Debunking Denialism

Defending science against the forces of irrationality.

Category Archives: Creationism

Questioning Evolution…by Spouting the Same Old Creationist Canards

1 Comment Posted by on March 3, 2013

I am frequently amazed at individuals who sincerely put forward what they consider strong “arguments” in favor of a particular form of pseudoscience when these assertions have already been debunked and destroyed thousands and thousands of times. I often wonder if these people have even bothered to perform a simple Internet search to see if those arguments have been rebutted before. After all, there are many websites on, for instance, evolution that efficiently refutes creationist arguments (such as Index to Creationist Claims). Then again, if they used the Internet for gathering credible scientific information, they might decide against making such arguments.

The Youtube user Khalid Elmekki recently uploaded an anti-evolution video entitled Questioning Evolution. In it, he put forwards some classic creationist assertions that lack any evidential or rational support whatsoever. Let us take them apart, one by one.

Evolution is not a belief

Throughout the video, Elmekki insinuates that evolution is a belief system. On the contrary, evolution is a well-supported scientific explanation for the observed diversity of life, backed up by tons and tons of evidence. One can read about some of this evidence in the National Academy of Sciences publication Science, Evolution, and Creationism or in the online book 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent by Douglas Theobald. Even the Wikipedia article on the evidence for common descent gives a good introduction to the topic.

Saying you “believe” in evolution is just as silly as saying that you “believe” in gravity. Evolution, gravity or any other scientific model is not something you believe in, it is something you accept based on the evidence.

Creationists use the term “Darwinism” as a rhetorical tool

Originally, the phrase “Darwinism” use to refer to the Darwin’s models for evolutionary biology, predating the New Synthesis. This was done to distinguish it from other forms of biological change over time, such as Lamarckism and Mutationalism, and from religious doctrines for the origin of different kinds of species such as creationism.

Today, creationists use the term “Darwinism” to make it look like modern evolutionary biology is an ideology (-ism) and not science, and to suggest that “Darwinism” and creationism are two different -isms on the same level. In reality, modern evolutionary biology is a well-supported scientific explanation, whereas creationism is pseudoscience that does not accurately describe reality. Read more of this post

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The Current Creationist Abuse of ENCODE and “junk DNA”

2 Comments Posted by on September 16, 2012

encode and junk

The creationist blogosphere is set ablaze by the popular media claim that “biochemical functions for 80% of the genome”. For instance, Barry Arrington at the intelligent design creationist blog Uncommon Descent calls it a vindication of intelligent design proponents.

Not so fast! An article on Nature News Blog, aptly entitled “fighting about ENCODE and junk”, clarifies the situation in detail. To make a long story short, the researchers used an extremely broad definition of functional that included almost any biochemical activity.

Here is the creationist and media narrative: Read more of this post

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Dr. Wile’s Tirade Against Evolution Continues…

2 Comments Posted by on September 15, 2012

Dr. Wile's website

Earlier this month, I wrote a criticism of a couple of videos produced by the Creation Museum that attacked a video made by the engineer and science educator Bill Nye. A commenter alerted me to a response by a Dr. Wile in the comment section on his blog. Dr. Wile is a young-earth creationist with a PhD in nuclear chemistry from the University of Rochester, who has experience with education (having written a couple of homeschooling textbooks on science as well as taught courses in science). In response, I wrote another response rebutting the claims made by Dr Wile.

Now, Dr. Wile has graciously taken the time to write a reply to my second post. It demonstrates the typical rhetoric and debating methods of creationists together with well-known evasion tactics. Let’s examine it in detail. Read more of this post

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Creationist Anti-Psychiatry: The Worst of Two Worlds

2 Comments Posted by on September 11, 2012

creationist anti-psychiatry

Crank magnetism refers to the discovery that people often believe different forms of pseudoscience at the same time. The classical examples are social right-wing conservatives who are creationist and reject the science of climate change, alternative medicine proponents who promote homeopathy and reject vaccines, creationists who are HIV/AIDS denialists and so on. Maybe the different forms of pseudoscience reinforce each other or maybe they are united in their opposition to the mainstream scientific establishment.

One such form of crank magnetism is creationist anti-psychiatry. It is a strange chimera, as proponents of anti-psychiatry often are secular liberals or social libertarians, who have very little in common with socially conservative creationism. Answers in Genesis published an article on the topic of mental conditions and treatment for mental conditions called Psychology Without Sin by Ernie Baker, a “certified biblical counselor”. The post contains an astounding level of ignorance of psychology and psychiatry and the proposed solution is laughable. Read more of this post

Anti-psychiatry, Creationism ,

Bill Nye Under Creationist Siege: A Reply to Dr. Jay L. Wile

8 Comments Posted by on September 10, 2012

siege

A commenter on this blog alerted me to a creationist response to me previous blog post on The Uninformed Creationist Assault on Bill Nye. It is written by the young-earth creationist Dr. Jay L. Wile, who has a PhD in nuclear chemistry from University of Rochester and can be found here. He also has experience with teaching and writing science textbooks for homeschooling.

As we will see, it is extremely generous to call it “a response”. It is mostly a garbled list of assertions (some just repeating what the young earth creationists said) with links to creationist websites that themselves have little to offer in terms of intellectual content.

Let’s take it on.

1. Denial of Evolution in the U. S.

The author tries to make an excuse for Nye’s patently false statement in the beginning. He claims, “In this sense, the U. S. stands out: despite its technological level, it has a very low acceptance of evolution.” But that’s not what Nye said. Nye said that denial of evolution is unique to the United States.

That is not only a quote out of context, it is really uncharitable to mark words and not try to understand the meaning of what is being said. To do that, context is required. Let me post what Bill Nye said, word for word:

Denial of evolution is unique to the United States. We are the world’s most advanced technological — I mean you can say Japan, but generally, United States is where most of the innovation still happens. People still move to the United States. And that is largely because of the intellectual capital — the general understanding of science. When you have a portion of population doesn’t believe in it, it holds everyone back.

So Bill Nye is not making the naive claim that denial of evolution is unique to the United States in the sense that it does not exist anywhere else, but rather the claim that United States is unique in being a highly technologically advanced society, yet have a large proportion of the population being creationist. The graph in Miller et. al. (2006) illustrates this well: despite being a large scientific superpower, U. S. finds itself among the bottom countries on the list. This is what makes United States unique. Obviously creationists exists in other technologically advanced nations, but the problem is not as big there as it is in the United States. The latest figure show that 46% of people in the U. S. is creationist (Gallup, 2012). It is this prevalence, together with being a scientific superpower, that makes the situation in U. S. unique. Read more of this post

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The Uninformed Creationist Assault on Bill Nye

4 Comments Posted by on September 4, 2012

Bill Nye

Big Think is “a knowledge forum featuring the ideas, lessons, stories and advice of leading experts from around the world”. They often post videos with scientists such as Stephen Pinker and Neil deGrasse Tyson, talking about various issues. A video was posted on the Big Think Youtube channel featuring Bill Nye, a scientist and a popular science educator. The video topic is creationism and how it is inappropriate for children. As far as I can tell, most of the things that Bill Nye said was completely rational and evidence-based. However, among young-earth creationists, this sparked vitriolic attacks, culminating in the production of not just one, but two video responses. One of them was from Dr. David Menton and Dr. Georgia Purdom at the Creation Museum. According to the video, both have PhDs in life science. The second video response is from Ken Ham, the president of Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum.

This post will outline the statements made by Bill Nye, the rebuttals by the young-earth creationists and why they fail.

What arguments did Bill Nye make?

More specifically, the arguments and points made by Bill Nye are the following:

  1. Denial of evolution is unique to the United States, as it is one of the most technologically advanced nations with a lot of intellectual capital in the form of the general understanding of science.
  2. Evolutionary biology is the grand unified explanation of biology much in the same way that plate tectonics is the grand unified explanation for geology.
  3. The worldview of creationists is “fantastically complicated” and “untenable”.
  4. If you want to rejection evolution, that is fine. But do not indoctrinate your children into creationism as the future needs scientifically literate individuals (e. g. “voters”, “taxpayers”, “engineers”).
  5. There is no evidence for creationism.

As far as I could tell, these were the substantive points made in Bill Nye’s video.

Were Bill Nye’s arguments reasonable?

Evolution is the grand unified explanation of life science and creationism does not reasonably explain a lot of the observations we see around us, such as distant starts or nested hierarchies, at least not without a credulous flood of ad hoc assertions. There is no evidence in favor of creationism and it seems reasonable to suppose that scientific literacy matters for the direction of a society. So far so good.

The only statement that I found to be debatable was the first. I can think of two possible interpretations: (1) creationism is unique to the U. S. in the sense that it is not widespread outside of the country or (2) U. S. is unique in being a technologically advanced society at the same time that a large proportion of the population are creationists. The first interpretation is wrong. Creationism is quite prevalent in the Middle East and creationist have a noticeable presence in other geographical areas as well, such as Australia, Great Britain, Switzerland, Austria, Germany and Turkey (Numbers, 2006; Numbers, 2009). The second interpretation is more reasonable. The graph Nye is probably thinking of is the one from Miller et. al. (2006) that depicts the acceptance of evolution in 34 countries, where the U. S. finishes at the bottom of the list, just above Turkey. In this sense, the U. S. stands out: despite its technological level, it has a very low acceptance of evolution. It is not entirely clear which of the two interpretations that is closest to what Bill Nye said or meant (others like Gould and Lewontin has made the claim in the first interpretation), but one could charitably assume that it was the second.

So in summary, the claims made by Bill Nye hold up pretty well.

The creationist retorts and their flaws

The two videos made by the creationists at the Creation Museum can be found here and here. In rough order, the arguments made by the creationists are as follows:

1. The first argument is an attack on the first interpretation of the uniqueness of creationism argument. It can be countered by noting that the second interpretation is probably closer to what Bill Nye meant, and so the creationist argument is really a straw man.

2. The second argument is a standard false balance argument: children should be taught both evolution and creationism. This can be rejected by noting that it is unfair to teach scientific falsehoods as if they were evidence-based facts. As Glenn Branch explains in Scott and Branch (2006, p. 135):

The power of the appeal to fairness is so strong that it is wisest to reply in kind: there is nothing fair about the creationist ambition for public education. It is not fair to citizens of a republic in which a basic constitutional principle is the government’s religious neutrality. It is not fair to tax payers , who run the risk of footing the legal bills due to lawsuit over actions that compromise the teaching of evolution. It is not fair to teachers, who have a professional duty to teach in accordance with the scientific consensus. Most important, it is not fair to the students, whose scientific literacy is on the line.

3. The third assertion is the classic “there are no mechanisms to gain genetic information” to become more complex over time. This astoundingly erroneous assertion was delivered by Dr. Purdom, PhD in molecular genetics. Gene duplication with subsequent adaptive divergence fulfills any potentially relevant definition of “genetic information” in biology. Read more of this post

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How Pseudoscientific Cranks Abuse Freedom

2 Comments Posted by on August 27, 2012

freedom

Freedom. How can anyone be against freedom? The simple answer is that people generally are not against freedom. It is often a core value in various political ideologies and play a central role in the law of many counties to the point of being ingrained in our social conscious. Therefore, predictably, a lot of pseudoscientific cranks abuse the notion of freedom for their own malevolent goals. Claims about health freedom is used to attack science-based medicine and promote dangerous and non-effective “treatments”. Holocaust denial is defended by appealing to freedom of speech. Various forms of creationism or climate change denialism is infiltrating education via academic freedom bills.

“Health Freedom”

A typical defense of quack medicine or anti-vaccination is talking about health freedom. Surely, people should be able to decide for themselves what type of medication they put in their bodies? Sure, but promoting anti-science quackery negates informed consent, because patients are basing their decision on false information. So, in an ironic twist of events, quack medicine is actually incompatible with real health freedom: the ability to decide what treatment is most rational for yourself based on the best available scientific evidence. Real health freedom also means freedom from cranks that exploit you for money and access to the standard of care from modern medicine. For quack medicine providers, health care freedom is a malevolent method for avoiding science-based quality control while still providing substandard care. Often far substandard care. Read more of this post

Alternative Medicine, Creationism, Holocaust Denialism, Skepticism , , ,

Creationist Bodie Hodge Tries to Understand Kin Selection

Leave a Comment Posted by on August 2, 2012

morality the secular response

Mechanical Engineer and creationist Bodie Hodge at Answers In Genesis has gotten all worked up about a popular science article about the evolution of morality in New Scientist. Unfortunately, the “criticism” laid out in the article in question is an obvious creationist swing and a miss because it misunderstands the nature of science, confuses the evolution of morality with moral philosophy, optimization of inclusive fitness and/or adaptive behavior of the individual with metaphysical notions of goodness and put forward many other flawed arguments.

The New Scientist article being discussed is called “If morality is broke, we can fix it” and can be found here. It is just a short editorial about the evolution of moral behavior and how it can be augmented and improved by humans. Simple enough, yet when Hodge tries to comment, he gets it all wrong.

Science as a human endeavor

Hodges starts off by misunderstanding the nature of science.

The article says, “Science has made great strides in explaining morality.” This statement attributes human-like qualities to the methodology of “science,” which is the fallacy of reification. “Science” does not explain things; people explain things. Sadly, this fallacy is made frequently on the secular side.

“Science” in this context does not refer to a monolithic and abstract methodology, but rather the concrete human endeavor to understand the world around us. That endeavor has indeed made great strides in many areas, such as sequencing genomes, building spaceships, understanding quantum mechanics and morality.

The article goes on to say, “No longer is [morality] seen as something handed down from on high . . .” Though many secular humanists profess that morality is not set by God, the majority of people disagree and still recognize that morality does comes from God. But does it really matter what people think, or is it about what God says?

It is a description of how the scientific viewpoint has changed over time. Hodges make a curious false dichotomy here. Either morality is about what people think, or it is a matter of what a deity says. On the contrary, morality has to be about evidence and rational arguments. Also, “what people think” and “what god says” is really the same thing as religious scripture was written by people and it is people who interpret them. There is really nothing in any religious texts that could not have been invented by humans. This is clear from the many contradictions and scientific falsehoods in the texts. If a deity had written the texts, then surely, it would pass an introductory science education. Read more of this post

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The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Eugenics

Leave a Comment Posted by on May 11, 2012

For the purpose of this article, eugenics is defined as “the belief that certain individuals should be killed, be forced to undergo sterilization or other be exposed to other coercive measures to prevented them from reproducing in order to protect the population from harm and to ensure the genetic quality of future generations”. I will occasionally attribute other beliefs to eugenics, such as beliefs in “racial purity” or that evolutionary beneficial implies moral, so let’s consider this a working definition for now. Yes, I am aware that there are people who support other forms of eugenics based on voluntarism etc. but those groups are not the target here.

As we shall see, there are many problems with eugenics. It is based on a multitude of scientific falsehoods, has huge practical problems, it is arguably not cost-effective and wildly unethical. Some of these points are somewhat overlapping, but they emphasize specific problems.

1. Eugenics is based on artificial selection, but this is in practice mainly useful for selecting genes with additive effects. However, most genes have interacting effects, making eugenics less efficient, although not impossible.

2. Eugenics is based on a naive view of development. There is hardly never a direct 1:1 relationship between one gene and one phenotypic trait. In general, most traits are polygenic (influenced by many genes) and most genes are pleiotropic (affect many different traits). It is more accurate to think of the situation as a huge, complex network of genes and gene products influencing each other. The heritability of personality traits and certain complex hereditary diseases tend to be moderate (calculated from twin and adoption studies). Using Genome-wide association studies to analyze hundreds of thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), scientists have found that candidate SNPs can only account for a fraction of his heritability (“missing heritability problem”). This may be accounted for by rare gene variants that are unique for different populations, variation in copy number or genetic interactions.

3. Eugenics is based on a naive view of the power of genes. Genes tend to be risk factors for certain conditions, where environment can act as the trigger. A classical example is the condition know as phenylketonuria (PKU). The genetic risk factor is a mutated version of a gene coding for the enzyme known as phenylalanine hydroxylase that catalyze the hydroxylation of the amino acid phenylalanine to tyrosine. When this is non-functional, phenylalanine accumulates and is converted to phenylketones. This in turn causes mental retardation, brain damage and seizures. An incredibly successful treatment is a diet free of phenylalanine and monitoring of the blood levels of this amino acid. In this case, environmental interventions are more beneficial, cheaper and less unethical than eugenics.

4. If you imagine the general problem outlined in point 3, but instead think of it being hundreds of different genetic and environmental risk factors, then you have an approximate view of most complex human diseases.

5. Even for so called single gene disorders, an individual with one copy of the defect allele and one copy of the healthy allele may have a selective advantage. The classic example is that a person heterozygous for the allele that in the homozygous condition causes sickle-cell anemia has a higher resistance to malaria. The allele, although detrimental in the homozygous condition, is retained in the population by balancing selection. Eliminating gene variants that cause disease in the homozygous condition may lead to less prevalence of individuals with heterozygous advantage. Read more of this post

Biotechnology Fear Mongering, Creationism, Science Explained, Skepticism , , , , ,

Swatting through Luke Barnes’ Review of “Why Evolution is True”

2 Comments Posted by on April 13, 2012

Luke Barnes is a postdoctoral researcher in the field of astronomy at the University of Sydney. He is probably a very competent astronomer. However, he seems to have some issues with modern evolutionary biology but dislikes being labeled a creationist. Despite his statements being very carefully engineered, he repeats many classic tactics and tropes of creationists.

Barnes wrote a three-part book review of Jerry Coyne’s book “Why Evolution is True” a while back that I will take pleasure in disentangling. I’m not someone who would defend Coyne no matter what, as I have strongly criticized his anti-psychiatry stance a couple of times before on this blog.

Barnes alludes to the stereotype that physicists tend to march into a field not closely related to physics and make sweeping proclamations about conclusions and problems in that field, especially if this field is perceived as being less stringent than physics. There are a few notable examples of where this has not turned out that good such as Freeman Dyson and climate change, Roger Penrose and consciousness as well as Linus Pauling (quantum chemist) and high doses of Vitamin C.

Generally speaking, the three parts roughly corresponds to criticizing the positive case for evolution, opposing the positive and negative case against intelligent design creationism and the supposedly negative effects of evolutionary biology on society. However, I will do my review of the review in one single post because I can focus on the core claims and misunderstandings.

No flies were actually harmed during the production of this post. Read more of this post

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