Why do creationists still exist

Yet creationists delight in dissecting out phrases from Gould's voluminous prose to make him sound as though he had doubted evolution, and they present punctuated equilibrium as though it allows new species to materialize overnight or birds to be born from reptile eggs. Fossil record shows a succession of hominins, with features becoming progressively less apelike and more modern. When confronted with a quotation from a scientific authority that seems to question evolution, insist on seeing the statement in context.

Almost invariably, the attack on evolution will prove illusory. This surprisingly common argument reflects several levels of ignorance about evolution.

The first mistake is that evolution does not teach that humans descended from monkeys; it states that both have a common ancestor. The parent species may survive indefinitely thereafter, or it may become extinct. The origin of life remains very much a mystery, but biochemists have learned about how primitive nucleic acids, amino acids and other building blocks of life could have formed and organized themselves into self-replicating, self-sustaining units, laying the foundation for cellular biochemistry.

Astrochemical analyses hint that quantities of these compounds might have originated in space and fallen to Earth in comets, a scenario that may solve the problem of how those constituents arose under the conditions that prevailed when our planet was young. Creationists sometimes try to invalidate all of evolution by pointing to science's current inability to explain the origin of life. But even if life on Earth turned out to have a nonevolutionary origin for instance, if aliens introduced the first cells billions of years ago , evolution since then would be robustly confirmed by countless microevolutionary and macroevolutionary studies.

Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance. Chance plays a part in evolution for example, in the random mutations that can give rise to new traits , but evolution does not depend on chance to create organisms, proteins or other entities.

As long as the forces of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times. But in the s Richard Hardison, then at Glendale College, wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet's.

On average, the program re-created the phrase in just iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare's entire play in just four and a half days. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that systems must become more disordered over time. Living cells therefore could not have evolved from inanimate chemicals, and multicellular life could not have evolved from protozoa.

This argument derives from a misunderstanding of the Second Law. If it were valid, mineral crystals and snowflakes would also be impossible, because they, too, are complex structures that form spontaneously from disordered parts. The Second Law actually states that the total entropy of a closed system one that no energy or matter leaves or enters cannot decrease.

Entropy is a physical concept often casually described as disorder, but it differs significantly from the conversational use of the word. More important, however, the Second Law permits parts of a system to decrease in entropy as long as other parts experience an offsetting increase.

Thus, our planet as a whole can grow more complex because the sun pours heat and light onto it, and the greater entropy associated with the sun's nuclear fusion more than rebalances the scales. Simple organisms can fuel their rise toward complexity by consuming other forms of life and nonliving materials.

Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features. On the contrary, biology has catalogued many traits produced by point mutations changes at precise positions in an organism's DNA —bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example.

Mutations that arise in the homeobox Hox family of development-regulating genes in animals can also have complex effects. Hox genes direct where legs, wings, antennae and body segments should grow. In fruit flies, for instance, the mutation called Antennapedia causes legs to sprout where antennae should grow.

These abnormal limbs are not functional, but their existence demonstrates that genetic mistakes can produce complex structures, which natural selection can then test for possible uses.

Moreover, molecular biology has discovered mechanisms for genetic change that go beyond point mutations, and these expand the ways in which new traits can appear.

Functional modules within genes can be spliced together in novel ways. Whole genes can be accidentally duplicated in an organism's DNA, and the duplicates are free to mutate into genes for new, complex features. Comparisons of the DNA from a wide variety of organisms indicate that this is how the globin family of blood proteins evolved over millions of years.

Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life. Evolutionary biologists have written extensively about how natural selection could produce new species. For instance, in the model called allopatry, developed by Ernst Mayr of Harvard University, if a population of organisms were isolated from the rest of its species by geographical boundaries, it might be subjected to different selective pressures. Changes would accumulate in the isolated population.

If those changes became so significant that the splinter group could not or routinely would not breed with the original stock, then the splinter group would be reproductively isolated and on its way toward becoming a new species.

Nautilus shell has become a symbol of evolution and biological change. As the creature that occupies the shell outgrows one chamber, it builds another, larger chamber next to it, creating a growing spiral pattern. Natural selection is the best studied of the evolutionary mechanisms, but biologists are open to other possibilities as well.

Biologists are constantly assessing the potential of unusual genetic mechanisms for causing speciation or for producing complex features in organisms. Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and others have persuasively argued that some cellular organelles, such as the energy-generating mitochondria, evolved through the symbiotic merger of ancient organisms.

Thus, science welcomes the possibility of evolution resulting from forces beyond natural selection. Yet those forces must be natural; they cannot be attributed to the actions of mysterious creative intelligences whose existence, in scientific terms, is unproved.

Speciation is probably fairly rare and in many cases might take centuries. Furthermore, recognizing a new species during a formative stage can be difficult because biologists sometimes disagree about how best to define a species.

The most widely used definition, Mayr's Biological Species Concept, recognizes a species as a distinct community of reproductively isolated populations—sets of organisms that normally do not or cannot breed outside their community. In practice, this standard can be difficult to apply to organisms isolated by distance or terrain or to plants and, of course, fossils do not breed.

Biologists therefore usually use organisms' physical and behavioral traits as clues to their species membership. Nevertheless, the scientific literature does contain reports of apparent speciation events in plants, insects and worms. In most of these experiments, researchers subjected organisms to various types of selection—for anatomical differences, mating behaviors, habitat preferences and other traits—and found that they had created populations of organisms that did not breed with outsiders.

For example, William R. Salt of the University of California, Davis, demonstrated that if they sorted a group of fruit flies by their preference for certain environments and bred those flies separately over 35 generations, the resulting flies would refuse to breed with those from a very different environment.

Evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils—creatures that are half reptile and half bird, for instance. Actually, paleontologists know of many detailed examples of fossils intermediate in form between various taxonomic groups. One of the most famous fossils of all time is Archaeopteryx , which combines feathers and skeletal structures peculiar to birds with features of dinosaurs.

A flock's worth of other feathered fossil species, some more avian and some less, has also been found. A sequence of fossils spans the evolution of modern horses from the tiny Eohippus. An amazing fossil creature from million years ago named Tiktaalik embodies the predicted and long-sought transition of certain fishes to life on land.

Whales had four-legged ancestors that walked on land, and creatures known as Ambulocetus and Rodhocetus helped to make that transition. Fossil seashells trace the evolution of various mollusks through millions of years. Perhaps 20 or more hominins not all of them our ancestors fill the gap between Lucy the australopithecine and modern humans.

Creationists, though, dismiss these fossil studies. They argue that Archaeopteryx is not a missing link between reptiles and birds—it is just an extinct bird with reptilian features. They want evolutionists to produce a weird, chimeric monster that cannot be classified as belonging to any known group. Even if a creationist does accept a fossil as transitional between two species, he or she may then insist on seeing other fossils intermediate between it and the first two.

These frustrating requests can proceed ad infinitum and place an unreasonable burden on the always incomplete fossil record. Nevertheless, evolutionists can cite further supportive evidence from molecular biology. All organisms share most of the same genes, but as evolution predicts, the structures of these genes and their products diverge among species, in keeping with their evolutionary relationships. These molecular data also show how various organisms are transitional within evolution.

Living things have fantastically intricate features—at the anatomical, cellular and molecular levels—that could not function if they were any less complex or sophisticated. The only prudent conclusion is that they are the products of intelligent design, not evolution.

In theologian William Paley wrote that if one finds a pocket watch in a field, the most reasonable conclusion is that someone dropped it, not that natural forces created it there. By analogy, Paley argued, the complex structures of living things must be the handiwork of direct, divine invention. Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species as an answer to Paley: he explained how natural forces of selection, acting on inherited features, could gradually shape the evolution of ornate organic structures.

Generations of creationists have tried to counter Darwin by citing the example of the eye as a structure that could not have evolved. The eye's ability to provide vision depends on the perfect arrangement of its parts, these critics say. Natural selection could thus never favor the transitional forms needed during the eye's evolution—what good is half an eye? Biology has vindicated Darwin: researchers have identified primitive eyes and light-sensing organs throughout the animal kingdom and have even tracked the evolutionary history of eyes through comparative genetics.

S adults say humans have always existed in their present form, while 81 percent say humans have evolved over time. By contrast, in the two-question approach, nearly one third of respondents 31 percent say humans have always existed in their present form, and 68 percent say they evolved over time.

These results suggest that some Americans who do accept that humans have evolved are reluctant to say so in the two-question approach, perhaps because they are uncomfortable placing themselves on the secular side of a cultural divide.

The effect of the different question formats is especially pronounced among two of the most religious subsets of U. Christians: white evangelical Protestants and black Protestants. Similarly, 59 percent of black Protestants who were asked about this topic in the two-question format say humans have always existed in their present form. These findings are in keeping with arguments by sociologists of religion that highly religious Americans may feel conflicted about saying humans have evolved, unless they are able to clarify that they also believe God had a hand in the development of life.

Indeed, the subset of people who respond differently to the two survey approaches consists mainly of those who believe that God or a higher power played a role in human evolution. For example, nearly all white evangelical Protestants who say humans have evolved—whether in a branched-choice or single-question format—also say God had a role in human evolution.

There are smaller differences among Catholics in response to the two different question formats, and white mainline Protestants express roughly the same views about evolution regardless of the approach used. Overwhelming majorities of the religiously unaffiliated those who describe their religion as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular say humans have evolved over time on both the two-question 87 percent and the single-question format 88 percent.

Prior to this recent experiment, the center tested various versions of a two-step approach to asking about evolution. In one line of testing, we varied the survey context that is, the questions that immediately precede the evolution questions but found no differences in survey responses.

Considered together, the experiments illustrate the importance of testing multiple ways of asking about evolution. For some people, views about the origins and development of human life are bound up with deeply held religious beliefs.

Indeed, the data show that a sizable share of Americans believe both that life on Earth has evolved over time and that God played some role in the evolutionary process.

The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. Answer: I could give you hundreds of examples, but I'll settle for three. Let's start with the early Paleozoic strata of the Grand Canyon.

As John S. As the land surface subsided beneath the ocean, the western ocean moved eastward covering the land. The limestone far out to sea, the shale closer to shore, and the sandstone right by the shore were being deposited all at the same time. Two lines of evidence prove this. Firstly, these facies intertongue deeply with each other, as the diagram shows.

Secondly, species that lived for only an instant of geological time left fossil horizons that slice slantwise across the facies. For instance, the horizon of the Olenellus Trilobite slices right across the Tapeats Sandstone; a little higher up, the Glossopelura Trilobite does the same through the Bright Angel Shales. These fossil horizons each represent an instant of geological time. The two lines of evidence show how the three facies formed together simultaneously, and how different parts of the same facies are of different ages.

Volcanic deposits slice cross facies as well as do fossils. In the southern Rocky Mountains, bentonite beds slice across the facies of the Cretaceous system of rocks. Bentonite is a rock that consists of clays that come from weathered and chemically altered volcanic debris.

As Steam, Carroll, and Clark say on page Because bentonite beds represent a single event of short duration and can be followed for hundreds of kilometers through the changing facies of the Cretaceous clastic wedge, they are invaluable for establishing correlation. On page , Stearn, Carroll, and Clark show a picture of the sedimentary facies that formed as the Taconic mountains of Ordovician times.

As these mountains grew on the east coast of what is now the United States, the river deltas consisting of sediments derived from these mountains built their way further and further westward from these mountains. A shale facies in the east near these mountains interfingers with and gives way to a limestone facies the Chicamauga limestone in the west.

However, a layer of clay that represent, a volcanic deposit slices right across the shale facies into the Chicamauga limestone. As Stearn, Carroll, and Clark say:. Facies of the Lower Grand Canyon: Thin, highly persistent layers of clay occur within Middle and Upper Ordovician limestones and shales along the miogeocline and adjacent platform. Although these beds are only a few centimeters thick, they can be traced for hundreds of kilometers from the shale into the limestone facies.

Because they are independent of facies, they make excellent key beds for establishing correlations. With this background under our belts, it is easy to recognize the fallacies of the creationist arguments.

Those homogeneous sedimentary rock deposits covering thousands of square kilometers are really nothing more than sedimentary facies. If the creationists had read their sources more carefully, they would have found that different parts of the same facies are of vastly different ages; conversely, adjacent facies of different types would often be the same age. Our discussion of facies shows there is hardly any way to prevent different facies from forming within the same geological age.

Finally, creationists cannot explain why the fossil horizons slice across facies the way they do. If their hydraulic selection theory were true, the denser fossils would be found in and parallel to the sandstone facies, and the lighter fossils would be found in and parallel to the limestone facies, not slicing across.

This means the fossils are a far better clue to the relative ages of the rocks than the rock type. And it doesn't take quotes from technical journals to show this, either. Freshman textbooks in geology are all anyone needs to set creationist misconceptions straight.

Question: But even if the grosser creationist claims are wrong, couldn't a monster flood produce facies as well? Answer: Not at all. A flood strong enough to move all the sediments of the earth would tend to mix the different types up into one big mishmash. If a Flood of Noah were literal history, we would expect to find only a post-Flood veneer of well-sorted sediments on top of the poorly sorted ones left by the flood. Instead we find huge sediment deposits like those of the Gulf Coast.

A layer of sediments up to 10, meters thick covers the Great Plains, Gulf Coast, and continental shelf. Here the facies of the river flood plains interfinger deeply with the delta facies of the Gulf Coast, which in turn interfinger deeply with the clays of the continental shelf. These deposits first started to form in Cretaceous times a hundred million years ago, and they have been accumulating constantly and without break through all that time on up to this very moment.

These sediments are thousands of times too thick to have accumulated in a mere 5 or 8 thousand year period since Noah's flood. Nor could they have been deposited during the Flood, since they are so obviously continuous with and similar to sediments being deposited today.

A similar point can be made on the deep ocean sediments. They are not a mixed-up jumble, and there is no break in their deposition from cretaceous times to today. True, in both cases the rates of deposition have varied; yet, in both cases the sediment types are so similar from top to bottom that the rates of deposition could not possibly have been much faster than the rates of today.

Question: Kofahl claims that the Mississippi Delta formed in only years. How do you reconcile his claim with your statements about the Gulf Coast sediments? Answer: Its current delta is years old, but it has had dozens of other deltas in the distant past. Every so often it jumps its banks, reaches the Gulf of Mexico by a new path, and starts to build a new delta at its new mouth.

In fact, the Mississippi River had partly changed its course in , emptying into the Gulf through the Atchafalaya River, until the Army Corps of Engineers stepped in to plug the leak. In the early Cenozoic, the Gulf of Mexico extended as far north as Illinois; the Mississippi had its delta there at that time.

These facts, like those on the Gulf Coast and deep sea sediments, can be found in many freshman geology texts. Question: Is there any more evidence against the hydraulic selection theory besides the sedimentary facies you mentioned? Answer: Yes, the fossils are in the right order for evolution but not for hydraulic selection. The light animals refuse to stay in the shallow rocks, and the dense animals refuse to stay in the deep rocks where they belong according to creationism.

Trilobites, light fragile creatures resembling pillbugs, tend to be found only in the deepest rocks. Pterodactyls flying dinosaurs are found no higher than the middle rocks, whereas birds are found mostly in the shallowest rocks. Turtles, dense creatures, tend to be found from middle to high rocks, not in the deep ones.

Ammonites, light buoyant cephalopod molluscs that resemble the chambered nautilus, tend to be found in the lower and middle rocks, not in the upper ones. There may be many hundreds of obviously distinct species of trilobites of a given size and general shape; the same applies to ammonites. The ICR hydraulic selection theory predicts that many species of the same size, shape, and weight will be found scrambled together in the same rocks, but real rocks show that each distinct species usually has its own horizon absolutely distinct from the horizons of other species of the same size, shape, and weight.

Even within the same formation, geologists often find trilobites of the same size and shape segregated by species into horizontal layers. Thus the hydraulic selection theory bristles with contradictions.

Strangely enough, Whitcomb and Morris , staunch champions of the hydraulic selection theory, show nothing but scorn for an orthodox geologist Daniel J.

Jones where he documents some small scale hydraulic selection. Jones' article merely describes in detail processes having nothing to do with evolution that experts observe in progress today moving microscopic fossils out of their proper order. He describes wave action, turbidity currents, streams, ground water, wind, glaciers, burrowing animals, and other various processes.

He even gives specific examples actually observed in various parts of the world today. He lists evidences having nothing to do with faunal succession or evolution that should put an observer on his guard that the microfossils he is observing have been displaced. For instance, if these microfossils are as large as the sediment they're buried with, then small scale hydraulic selection may have sorted them according to size out of their proper sequence.

Other telltale signs to look for are fragments of shells, lack of normal series of growth stages, and long fossils pointing in the same direction. Whitcomb and Morris say that Jones is merely trying to rationalize away fossils that are in the wrong order for evolution by assuming without proof that the damning fossils were somehow moved out of order:.

It is not at all uncommon for the smaller fossils on which rock identification is commonly based to be found out of place in the expected sequences. Such anomalies are usually explained as simple "displacements" Which, being interpreted, means that when fossils are not found in the stratum to which they have previously been assigned by evolutionary theory, it must be assumed that they have somehow been displaced subsequent to their original deposition.

And all that poor Jones did to deserve this gross misrepresentation was simply to supply a dab of evidence for hydraulic selection having nothing whatever to do with evolution.

Question: According to creationists, there are plenty of places where the fossils are in the wrong order for evolution. This must mean geologists have to assume evolution so as to arrange the geological time scale so as to date , , the, fossils so as to erect an evolutionary sequence so as to prove evolution, thereby reasoning in a vicious circle. When the fossils are in the wrong order, geologists apparently assume the "older" rocks were shoved on top of the younger ones thrust faulting , or else, that the strata were overturned recumbent folds , even though there is no physical evidence for these processes.

In particular, Whitcomb and Morris maintain the physical evidence proves the Lewis Overthrust and Heart M, ountain Overthrust never slid an inch. Answer: Whitcomb and Morris, again, quote their sources badly out of context. There is plenty of physical evidence having nothing to do with fossils or evolution that show thrust faulting to be very real.

The Lewis Overthrust of Glacier National Park, Montana, consists of the deformed Precambrian limestones of the Belt Formation that were shoved along a horizontal thrust fault on top of much younger but viciously crumpled Cretaceous shales.

These limestones, by the way, contain stromatolites and mudcracks of the sort seen forming in the Bahamas today. Stromatolites are a distinct form of calcareous deposits left by algae. Ross and Rezak wrote in their article about the Lewis Overthrust that the rocks along the thrust, fault are badly crumpled, but Whitcomb and Morris p.

Most visitors, especially those who stay on the roads, get the impression that the Belt strata are undisturbed and lie almost as flat today as they did when deposited in the sea which vanished so many million years ago. But if we read the rest of Ross's and Rezak's paragraph. Actually, they are folded. From points on and near the trails in the park, it is possible to observe places where the Belt series, as revealed in outcrops on ridges, cliffs, and canyon walls, are folded and crumpled almost as intricately as the soft younger strata in the mountains south of the park and in the Great Plains adjoining the park to the east.

The intricate crumpling and crushing in the immediate vicinity of the main overthrust, visible in localities like that near Marias Pass, shown in figure , must have taken place when the heavy overthrust slab was forced over the soft rocks beneath In some places only a single fault surface formed, with crushed and crumpled soft rocks beneath Rocks between these faults were crumpled and crushed in a variety of ways.

In some places the zone in which fracturing occurred was as much as feet thick; generally it must have been at least several hundred feet thick. Question: Whitcomb and Morris , pp. If any thrust block had slid over that little layer of shale, it would have obliterated it.

How do you explain that? Answer: Actually, the thrust faulting is the only process that could have created this layer. Notice that the underlying shales are crushed, and the overlying limestones are distorted, whereas this little shale layer is quite level. How could the limestones have been deposited distorted-looking on top of a level layer? Obviously, the shale layer consists of powder that was ground up in the thrust-faulting process and later cemented; the sliding created the shale layer.

Question: Whitcomb and Morris claim that geologists cannot find any possible roots for the Heart Mountain Overthrust of Wyoming. How do you prove that overthrusting could have really formed it? Answer: Simple! The level Cambrian strata broke off along a bedding plane, and slid downhill. On page , they reproduce a photograph from an article by Pierce , and insist that Pierce's picture illustrates the place where the thrust block rests on the underlying rock.

They quote Pierce out of context as if he were puzzled that the rocks in the picture show no evidence of sliding even though all good evolutionists know that fossils never come in that order. Actually, this picture has nothing to do with the thrust block at all. Pierce explains that the thrust block slid over younger rocks, that parts of the thrust block eroded away, and that a volcano finally deposited some debris over the area where a piece of the block had once stood.

This volcanic "early basic breccia" is illustrated in Pierce's photograph; he only states that the volcanic debris, not being a part of the original thrust block, never slid. Besides, Whitcomb and Morris ignore some deformation of the thrust block that shows it really slid after all. Pierce notes that the thrust block strata are often grossly deformed even when the underlying strata are not.

He even shows how the strata from one piece of the thrust block are often sliced across at a slant, forming an angle with the horizontal strata underlying the thrust fault. Whitcomb and Morris could not explain this fact, but it makes sense if overthrusting has really occurred. Question: But aren't geologists sort of bound to evolution as a matter of principle? Answer: If you mean that they are begging the question, then I must certainly disagree.