Thank you for joining us today. We apologize for all the questions we couldn't answer due to the time.
You will find the answers in our second session.
Name
Host
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Profession
Answer
Nicholas Metzke Thanks to the readers. They can feel free to email me at NCSE at matzke@ncseweb.org if I could help answer questions etc. I am particularly interested about developments regarding creationism in Islamic countries. Thanks!
Mustafa Akyol Many thanks to IslamOnline readers for their interest. Further information on this topic can be found at my blog, www.thewhitepath.com. I would also be pleased to reply to questions at akyol@mustafaakyol.org.
Name
Ahmad
- Egypt
Profession
Question
The biggest hurdle in the path of evolution is the 'missing link'. How does the theory of evolution explain the lack of it?
Answer
Nicholas Matzke The common public understanding of a "missing link" is basically an urban legend. First, evolution is not a chain (the "Great Chain of Being" is a pre-Darwinian model of the organization of life) -- it is a tree. And either way, there could be many more than One Single Missing Link.
Once that is cleared up, we come to the claim of more informed creationists, that there are no fossils with transitional morphologies (transitional forms) showing how ancestral species gradually diversified into modern organisms. This claim is endlessly repeated by creationists, usually along with some standard recycled quotes mined from evolutionary biologists. I wouldn't be surprised if Akyol posts the Gould quote about "the trade secret of paleontology". So I will preemptively post Gould's own rebuttal to creationist misquotes of him:
“Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists — whether through design or stupidity, I do not know — as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.”
— "Evolution as Fact and Theory," Hen's Teet
Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory," Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994, p. 260.
Now, I will show readers some transitional fossils to disprove the creationist claim. Follow the links:
Fossils in between apes and humans:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section1.html#morphological_intermediates_ex3
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/images/hominids2.jpg
Brain size in fossil human ("hominid") skulls over the last few million years:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/brainsize.gif
This link covers reptiles/birds, reptiles/mammals, ape/humans, early whales with legs, and seacows with legs. The graphics are quite impressive
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section1.html#morphological_intermediates
And I already showed you the dinobird, http://research.amnh.org/vertpaleo/dinobird.html , which along with Archeoptyryx and other feathered dinosaurs discovered in the last few years has clarified the origin of birds immensely.
So, this is just a sample of what is out there. As creationist Kurt Wise once admitted, these transitional fossils are expected on the evolutionary view, and not the creationist view. Most creationists pretend it all doesn't exist, or try and make it disappear with quotes out of context and the like.
Now, certainly, we don't have every fossil we would like to have, and there are many "missing links" -- but we have enough transitional forms with well-fossilized organisms, e.g. all of the major vertebrate groups, that we can be confident that these transformations did indeed happen.
The creationists can't even agree on which hominid skulls are apes and which are humans, see: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/compare.html This means, of course, that the skulls are inbetween, as evolution predicts.
Mustafa Akyol Well, what constitutes as a missing link or not has been a matter of debate, for sure. So Darwinians claim that they have some missing links, but others doubt whether these really create a lineage. The standard Darwinian answer has been "well we have a few and will find out more, soon." However, some prominent paleontologists have challenged this apologetic. From late 70's on, Gould and Eldredge challenged classical Darwinism and proposed "punctuated equilibrium" instead. This means "evolution happened too fast and did not leave behind transitional forms." (Well, if there are no traces left, how do you know it happened in the first place?)
Anyway, Gould was criticized by Dawkins for proposing an evolutionary scenario without a mechanism, like Darwin's small step-by-step changes. Gould, in response, argued that his view was supported by the fossils. So one side had the fossil, the other had the supposed mechanism, and they did not match.
The fossil problem still persist for Darwinism, especially in the Cambrian explosion phenomenon. Cambrian is the geological time when there was "Big Bang of biology". Before it, there were a few simple soft bodied living forms. During the Cambrian, all the major animals group (phyla) appeared quite abruptly.
Steve Meyer has a very good scientific paper on the Cambrian, titled " The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories." He concludes that the best explanation is design.
You can read it here:
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2177
Name
Sally
- Canada
Profession
Question
Why should – or shouldn't – intelligent design be taught in school?
Answer
Nicholas Matzke There are several reasons why ID should not be taught in schools. The most important one is that it is pseudoscience, i.e. fake science, and that kids who are taught ID are basically being misled and misinformed about the results of science. If you put ID in the classroom for reasons of "fairness", "balance", etc., then you are going to have to let in all of the other pseudosciences for the same reason -- e.g. denial that HIV causes AIDS (which happens to be supported by IDers Phillip Johnson and Jonathan Wells), Holocaust denial (which happens to be supported by Harun Yayha's organization, a group which Mustafa Akyol worked for I believe), UFO's, bigfoot, etc.
The second reason, particularly important in the U.S., is that the government should not be engaging in religious instruction in the public schools. Government establishment of religion is barred in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution because from the beginning the U.S. has been made up of diverse faiths, many of which fled religious oppression in Europe. The Founding Fathers realized that governmental establishment of religion resulted in strife, because while it might please the majority religion, members of minority religions would be excluded. People often think that teaching ID would be a good thing because they agree with it, until they realize that it would mean that someone else could teach *their* religious view in schools.
The situation is somewhat different in other countries that do not have a tradition of strict church/state establishment, but I think the history of conflict resulting from governments promoting particular religious views shows that keeping the government out of religious matters is probably a good idea in general.
Private schools are another matter of course, and one can debate teaching ID in a comparative religious context -- but in the U.S., if one is going to do comparative religion in a social studies class, I think it would be much more important for kids to learn about world religions than about a strange pseudoscience like ID, invented for legal purposes. But there might be situations in which this sort of thing would be appropriate, while teaching a variety of creation stories from various religions.
Mustafa Akyol I don't think that Intelligent Design should be mandated in science curriculums, because it is a new theory that needs to be developed, tested and refined. But students should be taught that there is a controversy going on about life's origins. Most textbooks in the West teach Darwinism as an undisputed fact. But this is not true. More than 600 scientists right now question Darwinism.
If schools and teacher want to include ID into their classes, that's fine, too. The core issue here is academic freedom and educational objectivity. We would be wrong to indoctrinate kids with Marxism, but we can teach ABOUT it, along with the critiques that people has brought about Marxism.
Name
Avery
- United States
Profession
Self-Unemployeed
Question
Mustafa Akyol: In your previous comment you stated you supported ID because you "think it is supported by the scientific evidence"... Do you 'know' of any evidence that supports ID, or just 'think' that it is out there somewhere to be found?
And "don't think that the origin of life and the origin of complex biological systems can be explained by the natural processes..." Some amount of evidence has convinced you of what you would call 'micro-evolution'...How many explanations or how many steps of the natural processes would it take to make you 'think' that it might be possible?
Answer
Mustafa Akyol The steps I would need to be convinced are the ones that Darwin himself described.
"Numerous, successive slight modifications."
Show me that life can originate from a prebiotic soup, and I will retreat from Intelligent Design. Or show me a natural process that produces rock formations like the Stonehenge, I will stop thinking that it was designed by intelligent beings.
Actually everybody accepts that life on Earth seems to have been designed. Richard Dawkins says that in his book, The Blind Watchmaker. But he says this is apparent design and actually there are natural mechanisms creating these complex being. Well, OK, then show us those mechanisms.. But instead, the Darwinians take it granted that such mechanisms exist and impose this faith of theirs as an integral part of science. No, science does not have such a commitment
Name
Ahmed Bahaa
- Egypt
Profession
Question
Is the current theory of evolution the same as Darwin's orignal theory or an expanded version of it?
Answer
Nicholas Matzke "Evolved." Modern Evolutionary Theory (I will call it MET) has many features not found in Darwin's work. Darwin is famous for:
(1) making the first compelling case for common ancestry in a "tree of life" pattern
(2) for arguing for natural selection as the explanation of functional adaptation.
(1) was accepted immediately, (2) was not really dominant in the scientific community until the 1930s. In the 1930s-1940s we had the "neo-darwinian synthesis" which combined natural selection and Mendelian genetics into population genetics, a mathematical description of how genes spread in populations under the force of selection. This body of theory led to things like neutral evolution (where selective differences are near 0), geographically localized speciation (from which "punctuated equilibrium" was derived), etc. In the 1960s onward we have had the incorporation of molecular biology providing the molecular mechanisms of heredity and mutation, and now we have "evo-devo", the synthesis of population genetics and developmental biology.
Much of this Darwin could not have even imagined. But it is impressive that his basic theory has stood up to repeated testing which each of these developments.
Mustafa Akyol It is not the same. Darwin did not know about genetics. What we have today is neo-Darwinism, which is an updated version of Darwin's original theory with modern genetics. But natural selection, Darwin's main idea, is still there. Neo-Darwinism adds random mutations as another "mechanism" of evolution.
Name
Stan K.
- United States
Profession
Question
I keep hearing of staggering evidence supporting evolution, what's the basis of an argument in support of creationism or intelligent design then?
Answer
Mustafa Akyol There is a wide range of evidence which supports what scientist call "micro-evolution", which means small-scale changes in an existing species. Animals and plants do change and adopt. But there is no observation showing us that truly new biological information -- like new genes, proteins, organels, organs -- arise through Darwinians mechanisms. Darwinists extrapolate from micro to macro evolution, but that's an article of faith. Micro-evolution does not produce new systems over time. No matter how long you breed horses, they will not develop wings. And, by the way, even some of the very famous "staggering evidence" of Darwinism turned out to be wrong in the past years. Two striking examples are the peppered moths of 19th century Britain and the embryo drawings of Ernst Haeckel. In both cases, the evidence was faked in order to produce evidence for Darwinism
Nicholas Matzke Well, there is reality and then there is what creationist/ID proponents say. There are hundreds of creationist arguments, often very obscure. Short rebuttals to most of them are here: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html In my opinion most creationist arguments are just wrong, usually uninformed, half-baked, or based on misleading rhetoric or misquoting authorities. A few of the creationist arguments rise to level of "science hasn't explained X yet", which is better, but usually scientists actually do know quite a bit about X, they just don't completely understand everything yet, which is very common in science.
For example, the "best" ID argument is that complex biological adaptations could not evolve gradually because all of the parts would have to come together at once for the system to function. This argument seems somewhat impressive at first, but it falls apart when you look at it closely because structures can and have changed function in evolution, a process called cooption or exaptation. For example, penguin flippers are derived from the wings of flying birds, those wings came from dinosaur forelimbs (see the amazing "dinobird" fossil by going here: http://research.amnh.org/vertpaleo/dinobird.html ), etc.
Darwin himself emphasized this point in 1859, but creationists have mostly ignored it. The ID camp found this out to their chagrin in the Dover trial, when Michael Behe was challenged on his claim that the immune system, a complex biochemical system that produces antibodies to diseases when you are vaccinated, could not evolve.
He said the scientists had "no answers" on how it evolved. But in fact, hundreds of papers have been published on exactly this topic. When cross-examining Behe, we stacked up a pile of books and papers on evolutionary immunology on Behe's witness stand to challenge his claim -- and yet he dismissed them all with a wave of his hand, saying they were not detailed enough for him. Of course he has no explanation whatsoever except for "ID did it". Anyway, expert witness Kenneth Miller said it best afterwards: "Ain't nothing going to convince this guy." The links, documentation, commentary, etc. on this episode are here: http://www2.ncseweb.org/wp/?p=124
Mustafa Akyol Well, there is reality and what Darwinists say. First of all, it is not just ID proponents who disagree with the standard Darwinian stories. Penguins are of course birds but the origin of birds is a controversial issue. The dinosaur theory, which is so popular in the media, is basically a just-so story. Ask this to Alan Feduccia, one of the world's most prominent ornithologists. He is not an ID proponent, he is an evolutionist, but he thinks that birds did not come from dinosaurs and this is a great myth. The dinosaurs which are proposed to be the ancestor of Archaeopteryx, the first known bird, is much younger from it... This is just one flaw in the whole dinobird hype.
As for Behe and irreducible complexity, Mr. Matzke is doing injustice. It is not just Behe who says that there are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the origin of complex biochemical systems. Let me just give you a quote from Franklin M. Harold, an evolutionary biochemist:
"We must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations." (Franklin M. Harold, The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms and the Order of Life 205 (New York, Oxford University Press 2001).)
Now ID does not say "we don't know how this evolved, so it must be designed." No, there are mathematical criteria to detect design. (See Dembski's work).
Kenneth Miller is not convincing Behe or any other objective commentator on the origin of biological complexity, because he is filling all the gaps with a commitment to naturalism. For Miller, see http://www.designinference.com/documents/2003.02.Miller_Response.htm
Name
Reef
- United Kingdom
Profession
Question
I view evolution theory as a doctrine like any other with the difference that it does not "allow God a foot in the door!". This is essential to its existence. But from the beginning, it contradicts a basic requirement of life. Constantly, in our daily lives, we opt for the most likely event to explain a situation and to solve our problems. Evolution opts for the most unlikely event simply because the alternative implies acceptance of a creator. I guess this kind of twisted reasoning wil not last and a better theory that recognises the existence of an all powerful all wise creator will replace it. ID seems to be the first step but the way forward is to recognise the existence of an other force that science cannot comprehend and which shapes all existence and all life according to what it sees fit. Only then can we look at the diversity of creation and find ways to explain how the creator brought into existence innumerable types of plants, animals, birds, fish and insects. At this point, I'd say that life comes from life and there is scope for a certain type of evolution in that a creator would not need to re-invent the wheel when making a new species.
Answer
Nicholas Matzke There are several prongs to this question, but the most important is the one that is fundamental to creationism in general: many people think that if evolution is true, and there is a natural explanation for life, then God of a higher power doesn't exist. But this is really not the case. Does anyone feel that their faith is threatened by the fact that we have a natural explanation for the weather, i.e. hurricanes, droughts, rain, snow, lightning, etc.? All of these things are mentioned as being controlled by God in the Bible (and I assume other holy texts and religious traditions), and many people pray about these things, but for some reason no one goes around and accuses the meteorologists and climatologists of promoting atheism. Benjamin Franklin got some flack when he developed the lightning rod in the 1700s, because people thought that this thwarted God's will. But soon people realized that this didn't make much sense, and that it was silly to think that a human invention like a lightning rod, based on a natural explanation of lightning (electricity), could contradict God's will. We can say the same thing about atomism, heliocentrism, etc. -- they were religiously controversial for a time, but eventually people realized that having a natural explanation for things made creation more amazing, rather than less so. Evolution is just one of the bigger and historically more recent shocks along these lines. But if someone really thinks that having a natural explanation for the origin of species really promotes atheism, then they should be fair about it and say the same thing about the chemists, physicists, meteorologists, geologists, etc., because they all discovered and rely upon natural explanations. Why single out evolution?
Mustafa Akyol This view is interesting but the nature does not have to comply with our intuitions. It could well be argued that the Creator created the universe without a need for any design and things would just evolve by themselves. But this would be a deistic, not a theistic faith. Moreover, this does not seem compatible with the scientific evidence because the complexity of life and the capacity of the natural laws we observe show us that those laws are not enough to create life. That's why biological design seems to be the best explanation for life's origin and the origin of new biological information as well. To have bacteria, fish, butterflies, elephants or humans from simple chemicals, you need very complex information and our experience shows us that information only comes from a mind.
Name
Lujain
- United Kingdom
Profession
Question
I've never understood the nature of the Islamic religious debate against evolutionism. Evolutionism is a science. Islam is not against science. So where exactly does the problem arise?
Answer
Nicholas Matzke I would like to say up front that I am very far from being an expert on Islam and so I cannot presume to speak authoritatively about it. But I think there are some commonalities between Islamic and Christian antievolutionism. These include: (1) antievolutionism is part of a larger conflict between modernism and fundamentalism, (2) fundamentalist adoption of a rigid/literalist interpretation of a holy text. (3) Creation of a pseudoscience to make it appear as if religious apologetics has the authority and prestige of science. It is a very strange fact that Islamic creationists in Turkey have borrowed/plagiarized much of their material from the Institute for Creation Research in the U.S., a young-earth creationist group here that believes in a strict Biblical literalism, including 6,000 year old earth, Noah's flood (as global), and also many believe that Armageddon is coming in a titanic battle in the Middle East. Of course, they believe this because they believe if they give up on Biblical literalism, then sin wasn't caused by Adam, and therefore Jesus died for nothing and didn't need to be resurrected. So it is very odd that e.g. fundamentalist Islamic groups such as Harun Yahya have adopted much of their material.
Mustafa Akyol There is no problem between Islam and "evolution" per se, but the meaning of the latter is open to interpretation. If evolution means that there is continuous change in nature and that species adopt to their environments, I think that's a scientific statement and it has no contradiction with the Muslim faith. However, by the term evolution, modern Darwinians mean something more. They argue that life on Earth is the product of the blind forces of nature and that there is no Creator worth speaking about. "Chance and necessity," as the famous atheist Jacques Monod argued, is their substitute for a Creator. Also George Gaylord Simpson, one of the gurus of neo-Darwinism, in his book "The Meaning of Evolution" put this quite clearly. "Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind," Simpson wrote, "He was not planned." (Simpson 1967, p. 345)
Now I don't think this openly atheistic idea is compatible with Islam. And it is not compatible with the scientific evidence, either. It is a philosophical presupposition that is imposed onto the scientific evidence. Intelligent Design theorists have unveiled this crucial fact and that's why they have been receiving so much reaction.
Nicholas Matzke I should add that for both Christianity and Islam, many people of each faith see no inherent conflict between their religion and science. Often people take the view that texts written 1,000+ years ago were not intended as science textbooks, because the original readers had no experience of atoms, galaxies, deep time, etc. But it took western Christianity hundreds of years to work out the relationship between religion and science, and it haven't finished, so it is not surprising that it might take awhile in Islam and elsewhere also.
Mustafa Akyol Putting the debate as a conflict between modernism and fundamentalism is wrong, I think. It is more of a debate between theism (the belief that there is a God) and atheism on a scientific level. A Muslim believer does not have to be a "fundamentalist" to believe that God created life. This is the very core of the Muslim faith. On the other hand, one does not have to be an atheist to be a modernist. The issue here is not Biblical literalism. It is whether life is designed or not.
Name
Editor
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Profession
Question
Thank you for joining us Nicholas Matzke and Mustafa Akyol.
Can you each give us a short account of your side of the debate please?
Answer
Nicholas Matzke Hi everyone. I am Nick Matzke. I work for the National Center for Science Education in the U.S. We are a nonprofit watchdog group based in Oakland, California, and our mission is to defend the teaching of science, i.e. evolution, in the public schools. This includes educating the public through meetings and talks, answering press questions, keeping statistics on the issue in the US and monitoring creationist activities through a website (www.ncseweb.org) and bimonthly journal. I was the science/creationism advisor for the lawyers in the Pennsylvania Kitzmiller vs. Dover case, where ID was declared unconstitutional. Obviously I think ID is not science, instead it is fundamentalist Christian apologetics, formerly known as "creation science", dressed up to be more secular.
Mustafa Akyol I am a Muslim writer who has been involved in the Intelligent Design/Darwinism debate for about 10 years. I am a proponent of Intelligent Design (ID); I think it is supported by the scientific evidence.
Although I believe that there is evolution in nature in the sense of change and adaptation, I don't think that the origin of life and the origin of complex biological systems can be explained by the natural processes that Darwinian evolution suggests.
