Ken Ham and the Missing Dinosaurs

Ken Ham got into a twitter war with the WaPo, after one of its writers posted an article in which it was written that all of the dinosaurs died out during Noah's flood.  The WaPo has since updated the article to correct the view.  It mostly serves as a vehicle for promoting the film "We Believe in Dinosaurs," which is an examination of creationism in the US.   Here is part of what Vicky Hallett wrote:

[David MacMillan] joined the directors of “We Believe in Dinosaurs” for a recent Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) to explain why some people accept “creation science.”

One key question: Why is it called “science”?

The label is popular with creationists, MacMillan writes, because it allows them “to set themselves up as participants in an equal controversy, as if there are two equal sides to choose from.” To bolster that idea, he adds, “some creationists also try to mimic the appearance of hypotheses, research, and so forth.”

When a child is raised with creationism — as MacMillan was — it’s the default position. If that’s what’s taught in school, the curriculum limits exposure to the mainstream evidence that life on Earth is far older than some Bible-based believers insist it is.

“The whole focus of organized creationism is advancing the idea that all the evidence can be interpreted in a variety of ways and everyone is biased,” MacMillan writes. “Plausible deniability, you know?”

This is not so unlike the Hammish one's insistence that there is no such thing as "historical science" because nobody was there to observe what happened. "Were you there?" is his catchphrase for that.While there is uncertainty in the scientific world, the idea that there are always two ways of interpreting evidence is nonsense.  Often, there is so much evidence supporting one particular interpretation that the alternatives are thrown in the dustbin of history.  Phlogisten, spontaneous generation, inheritance of acquired characteristics are examples of these.

So is creation science.

As Hugh Ross once pointed out (paraphrased), every single young earth creation argument suffers from one or more of three main problems: faulty assumptions, faulty reasoning, and failure to consider alternatives.  For Ken Ham, the earth was created 6ooo years ago.  There can be no alternative to this viewpoint.  All of the evidence has to point in that direction.  (This is where the heresy comes in).

Anyway, Ken Ham responded to the original WaPo article with the following tweets:

Hey @washingtonpost we at @ArkEncounter have NEVER said Dinosaurs were wiped out during Flood-get your facts right 

and 

I challenge @washingtonpost to show ONE instance where @arkencounter supposedly says Dinos died out during Flood! 

None of this, of course, helps Ham.  Now he has to defend the argument that, somehow, in the last four thousand years, dinosaurs disembarked from the ark, mysteriously all of them died out and No Written Records of Their Existence Were Kept.

David MacMillan took to the pages of Panda's Thumb to address young-earth creationism and his role in it. Critical to this account is that he is a former young-earth creationist. He suggests that Ken Ham's response to the WaPo article is not surprising:

Ken Ham gains an advantage by playing the persecuted saint; he has recently even compared his movement to Martin Luther and the Reformation. But more immediately, he takes offense because he has invested so heavily in one specific, defined, detailed narrative, to the point that getting these kinds of explanations “correct” becomes a central religious necessity. To most of us, it might not seem to make much of a difference whether he’s claiming dinosaurs died during the mythical flood or immediately after, but to stridently religious creationists like Ham, the Post article might as well have claimed he believes in the world of Harry Potter.

Most ironic, however, is that the Post article wasn’t nearly so incorrect as Ham insisted. True, the Ark Encounter features numerous caged dinosaur pairs – I’ve seen them in person – but their Flood narrative is invoked to explain why dinosaurs went extinct. In fact, the Flood is their automatic explanation for virtually everything we observe, particularly the mountains of evidence that run contrary to a 6,000-year-old world.

About the focus of young-earth creationism, he has this to say:

Creationists construct a dizzying array of ad hoc explanations for every possible piece of evidence, because at the root, they aren’t actually interested in developing testable models or creating useful theories. What’s important to them is presenting an appearance of the scientific process in order to maintain their authoritative position. That’s why organized creationism has thus far been largely impervious to scientific debunking: it’s not about science, it’s about faith, faith in the rigid system of beliefs they present to their followers.

It is this viewpoint that allows Ken Ham to castigate all other forms of creationism and insinuate that his version of events is the only Christian one. For those interested in how David MacMillan came to part ways with this movement, there is a multi-part post in the Panda's Thumb in which he discusses how the movement works.

Hugh Ross on Common Ancestry

What in the Wide World of Sports is a' Goin' on at RTB??????????

One of my readers clued me in to a podcast by Hugh Ross in which he tackles theistic evolution, otherwise known as evolutionary creationism. The title of the series is “I did not know that.” This particular talk can be found here.

The focus of the talk is how there is evidence for a historical Adam and Eve and that they were created between fifty and sixty thousand years ago. He specifically contrasts theistic evolution with what he calls the “Biblical model for human origins,” as if there is no theological basis for TE.

His understanding of TE is that we evolved from early ape forms but that it was controlled by God in a way that we scientists can never discover. This is a peculiar statement because science, left to its own devices, is not in the business of discovering whether or not God controlled events and processes. It is through faith that people believe in God.

Ross is one of the original proponents of the “tweaking” argument—that the universe shows evidence of a divine hand that tweaked the gravitational constants and elemental formation in just such a way as to allow life to occur. One degree off either way and...nothing. This is put forth in his book Fingerprint of God.

As I have mentioned before, the problem with this argument is that it is post hoc. We think that it is tweaked because we are here to observe it. There was always a slight probability that the universe would have developed like this anyway.

First he argues that evolution cannot explain the complexity of life because the second law of thermodynamics will degrade the genome of any species over time.

Wrong.

The second law of thermodynamics only applies to closed systems. Hugh Ross is a physicist and he is not aware that the earth is not a closed system? How can that be? It is part of the earth/sun system. There is also interaction with other bodies such as the moon. Everything on earth receives energy from the sun and this, in itself, is a thermodynamic process. Further, as someone else put it, if the earth really is a closed system, then God cannot operate in it. As soon as you introduce intervention from outside, the system opens. Onward...

He then says that the human genome has gotten more decayed over time since the creation of Adam and Eve also because of the influence of the second law of thermodynamics.

Wrong.

The second law of thermodynamics does not explain this. Genetics does. Our genome is more decayed (if you will) because of the influence of genetic load. With extensive gene flow, bad alleles are masked and can persist in a population in large numbers without expression. As we have been able to address many genetic defects with medical treatments, the number of these alleles has increased in our population. This is especially true in western nations, where our diet and behavior has created even more problems for us.

Ross states that there is evidence that modern humans have not been around very long because in Chromosome 21, there are only three different haplotypes and that, if humanity was older than that, there would be more.

Wrong.

This is a complete misread of a paper by Jin, et al (1999)¹ in which the authors study the haplotypes of Chromosome 21 in an effort to shed light on modern human origins. For one thing, there aren't three haplotypes, as Ross asserts. There are ten. There are three haplogroups that suggest that there were three migratory episodes of modern humans out of Africa. Ross focuses on the word “entropy” and, unfortunately, interprets it the way a physicist would. In this case, entropy refers to a function of Wrights F_st, which is a measure of genome variability. For example, North Americans have less entropy because they have greater genetic homogeneity than other groups that were studied. It has nothing to do with thermodynamics.

Ross argues that the chromosomal evidence that humans and the higher apes have a different number of chromosomes is invalid or misunderstood. In the early 1990s, it was discovered that human chromosome two is an end-to-end-fusion of two ape chromosomes. A close examination of chromosome two revealed that, while the other twenty-two chromosomes have one centromere, or central segment, human chromosome two has an extra non-functional centromere. Furthermore, while every chromosome has end segments known as telomeres, human chromosome two has inactive adjacent telomere segments in the middle of the chromosome. It is argued that, sometime in our early past, there was a translocation of two chromosomes to form Chromosome two. Ross argues that such a translocation could not possibly have happened because this would be “catastrophic for the organism” and would result in death.

Wrong.

There are many documented cases of translocation in animal species. There are species of horses that have different numbers of chromosomes and yet can produce fertile offspring. Ross further hampers his argument by saying that the jury is still out on whether or not the evidence is real because they might only appear to be centromeres and telomeres. This is, again, nonsense. It is obvious what they are. Further, how does he explain the duplication of the genes sequences in each chromosome?

Ross then tackles evidence for common ancestry contained in the disovery that the great apes and humans share the inability to manufacture vitamin C. He argues that in place of the inability to produce vitamin C is a new mechanism that recycles vitamin C in apes and humans. This is, he argues, not a loss of genetic function so much as it is a gaining of a new function. What Ross side-steps here and never mentions is that the arising of this mechanism in apes and humans is still evidence of common ancestry. In fact, it is better evidence because it means that exaptation happened in a common ancestor which was then passed on to each line.

And how does the evidence of the creation of a new mechanism in apes and humans figure into his idea of genome degradation?

He then launches into a discussion of the mitochondrial DNA evidence for the origins of modern humans and suggests that it demonstrates that we are descended from one woman (Eve) and then argues that this person likely lived between 50 and 60 thousand years ago. He further argues that Adam lived at the same time, based on Y-Chromosome evidence. This is their “testable creation model.”

There is a distinct problem with the harmonization of this evidence and the Bible. First, you have to really stretch the biblical genealogies to get them as far back as 50 to 60 thousand years. Second, while it is true that there was one original mtDNA variant from which modern humans are said to have arisen, that does not mean that there was only one woman alive at the time. In fact, there is evidence that there were thousands of modern humans alive at the time and that there was no distinct human couple at all.

Worse, the new evidence indicating that modern humans have 9% Neandertal genes calls into serious question the integrity of modern Homo sapiens as a unique species, suggesting that we are much, much older than we thought—perhaps 200 to 300 thousand years old.

He closes out by suggesting that the DNA evidence supports the disembarkation of four women and four men from Noah's ark, like that in Genesis 6-8. Aside from the genetic data indicating that the modern human population bottleneck reported by Venema occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, not the Middle East, there is not a scrap of biological, geological or palaeontological evidence that there was a world-wide flood of any kind.

In one fell swoop, RTB has turned its back on its historical Old-earth, progressive creation model and embraced the heart of young earth creationism, a model that has no serious scientific support of any kind. Is this really what RTB wants to do? If it really is accepting the idea that there were only eight people alive at the time of the flood, it must. It has always carved out a place that is separate from that of the major YEC groups and attempted to use conventional science as support for its apologetics. Now it seems that they are willing to accept a completely concordist model, even if it means the world-wide flood model, warts and all.

Not a fine day for scholarship.

¹Jin, L., Underhill, P. A., Doctor, V., et al. (1999). Distribution of haplotypes from a chromosome 21 region distinguishes multiple prehistoric human migrations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 96(7), 3796-3800. doi: http://www.pnas.org/content/96/7/3796.abstract

----------------
Now playing: Yes - Into the Storm
via FoxyTunes

Hugh Ross on Evolution

Sandwalk points us to a two minute video of Hugh Ross in which he tries to educate an audience on evolution and fails miserably. He clearly knows nothing about either evolution or the fossil record. This is embarrassing.



For one thing, he states that most mutations are harmful. Mutations are only harmful if they disrupt the genome in such a way that reduced fitness is conferred on the organism. Many mutations are fitness neutral. Mutations do not drive a species to extinction, changing environments drive a species to extinction. That is basic evolutionary ecology. This is worse than William Dembski's math.

He talks about the fossil record by asking where you see the evidence for transitional forms and then focuses only on whales and horses. That is ridiculous. There are transitional forms all over the fossil record at every major level. If this is really the biology coming out of RTB then Todd Wood is correct, they absolutely cannot be trusted for anything.

The comments on Sandwalk's page are priceless. One in particular: “So why didn't God make more dinosaurs and unicorns and dodo birds? Or maybe he just doesn't love them as much as he loves horses and whales. He sure seems to love roaches and bedbugs, too.”

Amazing.

Reasons to Believe and the Credibility Gap

Todd Wood has wrapped up his long series on the problems with Fuz Rana's interpretation of the human/chimp DNA differences and his responses to Dennis Venema's writings. He closes with some sobering thought:

To be honest, I do not believe that RTB will pay any attention whatsoever to this series of posts. Given Rana's insulting response to Venema's critique, I expect that they'll treat this as yet another "ad hominem attack." I've mostly written this series for third parties that might be confused about the Venema/Rana exchange. As far as I'm concerned, RTB's credibility is completely shot (read my analysis of their handling of the Neandertal genome for more evidence of errors and exaggerations on the part of Ross, Rana, and Samples: parts one, two, three). I would recommend that no one accept any of RTB's arguments without fact-checking their claims first. I do not know whether these problems are due to lazy scholarship, ignorance, intentional deception, or ideological blinders. What I do know is that you cannot trust Reasons to Believe.

This is very disappointing but, having read enough of Steve Matheson's writings, not entirely surprising. Once upon a time I had much respect for Hugh Ross and the work he did to try to convince the evangelical community that there could be a fulfilling theological construct that incorporated an old creation. He came to the University of Tennessee in the early 1990s and gave a series of compelling, cogent lectures on the astrophysical evidence. Even then, though, I had misgivings about what his (and his organization's) treatment of the biological data would be like. Now, it seems that my misgivings were well-founded and we have our answer.