What do Christians really believe about evolution?

Most people in the UK think that religious people believe in six-day creationism. Fortunately, they are wrong.

Less than one in six UK believers prefer separate creation to evolution

The Garden of Eden (Lucas Cranach the Elder (1530)). Note scenes including the creation of Eve, the temptation by the serpent, and the expulsion

A new YouGov poll conducted in Canada and the UK shows two contrasting facts. Among those who call themselves “believers or spiritual”, only 16%, under one in six, rejected evolution in favour of separate creation. A much larger group (39%) thught that “Humans and other living things evolved over time, in a process guided by God”. As an advocate of evolution science, I regard such people as potential allies. “Guided by God” is so vague an expression that it could be taken to include God having set up the laws of nature, which was actually Darwin’s own position, according to his autobiography (here, pp 92-3), when he wrote Origin of Species. (Caveat: the options offered were

1. Humans and other living things were created by God and have always existed in their current form
2. Humans and other living things evolved over time, in a process guided by God
3. Humans and other living things evolved over time as a result of natural selection, in which God played no part
4. I have another view of the origin of species and development of life on Earth which isn’t included in this list
5. I don’t know / I do not have a view on the origin of species and the development of life on Earth

Trillions of Stone Age Artifacts: A Young Earth Anthropology Paradox

If there really were lots of people, not just Noah’s family, and they really were spread out over Africa, and if they really were making tools from some 2.6 million years before present, and if they were profligate throwaways when it came to flint flakes, then a little arithmetic shows that there ought to be trillions (yes, millions of millions) of discarded tool bits all over Africa. And there are.

Earlier, I blogged about time as interval at Siccar Point, and time as process where the lavas of the Giants Causeway were weathered between outflows. Now (see below, reblogged from Naturalis Historia) I can add time as the accumulation of junk. Time shallow by geological standards, but very deep indeed compared with all of human history, or with the imaginings of the author(s) of Genesis. And I don’t think even Ken Ham can talk his way out of this one.

Image from ASU press release, at http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-03/asu-doj022715.php

And this week sees the resolution of another paradox: the oldest tools known date to some 2.6 million years before present (Mybp), but the oldest clearly hominin remains were at 2.4 Mybp. So do we have to infer that australopithecines made tools? Not necessarily, since (see here, and references therein) we now have a decidedly hominin-looking jaw at 2.8 Mybp.

There may be other implications for our ancestry. Jaw bones are the best preserved of all skeletal remains, but on their own they tell us little about what most interests us – the size of the brain case. However, where one fragment was found there may be others, and we can only await further developments.

Naturalis Historia

Trillions of stone artifacts cover the surface of the African continent. The product of the manufacturing of stone tools by hunters and gathers over long periods of time, these stone artifacts literally carpet the ground in some places in Egypt and Libya.

Just how much Stone-Age produced rock is strewn across the African continent?

Imagine a volume of rock equivalent to 42-84 million Great Pyramids of Giza.

The “million” isn’t a typo. That number sounds absolutely fantastic, doesn’t it?  Let’s take a look at how these numbers were derived.

The results of a study just published (see references below) shows how incredibly dense stone artifacts can be in some places in Africa.   Working in a remote location in southern Libya, researchers took surveys from hundreds of one or two-meter square plots. From the tens of thousands of artifacts found in them, they estimated a minimum density of 250,000 stone artifacts…

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No evidence for evolution, says the Reverend

The Rev David Blunt is Minister at North Uist and Grimsay Free Church of Scotland (Continuing), Bayhead, North Uist, not to be confused (Heaven forbid!) with the benighted folks at North Uist, Grimsay, and Berneray Free Church of Scotland, Carinish.

He subscribes to a catechism that states that unless God arbitrarily decides otherwise, I (he, too, come to think of it) am “foreordained to dishonour and wrath, … to the praise of the glory of his (God’s,not the Reverend’s) justice” because of the guilt of Adam’s first sin, rendering us liable to “everlasting separation from the comfortable presence of God, and most grievous torments in soul and body, without intermission, in hell-fire for ever.”

If he really believes that  that is what he believes and preaches, that is no one’s business but his own and his congregations (although I would have grave misgivings should he be preaching such sadistic doctrine to children.)

The Reverend also believes that the devil seeks to confuse us through the teaching of evolution, and  that everything was created over a period of six days, and in order to justify this belief he takes from time to time to the pages of the Hebridean News, where he tells us that

The notion that evolution is responsible for a process of development in living things, beginning with microbes and leading ultimately to men, must be rejected as there is not a single proven fact to support it.

I initially responded,

The Rev David Blunt says that “there is not a single proven fact” to support evolution. If he goes to the website http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ he will find, spelt out in detail, 29 separate arguments and hundreds of supporting facts that show that evolution is true. If he goes to the Biologs website, and looks up Dennis Venema, he will find a brilliant explanation of all this by a  devout evangelical.

If the Rev does not choose to inform himself about the facts,that is his business. But he denies their existence, he is bearing false witness.

The Reverend is clearly a fast reader, since within two days he had digested the 60 or so sections in talkorigins, and Dennis Venema’s excellent 28-part series. And so he was able to reply:

The sort of ‘facts’ which are essential for the theory of evolution to be true include the following: the existence of mutations representing the increase in genetic information necessary to arrive at more advanced life forms; the existence of life forms (extant or extinct) which are obviously transitional in character; the existence of billions of years of time.

Mutations … overwhelmingly detrimental… We still look in vain for specimens which are intermediate between one life form and another. The fossil record, which Darwin expected to provide examples of missing links, has yet to yield them.

Aeons of time are crucial to the theory of evolution yet it cannot be proved that the earth is billions of years old: indeed many scientific facts point to a much younger earth… [Evolution] must be able to account not simply for microbes to men but molecules to men – or even more precisely – particles to people. In other words it must be able to explain how life can arise from non-life. That is a real leap of faith!

There is no observable evidence for the theory of evolution. It is not testable over time and cannot be verified.

My response:

To pretend that biological evolution has to include an explanation of the origins of life is at best mistaken, at worst dishonest. Consider that before the 1950s, we did not know the origin of atoms. Nonetheless, atomic theory had been the central concept of chemistry since before the 1820s. Similarly, we do not know the origins of life, but evolution has been the central concept of biology since before the 1870s.

No one doubts that most mutations are harmful. A few of them do increase fitness. Harmful mutations are bred out, while fitness-enhancing mutations spread. It’s really that simple. Indeed, the whole of plant and animal breeding is one vast demonstration of evolution, albeit evolution directed by us rather than by the pressures of the natural environment. The Rev Blunt admits the occurrence of evolution under the pressure of artificial selection. How then can he claim that it is in principle impossible under natural selection, or that evolution has never been verified?

Australopithecus afarensis skull, through www.sculpturegallery.com

Museums are full of intermediate forms, if not the great-great-grandparents of living species, then at any rate their great-uncles. If the Rev cares to visit http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12052-009-0135-2  (free article) he will find a whole series of intermediates between land mammals and present-day whales. If he visits the Smithsonian museum‘s site at http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species, he will find out about over a dozen extinct species intermediate between apes and modern humans. If evolution is not true, why were these intermediates ever created?The age of the Earth is dated at over 4 billion years using some half-dozen different radiometric techniques. These the Rev Blunt will find explained, by an evangelical Christian, at “Radiometric Dating – A Christian Perspective“. We have known since 1928 that radioactive decay rates depend on the general laws of physics. If these had been different 4 billion years ago, the rocks wouldn’t have formed in the first place. If they had been almost 1000 fold faster in the past, as Young Earth creationists must claim, the rocks would have been melted by the heat produced.

Gatesy et al,.  Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution  Volume 66, Issue 2, February 2013, Pages 479–506

doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2012.10.012

I conclude by pointing out that the fossil record clearly shows that whales are descended from land mammals. Yet Genesis states that whales were created on Day 5, and land mammals on Day 6. One of two things follows. Either Genesis is not, and was never meant to be, a science textbook. Or God has deliberately deceived us by creating a highly detailed but totally misleading fossil record.

This is a choice that each of us has to make in our own way. There are no alternatives.

I predict that the Reverend will reply, challenging me to turn a bacterium into a biochemist within the timescale of a research grant.

Update: Actually, rereading his material, I see that he did better than that, accusing me of clutching at whiskers (that’s a good line, I think I’ll use it) in my discussion of whale phylogeny, repeating the claim, long since refuted,  that data from Mt St Helen’s shows radiometric dating to be unreliable, and finally asserting that the only valid evidence is eye-witness evidence.

There is no eye-witness evidence of the Ice Ages, which helped shape the mountains of North Uist. Does the reverend therefore think they never happened?

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Discovery Institute barking mad over Australopithecus sediba’s diet

This post originally appeared on The 21st Floor

I don’t normally bother with the Creationist newssheet, Evolution News and Views, but the recent article there by David Klinghoffergoes beyond what I am willing to suffer in silence. Klinghoffer himself, of course, is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, and the author of How Would God Vote? Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative. I do not know his academic credentials – I seem to remember that he is a lawyer, but neither his biography on the Discovery Institute website, nor his Wikipedia entry (which follows that biography rather closely), give any details, and I hope that some readers can tell us more about this.

I also think it worth noting that Klinghoffer’s article has nothing to do with Intelligent Design, misguided though that may be. Like so much Discovery Institute material, it is an attack on the well-established facts of common ancestry. In other words, what is being advocated is, in the strictest and narrowest sense of the word, creationism. And not even creationism as a philosophical or religious position, but as an interpretation of the facts of biology, in a manner that has been intellectually unsustainable since around 1830.

Anyway, to business: in my own recent posting here I describe why, when announcing their finding in 2010, the discoverers of Au. sediba chose, on reflection, to include it in the genus Australopithecus rather than in the genus Homo. That 2010 account does, however, give a long list of ways in which Au. sediba is closer than Australopithecus to modern humans, and the title I chose for my piece (An Almost Human Tragedy) reflects this. I also described the most recent, rather surprising, finding; that the diet of Au. sediba ignored available grasses, in favour of woodland products such as tree bark.

Now here is what Klinghoffer has to say about this same finding:

Another Human “Ancestor” Bites the Dust Bark

…Sure enough, the cooling trend [concerning the importance of Au. sediba] is now plainly in evidence, with Nature reporting that the creatures had a very notable characteristic in common with chimps, not humans, that had not previously been recognized: their diet, highlighted by tree bark and wood. This was found thanks to an analysis of tooth enamel and dental tartar and microwear. The NY Times lets its readers down softly:

“Dr. Berger was an author of the new journal report. Few other paleoanthropologists agree with Dr. Berger’s contention that the new species is the most plausible known ancestor of archaic and modern humans. [Emphasis added by Klinghoffer]. Dr. [Amanda G.] Henry’s group said that studies of additional fossils from the Malapa caves “will provide a better understanding of the dietary ecology of Au. sediba.””

Actually, the New York Times account amplifies an earlier one, which said

The discoverer of the fossils, Lee Berger of theUniversityofWitwatersrandinJohannesburg, says the new species, known as Australopithecus sediba, is the most plausible known ancestor of archaic and modern humans. Several other paleoanthropologists, while disagreeing with that interpretation, say the fossils are of great importance anyway, because they elucidate the mix-and-match process by which human evolution was shaped.

And the original paper in Science actually said, in the Abstract,

Combined craniodental and postcranial evidence demonstrates that this new species shares more derived features with early Homo than any other australopith species and thus might help reveal the ancestor of that genus

…and, in the body of the paper (p 203, column 3),

We can conclude that combined craniodental and postcranial evidence demonstrates that this new species shares more derived features with early Homo than does any other known australopith species, and thus represents a candidate ancestor for the genus, or a sister group to a close ancestor that persisted for some time after the first appearance of Homo [my added emphasis].

The situation is exactly as I described it, with no great claim to originality, in my earlier account here:

The problem is no longer one of finding a missing link, but one of tracing an individual branch (the one that led to us) through a densely forking bush. It is always notoriously difficult to distinguish closely related species, because of individual differences. Even when we can, we have no way of being sure which extinct species lie on our direct ancestral line; it is difficult to tell the difference between our great-grandfather and our great-great-uncle, or between one great-great-uncle and another.

In short, then, on the basis of newspaper accounts and apparently without having read the original literature, Klinghoffer gleefully demotes Au. sediba from a position that most workers in the field had never even claimed for it, in the belief that the evolutionary account is thereby in some way undermined. Actually, the boot is on the other foot; the loser is the religious doctrine of separate creation. For if the 20 or so known distinct australopithecine and other early hominin species are not related by common descent, and were therefore doomed to extinction without progeny, why were they ever created in the first place?