in the earth’s atmosphere protects the surface (and us!) from most of the lethal radiation that comes our way from space.

So, while there’s still lots of research to be done on the Cambrian explosion, it’s by no means as inexplicable as the IDers pretend.

DARWIN CAUSED THE HOLOCAUST?

Time and time again, Creationists accuse the theory of evolution by natural selection—and Darwin by name—of having inspired the Nazis to murder millions of Jews, gays, gypsies, and others, including the mentally ill.

The accusation would have surprised the Nazis, because official Party policy rejected evolution. During the Reich, science was under the control of Heinrich Himmler, and Himmler refused to believe that

• humans could have evolved from lower animals,

• humans were related to the primates, and even

• modern Homo sapiens could have arisen from Neanderthals.

Since displeasing Himmler was a fast track to the concentration camps, most German scientists toed the Party line.

What the Nazis did believe in was eugenics. Eugenics is based on the idea that—just as farmers breed their animals for better qualities— you can create “better” humans by weeding out all the “undesirables” from the breeding pool. The big problem with eugenics, obviously, is: Who decides who the “undesirables” are? Eugenics was promoted by Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Dalton, but Darwin himself firmly rejected it as unthinkably cruel and immoral.

The notion of eugenics was responsible for widespread atrocities during the first half of the twentieth century, not just in Germany but in other countries, notably the US and Sweden, though only Germany instituted mass exterminations. The more usual approach involved campaigns of forced sterilization. In the US, support for eugenics and forced-sterilization campaigns didn’t really collapse until after the end of World War II, when the public learned of the German atrocities.

THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

Evolution isn’t about the survival of the fittest.¹

You may be shocked to hear this, because so many detractors of evolution and even some of its ardent supporters think this notion is at the core of how natural selection works. Evolution is really about populations, not about individual members of those populations. This can be difficult to accept in human societies that are concerned about individual as well as group welfare, but it’s the way nature works. As with eugenics, attempts to take the descriptions of evolution and make them into prescriptions for the way that human societies should be run inevitably lead to gross cruelty and misery on a grand scale.

Darwin himself didn’t employ the phrase “survival of the fittest” and it’s not one that’s used in modern evolutionary biology (except perhaps in the case of genes). No one’s sure exactly who coined it, but it was first popularized by the UK philosopher/economist Herbert Spencer. Excited by Darwin’s theory but perhaps even more so by those of the Chevalier de Lamarck,¹ Spencer wrote a book called Principles of Biology (1864) in which he attempted to marry natural selection to his own notions of how society should be run. Those notions—that we should expect and accept that the privileged and ruthless will rise to the top of society, with the rest of us either in servitude to them or going to the wall—were much later called Social Darwinism. This term is grossly misleading, in that it implies that the scientific theory of evolution justifies human hardship and economic tyranny, but unfortunately it has stuck.

The confusion is exploited by creationists to this day. Although Spencer’s ideas were, for some while during the early part of the twentieth century, all the rage among the “robber baron” industrialists of the US (oddly enough, they never much caught on in his native land), they became mightily unpopular after World War II when, as with eugenics, the consequences became all too horrifically obvious.

YOUNG EARTH OR OLD EARTH?

In modern Creationism, there are two schools of thought about the age of the earth.

Old-earth Creationists (OECs) accept that the universe and the earth are of great antiquity, and regard the “days” mentioned in Genesis as periods of uncertain but great length. (This is a viable translation of the original text.)

Young-earth creationists (YECs) insist the earth was created just a few thousand years ago. Today, the usual figure they offer for the planet’s age is about 10,000 years. The young-earth creationist Harold Camping, famous for unsuccessfully predicting the end of the world in 2011 (see page 269), calculated the earth was about 13,000 years old, and the nineteenth-century German scholar Christian von Bunsen produced a figure of 22,000 years. Meanwhile a few YECs have suggested that that is far younger than any of these estimates.

What’s puzzling is that all these calculations are supposedly based on the same data. It’s perhaps not so surprising that such problems occur when trying to use the Bible as a science textbook. In 1 Kings 7/23-6, for example, the value of pi, the ratio between a circle’s circumference and its diameter, is indicated to be exactly 3.0.

Mainstream science offers a far different estimate of the world’s age. The oldest known crystal, a tiny piece of zircon found in early 2014 on a Western Australia sheep ranch, has been confidently dated to 4.4 billion years ago.

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