The Rocks Were There: Straight Science Answers to bent Creationist Questions 9798618844277

Table of contents :
1 . At the Starting Gate
2 . The Dating Game
3 . Evolution and Evidence
4 . On Creationists Who Should Know Better
5 . Depending on the Strangeness of Kinds
6 . More Evidence for Evolution
7 . Flood Geology : Tales of the Big Slosh

Citation preview

          The Rocks Were There Volume 1





                To the memory of SciStrike, who inspired all who knew him, and who is literally now a star. Bring on the Pug!





         

The Rocks Were There Straight Science Answers

to bent Creationist questions Volume 1        

James Downard Jackson Wheat



Copyright © 2020 by James Downard & Jackson Wheat             The Rocks Were There: Straight Science Answers to some bent Creationist questions Volume 1   All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.       Inquiries should be addressed to  

Rulon James Downard 4033 N. Belt St. Spokane, WA 99205       The Rocks Were There is part of the #TIP “Troubles in Paradise” project.  

www.tortucan.wordpress.com & www.tortucan.com

      First Printing: 2020 ISBN 979-8618844277  







Contents Volume 1               1. At the Starting Gate              14 Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3 16 Info Box: Inerrancy versus Literalism 21 An Ill Wind in Tortuca(n) 22 Source Methods on the March! 25 Meet the Synapsids 28 Info Box: Bird lungs 31 An Earful of Jaw 32

              2. The Dating Game              38 Info Box: Fun Facts on Carbon Fixation 38 Info Box: Mammoth Hunting 42 Behold the Isochron 50 Info Box: Geocentrism 53 Info Box: The KBS Tuff controversy 54 Beartooth Mountains ”discordances” 58 Chart: Dating Isotopes 59 Chart: Dating Isotopes Chronological 65 Grand Canyon Bass Rapids ”discordances” 67 Info Box: Hovind gives us the bird 68 Chart: Dating Isotopes 71 Info Box: The Snelling Affair 73 Info Box: Proto-Grand Canyon 74 Chart: Dating Isotopes Chronological 77 Accelerated decay 78

 



              3. Evolution and Evidence              88 Info Box: Living Fossils 89 Info Box: The Missing Day myth 92 How Evolution Works 97 Chart: Evolution versus Genesis 106 Origins or Bust 111 Info Box: Dean Kenyon 115 There’s No Place Like Homology 124 Info Box: Convergence 128 Uncommon Descent 136 Info Box: “Gradual” evolution 137 Info Box: Horse evolution & Huxley’s million mutations              142 Info Box: Pinniped systematics 147 Planet of the Apes 152 Chart: White’s hominids 152 Chart: Hominid chronology 153 Chart: Creationist skull classifications 158



              4.              On Creationists Who Should Know Better              166 Chart: Anti-evolution Fact Claimants 169 Case Study 1: Jeffrey Tomkins and Human Chromosome 2              170 Info Box: Chromosome 2 minions 176 ORFans in the storm 177 Info Box: Richard Buggs 182 Case Study 2: Georgia Purdom and Beneficial Mutations              195 Info Box: Rodhocetus tales 198 Richard Lenski’s E. coli studies 200 Chart: Lenski experiment papers 204 Info Box: DNA supercoiling 206 Info Box: Zeno Slicing 214 Not Frozen Fish: Antifreeze proteins 220 Info Box: Epigenetics in Deep Time 228 Case Study 3: Bodie Hodge and Genetic Mutations              228 Info Box: Helicases 231 Info Box: Endosymbiotic fusions 234 Info Box: Designer pathogens 237 Info Box: Tardigrades 251 Info Box: Owen’s Archetypes 254 Case Study 4: John Sanford and Genetic Entropy 257 Info Box: Cordova under the microscope 262 Info Box: Peppered moth 264 Info Box: Gene duplication 268

              5. Depending on the Strangeness of Kinds              278 Dogs and cats, really living together

285

A Baramin by any other name would not a Clade make              296 Info Box: Alan Feduccia and bird origins 308 Determining the Ark Kinds 310 The Cognitum 320 Info Box: The Great American Biotic Interchange324 Some Bats in the Baraminological Belfry 332 Info Box: How to make a bat wing 334



              6.              More Evidence for Evolution              341 Info Box: David Barton wall building 343 Riddle Me This: How does genetic information involve Satan?              344 Flying the Creationist Coop: “Infomation” and the origin of feathers              348 Chart: Feathered theropods 350 Info Box: Julia Clarke and Antarctic songbirds 356 Oh, not again ... DNA as “Information” 359 Info Box: Brains and Homo floresiensis 360 Info Box: Information as buzzword 363 Info Box: James Kohl on pheromones and light 368 Vestigial Organs 371 Menton down History Lane: Wiedersheim’s The Structure of Man              378 Evasion Exhibit No. 1: Embryology 383 Info Box: Recurrent laryngeal nerve 384 Evasion Exhibit No. 2: Homology 386 Evasion Exhibit No. 3: Appendicitis 389 Info Box: The Hovinds brainwashing Arthur Keith              395 Info Box: The Hologenome and microbiota 396 Evasion Exhibit No. 4: The tail wagging the dogma              408 Recapitulation and the Boogeyman of Haeckel 415 Info Box: The Sanger/Weikart/D’Souza daisy chain              418 Posturing on the Phylotypic Stage 431



              7. Dodging Geology              438 Lamentations on the Green River varves 442 Info Box: The London hammer and Coso artifact 455 Bring on the Tropes 1: Mt. St. Helens 457 Info Box: Steve Austin’s Three Card Monte 459 Info Box: The Manganese Mystery 461 How to Make an Incised Canyon 464 Bring on the Tropes 2: Scrape the Scablands 474 Info Box: Drowning the Columbia Basalt 476 Info Box: The Paluxy Mantracks 478 Vocabulary Recess: Lagerstätten 484 Chart: Neoproterozoic Lagerstätten 484 Chart: Paleozoic Lagerstätten 485 Chart: Mesozoic Lagerstätten 487 Chart: Cenozoic Lagerstätten 488 Woodmorappe Not to the Rescue 490 Bring on the Tropes 3: Overthrusts 496 Info Box: Santorini, Atlantis and the Exodus 505 Bring on the Tropes 4: Polystrate Fossils 507 Moving Violation: Coal Formation 515 Info Box: Heretic Matt Leisola 516 A Pinch of Salt 528 Reefer Madness 530 Scratching the Fossil Record 537 Chart: Mass Extinctions 541 Chart: Megasequences 548 Paddling the Hydrothermal Biome 554

  Appendix 1. Some Maps of Time

570

Appendix 2. Phyla and their Fossil Appearance              575 Appendix 3. Amino Acid Codons References Index

605 770

582



1. At the Starting Gate Science is perhaps the most important enterprise in all of human history. It shapes just about everything in our world and has for centuries. Where we live, how we get to work, how food is grown, how people are kept alive; all of this is due to science and how it has come to be applied in technology. And, science is a result of bipedal primates of various surface pigmentation who have throughout time (and are still today) attempting to understand their world.  But they have to be extremely careful in how they accomplish this. Uncovering the nature of reality cannot simply be accomplished by asserting that which we want to be true. No matter how many times we believe we can fly by flapping our arms, gravity always sends us crashing into an uncomfortable reality. The same principle is true of atoms, cells, evolution, and every other demonstrably true scientific theory; these things will not cease to exist because we wish or believe them to. However, there are many people today who do not believe that evolution (defined as change in allele frequencies in a population over generations, or more generally as natural common descent) has occurred in the distant past, transforming life over billions of years. These anti-evolutionists, while less common in other countries (as Jon Miller, Eugenie Scott and Shinji Okamoto reported in a 2006 Science survey) they make up a substantial portion of the US population— around 42% reported as flat out creationists according to a 2014 Gallup poll (with the US population being around 326 million people, that’s easily some 70 million anti-evolutionist adults). But, anti-evolutionists do far more than simply go around not accepting evolution; they write numerous books and blogs; make movies and “documentaries”; and travel the country speaking on the subject—always misinforming people (whether they realize it or not) on how evolution works and what scientists think about the field. In response, many scientists and science advocates have written extensive works criticizing their methods and conclusions. Some like Randy Moore & Mark Decker’s More Than Darwin in 2009 offer a field guide to the people involved, in prior years and

currently. Others are intended as general introductions to the issues, such as the books by Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins. Our intent in our work is to draw together as many of these threads as we may, providing a fresh look at a subject that seems never to go away. In two volumes, we will investigate the underlying methods that a particularly noisy subset of anti-evolutionists (the Young Earth Creationists) use to attack evolution, focusing specifically on the series of Answers books published by the Answers in Genesis (AiG) creationism group (one of the largest, if not the largest, antievolutionist organizations in the US). We will highlight a number of their conclusions, specifically those regarding what they call “historical science.” Historical science is one of the dichotomous sciences that antievolutionists often refer to. Now, to be fair, the term “historical science” does exist, such as in the philosophy of science literature. For example, Robert Francis & Steven Hare wrote a paper in 1994 on how the concept of historical science improves our understanding of fish ecosystems. However, that practical application side is decidedly not how anti-evolutionists want to use “historical science.” In 2007, Roger Patterson of Answers in Genesis defined historical science as “interpreting evidence from past events based on a presupposed philosophical point of view.” So it’s just philosophical, is it? Relying on the Patterson/AiG version of historical science as merely philosophical, in 2011 Troy Lacey jacked this up still higher by declaring that “Historical science (creationist or secular) by its very nature is based on a worldview i.e., religion.” Whoa! We have several issues with this. Leaving aside Lacey’s hyperbole that worldviews are by definition religions, let’s tackle that philosophical angle. The first is a matter of projection: scientists do not merely presuppose arbitrary philosophical points of view when dealing with data; this is what anti-evolutionists do. Presuppositionalism is literally a type of apologetics (defined as “reasoned arguments or writings in justification of something, typically a theory or religious doctrine”) where one’s own side is presupposed to be the only correct position, and all other positions are wrong are rendered wrong by definition. It is

an astoundingly circular argument that definitely does not fly in science. The second issue concerns that “philosophical point of view.” What do the creationists mean by this? Patterson continued (our bold):  

The past is not directly observable, testable, repeatable, or falsifiable; so interpretations of past events present greater challenges than interpretations involving operational science. Neither creation nor evolution is directly observable, testable, repeatable, or falsifiable. Each is based on certain philosophical assumptions about how the earth began. Naturalistic evolution assumes that there was no God, and biblical creation assumes that there was a God who created everything in the universe. Starting from two opposite presuppositions and looking at the same evidence, the explanations of the history of the universe are very different. The argument is not over the evidence—the evidence is the same—it is over the way the evidence should be interpreted.  

There are so many problems with this interpretation, and some of these highlight foundational falsehoods underlying all antievolutionism. So looking into it a bit more deeply is a good idea. Right from the start we must take issue with the idea that creationists are dealing with “the same evidence.” No, they are not. At best they are bumping into a tiny sliver of the data set, examples carefully selected to serve their presuppositional purposes, but not addressed squarely and fairly. We’ll be examining just how much evidence they’re leaving out in these two volumes, but as coauthor JD literally measures anti-evolutionist source usage, citation by citation, it’s fair to say as a ballpark average that creationists are ignoring 90% of the relevant information. You can’t make sound scientific judgments on such a shallow foundation. The next issue is that the past is not observable or testable. Sure, we cannot “falsify” the past; we’re honestly not sure how one could falsify reality (a bit contradictory, no?). What happened, happened.  As for “repeatable”, we would argue that in a way we repeat history every time we neglect it. For example, French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte attacked Russia during the winter, and his army was brutally crushed because of it. Not learning from history, Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich did

the same, repeating the same mistake. Isn’t that a form of historical experimentation and repeatability?[1] Next, is the past observable? Yes, there are many things that give us direct insights into the past, many of which we’ll be discussing when we deal with Kent Hovind later. Take geology. When magma cools, the minerals that make up the rocks can follow one of two tracks, described early in the 1900s by Norman Bowen, and now part of standard geology texts today. In the Bowen Reaction Series, if there’s a lot of iron and magnesium to start, a “discontinuous” branch generates olivine, pyroxene, amphibole (hornblende), and biotite. If the calcium-rich anorthite form of feldspar (plagioclase) is present, there will be a “continuous” series from that in which calcium gets seamlessly replaced by sodium to form albite. On both branches, though, the cooling process ends up with orthoclase feldspar, muscovite, and finally quartz. Now, no one is watching the cooling of magma on a video camera and taking temperature readings of the magma deep in the earth as the minerals form. Rather, geologists diligently worked out by experimentation at what temperature the minerals form naturally.  With that knowledge, we can now work backwards to understand the temperature from the minerals. No one had to directly observe the magma in the past for us to know now what temperature it was when each mineral formed. Their very existence testifies to the process required to make them. Which reminds us of the oft-asked question from creationists, intended as a stumper: “Were you there ...” when life began, or dinosaurs roamed about? No, we weren’t. But the rocks were there. That’s how we can know. And that’s what this book is about.  

Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3  

So, is the past testable? Absolutely. In science, the hallmark of a good theory is the ability of that theory to make predictions. Any hypothesis can “account” for a set of observations after the fact, but a good theory can predict new observations before they even occur.

One example is Tiktaalik. This was a sarcopterygian or lobefinned fish that lived about 375 million years ago in the Devonian period (there’s a set of Maps of Time charts in Appendix 1 laying out all the geological periods for your convenience). From a Big Picture systematic point of view, the sarcopterygians include all animals more closely related to us than ray-finned fish—that means the extinct coelacanths, along with the living lungfish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Paleontologist Neil Shubin and his colleagues predicted that if the current model of tetrapod (fourlimbed animal) evolution is correct, where tetrapods are a subset of lobe-finned fish, then they should expect to find a fish with tetrapod characteristics in Devonian strata. Not Cambrian (150 million years earlier), or Jurassic (200 million years later), but specifically Devonian, the window in time in which their evolution needed to have occurred. And not in deep marine or inland terrestrial deposits, either, but in shallow marine and coastal ones, the habitat in which this transition was taking place. This animal would necessarily have the gills, scales, and fins of a fish (they’d be aquatic animals, after all), but would also show features that would make sense in animals undergoing a change to a more terrestrial habitat (where the eventual forms have distinctive rib and limb bones, a mobile neck with separate pectoral girdle, the full lungs of a tetrapod, as well changes in the joints and ear regions). As vividly recounted in Shubin’s Your Inner Fish, Tiktaalik straddled that transition zone quite nicely, with weight-bearing fins that could flex (allowing it to hold to the bottom against fast currents), primitive lungs (attested to by the spiracle openings atop its head), and the pectoral girdle separate from the skull, the first fish with the makings of a flexible neck. Time and place, specified on evolutionary predictive lines, and a set of morphological features that ring true as a vertebrate in transition. Their very existence weighs on the scale of evidence as supporting the model that uniquely anticipated such a form of life would exist back then, so many millions of years ago. Tiktaalik is not the only example of successful fossil prediction. The feathered dinosaurians Archaeopteryx and Microraptor, the mammal-like reptiles Diarthrognathus and Probainognathus, and the wasp-like ant Sphecomyrma all had characteristics anticipated by

evolutionary biologists. We’ll have more to say on them in the chapters to come. Had none of these been found, the transitional gap would have remained, and creationists would have harped on them. And nothing guaranteed that in the luck of the draw they would have had to have been preserved at all. But they were preserved—and found.  These were not cases of fossils found and interpreted as transitional only after the fact.  They were predicted! That is a blatant physical testament favoring evolution. Anti-evolutionists, on the other hand, have no examples of this. They have never successfully predicted any fossils with certain characteristics. Part of this is due to how few of them do paleontology, and still fewer lay out the characteristics that would need to be changing or not, then seek out the evidence in the way the regular science does so successfully. Indeed, creationists have never successfully predicted any phenomena that should exist if the Earth were only around 6,000 years old and if a global Flood had occurred. In science, a hypothesis that makes no verifiable predictions is another way of saying it is a useless hypothesis.  Or in popular terms: just plain wrong. This is not to say some anti-evolutionists don’t try to contribute to the scientific technical literature. Intelligent Design advocate Jonathan Wells authored a 1985 paper proposing “Inertial force as a possible factor in mitosis” and coauthored with Brian Rowning and others a 1997 paper on organelle transport in Xenopus eggs. Neither paper improved the case for anti-evolutionism, though.[2] But it’s worse than that. Strictly anti-evolutionist articles have yet to survive the peer-review process in standard journals, and since so many of their articles published in their own journals (such as the Answers Research Journal for Young Earth creationism, or BIOComplexity for Intelligent Design) ignore so much of the technical data, neither of the authors of this book are holding our breath for a successful anti-evolutionist piece to ever come down the slide. Back to the “historical science” quote: Patterson projected yet again when he contended that both evolutionists and anti-evolutionists were simply basing their understanding of the past on some arbitrary philosophic assumptions. But, this time, the author went further in saying that there either is no God or God created everything.

This is the most blatant of false dichotomies, for the options not only cannot be whittled down to either “No god” or “God”—they most certainly can’t be hacked down further to mean only Patterson’s very specific version of what god is proposed to have created the universe. Obviously there are a vast range of options as to what’s going on here. Some people do not believe in the existence of any gods; most others do. Some people believe that a god had a direct hand in the evolution of life on Earth; some do not. Some people believe in the existence of a god, but do not believe that god intervened in the evolution of life. None of the current religions on Earth can be said to be believed by most people, so at most Patterson was trying to privilege his particular creationist version of Christianity as the only allowed alternative to not-God. But even restricting things to the Christian theological field, there are many scientists who believe in the Christian God but do not believe that God intervened in evolution—from paleontologist Robert Bakker and biologist Mary Schweitzer, to ones who have written notable books on how their science connects with their faith, such as biologist Kenneth Miller in 1999 and paleontologist Robert Asher in 2012. Finally, on this quote, we can agree with the author on one thing: what is causing the anti-evolutionist to stall up is not a matter of evidence. Theirs is a theological imperative, but it is a branch of evangelical apologetics, not science. While our book isn’t concerned with the theological beliefs of Answers in Genesis (for those interested, biblical scholar Joel Anderson has gone through that in The Heresy of Ham, exploring how their literalist interpretations are both unscientific and unbiblical) such issues do come up as the underlying rationale for the anti-evolutionary position (and not just the overtly Young Earth creationist one of AiG). Ultimately for anti-evolutionists, the argument is about your eternal soul, about where you go when you die, not how old the Earth is or how the universe formed, or even how our species originated. That is why so many anti-evolutionists come back to “When you die, you’re going to be judged for your actions.” Unlike scientists and science advocates, busily trying to account for all the available evidence, but not trying to frame their findings against a theological mandate, antievolutionists are ultimately not concerned with what implications the

data have for future endeavors. And, as we continue through the antievolutionist arguments in this book, we will repeatedly focus on seeing where the data do in fact land. Now, that was a long detour to understand what Roger Patterson meant by “philosophical point of view.” The last problem with the author’s definition is what is meant by “past events.” How far back into the past do we have to go before science becomes historical science? Five minutes? Five hours? Five days? Five years? Fifty years? 500 years? 5,000 years? Is it only personal experience that’s allowed on the field, or can mute objects like rocks or the fossils in them not “bear witness” to the events that generated them?  If you wanted to dig your heels in, wouldn’t every experiment become “historical science” the moment it was finished? Real science doesn’t work that way. In fact, it can’t be so restrictive. There is no clear demarcation between the science that deals with the present (or observational/operational science as antievolutionists call it) and historical science. Let’s take some real-world examples to see why this is so. Anti-evolutionists would say that making vaccines is operational science, but the concept underlying the creation of new ones is that viruses and bacteria change genetically as the generations go on. Ohoh; this is the principle underlying natural evolution. Should it come then as a surprise that modern epidemiology pays attention to the evolutionary dynamics of viruses and bacteria in working out ways to inoculate us against them?  Even the stray creationist who works in that field uses evolution to do their work, such as British creationist Mark Toleman. And, what about forensic science? This is a field where a criminal’s identity must be inferred from evidence assembled after the fact—hair, blood spatters, purchasing receipts, video footage, etc. We imagine that anti-evolutionists would be perfectly fine with acknowledging that forensic science works, since that is demonstrably true; however, the same forensic principles have been used to solve cases that are years and even decades old. Is that not historical science?  And doesn’t it still work? So, what then is this strictly operational/observational science the creationists want as the only permissible one? Patterson defines it as “a systematic approach to understanding that uses observable,

testable, repeatable, and falsifiable experimentation to understand how nature commonly behaves.” Well, by that definition, evolution qualifies as an operational science. Evolution is definitely observable and (as we showed) testable. All of its mechanisms—whether natural selection (differential reproductive success) or sexual selection (mate preferences affecting the allele mix), genetic drift (genes mutating in ways that don’t immediately show up as good or bad), gene flow (how specific alleles move though population segments), or the founder effect (small populations establishing a base from which all descendants build on) —are observable and testable. In fact, these mechanisms are completely accepted even by many anti-evolutionists, if you look carefully at their own literature for the fine print; they just avoid drawing the bigger implications of them. But that doesn’t mean we’re not going to notice. Evolution is most certainly falsifiable. Never mind the paleontological cliché of finding a rabbit in the Precambrian (there simply should be no highly derived terrestrial vertebrates back then).  If allele frequency did not change from generation to generation, then the underlying mutation stockpile for the process would be missing, and evolution would be falsified. That hasn’t happened, and we can’t pretend that it has just to please the dogmatic needs of creationists who take Roger Patterson’s stunted definition of “science” as gospel. Lastly, evolution is repeatable, but we have to understand what this means. Let’s return to our forensic science example. Can a single murder be repeated? No, once the person is dead, then (tautologically) they’re dead. Forensic scientists do not have to completely redo the murder to figure out who was the murderer, though, nor do they require a bevy of eyewitnesses (so capable of human uncertainty in their own way). They can reconstruct the relevant information through hair or blood samples (the accused’s or the victim’s, found in circumstantially conclusive ways), purchasing history that placed the accused next door to the scene of the crime at that very moment, etc. What is repeatable about this situation is that you can reliably reach the same conclusion based on the available evidence. If five independent forensic scientists draw the same conclusion from the same evidence, then that probably means the evidence is strong;

however, if five independent forensic scientists draw five different conclusions, then the evidence is correspondingly weaker. This is why peer-review and the open presentation of evidence is so important. It allows independent labs around the world to critique each other, so that the truth is discovered. If a technical article survives multiple rounds of peer-review, then it is more probably true. If it does not, then the researchers have to go back to the drawing boards to start again. Once the researchers are ready and present another paper, that must go through another round of peer-review, and even if that paper does survive the process, then those and hopefully other independent researchers continue their work. Science is a fairly simple circular process, one that never ends,   ___________________________________________________________________

Inerrancy versus literalism They’re not the same idea, though they often overlap, and has been more of a concern for conservative American theologians than elsewhere. A 1978 Evangelical Theological Society “Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy” committed their signatories to it, though in practice this runs across the spectrum regarding the age of the Earth, the Flood and moral matters. Where a literalist might insist there was a global Flood because Genesis said so, an inerrantist could still allow interpretative leeway on that global part, rationalizing that it was “global” as far as Noah’s local world was concerned. Science issues have tended to take a back seat to the broader concern of not dividing the Christian community, though, from Bernard Ramm in 1969 down to Mark Snoeberger in 2013. Conservative creationists like Edward Hindson focused more about how it related to homosexuality and feminism in 1982, while Conservapedia was still holding to full YEC inerrant literalism in 2019. One measure of where the fissures in the inerrancy wall reside today concerned a 2000 paper by David Livingston & Mark Noll suggesting that one of the great defenders of inerrancy, Benjamin Warfield (1851-1921), was not averse to a generic form of natural

evolution. That elicited a rather delayed but strenuous pushback in 2010 from Fred Zaspel (orbiting Intelligent Design antievolutionism). Meanwhile, a 2018 article by Norman Geisler (19322019) & Douglas Potter exhibited the fence-straddling approach of those who cannot abide any of the Bible being in error but not explicitly identifying how this plays out concerning matters geological, cosmological or biological (mentioning only in passing how Jesus accepted the reality of Noah). building on the collective interactive contribution of hundreds of thousands in all the many disciplines, continually refining concepts (even ones that we think we have a good grasp on). This is the opposite of what happens in the top-down dogmatism of anti-evolutionism. Whether specifically creationist or the “Creationism Lite” of Intelligent Design, a mantra is asserted that evolution (or “Darwinism”) is insufficient to explain Earth’s biodiversity.  Doctrinal Young Earth creationists go much further, though, to insist that the Earth is only a few thousand years old, a global Flood occurred in the very recent past, the Bible is inerrant (see the  Info Box on the previous page), and that all organisms can be divided into a set of “kinds”. None of these have the possibility of being overturned for the creationist because they are assumed a priori at the outset. In a very real sense, no amount of evidence can persuade them. The same cannot be said of any scientific proposition, whether evolution, the Big Bang, or abiogenesis (not strictly a concern of natural evolution anyway, however insistently anti-evolutionists play the Origins or Bust card in their apologetic game, which we’ll have more to say on in Chapter 3).  

An Ill Wind in Tortuca(n)  

From the outset, the creationists we’ll be studying in this book (Ken Ham and his colleagues, and quite a few others) have rejected any and all science that disagrees with them. But the torrent of science data has compelled them to waffle, as they juggle what aspects of evolution they can accept or adapt. For example, they can allow “microevolution” (individual mutations) but not the dreaded

“macroevolution” (what can happen when lots of the former accumulate). It’s a very common anti-evolutionary anxiety, and one that can forge strange bedfellows, as seen in 2014 when the creationist Got Questions website cribbed from the Intelligent Design camp by freely invoking Steve Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt and Lee Spetner, as if they had done any better at disconnecting micro from macro than the creationists they usually relied on. For comparison, Willi Hennig (the founder of modern cladistic systematics) thought macroevolution consisted solely of microevolutionary processes, and that remains the main view in science today, as expressed by Andrew Simons or Michael Dietrich. The most you can get by way of scientific pushback comes from someone like paleobiologist Douglas Erwin, who brings up the issue of pacing, and how the arrival of gene regulatory networks and ecological interactions in the Cambrian added new layers to the metazoan dynamic mix. Erwin’s many essays on these topics have been quotemined by anti-evolutionists as somehow undermining “Darwinism”, even though the factors Erwin highlighted are no less natural than the purely genetic “microevolution” the anti-evolutionists imagine they can be comfortable with. This difference in the way anti-evolutionists grapple with issues and the data underlying them, compared to how scientists tackle them in their disciplines, offers clues to their disparate cognitive processes, involving in the creationist case what coauthor JD calls being a Tortucan. Latin for turtle (because he imagined people having a “mind shell” to prevent new ideas from entering), this tag builds on a cognitive ability to genuinely not think about things they don’t want to think about, a reflexive mental knack which JD dubs “Matthew Harrison Brady Syndrome” (MHBS) in honor of the fictional version of anti-evolution crusader William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) from the 1925 Scopes Trial era.[3] While college students overall can be influenced by how terms like “macroevolution” are presented in courses, as Joel Abraham et al. explored in a 2012 paper, we contend that the unfortunate reality of the Tortucan mindset is that it cannot simply be “educated out” of people, especially since it occurs broadly across our human species. You can

be old, young, white, black, conservative, liberal, theist or atheist; it does not matter. Is Ken Ham saying he would never change his mind on evolution any less dogmatic and tortucan than Noam Chomsky (often with coauthor Edward Herman) suggesting through the 1970s and into this century that the Khmer Rouge did not commit genocide in Cambodia (as morally troubling a stance as The Young Turks steadfastly denying the Armenian genocide)? Those advocates represent opposite ends of the spectrum—Ham being a very conservative religious creationist and Chomsky an extremely liberal atheist evolutionist—but they both have the same mental hang-ups about certain issues (their “tortucan ruts”). That also means being a Tortucan cannot be equated with being dumb. Witness Chomsky the brilliant linguist who nonetheless ended up getting a whole chapter in Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason. Very likely, the Tortucan mindset is linked in some capacity to one’s neurology. To go back to creationism (which is a subset of religious fundamentalism), Wanting Zhong et al.’s 2017 paper “Biological and cognitive underpinnings of religious fundamentalism,” identified several relevant brain systems playing a part:  

we found that participants with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) lesions have fundamentalist beliefs similar to patients with [ventromedial prefrontal cortex] lesions and that the effect of a dlPFC lesion on fundamentalism was significantly mediated by decreased cognitive flexibility and openness. These findings indicate that cognitive flexibility and openness are necessary for flexible and adaptive religious commitment, and that such diversity of religious thought is dependent on dlPFC functionality.  

The study also “found it was the extent of dlPFC volume loss that indirectly affected fundamentalist beliefs through its effect on cognitive flexibility and openness.” Even more specifically, the anterior cingulate cortex may be involved in “MHBS” and the Tortucan phenomenon too. That’s an old primate brain system that helps resolve social conflict. Work in that area includes Vincent Van Veen & Cameron Carter’s 2002 paper on conflict monitoring, and Peter Rudebeck et al. in 2006 on social valuation in macaques. That has become further coopted in us

humans for self-deception, as suggested by Nobuhito Abe et al. in 2006. And since religious fundamentalism is a subset of (obviously) religion, some researchers have attempted to link religious belief to ways people think about things. For example, the 2012 papers “Divine intuition: Cognitive style influences belief in God” by Amitai Shenhav et al., and “Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief” by Will Gervais & Ara Norenzayan indicate that people who think intuitively more than analytically are more likely to believe in god(s). That is, if you think with your “gut” more than your brain, then you are more likely to believe in some manner of god. This branch of science that involves exploring those biological and cognitive underpinnings of religion is called neurotheology (see Craig Aaen-Stockdale’s 2012 review). It not only attempts to explain religion but spirituality in general through evolutionary processes. As it happens, there are a number of different hypotheses that could potentially explain the origin of religion. Matthew Alper posits in The ‘God’ Part of the Brain that religion arose as a naturally selected counterweight to consciousness and its attendant existential crises (why are we here?). Another hypothesis explains religion as pedomorphic—a trait that occurs in juveniles but is retained until adulthood. Another word for that is neoteny, and under that view the occurrence of religion in adulthood could be seen as a “leftover” of the agency detection that children naturally display. Third, religion could be what Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) and Richard Lewontin called a “spandrel”—a byproduct of some other biological (or in this case neurological) process that ended up becoming important later. None of these are mutually exclusive. Indeed, coauthor JD’s working definition of religion pulls much of it together as “a neotenous spandrel that is sustained as a Scorched Earth Defense.” Scorched Earth Defenses being biological systems that, while dangerous, nonetheless have upsides that compensate for something even more dangerous (sickle cell anemia being one such, which has been sustained in some populations because the malaria it inadvertently protects people from takes an even higher toll). Ah, but what could be more perilous than having minds that make up religions? Having minds that are incapable of making up religions—

or much of anything else. Cue an extinct population? There are definite methodological challenges here. The most important is how do we test any of these hypotheses? Sure, we can come up with ad hoc rationalizations for religion utilizing evolution (in the same way that creationists attempt to explain current phenomena with a global flood), but these do nothing for our understanding if they do not actually contribute any testable knowledge. There are no other species of non-human hominids around today to compare to, and our closest living primate relatives do not show any discernable religious tendencies (or do double-entry bookkeeping). We also cannot see if religion or some primitive form of it was present in Homo heidelbergensis, erectus, etc. A circumstantial case can be made for symbolic activity among our close cousins, the Neanderthals (possible burial rituals), but this remains contentious. Regardless, the origin and evolution of religion remain shrouded in a time long before people started building identifiable shrines and temples, and the most that we can actually test at this point is how brain systems (ours and other animals) might correlate with religious activities. Stay tuned as more work comes in the future.  

Source Methods on the March!  

Understand that whatever it is that’s going on in the heads of antievolutionists can’t be put under a microscope, but we can measure the impact of this by looking at what comes out the product end. We can see how anti-evolutionism fails as a way of thinking about things by employing what we call the Source Methods approach. This is oh so simple, it’s the basics of sound reasoning, and not just in the sciences; every rigorous discipline depends on it. Indeed, coauthor JW found the current “Biological Inquiry” methods course at his university carries through on these principles, set down in an influential 2012 education paper by Ellen Goldey et al., stressing using real world examples and “developing students’ skills in mastering primary literature.” To start with, there are three layers to what goes on when people present arguments. There is a top level of deep philosophy, fundamental (and perhaps even necessary) assumptions that underlie

their approach to the matter. Naturalism can be one of those, while for others religious perspectives (often framed as supernaturalism) play a direct role that may or may not be justified. Some philosophical presumptions are inherently show-stoppers, such as solipsism, where the universe is held to be a personal illusion with no external reality beyond your own head. Why then undertake any scientific study of what is just a mental simulation? Which brings us to the big level one step down: the data floor. It’s nothing more nor less than the observations which the hypotheses need to explain. Not offer a promise to do that, but actually do so. Any would-be competitor to a working discipline, as creationism or Intelligent Design propose to do for evolution, needs to compete across all the relevant data field, not just cherry-picked snippets of it. This book is going to be all over the data floor, and how to interact with it. And that puts us in the less appreciated basement of Source Methods. Our trimmed down layperson’s version starts by asking only four questions:  

Where did you get your information? How did you fact-check that information? What do you think happened? What would change your mind?  

These four questions just prod you to put your information sources to the test, to think about where and how that information originated and how you know it is credible. As easy as it seems, these questions can quickly expose the underlying flaws in your opponent’s arguments as well as your own. It’s the ring of truth that genuine science strives for, and which the truth will regularly give.  And it’s the dull thud you get when you look at the anti-evolutionist rival by the same measure. As you’ll see, there are always flaws in anti-evolutionism. Here’s a preview just to show how powerful the method is. One of us (JW) came across (some way or another) a YouTube channel called Genesis Apologetics, which had disabled comments for all its videos (perhaps showing how not confident they are in their beliefs). Shortly thereafter he discovered that the channel had a FaceBook account where the people who run the page post videos

from the channel. One of the videos was titled “Fossil Record: Noah’s Flood or Evolution?” Of course, with a title like that, the video was assuredly geared towards creationists, and at some point, the video made a claim about an alleged bird ancestor from the Triassic called “Protoavis”. “Protoavis” was a collection of misidentified theropod bones that formed a chimaera, and for good reason (the evidence) no paleontologists take it seriously today—for those who want to learn more, coauthor JD went through the history of the affair in the ‘Dem Bones chapter of his TIP project (“Troubles in Paradise: The Methodology of Creationism”). The video cited Tim Beardsley’s 1986 commentary piece “Fossil bird shakes evolutionary hypotheses” that had been used by creationists like Henry Morris & Gary Parker and Duane Gish in the 1980’s and 1990’s to argue that birds were not dinosaurs, so all Genesis Apologetics had done in the 21st century was rip off a dated non-technical paper culled from the creationist quote mine. And just to remind us all of how bad scholarship seems never to die: Brian Thomas of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) was still trying to present “Protoavis” as a valid fossil in an Acts & Facts article in October of 2019. How embarrassing for the creationists. Perhaps they should have fact-checked their sources first. So, what does this all mean so far? Already, we have seen that anti-evolutionists misunderstand and misconstrue science to further their uncompromising agenda, and that there is a method for disassembling their arguments. However, before we get to their indigestible meat, we need to cover one more topic. This concerns how organisms are related to each other, and the tool modern systematics uses routinely to measure it: cladistics. Buzzword alert! Each one of you reading this book (and we’ll assume there are no invertebrate or bacterial readers out there, though be sure to let us know if there are) is a single member of a long lineage. Our parents each have parents who have their parents and so on. As a mammal (an animal having fur or hair as well as lactal mammaries), we developed inside our mother, specifically in an internal amniotic sac where we acquired all the nutrients necessary to become a baby, making our mothers a viviparous mammal. Now, is it a coincidence that we have fur or hair, mammaries, and developed in an amniotic sac

inside our mothers? No, rather, it is because we are a placental mammal—like giraffes, chimps, shrews, elephants, whales, and anteaters—that we have these characteristics. Mammalia constitutes a specific group of four-legged animals, called tetrapods, which all share the characteristics of fur or hair, lactal mammaries that produce milk, warm-blooded (endothermic) metabolism, one large dentary jaw bone, and three middle ear bones. Unlike our mothers, not all mammals have their offspring develop in an internal amniotic sac, though. Monotremes, for instance, are the only living mammals that do not engage in viviparous birth; instead, they lay eggs. Yes, eggs. Though the only monotremes around today hail from Australia and New Guinea (the platypus and four species of echidna), in 2013 Rosendo Pascual’s paleontologists found some used to live in South America (a geological neighbor in those days, from continental drift). Still deeper roots are to be found in the Cretaceous, with the fossil Repenomamus described by Jinling Li et al. in 2001 representative of mammal evolution at that early stage, with Alexander Averianov & Alexey Lopatin sorting out some of their systematic connections in 2011 and 2014 papers. Spoiler alert: these are so many clues to the “historical science” of their origin. It’s more of that natural evolution thing, you see; animals don’t pop out of nowhere, without natural antecedent. Not ever. The discovery of the platypus caused quite a stir among the respectable British naturalists back in the day, as Brian Hall has recounted. In 1788, British Deputy Judge-Advocate David Collins, along with the First Fleet, reached the Australian penal colony known as New South Wales, and there encountered “an amphibious animal, of the mole species” that had “the upper and lower mandibles of a duck.”  That duck bill really threw them off.  It didn’t fit at all in the tidy notion of fixed “kinds” so many 18th century naturalists had grown up with, as Harriet Ritvo recounted in her 1997 book on the critter. By 1799, George Shaw, Keeper of the Department of Natural History of the Modern Curiosities of the British Museum, puzzled: “Of all the Mammalia yet known it seems the most extra-ordinary in its conformation; exhibiting the perfect resemblance of the beak of a Duck engrafted on the head of a quadruped. So accurate is the similitude,

that, at first view, it naturally excites the idea of some deceptive preparation by artificial means…” This sentiment was shared by many naturalists, such as the grave-robbing Robert Knox, who wrote the small mammal off as a hoax. Over time, more specimens were gathered, and the behavior of the living animal began to be studied, leading to the realization that this was a mammal with distinctly reptilian characteristics. Horrors! For instance, platypuses have internal testes and a cloaca (an orifice for excreting and urinating) like reptiles; however, they have fur, lactal mammaries, and a diaphragm and are warm-blooded like mammals (though their body temperature is below that of the marsupials, in turn below us still more toasty placentals). As Erica Cromer has noted, their egg-incubating behavior is less like that of reptiles or birds, platypus eggs spending a much longer period (28 days) in the uterus, for example, compared to only a day for a chicken in its reproductive tract. But don’t think then that the platypus is some sort of simplistic “missing link” between reptiles and true mammals. That’s an old concept we’re hoping to knock by the wayside in this book. The platypus is firmly a mammal. Its egg-laying propensity, however, is indicative of a time when all mammals laid eggs. We should also note that the platypus is not closely related to birds either: its “duck bill” is soft and not bird-like at all. While the platypus’ mouth is on the underside of its bill, bird beaks are two separate parts that open and close, and are derived (as we’ll be seeing in Chapter 3) from the still more ancient dinosaur snout So the platypus is not part of the deep reptile-mammal transition— it’s a fairly recent addition to the furball parade. Likewise for their monotreme relatives, the echidnas (also known as spiny anteaters, even though they are not closely related to the actual anteaters, who are placental mammals) Echidnas diverged from their last common ancestor with the platypus around 63.6 million years ago, which followed closely behind the extinction event that killed the dinosaurs (around 65.5 million years ago). A 2009 survey of their genetics, morphology and ecology by Matthew Phillips et al. suggested their ancestors were a semi-aquatic platypus-like animal. The remaining question would be why they

eventually switched niches back to the land. Future fossils may settle that (or get building on that Time Machine to go snatch live protoechidna specimens from the Mesozoic). Regardless, we must stress that the monotremes are still true mammals. The ancestors of mammals we’re seeking were far more reptilian, though, having jaws made of more than one bone. To get to them we have to press still farther back in time. The most recent common ancestor between the living placental mammals, marsupials, and monotremes appeared about 180 million years ago, which was during the Jurassic period, and that ancestor was definitely an amniotic egg-layer.  

Meet the Synapsids  

The amniotes (tetrapods that develop in an amniotic sac, whether internal or external) did a lot of diversifying. The diapsids (so-called by their distinctive twin skull openings for muscle attachments) would eventually include the extinct dinosaurs as well as modern reptiles. And the synapsids (identified by their single skull opening, which later became the zygomatic arch of our own cheekbones) represent in time the mammals and all animals more closely related to them than to sauropsids or reptiles and birds. Preceding the true mammals over a hundred-million-year span were a glut of these synapsids, including the cynodonts, anomodonts, and gorgonopsians. Collectively known as mammal-like reptiles or reptile-like mammals, these were greatly expounded upon by coauthor JD in Evolution Slam Dunk concerning how diligently anti-evolutionists have ignored them. While the earliest representatives of the synapsids closely resembled what we’d call a “reptile” today, it’s important to remember that systematically they’re distinct groups, which readers should keep in mind when we refer to animals as reptilian or not when dealing with the mammalian roots. Kenneth Angielczyk and Kevin Padian have noted this distinction in 2009 articles, as has Donald Prothero in his book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, warning that “anyone who still uses the obsolete and misleading term mammal-like reptile clearly doesn’t know much about the current understanding of vertebrate evolution.”

Well, harrumph! And yet Prothero also admitted that the earliest synapsids “are almost indistinguishable from the earliest true reptiles in most features.” It’s in that general sense, then, that we’ll be alluding to “reptiles” in our discussions. You were warned. Beneath this nomenclatural issue, what is important to glean from synapsid evolution is that they heralded the beginning of a related suite of biological adaptions: the mammalian version of endothermy (warm-bloodedness), the formation of the distinctive mammalian jaw and ears, our hairy surface integuments, upright mammalian gait, and lactal mammaries. Let’s start with endothermy. Animals find lots of ways to keep themselves warm. But while some arthropods, like moths, warm their wings before flight, and John Lighton & Barry Lovegrove even found honeybees can warm up by selectively burping carbon dioxide, they’re still not considered true endotherms. Going full warm blooded involves big tradeoffs—you have to eat more food, and avoid overheating on warm days. Even quantifying the parameters can get pretty involved, as Peter Brice showed in a 2010 paper. Some of the evidence could be gleaned experimentally, as Albert Bennett and colleagues did in a 2000 paper on lizard metabolism. By 2004 Gordon Grigg’s team could write that “the changes involved in the transition to endothermy are more quantitative than qualitative.” And by 2016, enough had been learned of the genetics and biology for Lovegrove to lay out a much more detailed itinerary on the when and how of the evolution of endothermy. In fact, facultative endothermy has arisen independently in several vertebrate lines. Brian Bostrom et al. have shown leatherback sea turtles to be partly endothermic, and Zachary Stahlschmidt & Dale DeNardo found boids (non-venomous snakes including pythons and boas) regulate their temperature while brooding. Kathryn Dickson & Jeffrey Graham have surveyed the many fish groups that have developed it, and a 2015 paper by Nicholas Wegner et al. even pegged the opah fish (Lampris guttatus) as totally endothermic. By the way, Michael Gottfried et al. found the opah had a bit of a fossil record too: Megalampris from New Zealand, living 26 million years ago in the Oligocene—a period of changing climate, as it happens, not coincidentally including the selective pressure of ocean cooling. Raise that thermostat!

But in its fullest metabolic form endothermy has evolved in only two lineages of amniotes: mammals and birds. For mammals, understanding how endothermy arose required connecting a lot of biological dots, as paleontologist Tom Kemp pointed out in a 2006 paper:  

Explaining the course of evolution of any particular case of megaevolution, such as the origin of endotherms, becomes a matter of understanding the nature of the integration between all the structures and functions involved in the evolutionary transition, rather than identifying one particular structure or function as paramount over the rest as far as selection is concerned. Clearly from this perspective, it is unrealistic to consider even the origin of endothermy alone, because it too cannot be understood in isolation of other structures and functions of the organisms that are not immediately associated with temperature physiology…  

Kemp argued that the evolution of endothermy involved a “correlated progression” model where “Each structure and function associated with endothermy evolved a small increment at a time, in loose linkage with all the others evolving similarly.” At every stage the full system would be functional, ratcheting up over time until the result was the full endothermic form.[4] What about those warm-blooded birds? How did their endotermy originate? Birds are now regarded to be the descendants of carnivorous dinosaurs known as theropods (think your basic Jurassic Park “Velociraptor”, and then run). As for their biology (including how their lungs originated), scientists had been thrashing over that for some time, and it was still (pardon the pun) a hotly-contested issue when Willem Hillenius & John Ruben surveyed the issues in 2004 (see the Info Box  on how that has changed in the years since). But since then a lot more evidence has come onto the field, and currently dinosaurs appear to have been “mesothermic”—that is, possessing thermoregulation intermediate between true ectothermy (cold-bloodedness) and endothermy. Several recent papers by Robert Eagle and colleagues found dinosaur body temperatures ranged from the reptile level to somewhat higher, which makes sense. We should

expect to see intermediate metabolic rates between the endotherms and their ectotherm relatives. In 2001, Mary Schweitzer & Cynthia Marshall  proposed that  “The  model   ___________________________________________________________________

Bird lungs Birds have a distinctive flow-through breathing apparatus with air sacs that supplement their lungs, fed by a unidirectional airflow facilitated by bones with pneumatic openings. Creationist Daniel Anderson insisted in 2006 this avian arrangement “has no parallel in the animal kingdom.” Well, maybe so long as Anderson’s idea research was repeating Answers in Genesis relying in 1999 on the likes of Intelligent Design advocate Michael Denton, mushed in with Carl Wieland dismissing work by Patrick O’Connor & Leon Claessens on “Basic avian pulmonary design and flow-through ventilation in non-avian theropod dinosaurs” in 2005. Hillenius and Ruben represented a scientific camp that thought nothing like the avian pulmonary system was known in dinosaurs, which they defended in many papers (included in our references), with the most recent major shot being Davon Quick’s 2009 paper with Ruben on dinosaur cardio-pulmonary anatomy. That work was pounced on as sacred writ by anti-evolutionists, from Peter Galling at AiG to Casey Luskin at the Discovery Institute. Meanwhile, an opposing view has gained ground over the last decade as more fossils were discovered, and further work was done on living vertebrates. Richard Butler, Jonathan Codd, Patrick O’Conner, Emma Schachner, Paul Sereno, Mathew Wedel and colleagues are among those contending that the biological features permitting the unidirectional airflow seen in birds was ancestral to archosaurs, and that theropod dinosaurs especially graded into the avian mode with comparable air sac openings in their bones. Ex-creationist Jonathan Kane’s 2016 book chapter on “Created Kinds and the Origin of Birds,” which specifically addressed the objections Answers in Genesis has offered against bird evolution, reviewed the many problems with Ruben’s stance on dinosaur breathing. For example, Ruben’s concern that the mobile femurs of

dinosaurs ruled out an avian style respiration appears to have snagged on how ostriches shared those mobile bones and yet somehow managed to breathe just fine. That more of a continuum existed between dinosaur and bird is suggested by the papers on femoral evolution in dinosaurs and birds by John Hutchison 2001 and with Vivian Allen 2009, and Andrew Farke & Justy Alicea’s 2009 study on “Femoral Strength and Posture in Terrestrial Birds and Non-Avian Theropods.” There will be much more to say about the evolution of birds (and lungs), and how anti-evolutionists grapple with it, in the chapters to come. begins with simple changes in a single gene of a common ancestor, and it includes a series of concomitant physiological and morphological changes, beginning perhaps as early as the first archosaurian common ancestor of dinosaurs and crocodiles. These changes continued to accumulate within the theropod-avian lineage, were maintained and refined through selective forces, and culminated in extant birds.” We see the same parallel process over in the mammal ancestors. Albert Bennett & John Ruben laid out the case for therapsid endothermy back in 1986, and in 1994 Willem Hillenius called attention to the complex nasal turbinate bones in therapsids whose shape implied a higher metabolic rate to their breathing (the more active the oxygen flow, the higher the thermostat). Subsequent work has confirmed these insights. The early synapsids were ectothermic but become more endothermic over the millions of years to follow.  

An Earful of Jaw  

OK, enough about endothermy. The next important thing about mammals is our jaw and middle ear. Mammal ancestors had a number of bones in their jaws, like reptiles, but two of those bones (the quadrate in the skull and articular in the jaw), were joined by what eventually became the uniquely mammalian layout (built on the squamosal in the skull and an enlarged dentary bone in the jaw). That eventually freed up the ancestral reptile

articular-quadrate set to move out to become our ear bones (the malleus and incus, respectively). The transition from a reptilian jaw to a mammalian jaw had been spotted in our developmental biology all the way back in the 1830s. It’s a wonderful tale of scientific exploration, which Stephen Jay Gould devoted one of his essays to in 1990: “An Earful of Jaw.” But even more exciting, recent papers by Neal Anthwal and colleagues have delved into the genetic and biological underpinnings of the evolution of these structures in great detail. The coopting of the old reptilian jaw bones for hearing was also exquisitely preserved in the fossil record, involving work by many paleontologists, including Tom Kemp.  But the (dare we say) jawdropping prediction by Robert Broom in 1912 must take the cake.  He worked out that a specific form with both the jaw attachments occurring together had to have existed as the necessary transitional stage, and that prediction was fulfilled in 1932 with the discovery of the early Jurassic therapsid Diarthrognathus broomi (understandably named in his honor, and which was visited in JD’s Evolution Slam Dunk). Third on the checklist: all mammals possess hair, even the sleek dolphins. So how did that come about? The earliest synapsids didn’t have hair. Or at least, so we may surmise based on the limited fossils available. A rare body print identified by Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki & Maciej Bojanowski from the early Permian pelycosaur Dimetropus leisnerianus (part of the group that includes the famous finback Dimetrodon that shows up in every kid’s prehistoric creatures set) indicated at least its belly had rectangular scales like a crocodile. But by the later Permian, apparent hair traces have turned up in coprolites (fossilized dung), studied in papers by Roger Smith & Jennifer Botha-Brink in 2011, and Piotr Bajdek et al. in 2016. So, sometime after 300 million years ago (when the Permian began), hair appeared in the mammal-like reptiles, and scientists in the evolutionary developmental biology field (Evo-Devo for short) have delved into its biological origin. They’ve identified many genes involved: Wnt, Shh (Sonic hedgehog—and yes, it’s named for the video game character), and the bone morphogenetic protein (bmp) families. Which is only natural, since those are inescapably tangled up

with the evolution of keratinous structures in general (scales, claws, and feathers, along with our hair). Just on the Wnt gene, Roel Nusse & Harold Varmus 1992 surveyed their broad functions in animals, while Jiro Kishimoto et al. 2000, Thomas Andl et al. 2002, and Demeng Chen et al. 2012 have shown their role in hair formation, and Zhicao Yue et al. 2006 has done comparable work on its role in determining feather symmetry. In 1998 St-Jacques et al. found Shh signaling “essential for hair development,” and Holger Kulessa et al. 2000 and Michael Rendl et al. 2008 found comparable contributions by Bmp. Honest, we’re trying to avoid drowning the reader in the science works, but they’re also really neat. Several papers have revealed how deep those genetic roots go on the hair side: Leopold Eckhart et al. in 2008 and Danielle Dhouailly in 2009 found that the genes for the cysteine-rich alpha-keratin proteins necessary for hair development in mammals have direct homologues in sauropsids (the traditional “reptiles” and birds).  Thus, the genes for making hair were not popping up out of nowhere, but had been operating in the common ancestor of all amniotes for millions of years, now co-opted yet again for new functions in the synapsidmammal lineage.  That’s how evolution works. Fourth on the checklist: the mammalian gait is quite different from that of reptiles. Mammals walk with their legs positioned under their bodies, while reptiles have their legs sprawled out to the sides. We see the transition from reptilian to mammalian gate in the synapsid ancestors of modern mammals, where the earliest synapsids, such as pelycosaurs, had sprawling limbs, while the limbs moved progressively towards the underside of the body as the group evolved. Now the dinosaurs developed an upright stance independently, carried on in their universally bipedal bird descendants, which highlights the advantages to any vertebrate whose natural mutations work in that direction. As David Carrier laid out in an influential 1987 paper, vertebrates with paired lungs who flex their bodies sideways to walk (like reptiles) can’t breathe and move at the same time. That limits their adaptive options, and birds and mammals have shown what can happen when “Carrier’s Constraint” is removed among forms that don’t move by sideways wriggles.

Fifth on the mammal checklist are the lactal mammaries, the glands that produce milk for offspring and for which the mammals are named. How many mammaries a mammal has depends greatly on the species: humans have two, cows have four, pigs can have twelve, etc. Of course, both placental mammals and marsupials have nipples; however, monotremes do not. That’s because the monotremes lost their ancestral sucking capabilities (appearing by the later Triassic in taxa like the cynodont Brasilitherium, reviewed in a 2018 Science piece by Gretchen Vogel). As they adapted to eating more hardshelled prey, where a pliant suckling mouth only got in the way, a few hundred million years on we have the living monotremes with only mammary patches on their bodies from which the young could suckle. This lack of nipples has caused an interesting evolutionary adaptation in the monotremes, characterized by Ashwantha Enjapoori in several recent papers. Since the milk is exposed to the air, they found a unique protein in their milk that helps protect the young from bacterial infection, appropriately named the Monotreme Lactation Protein (MLP). But just as relevant from an evolutionary perspective, the hormones triggering the milk remained ancient, originating deep in the mammalian lineage, likely before the divergence of marsupials and eutherians (placental mammals). To bring this part full circle, in 2002 and 2012 papers Olav Oftedal worked out that “The mammary gland apparently derives from an ancestral apocrine-like gland that was associated with hair follicles.” Experimental work by Julie Mayer et al. in 2008 even identified the specific role of Bmp in the “Conversion of the Nipple to Hair-Bearing Epithelia by Lowering Bone Morphologenetic Protein Pathway Activity at the Dermal-Epidermal Interface.” Now there’s evolutionary coopting for you! So, why are all of these mammal features important? What is the point of describing them in such detail? The point is that we have all the main diagnostic elements of mammals: we are endothermic, we have three bones in our middle ear and one bone comprising the jaw, we have hair, we have limbs under our bodies (even when we try a walk on all fours), and we have lactal mammaries. To play on the old phrase, if it walks and hears and suckles like a mammal… We have these characteristics because we are mammals, and therefore we are also descended from mammals. Traits are passed

from parent to offspring and are gradually changed over the generations by natural mutation; this is evolution in a nutshell. And, as those traits are inherited with descendants diversifying into different species, clades are formed—remember our cladistics?  Clades are what they’re all about: groups of organisms related by a common ancestor (something ultimately and inevitably true of all organisms). Clades are then nested inside each other, like so many biological Russian Dolls. For example, the clade feliformes consists of all cat-like carnivorans—lion, tiger, hyena, meerkat, civet, fossa, binturong, etc. Feliformes is nested within the larger clade carnivora, which contains all cat-like and dog-like carnivorans—dogs, bears, seals, mustelids, etc. All carnivorans are nested within laurasiatheria (mammals originally hailing from North America, Europe, and Asia), which nests in turn within boreoeutheria (laurasiatheria and mostly primates and rodents), further nested within placentalia (all placental mammals), and on it goes ... all the way back through the lineage of life to LUCA (the Last Universal Common Ancestor). Yep, a lot of jargon, but the names aren’t just to intimidate, they’re the ways scientists clarify and specify their concepts so that meaning can be assigned. It’s not magic, everybody in a specialized field does it. Try talking to your car mechanic without using their terminology, from lug wrench to catalytic converter. And don’t even get us started on computer or internet nomenclature. You think taxonomists love jargon, talk with an IT person. So while there will be terms used as we invoke the cladistic toolkit, we’ll try to keep things defined and explained, so everyone can follow along without losing sight of the goal: to understand things. All of these clades are identified by the diagnostic traits we’ve discussed so far. Mammals are defined by hair, lactal mammaries, and a number of other traits; however, all mammals develop embryonically in an amniotic sac, meaning they are amniotes. All amniotes either have four limbs or are descended from an ancestor that did, making them tetrapods. All tetrapods have a backbone, making them vertebrates. All vertebrates have pharyngeal slits; a post-anal tail (even if temporarily); a notochord; and a dorsal hollow nerve cord, making them chordates. And with that, we’ve climbed all the way back through the systematic checklist into the most basic of animal phyla,

the body plans that can be discerned in complex life (and why we can tell a cow from a katydid).[5] Everyone reading this book is simultaneously a member of the human species, and a mammal, and an amniote, and a tetrapod, and a vertebrate, and a chordate. It goes on and on. The reason that all organisms are part of clades that are nested within other clades is that all organisms are related by natural branching common descent. Any attempt to make sense of the history of life without recognizing that reality is doomed to failure, as we’ll see further down in Chapter 5 regarding the creationist baraminology. So it is that mammals are modified descendants of earlier amniotes, placentalians are a modified subgroup of earlier mammals, laurasiatherians are a modified subgroup of placentalians, etc. This is precisely how we understand evolution works. Applying the relationship between genetic relatedness and phenotypic characteristics (the observable traits in individuals) allows researchers to understand the history of life in the distant past. Because most fossils date too long ago to be genetically tested, though, relatedness must be inferred from those individual phenotypes. But that doesn’t mean the inferences are weak or speculative. It’s that forensic science again, using tools as precise as any in science. As Henry David Thoreau once quipped: some circumstantial evidence is conclusive—like finding a trout in the milk. This inference allows researchers to tell a lot of things about fossil organisms. For example, all mammals have vertebrae; there are no counterexamples. They are also necessarily eukaryotic (having nuclei in their cells), and hence, multicellular. They’ll have internal digestive tracts because they are tetrapodal amniotic chordates. If organisms had not evolved in this way, if they were simply designed as they are currently, then that designer comes off as, well, rather deceitful. Why create organisms to merely look like they were descending with inherited modifications through generations? To test people? We’re not able to chat with any prospective deity to ask what they had in mind littering the Mesozoic with mammal transitionals. But what we can say is that even if the relatedness among organisms is just a cleverly devised smokescreen, it allows researchers to make predictions that can and have been verified—such as Archaeopteryx, Tiktaalik, Microraptor, and others. It even allowed researchers to

predict that, if birds are their descendants, non-avian dinosaurs should have a furcula (the wishbone). And sure enough, numerous theropods have now been found with furculae. Strange coincidence? The fact that researchers can make verifiable predictions using evolution indicates either that it works because it’s true … or researchers are just unfathomably lucky. In his Evolution Slam Dunk, coauthor JD called this the Fossil Genie—a most obliging jinn that seemed positively dedicated to supplying evolutionary paleontologists with a fossil record cluttered with specimens to match their predictions, and so make them ever so happy. JD regards that as a rather unlikely and unsatisfying hypothesis. So don’t forget that buzzard cladistics we warned you of earlier. Cladistics is nothing more nor less than the modern descendent of Linnaean taxonomy. Back in the 18th century Carolus Linnaeus (17071778) proposed a certain set of categories for classifying organisms:

Kingdom / Phylum / Class / Order / Family / Genus / Species They’re still used today. But instead of just looking at the overall morphology of organisms, as taxonomists used to do, cladistics puts it all on a rigorous scientific footing by quantifying the details, and comparing organisms trait by trait to measure how “parsimonious” one potential lineage relationship is compared to another. Modern cladistics allows researchers to create many new categories for classifying organisms, including newly found unnamed ones (and anyone who keeps up with the scientific literature knows how many of those there are these days). This system has turned out to be much better for understanding the relationships among organisms than old Linnaeus could have dreamed—and that means their evolutionary relationships. Whether creationists like it or not (and they don’t), contemporary molecular genetics, the full range of fossil evidence, and recent interdisciplinary fields like evolutionary developmental biology (Evo-Devo) and paleogenomics have shed even more light on those relationships. So, with an understanding of the Source Methods approach and cladistics, we have the tools to delve headlong into the arguments creationists put forward, and see if any of them hold up to scrutiny. In the two volumes we will encounter a bunch of really interesting

subjects, including outer space and astrophysics, radiometric dating, dinosaurs, human evolution and the mythology we humans have come up with to explain the natural world around us. But the primary focus of this first volume will be on the biology of life and the clues offered by what has been found so far among fossils. And speaking of that.... In a 2017 article in Acts & Facts (the Institute for Creation Research’s glossy magazine aimed to appear like a National Geographic or Scientific American for their readership) titled “The Stones Cry Out: What Rocks and Fossils Say about the Age of the Earth,” Brian Thomas wrote (his italics): “Christians should be encouraged to look at the rocks and fossils themselves and compare them with the biblical record, instead of relying on ‘a majority of authorities’ who write their own world history apart from that given by the highest ranking authority.” We would heartily agree that everyone who seeks to address the age of the Earth and like matters “look at the rocks and fossils themselves.” Indeed, where else would you look, if not to the evidence? Though they will find no religious doctrine offers much in the way of insight on their study (not just the biblical one Thomas prefers to the exclusion of all others), they will find those tangible strata have quite a story to tell. The rocks were there, you see.



2. The Dating Game Creationists don’t like radiocarbon dating. In fact, they don’t really like most ways of dating things, as we’ll see, because those findings naturally contradict their Young Earth time frame. But radiocarbon dating gets star billing, partly because it trips off the tongue more easily than “rubidium-strontium.” The concept is easy enough to grasp, though, and the Answers books explain the basics of it accurately enough (they can hardly deny it, it since its quite fundamental biology and physics). Living things ingest carbon all the time.  It’s in the food, you know. We’re made of it. But there’s a feature of the carbon-based food we eat that can be used as a dating mechanism: cosmic rays slamming into the atmosphere break atoms down into their constituent particles (neutrons and protons), along with making mesons (ephemeral particles that decay in less than a microsecond) and other fun stuff. When they hit the nitrogen in the atmosphere (14N)—and there’s a lot of it handy (78% of our air is made of it)—a proton gets knocked off and it becomes the element one down on the periodic table, an isotope of carbon, but one with a couple of extra neutrons (14C) compared to the basic carbon atom (12C). There’s a 13C carbon isotope that occurs naturally too, which we’ll get to in due course. Plants incorporate that radiocarbon along with the standard carbon, and the things that eat the plants do that too—and the things that eat the things that eat the plants end up with it along the food chain. So living things based on carbon can’t avoid having 14C in their system. 14 C doesn’t stay that way, though. It’s radioactive,  and decays  over time,   ___________________________________________________________________

Fun facts on carbon fixation C3 involves utilizing the enzyme RuBisCO to fix carbon dioxide from the air into the three-carbon intermediate molecule 3phosphoglycerate; meanwhile, C4 carbon fixation produces the four-carbon malate instead.

Researchers understand the C4 pathway to have evolved from the C3 pathway, with some authors noting that this process has occurred some sixty times. The step-by-step evolution has been worked out, reviewed in 2016 papers by Andrea Bräutigam & Udo Gowik, “Photorespiration connects C3 and C4 photosynthesis,” and “Glycine decarboxylase in C3, C4 and C3–C4 intermediate species” by Stefanie Schulze et al., showing even what the intermediate steps in the process looked like. In addition, knowing how C3 plants convert to C4 can even help farmers grow more rice with fewer resources because the evolved C4 mechanism is more efficient. This fact stands in stark contrast to Kent Hovind’s claim that farmers rely on evolution not happening; their crops say otherwise. shedding its excess neutrons in pairs to become basic 12C again. The process is pretty slow from our point of view: half of the radioactive atoms will have decayed to 12C after 5,730 years (which is already perilously close to the age of Creation in AiG’s 6,000-year reckoning, remember), half of that in another 5,730 years (oops, we’re way past the Genesis Creation now), and so on, until there’s too little to measure accurately (just try counting individual atoms, they’re really small and can slip through your fingers so easily). More on how you count weensy things like atoms in a bit. Now we’re always munching on fresh carbon while we’re alive (it’s like a habit with us), so a balance is achieved in the body between the 14 C and the 12C. That is, until you stop eating. Keep that up long enough and it’s what’s called being dead. No more eating. No more fresh carbon mix coming in. So, bit by bit, the radioactive 14C can’t avoid decaying away until there’s nothing left in the sample to detect but 12C (that takes over 50,000 years by the way). Light Bulb Moment: maybe we could use this as a way of dating how old dead organic things are? The older it is, the less 14C there would be (duh), and the more 12C there would have to be proportionally, so applying that half-life thing to the ratio would directly measure (within a reasonable margin of error) how much time had elapsed since the critter had stopped munching 14C-laced food. That’s true even though the proportion of 14C in the atmosphere can vary due to our own human activity, as we burn fossil fuel that are storehouses of depleted carbon. Bacteria and natural radioactive

sources can also impact the process a bit, and more rarely even the breakup of glacial ice dams can affect 14C balances, as their fresh water drains into the salter ocean (though climate researcher Wallace Broecker noted how this would make radiocarbon dates on things living from such a period appear younger, not older). It didn’t take long for scientists to start taking all these things into account, of course, such as Meyer Rubin & Dwight Taylor laying out how not to date living clams and snails in 1963. Fast-forward to 2010 and a paper by Katerina Douka et al. showed how improvements in analytical techniques could even deal with the vexing “reservoir effect” (where oceans and the food chains of organisms living there tend to be deplete in 14C) to permit more useful dating of the pesky marine shellfish. A particularly neat aspect of how knowledge can be teased from what others might dismiss as “discordant” factors is how the heavier carbon isotopes don’t diffuse as easily in plants as the natural 12C, and several enzymes in the carbon fixation paths (C3 and C4) in photosynthesis also preferentially incorporate the lighter natural 12C in differing degrees (see the  Info Box for more Fun Facts). Many papers have gone into this: Marion O’Leary in 1988 and Graham Farquhar et al. in 1989, several by Irene Fernandez and colleagues in 2003, and a recent paper by Simon Fahrni et al. in 2017. All this can be especially useful in assessing the impact of climate change, as organisms using either the C3 or C4 systems react differently. Forests are an obvious example, with papers on the general impact by Lucas Silva & Madhur Anand in 2013, and Ana Cabaneiro & Fernandez more specifically on European pine forests in 2015. So radiocarbon dating is not in collapse. But wait. 5,730 years plus 5,730 years plus 5,730 years etc. ... maybe you might be getting the idea how measuring the remnants of even a “rapidly” decaying isotope like 14C could quickly sprint past the supposed age of all things according to the AiG playbook. And how still longer-lived radioactive isotopes, with half-lives running into the millions of years (or even billions, in the case of 238U  209Pb) would pose a big problem for Young Earth Creationism by their very existence. As Emily Willoughby noted in her 2016 book chapter on “Radiometric Dating and the Age of the Earth,” any radioisotope with a half-life less than 460 million years would be gone if the Earth were 4.5

billion years old—while any created isotopes with half-lives longer than 600 years wouldn’t have time to decay away if the Earth were only 6,000 years old. Willoughby charted the 34 radioactive elements with half-lives of 70 million years or less, and you’ll never guess what the results were. Well, actually you can guess (if you have even a ballpark figure for how old the Earth is): all have undetectable values in rocks. So this radioactive dating thing is an issue so hot for creationist dogma that it’s, well ... radioactive. And this makes the reaction by many creationists quite a sight to behold. There had already been a parade of creationists on this matter of radiometric dating before Answers in Genesis got in the game: popular level books like Donald Chittick’s 1984 The Controversy; textbooks like George Mulfinger & Donald Snyder’s 1979 Earth Science for Christian Schools, or Henry Morris’ Scientific Creationism aimed at public school use in 1985. And then there’s the technical RATE books (the acronym for Radioactive Age of The Earth) by Larry Vardiman et al. in 2000 and 2005, the most extensive compilation of YEC claims on this subject, which has earned a comparable pushback from critics (there’s a whole page of linked articles at the Christian pro-science American Scientific Affiliation, for example). Most of the YEC claims have been recycled in the secondary apologetic publications, of course, such as the many Acts & Facts articles assailing radiometric dating since 2014 by Vernon Cupps, as well as by the RATE authors themselves. Some authors explicitly targeted human evolution (a prime concern of creationists wanting our species never to be descended from any “lower” animal, as we’ll see graphically in the next chapter, and explore in more depth in Volume 2), and that naturally involved questioning the dating methods used on the fossils. It’s revealing though how little the quote mining deck stacking method of Marvin Lubenow’s Bones of Contention in 1992 differed from Christopher Rupe & John Sanford trying the same tricks a quarter century later in Contested Bones in 2017, or in Brian Thomas charting out in 2015 and 2017 articles dozens of alleged “Young Radiocarbon Samples” that he’d culled from a variety of creationist sources. Pulling up the rear, the quirky “non-creationist” Richard Milton’s 1997 Shattering the Myths of Darwinism drew so heavily (and

credulously) on standard YEC arguments that coauthor JD pegged him as his poster child for scholarly incompetence while reviewing YEC arguments in his old TIP “Dinomania” chapter. There were naturally plenty of scientific responses to that initial spurt of Young Earth claims, with notable articles including Christopher Weber in 1982, several 1983 anthology works by Stephen Brush, and a very hefty 1987 volume, the classic Science and Earth History by Arthur Strahler. As the Internet came on the scene, critics of creationism have found that a handy venue, as Kevin Henke noted in 1998 regarding the claims of creationist David Plaisted. And besides the continuing secondary Glee Club of the upper echelon like Rupe, Sanford and Thomas today, there are a lot of creationists online who compile lists of “anomalous” radiocarbon dates they’ve culled from other creationists, obviously not bothering to read them closely enough to learn the details. One such would be Michael Brown in 2018, relying on other creationists to do his trawling for him, such as a 1988 article by Robert Brown on 14C. The result was a string of chestnuts, offered without explanatory detail, like the aforementioned Rubin & Taylor paper, the musk ox matter we’ll be discussing shortly (though he did not even give the author’s names but listed the item generally as “Fairbanks Creek Musk Ox”), as well as a 1963 study by M. L. Keith & G. M. Anderson identifying “Fictitious Results” from mollusk shells (which were caused because the humus these river dwellers drew on was depleted in 14C) and a 1984 Alan Riggs paper on snails living in desert springs (where their fixation of dissolved HCO3 resulted in a 14C deficiency in their shells). Let’s take a look at how the Keith and Riggs papers have filtered through the creationist food chain, and how the sort of “scholar” who could misrepresent their contents secondhand could go on misrepresenting other things. The Keith paper showed up in one of Kent Hovind’s old videos (where the creationist misspelled it as “Kieth”), along with a 1971 Wakefield Dort science article on some mummified seals (whose aquatic diet and lifestyle inevitably and still quite naturally skewed the carbon balances in their tissues), and a very secondary invocation (cribbed from a 1994 creationist book by Erich von Fange) of creationist Hugh Miller’s faulty claim that he had dated four dinosaur

bones to 20,000 years (still three times the age of the YEC Earth, of course). Science correspondent Michael Lafferty tracked the Miller details down in 1991, documenting how the scientists at both the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh (from whom Miller had obtained his dino bits) and the University of Arizona (where Miller took them for dating) had warned Miller that all he was about to “date” were the organic preservatives that had been used on the specimens, not any carbon in the bones since that had been replaced long ago by minerals (a fact even Hovind mentioned in his own video). A big nod   here to the   2008 video by Potholer54,    a  British  critic  of ___________________________________________________________________

Mammoth hunting Tracking down the primary source data regarding creationist claims can involve quite a trek, helped at times by improving access to the original sources. For example, in 2001 Walt Brown’s In the Beginning claimed several mammoths had produced conflicting radiocarbon dates (Dima, Franklin, and Vollosovitch), citing along the way a 1975 paper by Troy Péwé and a 1982 one by N. A. Dubrovo. Brown’s claim has made the rounds of secondary copiers, such as Bill Morgan “quoting” Pewe in 2005 (“One part of the Vollosvitch mammoth carbon dated at 29,500 years and another part at 44,000”), but had obviously only cribbed the Brown version since Péwé had not discussed that mammoth. At the same time, in 2005, Mark Isaak’s Counter-Creationism Handbook (available also as “Claim CD011.2” at the TalkOrigins Archive) suggested Brown had confused different mammoth specimens, along with overlooking the role played by preservative contamination, but Isaak couldn’t identify where Brown got the ages for the Vollosovitch mammoth. A 2007 CreationWiki posting acknowledged Brown’s goofs on the latter two, but insisted there was still a controversy regarding the Dima mammoth. However, as Anatoli Lozhkin & Patricia Anderson’s 2016 review of the dating (41,000±900 years ago) and paleontology of the Dima mammoth put it, “Limited access to early

Russian literature resulted in unfortunate misinformation in Englishlanguage publications.” Indeed. Step forward to 2019, when creationism critic Paulogia encountered Kent Hovind repeating Brown’s Vollosovitch factoid (like Morgan, Hovind also apparently never met a bit of Brown he wouldn’t copy while not fact checking it), he was able to discover the original dating in a 1997 paper by Yurij Vasil’chuk et al. that Brown had not cited. Given that there were two mammoths found in Russia, not one (Brown and CreationWiki were aware of that), the wide margin for errors on the samples suggested caution over how pristine they were after three quarters of a century under uncertain conditions, thus explaining the slight variation in three of the pieces (clustering around 30K), with the older 44K date representing that of the other mammoth.   creationist twaddle, who did a lot of fine tracking to pin down this evasive daisy chain lurking behind Hovind’s confident assertions. Miller’s notions were still being defended into the 21st century, as evidenced by a 2011 posting on “Media Interview and Corrections” by the creationist Paleo Group (a group working for the Montana creationist Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum). Read the  Info Box for Walt Brown and Kent Hovind versus mammoths. As if it were possible to outdo Hovind for secondary credulity, in his 2009 Earth’s Catastrophic Past book, Andrew Snelling not only trotted out the Keith and Riggs works, but added extensive quotes culled from one of our all-time favorites in the “oh you’ve got to be kidding” category: Robert E. Lee’s 1981 complaints about radiocarbon dating from the Anthropological Journal of Canada (Snelling cribbed his quotes from the Creation Research Society Quarterly’s 1982 reprint of Lee’s piece). That journal is not available online, and for good reason: however serious sounding the publication appeared to be, it wasn’t a science journal, nor was its editor Robert Lee a qualified scientist. The “Anthropological Journal of Canada” was a mimeographed screed selfpublished by some Canadian anti-evolutionists, as coauthor JD discovered because, by astounding luck, his college alma mater

(Eastern Washington University) happened to have (inexplicably) full hard copy of the original in their archives. Lee’s non-authoritative opinion pops up fairly often in the fringe YEC literature, usually in a pile cribbed secondarily from quote mines or sources not worth the trouble. Some examples: Laurence Smart 1996, James Perloff 1999, Dennis Petersen 2002, Vance Ferrell 2010, All About Archaeology 2011 (one of many “All About...” creationist websites put up in 2011), NephiCode 2012 (a Mormon apologist angling to land their doctrine’s wandering prophet Lehi down in South America) including the Keith and Riggs citations, and Bill Jahns 2018 (fielding the Keith article along with revisionist historian David Rohl quibbling Egyptian dating in his 1995 book Pharaohs and Kings). How far this smorgasbord eclectic practice can slide might be seen by Grady McMurtry’s 2010 fielding of Lee along with the Keith and Riggs misrepresentations, doses of trawled Richard Milton, and finally mistaking a 2008 paper by Peter Swart reevaluating 13C preferences in the carbon cycle millions of years ago as somehow undermining radiocarbon dating (apparently forgetting both that RC dating wasn’t the issue in that paper, or that it is 12C and 14C that are the isotopes involved in that process, not 13C). This spirit of wishful thinking triumphing over sound method surfaced again when the “Paleochronology Group” (that would be the fancier-sounding moniker of the Paleo Group mentioned above) tried to radiocarbon date a number of dinosaur bones. They sent a piece of a Triceratops horn to the University of Georgia for C-14 dating and received a date of just a few thousand years. A number of other samples were evidently dated in-house, according to Tom Shipley at The Creation Club in a 2015 post—including fossils of Acrocanthosaurus, an unnamed hadrosaur, Allosaurus, and Apatosaurus. According to Shipley, the results came back for each specimen between about 20,000 and 40,000 years old. Not quite 4,500 years ala Flood time, of course, but closer than a hundred million was. The Paleochronology Group then published their finds in a paper titled “A Comparison of δ13C & pMC Values for Ten CretaceousJurassic Dinosaur Bones from Texas to Alaska USA, China and Europe with that of Coal and Diamonds” and presented the results at the 2012 Western Pacific Geophysics Meeting in Singapore. The

abstract of the paper was even posted on the Meeting’s website, but once the results were peer-reviewed and it was determined that the Group was merely using the results to push a creationist agenda, the abstract was removed. Two of their coauthors, Hugh Miller and Hugh Owen, complained about their treatment, and in 2015 Shipley howled that the “Great Darwinian Propaganda Machine” was silencing them. But it should be suspicious that the actual paper has never been posted online, which you would think the creationists would be anxious to do, to make available that which was supposedly suppressed. Though that would have also allowed people to see whether their protocols on ruling out contamination were really as stringent as their abstract insisted. This story was brought to both coauthors’ attention when a conspiracy theorist YouTube channel called Beyond Science (the astute will note that his acronym is an ironically apt “BS”) repeated only the creationist side of the story. Beyond Science hasn’t been alone in swallowing the tale. Jay Wile treated the Paleochronology Group’s findings as valid in a 2018 blog posting, and a 2017 lecture on “Carbon-14 in Fossil Carbon, Or, The Missing Presentation” by creationist Paul Giem insisted there were no contamination issues in the samples because they had been washed in acid beforehand. But we can be skeptical of Giem’s capacity to spot the limitations of such procedures when one looked at his source for a carbon date of 24,600 BP obtained from a mosasaur. Johan Lindgren et al.’s 2011 “Microspectroscopic Evidence of Cretaceous Bone Proteins” had been most specific about contamination (regarding samples that had been subjected to just that surface acid bath):  

the amount of finite carbon was exceedingly small, corresponding to 4.68%±0.1 of modern 14C activity (yielding an age of 24 600 BP), and most likely reflect bacterial activity near the outer surface of the bone (although no bacterial proteins or hopanoids were detected, one bacterial DNA sequence was amplified by PCR, and microscopic clusters of bone-boring cyanobacteria were seen in places along the perimeter of the diaphyseal cortex).  

Ah, leaving out the relevant data and background literally under their nose? Why not? That’s what creationists do, and such superficial

daisy chain repetitive methodology has similarly afflicted the Answers book gang when they took their repeated swings at the field. Let’s start with the radiocarbon side. Having described the basics of radiocarbon dating, the Answers books commenced their not so gentle deck-stacking, declaring (their bold) that “Anything over about 50,000 years old should theoretically have no detectable 14C left. That is why radiocarbon dating cannot give millions of years. In fact, if a sample contains 14C, it is good evidence that it is not millions of years old.” This was a set up to the contention later in the chapter that supposedly old objects like coal contained 14C and therefore had to be young. But that was a false trail on several counts. First, contamination (including by those pesky invasive bacteria) could result in 14C being detected long after the original stuff had decayed away, and there were four other factors that could result in an instrument registering “14C” in samples that were actually much older. Rachel Taylor & John Southon detailed these in a 2007 paper on how to use natural diamonds (really, really, really old objects) to calibrate the dating equipment. First, not only could stray cosmic rays generate fresh 14C now and then (trace atoms of nitrogen can occur in diamonds, along with boron, oxygen and sulfur), but secondly, the instrument itself could accumulate a background hum that would show spurious “14C” on the meter. Thirdly, contamination anywhere along the line of preparation can slip some 14C into the mix too, including fresh 14C atoms incorporated into the CO2 that crops up in the atmosphere (and the science tends to be done in our atmosphere, doesn’t it?). Finally, the very radiation being used to bounce off the atoms (ideally deflecting one way for 14C and another for 12C) can generate accidental readings of “14C” from the atom in the middle, as the beam will occasionally ricochet off a 13C atom and register it as the adjacent 14C.[6] All those would be very rare exceptions, of course. So rare, in fact, that taken all totaled, the stuff detected would result in a few blips that, when fed into the formula, would generate a radiocarbon “date” clean off the scope: 80,000 or 90,000 years in the case of those carefully prepared diamonds Taylor and Southon employed (meticulously shielding the samples from as much of the external micro-contamination sources as was humanly possible). Such “dates”

would be just an artifact of the process, well past the 50,000 year natural dating precision (and still farther from the 6000 years creationists claimed for their appearance at Creation). Such are the “dates” everybody gets from diamonds, including creationists. The Taylor-Southon paper is revealing in another way, though, because it shows how easily creationists can suppress data that undercuts their argument. Creationist geologist Andrew Snelling neglected to mention any of that relevant contamination potential when he tried to spin the paper in a 2007 Answers in Genesis article, doubling down on his claim that these diamond dates really proved the Earth was young, and repeated this argument in 2011 and 2019. A similar dance-around occurred with John Baumgardner’s responses to the criticisms by Kirk Bertsche (coming from the theistic evolution stance), and Josef Holzschuh, Jean de Pontcharra & Hugh Miller’s 2009 paper claiming “Recent C-14 Dating of Fossils, including Dinosaur Bone Collagen.” None mentioned the perfectly natural reasons why the diamonds would “date” as they did, let alone address those issues. As we’ll be seeing repeatedly with Snelling’s work in this chapter, this is the standard operating procedure for creationism, and especially for those circulating at the top of their authority chain. Merely because the creationists cite technical work does not mean those works mean what they purport them to mean. Snelling is a particularly unreliable and evasive purveyor of primary source data, and yet his views continue to filter through the creationist apologetic food chain. The diamond claim has become such an entrenched trope that Christopher Rupe & John Sanford repeated it in Contested Bones without even bothering to offer a source citation for it, and in 2019 Jeff Miller listed radiocarbon in diamonds as his example #5 from the “21 Reasons to Believe the Earth is Young” (Lorence Collins & Ken Woglemuth presented their own critical analysis of Miller’s list, and we’ll be hitting more of Miller’s examples in this and subsequent chapters). This eyes wide shut mode had quickly filtered downstream to Mike Riddle, who made the mistake of citing the Taylor-Southon paper directly in his own 2007 contribution to the Answers book, billing it as confirmation for the presence of “detectable” 14C in diamonds. Riddle had merely repeated the trimmed notions he got secondarily from

Snelling, of course, and had never bothered to actually read the source paper. And we know this because our coauthor JD asked him (when he was in JD’s hometown of Spokane, Washington, in 2010. on an AiG lecture tour to a church there). Riddle didn’t seem at all bothered by being called out for his secondary parasitism, or show any inclination to mend his ways. And we can know that too, because the coauthors of this book had another chance to ask him in a July 2018 video conversation, where we confirmed Riddle still hadn’t read the paper. We told you the Taylor-Southon paper was revealing. Mike Riddle’s complete disinterest in actually studying any of the data field directly in this diamond case comported with his overall philosophical approach to evolution generally, which in our 2018 chat was a raging Origins or Bust presuppositionalism, where evolution was deemed impossible at the start solely because science had yet to work out how life originated prebiotically (though there is relevant work on that front, which we’ll be going into next chapter). Never mind that we repeatedly reminded Riddle that none of the evolution evidence goes away because of how life originated, Riddle would not allow us the integrity of our own position, which is that it literally didn’t matter whether life had originated naturally. Even if life had come about by a flaming miracle, macroevolution evidence like the reptile-mammal transition (which coauthor JD had penned a full book on, and tried unsuccessfully to get Riddle to think about) was still there The synapsid vertebrates existed; they were presumptively sexually reproducing amniotes with DNA bearing homeobox genes. And with their many fossils to look at, their natural observed evolution over the next hundred million years (a time frame Young Earth creationist Riddle so obviously lacked in his constricted mental Map of Time) didn’t require knowing how any of those deeper systems (sexual reproduction, homeobox genes, or DNA) came to be in the first place. They already were there, and we’d be observing their natural evolution from that point on. When pressed in the 2018 chat, Riddle freely admitted he had read no technical literature on the relevant subjects. In a fundamental sense, Mike Riddle had thought to “study” paleontology,

developmental biology, geology, and so on, in the same way Flat Earth believers tackle geography, astronomy, or kinematics. Which was: not at all. To invert a line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: There is a madness to this method. Mike Riddle’s preference for repeating the claims of Andrew Snelling unchecked surfaced repeatedly in his Answers book chapters. In 1997 a Snelling paper claimed a chunk of fossilized wood in a Tertiary lava flow could be radiocarbon dated without any trace of exogenous contamination (claims which he repeated in a 2000 piece). A twice-told tale? Well it must be true then! Or at least so it must have seemed to Riddle, all too ready to repeat it. Outside the creationist echo chamber, though, a 2014 post by Russian PhD geologist candidate and blogger Chemostrat1646 noticed a host of forensic details that the geology-savvy Snelling ought to have considered regarding that wood fossil, but somehow overlooked:  

Dr. Snelling provides several additional clues that would lead any other investigator to find better samples for dating. First, the basalt flow encasing the wood was only ~21-25 meters below the surface, meaning that it was long exposed to surface waters percolating downward into the rock. These surfaces waters contain not only modern atmosphere, but organic acids that bond tightly to the wood. The wood fragments themselves show evidence of being altered by intruding waters, as Dr. Snelling notes (p. 8): "Permineralization was too advanced" to identify taxonomically important features under the electron microscope.... Yet this basalt was shipped to a lab for K-Ar dating, after which Dr. Snelling criticized the inconsistent and apparently old results.  

Instead of getting all the facts on the table first and fairly trying to account for them, all Riddle and the many other Answers books authors we are examining here have done is to repeatedly roll out old examples of purportedly anomalous radiocarbon dates, largely drawn secondarily from reports previously churned in the creationist literature. In no case do the creationists show any inclination to recognize the full context of the data (either because they didn’t bother to think about that, or had relied secondarily on apologists who had previously not thought about it for them).

Some of them are real chestnuts, so dated they’re showing signs of mildew. The 2000 Revised & Expanded Answers Book and the 2007 Creation Answers book invoked Robert Brown’s 1992 Creation Research Society Quarterly piece on how muscle from a musk ox was dated at 24,000 years old, while its hair came to only 17,000. What Brown never mentioned (and the still more secondary Answers books obviously didn’t think to check out) was that the ox specimen was an old and partial sample that had been collected way back in 1940, long before the rigors of sample collection necessary for proper radiometric dating were in play, where contamination by ground conditions over the millennia or the gathering and processing of the samples themselves could easily have rendered the diverging dates understandable, indeed inevitable. Moreover, the source paper by Robert Stuckenrath & James Mielke that Brown had cited was itself written back in 1970, decades before the Answers books were repeating this lone data blip, culled from a long list of old Smithsonian samples being tested at that time. None of those other (non-controversial) examples were being trotted out as anomalous, so the Answers books were waving this single blip as if that carefully picked cherry were an unresolvable roadblock for all of the radiocarbon dating they did not examine. That Robert Brown might not have been the most reliable reporter of science information, though, was on display concerning the other claim the Answers books cited him for, regarding the Rampart Cave in the Grand Canyon. According to the Answers version, “Approximately 39,000 dung pellets accumulated in the main area of this cave between 40 and 20 thousand C-14 years BP.“ Relying again entirely on Brown’s 1992 secondary account, the Answers books repeated Brown’s conclusion that the 20,000-year timeframe could not be valid because it “suggested less than 2 pellets per year were produced by the sloths. Correcting the dates increased the number to a more realistic 1.4 per day.” Brown’s “correcting” involved ramming the data into his particular version of Young Earth creationism, where the dung was deemed to have accumulated only over a 77 year post-Flood interval from 2348 to 2271 BCE. Though even that date had a curious pedigree. Only two years before, Brown had insisted the Flood occurred in 3300 BCE, a

whopping thousand years before the more traditional biblical date he was using in the 1992 piece AiG cited. The idea that one Brown could come up with two so very divergent authoritative dates for the Flood by relying on different versions of the supposedly immutably clear genealogy cues in the book of Genesis says less about a viable biblical chronology than it does about the elastic properties of modern creationist apologetics when rummaging through the murky basement of the available documents. Witness Brian Thomas in a March 2018 Acts & Facts article. Even though the traditional date of around 2,350 BCE freely circulates among grassroots YECers (especially in the Kent Hovind set), Thomas culled through the patriarchal ages and sundry textual clues to arrive at a completely different date of 2,472 BCE for the Flood year. And creationists accuse evolutionists of changing their views too much! But back to the dung. There’s a tiny problem with Brown’s poop argument: the original 1974 source by Austin Long & Paul Martin had said no such thing. No 39,000 pellets; no long-term accumulation of millennia of defecating sloths. In fact, they had noted that the thin Rampart Cave dung slice they’d found represented “perhaps less than a week’s elimination of one adult sloth.” From which we may conclude both that Robert Brown did not know how to read, and that the Answers book teams did not know how to source fact check. What we’re seeing in their giddy secondary invocation of Brown (where literally all of his cited conclusions were shaky) is the antievolutionists’ bad method of secondary source addiction in its purest form. So far we’ve been dealing with creationists grumping about fairly recent time, the tens of thousands of years accessible by radiocarbon dating. But what about really Deep Time, those millions and billions of years they don’t want to exist either? The 19th century had seen the rise of fully modern geology, where the concepts of Deep Time took hold as early naturalists went out in the world, many of them devoutly looking for evidence for the Flood, but finding only the ancient traces of ice, which in the course of things revealed glacial ages and vast spans of time between them. There’s

scads of historical work on this process, with Martin Rudwick being just one of the authors readers can dive into for more of the juicy details. The take home point: by the turn of the 20th century geologists were justifiably confident about relative age determinations (that the Cretaceous period definitely occurred after the Jurassic, for instance). While self-taught Seventh Day Adventist “geologist” George McCready Price (1870-1963) played point man for a religious revival of Young Earth creationism back in the 1920s, uniformitarian geology was working out increasingly reliable ballpark figures for the absolute ages of at least that part of the geologic column that contained complex life. By the time old coauthor JD began to rummage through the World Book Encyclopedia as a kid in the late 1950s, when radioactive dating was just coming onto the scene, they’d worked out that the Cambrian Period had occurred about half a billion years ago. But the Precambrian was something else. Up until the middle of the 20th century, little seemed to have been alive back then apart from bacteria to give more of a clue about turnover rates, and the plate tectonics that would suggest how much of the physical turf had been physically lost in the interim awaited the geological revolution of the 1960s. With so little initially to “measure,” geologists and evolutionists alike tended to radically underestimate the time involved from the Cambrian back to the formation of the earth, pegging it at maybe a few billion years, a tale radiometric dating pioneer Brent Dalrymple has chronicled in many reviews over as many decades (1984, 1991, 2001 and 2007). Based on the nature of the earliest rocks found, four and a half billion years remains a good ballpark figure for when the earth formed (involving both the differentiation of the core and mantel and appearance of surface crust), meaning the Precambrian encompasses at least 88% of all the history of the Earth. Radioactivity supplied a fresh measuring stick: atoms that decayed uniquely and inevitably and steadily along specialized paths into particular elemental isotopes. When trapped in a rock sample they ticked away the eons, and you counted the elapsed time by comparing how much of the parent element remained with the quantity of its necessary decay products. The first planetary scientists to tap that radiometric timekeeper were in for a bit of a shock: the Precambrian segment of earth history

abruptly got several billion years older. But then, such cosmological vertigo was going around. Astronomers were catching a severe case of it in the 1920s as it dawned on them that the fuzzy “nebulae” seen through their new jumbo instruments were really “island universes” (we call them galaxies these days)—a true telescopic time travel, showing images literally from “a long time ago and far, far away.” As with radiocarbon, successfully dating objects using the longerlived radioisotopes depends on taking into account a variety of factors, all of which Young Earth creationists have picked on as a means to skip their theologically corrosive science lesson (that the Earth can’t possibly be only 6,000 years old). First, there is the inherently naturalistic assumption that radioactive decay did indeed occur in the past, and at the same monotonously fixed rates observed experimentally (we’ll see shortly how some of the more recent creationist apologists have tried to downplay that angle). More importantly, all radioactive dating methods are context sensitive. If any elements of the decay chain happen to flow in or out of the sample before scientists get a crack at measuring them, that process can bollix the result. That happens rather obviously in metamorphic rocks (again as we’ll see), which are by definition formed from prior material. The formation of volcanic rock can also yield anomalously “old” ages when subjected specifically to the K-Ar potassium-argon technique, simply because the inert gas argon can percolate up through the magma, or leak out, altering the balance in any particular sample. Fortunately, there are really clever ways to get around a lot of these roadblocks, such as the 40Ar/39Ar method, which bypasses the initial starting condition issue of the K-Ar method, by converting 39K into 39Ar through neutron bombardment, allowing one mass spectrometer to measure both argon isotopes at a stroke. The comparative balance of just these argon isotopes in the sample provide a more accurate measure of its age. It’s interesting that creationists Christopher Rupe & John Sanford blatantly misrepresented this matter in their 2017 book, where they cited a New Mexico Geochronology Lab summary of the problems of the K-Ar method, but not the compensating features of the 40Ar/39Ar approach that the posting had literally discussed in the very next paragraph.

If you’re getting a pattern of persistent data suppression in creationist apologetics, it’s because there is one. And that process kicks into high gear with the ultimate in compensatory radiometric dating tools: isochrons.  

Behold the Isochron  

For radiogenic isotopes with longer half-lives (the ones that make the world too old for Henry Morris or Andrew Snelling even by existing), it dawned on the scientists that there was another layer of analysis that could be performed on the direct radiometric dates. The recipe starts with carefully obtaining minerals restricted to a single “cogenetic” unit of rock (one formed functionally at the same time), bearing in mind how magma can incorporate new melted material along the way. Working out how much daughter isotopes were present when the rock originally crystallized involves comparison with non-radioactive isotopes in non-radioactive rocks (determining a baseline equilibrium ratio), and that puts in perspective the relevant isotopes measured in those samples using the standard instruments. That used to be where the process ended, but isochron dating puts the information through a second wringer, relating the multiple readings to the naturally observed isotope ratios. With several radioactive clocks ticking in the same rock, independent of what their starting conditions may have been for each of the original isotopes, they’d all have to generate decay products reflecting the same amount of time that had elapsed since the rock formed. If nothing has interfered with that mix (if the system has remained closed), it will result in the values falling along a straight line, an isochron—known specifically as the Wetherill Concordia plot. “Discordant” ones are those where values don’t fall on the line, meaning the system was an open one. Another factor: the steeper the isochron slope, the older the rock. But it gets even neater. What if the piece had been heated after its original formation? If it had congealed uniformly (so that none of the decay products have escaped) the isochron will be reset at a higher level on the chart and with a new shallower slope (that underestimates its true age, by the way). A flat line for the slope represents something

so young that it’s brand new (we’ll bump into some of that shortly). But if any of the decay isotopes have been lost, the plot will scatter without forming an isochron line at all. In other words, the technique itself is self-correcting, revealing whenever the individual mineral “ages” have been adversely affected. As you might expect, there’s no shortage of scientific coverage of the isochron matter. Brent Dalrymple’s 1991 book surveyed the principles, and Alan Dickin’s 2005 textbook Radiogenic Isotope Geology explains the process in great detail (including how “regression-line fitting” detects and deals with “errorchrons”). The topic has naturally come up in the anticreationist game, from Stephen Brush’s “Ghosts from the Nineteenth Century: Creationist Arguments for a Young Earth” in 1983, Old Earth creationist Alan Hayward 1985, and Arthur Strahler’s mammoth 1987 criticism, to Ken Miller in 1984 and again in 1999, and Mark Isaak updating his TalkOrigins post on it in 2006. And, also as might be expected, creationists have not always been keen to come to grips with isochrons. Back during the initial spurt of active Young Earth creationism, the heavy hitters Henry Morris in his 1985 Scientific Creationism and Duane Gish in his 1995 Evolution: The Fossils STILL Say NO! didn’t feel the need to discuss them at all, nor did the more derivative books by Scott Huse in 1997 or John Ankerberg & John Weldon in 1998. A first creationist stab had come in 1982 when Russell Akridge took on isochrons in what may qualify as one of the lamest analogies in any branch of analytical argument. Citing no technical science work at all, Akridge imagined farmers whose truckloads of apples, coconuts and bananas were intermingled after a truck collision. Some days later two “scientists” came upon the piles and while the “Catastrophist” proposed the result reflected merely that mixture of the fixed fruit kinds, the Uniformitarian hypothesized that “these piles of fruit have been as part of the crust for millions of years” and that some of the apples had actually decayed into the other fruits over that time. Besides forgetting the rather obvious points that the decay of isotopes is observed and inevitable in actual physics, there was the nature of isochron dating that was self-calibrating. Dismissing isochrons as just “mixing” percolated through the YEC chain, with Paul Giem 2003 repeating the same mistakes on “mixing

lines” Brent Dalrymple had explained back in 1984 criticizing William Overn and Russell Arndts (1935-2010), who continued to selectively cite older work like Yong-Fei Zheng 1989 (belied by Zheng’s more recent views, such as in Jiang Feng Chen et al. 2007). Arndt is a geocentrist, by the way (see the Info Box  ). Giem obviously had a problem dealing with magma incorporating older material, especially as subduction brought them together, or deal with how the science of 2003 had moved on. It’s revealing how many of Giem’s sources were done decades earlier, such as William Leeman in 1974, just on the cusp of plate tectonics changing the game when it came to interpreting variations in elements like strontium in the magma samples—a factor recognized long before 2003, as when James Myers et al. noted (in a 1984 technical paper not cited by Giem) how “the Sr content of the assimilant strongly influences resultant isotopic systematics.” At the creationist definitional level, Steven Austin’s glossary listing for “isochron age” in the first RATE book parsed the finer points very carefully (the italicized terms were also defined in the glossary, mostly by Andrew Snelling). Contrast Austin’s version with how we described the isochron process above:  

An estimate of the absolute age of a suite of several rocks or minerals. The method assumes that the initial abundances or ratios of stable daughter throughout the suite of several rocks or minerals was uniformly mixed or homogeneous. The method estimates the time it would take the suite of rocks or minerals to evolve from the uniformly mixed condition. A linear array plot of daughter versus parent is believed to confirm the initially mixed condition. The slope of the linear array (isochron) is thought to indicate the absolute age assuming constancy of decay of radioactive parent. “Whole-rock isochron ages” come from a suite of rocks from a single cogenetic unit. “Mineral isochron ages” come from different minerals within a single rock.  

Austin got that the slope signified the absolute age, but his veer off into the idea that isochrons somehow measured how the rock would “evolve from the uniformly mixed condition” was a strange way to put things, since the constituents aren’t necessarily becoming unmixed over time, just having new decay products appearing as that time wore on. Nor did Austin make it clear

___________________________________________________________________

Geocentrism A contextual note on Russell Arndts. Of relevance to his gravitas as a “science” analyst is that he was also a geocentrist—that’s right, he did not believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun, earning a glowing obituary in The Biblical Astronomer devoted to defending geocentric creationism. Coauthor JD reviewed the weird persistence of geocentrism (especially among some hyper-conservative Catholics) for his “A Brief History of Creationism” TIP 1.6 post, noting its disproportionate impact on the political culture and science education, from Paul Ellwanger’s “equal time” for creationism efforts in the 1980s (that required Supreme Court rulings to blunt) … to Tom Willis writing the “Intelligent Design” parts of the Kansas state science standards in 1999 … out to its creepier fringe, like Holocaust denier Robert Sungenis, whose lectures Peter Hess described as “like trying to make sense of a Stockhausen symphony in an amusement park while tripping out with Timothy Leary.” According to Glenn Branch in 2014, prominent geocentrist Gerardus Bouw was slated to testify on behalf of the credibility of Creation Science back at the 1982 McLean v. Arkansas trial—one can imagine what nuggets Bouw might have ventured under cross examination, giving the testimony by Norman Geisler (1932-2019) a run for his money (Gene Lyons reported how Geisler revealed UFOs were “a satanic manifestation in the world for the purpose of deception” based on perusing Reader’s Digest). For more on the seriously wacked world of geocentrism, consult the varied reportage of Michael Forrest, Francis Graham, Jack Krebs, Robert Newman, and Bruce Wilson in our references.   how subsequent modification of the rock would affect that absolute age slope, or whether too much of that “mixing” would result in no isochron line forming at all. These are not trivial omissions. In the 2007 Answers book we’re examining at depth, Mike Riddle cited Andrew Snelling’s 1998 objections to the K-Ar dating of recent

andesite flows at Mt. Ngauruhoe (a volcano in the creationist’s New Zealand back yard). Riddle reported, “These rocks are known to have formed from eruptions in 1949, 1954, and 1975. The rock samples were sent to a respected commercial laboratory (Geochron Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts). The ‘ages’ of the rocks ranged from 0.27 to 3.5 million years old.” Ironically, this was in the last paragraph before Riddle took a stab at isochrons, and evidently Riddle was unaware that these bore on the issue, as well as the argon-sensitive K-Ar technique. Snelling had pressed ahead on his claims in a 2003 paper (subsequently put online in 2010), which a 2012 posting by Chemostrat1646 took apart, noting how Snelling had claimed there was “no age information” in several flat isochron plots from further dating, when the ___________________________________________________________________

The KBS Tuff controversy Paleontologists had hominid remains in rocks at Koobi Fora, Kenya, they couldn’t directly date, but on top of that was volcanic tuff that in principle could be dated … if they could decide whether that ash layer reflected a single tidy event, or eruptions that potentially reworked older volcanic material. Working out that generated (and finally resolved) the “controversy.” One team used the new (and more accurate) 40Ar/39Ar technique, yielding a date around 2.4 million years, but that soon came into conflict with other samples dated to 1.8 million years by the more established direct K-Ar method (a technique that could be compromised by whether any of the naturally leaky argon had come or gone in the samples, unlike the 40Ar/39Ar approach that didn’t depend on knowing the starting conditions, only how the resulting mix sorted out over time). The younger date squared with the animals associated at the site, though, especially fossil pigs, which seemed far too like their neighbors that had been reliably dated to that 1.8 million-year period. But once it became clear that there had been several ancient ash falls, washing material into a lake and dragging older stuff with it, the quite accurate (but misleading) older 40Ar/39Ar dating of the volcanic tuff came into focus and the younger date came to be corroborated by further testing.

The source trail began with G. H. Curtiss et al.’s 1975 younger K-Ar date. In 1976 F. J. Fitch et al. reported 40Ar/39Ar data and Anthony Hurford et al. did a fission track study (a technique that spots the decay effects on the crystals themselves, rather than the 235 Uranium that made them), which prompted plenty of back and forth with G. A. Wagner et al. in 1977. In 1979 Thure Cerling et al. broadened the field to relate the Koobi Fora   fact was (Chemo’s bold) “the flat lines imply a zero age. In other words, Snelling's isotope data did reveal age information! The age of these volcanic rocks, according to the Rb-Sr and Sm-Nd isotope systems, is consistent with the known ages of ~30–60 years.” Meanwhile, Vernon Cupps hammered away on the Ngauruhoe and isochrons at Acts & Facts, repeating without critical examination Snelling’s isochron claims in 2014 (“The Iconic Isochron”) and 2015 (“Alkali Metal Dating”) articles. Volcanoes supply endless fun for scientists, and opportunities for tripping over more isochrons for creationists who dislike the results. They played a role in the “KBS Tuff controversy” from the early 1970s, for example, when competing laboratories attempted to date a Kenyan australopithecine site by the volcanic tuff associated with it (see the Info Box  ). But in a 2014 paper on the half-life of the 176Lutetium isotope (which we’ll be discussing quite a lot more about), Andrew Snelling tossed what he must ___________________________________________________________________

and Shungura Formations, and more work came on the scene in 1980: fission tracking by A. J. W. Gleadow, R. E. Drake et al.’s continuing Koobi Fora-Shungura 40Ar/39A correlations, and Ian McDougall et al. taking a fresh look at the K-Ar evidence. McDougall kept busy with 1981 and 1985 papers on the 40Ar/39Ar side, and by 2006 he and Francis Brown could present a precise 40 Ar/39Ar geochronology for the once contentious tuff. As Roger Lewin covered in his 1987 book, drawing on his own personal correspondence with the participants, it hadn’t helped matters that there were so many competing reputations and

theories at stake. Richard Leakey in particular had an incentive to favor the older dating because it would put his exciting hominid fossil find a notch earlier than the established competition. And this social context only fueled the skepticism of antievolutionists in the 1990s, as a disparate range of writers waved the KBS Tuff case about as a supposed problem for radiometric dating and evolution: overt creationist Marvin Lubenow, Hare Krishna groupies Michael Cremo & Richard Thompson (who believed human beings had been around for hundreds of millions of years), and contrarian science writer Richard Milton (who decided to doubt the age of the Earth by relying too credulously on a scattershot of creationists he never fact checked). The parade hasn’t slowed down in the decades since. Recent examples include Jonathan O’Brien invoking Lubenow’s authority in 2015, while also disparaging some dandy geochronology detective work from Ricardo Melchor, Haraldo Vizán and colleagues untangling the complex stratigraphy of a deposit in Argentina (where some seemingly Triassic bird tracks turned out to belong to the much later, and notably less surprising, Eocene), and Christopher Rupe & John Sanford repeating the creationist line on the KBS Tuff in their 2017 Contested Bones book, which managed to be both derivative and repetitive.  

have thought was the deadliest bomb:  

Data points that do not fit on the isochron are simply ignored because their values are regarded as due to contamination. That this is common practice is illustrated with numerous examples from the relevant literature by Faure and Mensing (2005) and Dickin (2005). On the other hand, it could be argued that this discarding of data points which do not fit the isochron is somewhat arbitrary and therefore is not good science, because it is merely assumed “aberrant” values are due to contamination rather than that being proven to be so.  

What is also “not good science” is a blanket accusation with insufficient documentation, for Snelling offered no examples or page numbers from either volume for readers to check up on whether his charge was valid. Indeed, Alan Dickin’s book specified many

safeguards to detect and evaluate contamination, but hardly in the glib a priori way Snelling implied. For example, the Kambalda lavas of western Australia (a particular form of volcanism whose magmas concentrate iron, nickel, copper and platinum, modified by subsequent metamorphism). Because of the economic value of such ores, there has been understandable effort to figure out how that occurs, including the part played by vesicle bubbles in the lava and the impact of early continental formation. Besides the papers on the Kambalda referenced by Dickin in the paragraph below, and some additional work by Jon Claoué-Long et al. in 1988, we’ve included in our bibliography some relevant ones by Steve Beresford, Murray Duke, David Mole and David Williams, along with a new review by Tom Andersen assessing and correcting for lead loss in zircons used in U-Pb geochronology. You can judge for yourself how careful Dickin had been on recognizing some of the pitfalls in dating rocks of such specialized character (our bold):  

The danger of constructing a ‘composite’ Sm-Nd isochron of acid, basic and ultra-basic rocks that might not be co-magmatic was pointed out by Claoué-Long et al. (1984). These workers attempted to date the Kambalda lavas by the Sm-Nd method without utilising acid rocks. However, they were forced to combine analyses from komatiite point from Kambalda and a suite of basalt lavas from Bluebush (40km south of the main Kambalda sequence), ten data points have an age of 3262 ± 44 Myr (2σ). This was interpreted as the time of eruption. Chauvel et al. (1985) challenged this interpretation on the basis that Pb-Pb dating of the Kambalda volcanics and associated igneous sulphide mineralisation gave an age of 2726 ± 34 Myr, which they argued to be resistant to re-setting by later events. They attributed the 3.2 Byr apparent Sm-ND age to either variable crustal contamination of the magma suite by older basement, or possibly a heterogeneous mantle source. U-Pb dating of 3.4-Byr-old zircon xenocrysts in one of the hanging-wall basalts subsequently confirmed the contamination model (Compston et al., 1985 [published 1986]).  

If that was what Snelling had in mind, he’d better think again, for this looks like the geologists were incorporating all the available data, which is what scientists are supposed to do, right?

But then, perhaps Snelling was not always attentive to the details in his rush to jump a conclusion. It was certainly not a sign of fastidious scholarship that Snelling got basic citation details askew. In source checking Snelling’s work, many typographical goofs surfaced (inaccurate dates and article titles), and in Snelling’s 2015 paper we’ll be covering presently, somehow he interpolated a “D. A. Roberts” as coauthor of a 1993 paper he cited by Karim Ashktorab et al. on rhenium decay. In this regard, in a post titled “Andrew Snelling concedes, radiometric dating of meteorites is solid,” Chemostrat1646 spotted something even more peculiar at the data floor regarding a 2014 paper Snelling wrote on the Allende meteorite. While noting how Snelling effectively scratched his head over the curious concordance of the various dating mechanisms independently putting the Allende rock at over 4.5 billion years old, the blogger added this (Chemo’s bold):  

Snelling showcases his stellar research in Table 1, which reports, for example, that some of the meteorite ages in his histogram were calculated through an Al-Mg isochron. He cites one paper by Bouvier et al. (2008), where he claims that Al-Mg isochron ages were calibrated to Pb-Pb ages. However, not only does the reference cited provide no isochron ages of any kind, it also makes absolutely no mention of the Al-Mg system, period.[7]  

Accusing the scientists of tossing aside discordant isochron values was one thing (especially without examples to see whether they were unjustified to do so, if they had), but experimentally showing that the very process was wrong, now that would be quite another. Steve Austin was one of the first off the mark to tackle that task, in his 1994 Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe, where he tried to pull off one of the more daring of creationist magic shows. Austin sought to prove how easy it was to produce false isochrons and thereby slay the new radiometric dragon (the Rubidium-Strontium Rb/Sr method in this case). But as noted, genuine isochrons required rock reasonably formed at one go (samples from the same lava flow, for example). Lumping together readings from different formations will not do. This is because an isochron chart is something like tracing a bullet’s path through a house: where an entry in the front window and

an exit out the side ought to align perfectly with holes in all the intervening walls. For that, you need a natural layout, not a collection of flats carted in and assembled to fake a crime scene as if it were a movie set. But that’s what Austin was doing with his “pseudo-isochrons”— arranging the dates from different samples to form a contrived line where the isochron formulas would yield unacceptable dates. Nice try, but no cigar. Paul Taylor’s 1995 Illustrated Origins Answer Book intimated isochron dating was flawed, and Ken Ham confidently repeated Austin’s faulty findings in his 1998 The Great Dinosaur Mystery SOLVED! Such creationist confirmation bias may be compared to the critical analysis by Chris Stasson in 2003, documenting how Austin had improperly selected samples tailored to discrediting the radiometric dating method. But the creationist sideshow was only beginning. In 1998 Andrew Snelling entered the game when he coauthored a paper with Austin to challenge supposedly conflicting K-Ar and Rb-Sr dates relating to the Cardenas Basalt in the Grand Canyon (a deposit dated by these means to over a billion years old, per Edwin Larson et al.’s 1994 paper the creationists were disputing). In these efforts Snelling dangled the prospect of an “accelerated nuclear decay” to resolve the problem in a YEC-friendly manner (which we’ll get to shortly). Austin and Snelling naturally had brought all this up in chapters for the RATE volumes, which the ever-ready mouthpiece Mike Riddle was more than happy to repeat for the faithful in his own Answers book chapter, focusing first on the supposed discordance where more recent lava flows supposedly dated to 1.14 billion years, with Riddle concluding, “When assumptions are taken into consideration and discordant (disagreeing or unacceptable) dates are not omitted, radioisotope dating often gives inconsistent and inflated ages.” Given what we’ve observed of Riddle’s glaring lack of research curiosity (the Taylor-Southon case), is there any reason to suspect Riddle put this latest claim through the fact check wringer he hadn’t used in any other case? He certainly showed no inclination to explain what these vital “assumptions” were that the creationists found so faulty.

While working geologists have typically been too busy doing their work to take up the thankless task of tutoring creationists on the basics of radiometric dating, someone more than willing to perform that task was Chemostrat1646. In a 2011 posting, the Russian geology student noted more recent analyses on the Cardenas Basalt had been done by Michael Timmons et al. in 2001 and 2005, and by Arlo Weil et al. in 2003. These showed how the 40Ar/39Ar dates directly reflected the outgassing of that inert element argon from the volcanic deposit during its extended formation (once again oh so relevant to the argonsensitive K-Ar method). Snelling and Austin had even admitted how altered their own new samples were (riddled with volcanic glass, known for its lowered retention of argon). A suspicious mind might wonder whether they might have deliberately selected their specimens with those very properties in mind. None of these issues surfaced in Riddle’s Glee Club version. To drop what he thought were solid bricks on the veracity of radiometric dating, Riddle’s two big case studies (on amphibolite metamorphic minerals in the Beartooth Mountains of Montana and igneous diabase rocks from the Bass Rapids section of the Grand Canyon) offered in the current Answers book chapter were drawn from (guess who) primarily Steve Austin with a bit of Andrew Snelling on the side. What could go wrong?  

Beartooth Mountains “discordances”  

Riddle’s first example, the Beartooth Mountains sample, depended exclusively on Steven Austin’s 2005 RATE book analysis, which Austin summarized in his abstract as “Within a single Beartooth amphibolite sample, three discordant mineral isochron ‘ages’ range from 2515±110 Ma (Rb-Sr mineral isochron) to 2886±190 Ma (Sm-Nd mineral isochron),” and that “Although significant discordance exists between the K-Ar, Rb-Sr, Sm-Nd, and Pb-Pb radioisotope methods, each radioisotope pair appears to yield discordant ‘ages’ internally between whole-rocks and minerals.” Riddle summarized Austin’s data in this chart (we’ve highlighted the isochron ones in grey):  

  Dating Isotopes

Billions of Years

Types of Data (whole rock or separate mineral within the rock)

Potassium-

1.520

Quartz-plagioclase mineral[8]

Argon (single-

2.011

Whole rock

2.403 2.620 2.515

Biotite mineral Hornblende mineral

2.790

Previously published

sample)     Rubidium-

5 minerals

Strontium (isochron)

result based on 30 whole rock samples (1982) Samarium-

2.886

4 minerals

2.689

5 minerals

Neodymium (isochron) Lead-Lead (isochron)  

All of the values are from new RATE experiment, apart from the older 1982 ones done by Joseph Wooden’s team (which source Riddle did not mention in his gloss). Buried within this source-free summary were a host of assumptions, each essential to the creationist argument. As we’ll see, Riddle was at best only vaguely aware of the conceptual minefield he was dragging his readers into. At no point did he think to investigate the forensic underpinnings of the conclusions he culled so dutifully from the artful Mr. Austin. Literally all the Answers book readers got was the creationist’s conclusions summarized in that chart. The first thing to consider is the geochronology aspect. Mountains take time to form (at least in the normal tectonic way of looking at them, rather than the catastrophically abrupt YEC funhouse version) and do so over a big spread of physical space, during which all

manner of dynamic forces can come into play, including metamorphic ones that can alter the radioisotope balances in particular places. So it would definitely matter whether each of the supposedly conflicting radiometric dates related to the very same spot in the “Beartooth Mountains” (and hence reflected locations that ought to have been literally contemporary) or involved different segments of a mountain range (for which we would hardly expect identical numbers all the way through). Likewise, we’d need to know whether the isochrons involved were covering the same places (a necessary requirement for that process, remember), and not perfectly accurate independent measures for places separate in time (where dates ranging over even a few hundred million years might be expected, depending on how long it took the Beartooth Mountains to form). Second, that in cases where identical deposits were being assessed by different radioactive measures, had Austin fairly ruled out that perfectly natural physical processes couldn’t account for any seeming discordances. We can spot right off the bat those anomalously young K-Ar dates on the top of Riddle’s sheet, and be primed to ask whether argon leakage might have been playing a role there. The amphibolites Austin focused on in the Beartooth case are metamorphic rocks (processes which can reset an isochron), just as basalts (in the Bass Rapids example we’ll be covering next) can incorporate older magma in their formation. Which means we’ll need to keep an eye out for whether the science papers Austin cited had addressed any of these issues, or whether Riddle didn’t need to step over it because Austin had left that part out of his RATE discussion. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, can that super-duper ultraquicky-fast YEC Flood model actually account for any of those data more accurately, let alone all of it, including the paleoenvironment (described by Andrew Fiorillo in 2000)? Or did Austin merely assume the Flood as catch-all offstage “explanation,” rather than earn the merit badge fair and square by showing that the available science data fit a clearly outlined Flood scenario. Come to think of it, does Austin (or any other creationist) really have a “clearly outlined Flood scenario”, one which plainly guides the reader to what they think happened? Once again, we have that Map of Time matter looming on the conceptual horizon.

The creationist commenced his case by casting general doubt on the process by citing work by Kenneth Ludwig (the scientist’s online Isoplot analytical tool, not his 2000 technical paper on decay constant calibration errors, which we include in our references). Ludwig laid out factors that needed to be taken into account in using radiometric dating methods, which Austin summarized thusly:  

(1) errors concerning the assumption of a closed system (2) errors concerning the invariant beginning isotope ratio, and (3) errors concerning the parent radioisotope decay constant.  

Then Austin double-dipped that third one by citing a 1998 paper by Paul Renne et al. (to which Ludwig was a coauthor by the way) titled “Absolute Ages Aren’t Exactly” that dealt with the effect of uncertainties about the decay rate in some (but not all) relevant isotopes. Austin’s summary of that (his italics) that “at least four uncertainties must be incorporated into our understanding of the overall error associated with any isochron.” Austin did not note the Renne paper’s observation that improvements in instrument precision (by then down to 0.5% error rate or less) allowed “increasingly sensitive resolution in time when the same isotopic system and methodology are used to date different samples.” As to that decay rate issue, the super-slow decaying lutetium and rhenium were the big ones noted by the paper (in the section on the creationist notion of accelerated decay below we’ll be looking into how Andrew Snelling and others have tried to play that). As for the specifics, the Renne chart put the error range for other methods at tens of millions of years when dating things as old as the early Earth, with the 40Ar/39Ar method pegging a margin of around 30 million years for a sample 4.5 billion years old. For younger rocks (such as the 2.8 Byr range Austin was addressing in his 2005 RATE Beartooth effort) the dates might be 20 million years off (not trivial, but hardly enough to compress things down over five whole orders of magnitude to those mandated in the YEC dogma). Listed as most reliable on Renne’s chart was the 207 Pb/206Pb method, effectively accurate over all values relevant to the age of the Earth. Do remember that.[9]

Austin wasn’t starting off well in his use of primary source documentation. Already there was a pile of Renne confetti coming from the creationist shredder, data which secondary redactor Mike Riddle would presumably have been completely unaware of, solely on account of his not bothering to read any of Austin’s primary sources to check. Having cast these generic doubts about radiometric dating, Austin turned to the geology of the Beartooth Mountains. Drawing on geology work by Paul Mueller, Jeffrey Warner, Joseph Wooden and colleagues from 1982 to 1988 (and one of their papers from 1998, as we’ll see), Austin adequately summarized the standard geological view: “Ancient metamorphosed basement rocks comprise the deeper continental crust in the northern Rocky Mountain region of the United States.” This blob of Precambrian rocks ended up exposed along a five hundred mile stretch running northwest from Colorado, through the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming, and into the Beartooth range in Montana and Idaho (a point Austin didn’t stress, but which was obvious if you simply measured the distance on the map he supplied). “The most carefully studied andesite amphibolite comes from the Long Lake magmatic complex on the Beartooth Highway in Wyoming,” Austin declared, citing a 1988 paper by the Mueller group. Austin’s geology summary ended with this (our bold to highlight some most relevant points):  

The 2790 Ma isochron is supposed to date the thermal event that recrystallized and homogenized the Sr isotopes of these metamorphic rocks [Wooden et al., 1982]. The granitoid rocks of the southeastern Beartooth Mountains gave a Rb-Sr whole-rock isochron age of 2810±40Ma with initial 87Sr/86Sr = 0.7018±0.0002, and age and initial Sr ratio essentially indistinguishable from the amphibolite [Mueller et al., 1983]. The protolith from which the andesite amphibolite recrystallized is suggested to be 2950Ma [Mueller et al., 1983].  

All this notably understated the fascinating story of how and when those mountains formed, and how the detailed constituents of the rocks established that, knowledge assembled over many decades of hard work by the geology that Austin’s creationism wishes to toss in the waste basket. Austin had to be aware of some of the data, though, since the 1998 Mueller paper he cited had discussed the subject at

length, identifying three “terrane” subdivisions based on a range of radiometric dates and other evidence to pin down the broad geological sequence. First, there was that protolith igneous intrusion 3.3-3.1 Ga to form the “Montana metasedimentary province” (MMP) in the northwest end of what would become the Beartooth Mountains. That was part of a “major crust-forming event” going on at the time, generating the Madison and Gallatin Ranges in Montana as well, discussed in a 1996 paper David Mogk coauthored with Mueller and Wooden. Several hundred million years later (2.9-2.7 Ga)—let that sink in— the “Beartooth-Bighorn magmatic zone” (BBMZ) developed, composed of different rock forms while inevitably incorporating some of the stuff already present. Right after that, still further southeast, the “Wyoming greenstone province” (WGP) formed (2.7-2.5 Ga), again with distinctively different minerals and once more including pieces of that older rock still laying around from before 3 billion years. Do the math: the process spanned 800 million years, roughly the time separating our present era of gymnastic creationists from the Ediacara biota. Over the next billion and a half years—let that sink in too—vast crustal province building went on all over North America (becoming a continental Laurentia), as John Goodge & Jeffrey Vervoort reviewed in their 2006 paper. The first stirrings of multicellular life were going in the seas by then, and about half a billion years later—again let that sink in —the Cambrian installment of what we now call North America was resting along the equator. What the maps now call Beartooth Butte was by then an oceanic continental shelf crawling with trilobites, until environmental shifts upset the ecology and the players rearranged: a 2008 paper by Robert Thomas noting the “large numbers of one or two genera of deepocean trilobites that migrated onto the shelf after the extinction event.” Press on another hundred million years and we’re in the Devonian (410-360 million years ago). Beartooth Butte was now a marine estuary populated with many sea critters typical of that time (including very primitive fishes) but not anything distinctive of earlier or later ages. How come? Couldn’t that staggeringly powerful Flood have sloshed in a plesiosaur or whale now and then (let alone a terrestrial dinosaur or moose) just to shock the uniformitarian paleontologists?

But all we get are signs of the ebb and flow of naturally shifting ecologies, snapshots of their time slice, not the mushed cataclysm you’d expect from a universal and rapid titanic global inundation. Fast forward down to the Cretaceous, and renewed volcanic activity during the Laramide uplift shoved around 3,000 square miles of the area up as the Beartooth Plateau (including what eroded bits of it were left of the Cambrian and Devonian deposits bulging along with it), described in 1989 and 1992 analyses by James Meen and David Eggler. Lots of interesting science here, don’t you think? But not interesting enough for Steve Austin’s creationist magic show, or Mike Riddle’s mimed version. Now the Mueller group had done much work already on how the sturdy but easily recycled zircons could illuminate the timing of the geology (where the crystals can be of one age but also get mushed into metamorphic rocks forming much later), such as their 1996 paper on the distinctive trondhjemitic gneiss that was so common in those Archean times (and which, incidentally, helped identify when plate tectonics started to kick in around 3.2 Ga, in which true granites came to be the norm). Zircons come up repeatedly in geology and radiometric dating, but only arise in creationist apologetics as a bludgeon to undermine the reliability of both. An award for obtuseness on zircon crystals would go to Frank Sherwin in 2010, significantly misrepresenting Paul Myrow et al.’s paper on “Extraordinary transport and mixing of sediment across Himalayan central Gondwana during the Cambrian-Ordovician” when he cited it for the claim that “geologists are baffled by rocks that evidently moved across continents—up to 3,000 miles.” No, they weren’t. Those “rocks” were in fact tiny detrital zircons, whose presence in “well-mixed sediment” spread along some 2,000 km of what is now the north of India, and coming from similar distances away (not “3,000 miles”), offered clues on what was going on half a billion years ago as Gondwana assembled during a period of major mountain building (with rain eroding pieces and washing bits downstream in sediments). Part of the reason for their “extraordinary” presence suggests “sediment dispersal across a nonvegetated landscape”—a nod to how different the world was back then, long before plants appeared on the

land to hold onto eroding soil with their root systems. None of which Sherwin alluded to. In much the same way, the 1998 paper Austin cited was actually a report on new zircon samples they had collected from four separate locations in the Beartooth range, chosen to clarify more about the older MMP side of things. It’s worth noting that not one of these samples had been drawn from spots closer than 45 miles from any other (mountain ranges do take up space). Interestingly Austin did not address any of those 1998 Mueller zircon data in his RATE piece, though we can surmise why. Most of their U-Pb dates fell 3.2-3.4 Ga, but there were plain implications of what wasn’t showing up, as Mueller’s paper noted (our bold): “The lack of grains that are less than 2.7-2.8 Ga, and that are clearly not metamorphic based on morphology and low Th/U constrains the depositional age of all quartzites to no younger than 2.7 Ga; the maximum age probably varies, but cannot exceed the age of the youngest detrital grain in each sample.” Still a long way from 4,300 years ago (Austin’s Flood). Speaking of which, Austin didn’t—speak of it, we mean. For at no point in all of his paper did Austin offer a creationist Flood Geology accounting of how those rocks got to be where and the way they are. Nor did Andrew Snelling in his 2005 RATE chapter on isochrons, when he briefly summarized the accepted geology of the Long Lake region. Hide that ball. Take that Long Lake Magmatic Complex, a place Austin mentioned oh-so-briefly by name. How was it formed in the hypothetical Flood? There may be no more illustrative contrast of the non-utility of Austin and Snelling’s creationism than to compare their conceptual nothing with the 2010 paper by Mueller’s team describing in detail how that specific Long Lake feature formed, the outcome of naturally identifiable processes (the sort we can observe today unsettling real estate from Seattle to Tokyo) “involving plate collision, subduction, and multi-depth melting of both new crust and at least partially depleted mantel along an ancient continental margin.” But onto the star witnesses, the actual radiometric dates Austin so wanted to discord us with.

Austin’s 2005 RATE reported on his extraction of a “single multikilogram sample of the Beartooth andesite amphibolite ... specifically selected because it was apparently one of the sample locations” that featured in Joseph Wooden’s 1982 paper. This rock was then prepared and submitted to an external science lab to do the actual dating. Because the sample was a single one, that would functionally bypass the potential snag of our first hook (trying to contrast dates from different locations), but wouldn’t get the creationist off the other two snags: the dynamics both of the dating processes Austin elected to use, and what could happen with those amphibolite rocks, which we know Austin was aware of based on his own geological summary quoted above. Finally, there need to be an honestly presented creationist Flood explanation offered for readers to judge as to which was the superior alternative. Something now to notice about how Riddle assembled his summary chart of Austin’s results. Austin had discussed the individual dating plots of each process, highlighting the “discordances” at each point, but had not compiled such a main listing himself. Riddle (or perhaps some assistant at AiG) filled this gap for the Answers volume, clumping the listings by the radiometric dating tool used to obtain them. This naturally rendered the scattering of values for particular methods (especially the multiple ones coming from the K-Ar measure) more obvious, but which Riddle did not otherwise discuss. But what happens when you put Austin’s “discordant” RATE dates in chronological order, oldest to youngest, and compare those with what the regular geologists had worked out for the Beartooth-Bighorn magmatic zone:   Dating Isotopes

Billions of Years

Types of Data (whole rock or separate mineral within the rock)

Samarium-

2.886

4 minerals

2.689 2.620

5 minerals Hornblende mineral

2.515

5 minerals

Neodymium Lead-Lead PotassiumArgon Rubidium-

Strontium Potassium-

2.403

Biotite mineral

2.011

Whole rock

1.520

Quartz-plagioclase

Argon PotassiumArgon PotassiumArgon

mineral

 

We’ve boxed the upper two values, where the Sm-Nd and the extremely reliable Pb-Pb dates fell neatly in the range for the timeframe in which the BBMZ was occurring (2.7-2.9 Ga). That leaves the others to consider, likewise boxed. All but one of those younger dates stemmed from Austin’s particular use of the argon-sensitive K-Ar method rather than the more accurate 40Ar/39Ar approach. On this matter, in a 2011 comment on Riddle’s AiG piece, Chemostrat1646 went further, noting how the specific kinds of minerals involved, and how many samples had been used, needed to be taken into account (his italics):  

Mr. Riddle exposes his unfamiliarity with such data by noting that "in some cases, the whole rock age is greater than the age of the minerals, and for others, the reverse occurs." What does this mean? In the former case (Rb-Sr isochron), the difference is found in the population (number of samples) for each isochron age. One is built from 5 points; the other from 30 [in the 1982 Mueller paper]. The reverse is true for K-Ar dates, because some minerals do not retain argon as well as others. It is not unexpected that the "Quartz-plagioclase" mineral yielded a younger date than either biotite or hornblende, given the lower retentivity of argon and higher susceptibility to alteration or thermal disturbance.  

That “whole rock” value was just the average for all the K-Ar samples Austin used (and was naturally pulled down by that particularly low 1.520 Ga value for the quartz-plagioclase). And Austin functionally accepted the forensic facts even as he tossed the issue down the dumpster, when he acknowledged:  

The quartz-plagioclase fraction, that has lost the largest proportion of its has the lowest concentration of

36

40

Ar, also

Ar, consistent with an Ar loss model. Biotite and

hornblende give the oldest “ages.” Biotite has significant

40

K and significant

40

Ar,

differing from the other minerals. Although the biotite data could allow a K-Ar isochron plot, we assign little statistical significance to it and do not show it as a figure by Isoplot.  

Looking closer still, though, how much “alteration or thermal disturbance” had there been in those rocks? Austin tread carefully that tightrope. Because rubidium is highly sensitive to leeching off hydrothermal fluids and metasomatic alteration to rock, it’s known in the dating science gig as a measure not necessarily of the time a piece of rock was formed, but the last time it was altered by those processes. That the single date in Austin’s RATE analysis fell several hundred million years after the likely formation of the rock was not only perfectly reasonable, it was exceedingly suspicious that geologist Austin neglected to mention that factor in his discussion, which waved only the seeming discordances. Take note also of Austin’s backhanded recognition of the accuracy of Pb-Pb dating (which we know put his own sample entirely within the ballpark of the standard geological interpretation):  

The Pb-Pb mineral isochron has very low error associated with the estimated age because of the extreme difference in radiogenic Pb’s between the minerals, and because the isochron interpretation supposes the radiogenic Pb’s to have been homogenized during the essentially instantaneous metamorphic event. The Pb-Pb mineral isochron for Beartooth amphibolite is discordant with the Rb-Sr mineral isochron and the whole-rock Rb-Sr isochron of Wooden et al. [1982]. Also, the Sm-Nd mineral isochron is discordant with the Rb-Sr mineral isochron.  

As magic shows go, Austin’s suffered from the degree to which he neglected to properly wave the “perfectly ordinary gentlemen’s handkerchief” in front of his hat before extracting his discordant rabbit. We mentioned the Bowen Reaction series last chapter, regarding how the presence of particular minerals in igneous rocks follows a pattern of formation, depending on how much iron, magnesium and calcium are present initially. The hornblende amphibolite Austin was using in the RATE study fell on the “discontinuous” branch of the series, and Austin as a

geologist was hardly unaware of some of the foibles one encountered regarding the components of the Sm-Nd dating process (and why they might be showing up as the very oldest of the “discordant” dates). When discussing his Sm-Nd mineral isochron in the RATE paper, did Austin think merely spouting the geologists’ patter would be sufficient to keep us from noticing this (our bold):  

The mineral magnetite (without significant ilmenite included) appears to lie off the line described by the other five points, suggesting that the magnetite did not remelt completely in the metamorphic process, but retained its initial 143

Nd/144Nd from the protolith, not from the homogenization of the

subsequent metamorphic event.  

Incidentally, Andrew Snelling’s glossary entry on “ilmenite” in the 2000 RATE volume noted this mineral (again italics denoted terms otherwise defined in their glossary) “is a common accessory mineral in mafic igneous rocks, that is, igneous rocks rich in iron (Fe) and magnesium (Mg), such as gabbros.” Thus, its comparative absence in the sample Austin offered five years later required accounting for even by their own measure. Regarding these isotopes and their capacity to get concentrated, of relevance is that the 147Sm/144Nd ratios in the titanite minerals Austin extracted from the main sample were so high that “the technical difficulty of measuring very high abundances  of Sm and Nd in titanite” required he split them up for the radiometric lab to date. With all the component parts now placed in context, we may now dismiss the first of Riddle’s star witnesses as a definite plus—but not for the creationist side. Far from discrediting isochrons or the reliability of radiometric dating generally, the testimony of the Beartooth Mountain rock in Austin’s own RATE study samples (fairly collected and accurately dated independently) confirmed at every point the standard geological narrative. And all Riddle needed to have done to see that was (1) put the dates in chronological order, and (2) read outside the creationist box to see what the regular geologists were saying about the data and their implications, then (3) pay close attention to what Austin had specifically written on the samples in his own reporting of the findings.

All that was needed was curiosity and diligence. What we got with Riddle was an insubstantial imitation, faithfully trying to repeat Austin’s failed magic trick, minus the hat and rabbit.  

Grand Canyon Bass Rapids “discordances”  

One star witness down, one to go. The Bass Rapids Sill sample involved a much more famous piece of real estate: the Grand Canyon, with a much more convoluted geological history to explore (neatly surveyed in James Powell’s 2005 book), on which many a creationist has been falling over one another over the years to claim (as Steve Austin did in his 1994 book) that it was a Monument to Catastrophe. The attraction of the canyon for creationists is that it is such an icon of slow geological change, a literal Map of Time revealed by the wet ditch down the middle, that to be unable to coopt it for the creationist side would be a mighty lapse indeed. Wilfrid Elders has dubbed this a branch of “Bibliolatry” in which the text is taken to override any contrary scientific observation, with a new installment coming in 2003 when Tom Vail distilled the creationist view for Grand Canyon: A Different View. This glossy coffee table book, replete with vivid photos of the canyon, caused some kerfuffle when it was included for sale (under the “Inspirational” section) in the park’s assorted book stores, and a testy government employee, Jeff Ruch of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), mistook this for a change in the science stance of the National Park Service, calling for its removal Soon Glenn Branch at the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) and Jodi Wilgoren (NY Times) were on the case, along with a procession of umbrage from creationists Mike Matthews, Mark Looy and Pam Sheppard at AiG, certain that Vail’s book deserved no suppression as it was just their alternative (and oh so correct) view of the science. Michael Shermer poured some cold water of skepticism on the matter in 2007 when he called attention to the fact that Ruch hadn’t actually confirmed ___________________________________________________________________

Hovind gives us the bird

In a case of one incompetent credulous Christian creationist scofflaw copying verbatim from an equally incompetent and credulous Islamic one, in a 2018 video Kent Hovind cribbed from a 2003 article by Harun Yahya (the pseudonym of the rather creepy Turkish businessman and conservative ideologue Adnan Oktar, whose predilection for busty scantily-clad women got him in trouble with the puritanical Erdoğan regime, as Jerry Coyne reported with some relish in 2018). The Yahya post criticized a Scientific American summary article by Richard Prum & Alan Brush on their recent collaborative work clarifying the evolutionary origin of feathers from reptilian scale placodes. Along the way Yahya extensively quote mined a 2002 paper by Alan Feduccia challenging the dinosaur origin of birds, which Hovind duly repeated line by line. In coauthor JD’s 2018 debate, Hovind said he compiled his own PowerPoints, which only underscored his methods limitations, since that meant he had tripped twice over unfamiliar terms like lacustrine (first when he typed the secondary text into the ppt, then again when he read it aloud online) without bothering to look any of them up to find out what they meant. Furthermore, Hovind objectively showed no awareness of Prum’s extensive 2003 response to Feduccia, an omission reinforcing how the bumptious creationist was just reading somebody else’s gloss of somebody else on something else. Hovind then blundered even more egregiously by repeating the thoroughly discredited 1980s claim that the original London Archaeopteryx specimen was a 19th century forgery. This daring (and loony) hypothesis   there had been a change in Park Service policies, or that anybody was presenting creationist positions officially instead of the standard geological view. Ruch, a liberal critic of the Bush Administration, has continued to be a critic of the Trump administration (with rather more cause), showing up in Charles Clark’s 2017 coverage of the more palpable shifts at the EPA under Scott Pruitt (ousted in 2018 over his lavish free-spending ways). But creationists hardly needed national park bookstores to spread their notions (though they would certainly like such enablement); they

have a well-honed network of publishing houses, videos and websites to disseminate Flood Geology to the receptive faithful, ill-equipped methodologically or inclined philosophically to challenge what they are told. For example, in 2012 Steve Austin penned a highly trimmed account of their YEC version of the formation of the Grand Canyon for Hank Hanegraaff’s Christian Research Institute, which followed the familiar path of pitting “the historical framework of Scripture” the creationists draw on against “the uniformitarian assumptions of Charles Lyell  and Charles Darwin” held by their ___________________________________________________________________

had been presented in the British Journal of Photography by the ever-quirky Fred Hoyle, the ID-ish antievolutionist Lee Spetner, photographer John Watkins and medical doctor R. S. Watkins (possibly a relation, though none of the coverage on this matter JD could uncover clarified that point. The claim was soon obliterated by a 1986 analysis by Alan Charig et al. (Chris Nedin has a thorough 2002 review of the flap online). While a few continued to field the fraud claim, like creationist Ian Taylor in 1990 and even Intelligent Design advocate Steve Meyer (in a 1998 lecture coauthor JD witnessed firsthand, though Meyer immediately backed off the claim when JD challenged him on it), most rejected it, including Jonathan Sarfati in 2000 and even the current 2018 Archaeopteryx entry in the usually hyper-credulous Conservapedia (a website founded by the late Phyllis Schlafly’s equally conservative son Andy). The whole fake hypothesis was rendered preposterously irrelevant, of course, by the many specimens of that early flier found over the century and a half since—and still being found, such as by Gerald Mayr et al. in 2007, Christian Foth et al. in 2014 and Oliver Rauhut et al. in 2018. For all those reasons, for Kent Hovind to attack in 2018 paleontology books for continuing to present the supposedly “fake” Archaeopteryx when it was Hovind who was repeating this longdiscredited “fake news” claim represented the height of pathetic hypocrisy (given how often the creationist repeatedly and unjustifiably attacked textbooks on those grounds). The similarity of

Hovind’s behavior to a certain President of the United States, equally addicted to unwarranted claims of “fake news” is likely not coincidental, in that both manifest identically corrupted source methodology and brazenly arrogant temperament.   ”evolutionist” opponents, with no ground in the middle allowed. Working geologists who happen to be Christians have not always taken this effort to drag the Grand Canyon toward the YEC goalpost in silence, such as Carol Hill & Stephen Moshier in 2009, and at greater length in the 2016 book The Grand Canyon, Monument to an Ancient Earth: Can Noah’s Flood Explain the Grand Canyon Hill coauthored with three other geologists. But our focus here is on the physical science of it, and whether the arguments offered by the creationists hold any Flood water when viewed at the source documentation level. The RATE data Riddle echoed on Bass Rapids derived from a 2003 AiG paper by Andrew Snelling, Steve Austin, and Bill Hoesch, which information Austin reprised in his 2005 RATE piece we’ve just examined on the Beartooth case. To begin with, that Hoesch and Austin as a team might have been even less reliable at processing information than Austin was solo may be measured by one of their other collaborations, a short 2004 ICR piece on Dinosaur National Monument, regarding some snail fossils found there: “Modern snails from this family, that are nearly identical to these fossil forms, require in their life-cycle waters that are (1) perennial, (2) well-oxygenated, and (3) low in turbidity. Such conditions could hardly have been met during deposition of the Quarry sandstone bed, much less the overall Brushy Basin Member. This enigma has been called ‘the Morrison gastropod problem.’” For this they cited only one source, whose footnote we offer verbatim (affording all reading this the opportunity to do their own source investigation, if they’re so inclined):  

Evanoff, E., 1998, Paleoenvironmental implications of freshwater gastropod faunas in the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation of the Western Interior--an enigma between geologic and biologic evidence; final report: in, C. Turner, and F. Peterson, eds., Final Report: The Morrison Formation Extinct Ecosystem Project, op. cit., pp. 103-104.

 

A teensy problem: that alleged paper by Evanoff didn’t exist. When an Internet search failed to turn up either the paper or the volume in which it was purportedly to appear (two decades ago), coauthor JD checked with Emmett Evanoff directly (he’s at the University of Northern Colorado), who not only confirmed he had no idea what they were talking about, he even knew of no “Morrison gastropod problem” to resolve. Not that the geology of the place wasn’t interesting. The Morrison Formation consisted of four members stretching over millions of years: the oldest being the shallow marine Windy Hill tidal flats along the southern shore of the extended Sundance Sea that ran all the way up to the Arctic Ocean as part of the vast Western Interior Seaway. That was followed by the lakes and mudflats of the Tidwell after that sea receded, replaced then by the dry terrestrial alluvial plain of the Salt Wash, and finally the volcanic-rich mudstone of the Brushy Basin (which has been dated at around 147 Ma) beside the large saline Lake T’oo’dichi’ Christine Turner & Neil Fishman identified in 1991. Hoesch & Austin were aware of that latter data set, as they cited Turner & Fishman’s paper, mentioning just before that “Morrison gastropod problem” how there was airborne volcanic ash deposited there (despite how inconsistent that would be when all the volcanos of the world were supposed to have been under the Flood waters). Ironically, by 2004 Turner & Fred Peterson had reconstructed the shifting ecosystems revealed in the Morrison Formation layers, and for good measure we’ve included in our references Turner et al. 1995 and 1996, the most recent examples we could find online of the ongoing Morrison Formation Extinct Ecosystems Project (note the plural on the “Ecosystems” differing from how the creationists tagged it in the singular in their not quite real wishful thinking source citation). Closer to our own time, Lawrence Tanner et al. did a detailed 2014 review of the lacustrine paleoclimate of the Brushy Basin segment. While just a fancy technical term for environments with lakes, “lacustrine” turns out to be a word missing from Kent Hovind’s vocabulary, as recounted in the  Info Box on pages 68-69 concerning some of his scholarly antics apropos birds.

All of what we’ve seen then regarding Snelling, Austin and Hoesch suggests, together or on their own, a close attention to the necessary details of a scientific problem is not one of their salient skills, which put Riddle at an immediate disadvantage when relying on them for the Bass Rapids dating claims. Riddle remained in chart-making mode for the Answers book, once again grouping the findings by the dating method they used rather than the chronology the data might imply if you looked away from the rapidly waving creationist magician’s wand (and again, we’ve put the isochron values in grey):  

  Dating Isotopes

Billions of Years

Types of Data (whole rock or separate mineral within the rock)

Potassium-

0.8415

11 whole rock samples

Argon   Rubidium-

(isochron)

0.665 to 1.053 1.007

Strontium (isochron)    

Model ages from singlesample whole rocks Magnetite mineral grains

from 7 rock samples

1.055 1.060 1.070

11 whole rocks 7 minerals Previously published age based on 5 whole rock samples (1982)

  Lead-Lead (isochron) Samarium-

1.075 1.250 1.327 1.330

12 minerals 11 whole rocks 6 minerals 8 minerals

Neodymium (isochron)

1.336

Magnetite mineral grains

from 7 rock samples

   

1.379

6 minerals

As with the Beartooth case, we can start with what Austin and company had to say about the geology of the Bass Rapids Diabase Sill. Austin drew on a range of geology publications on the structure and dating of the deposits, much of it previously fielded in his paper with Snelling and Hoesch, and a chunk of it already decades old at the time. There were 1974 papers by Edwin McKee & Donald Noble on the age of the Cardenas Lava (which we bumped into above), and Donald Elston & Sherman Grommé on whether the Precambrian parts of the stack suggested there had been some polar wandering from where it is presently (that might be inadvertently implied by landmasses shifted by plate movements). Some 1982 and 1989 works by Elston and McKee correlated the deposition dates and circumstances of the canyon’s strata. A 1990 paper by Scott Babcock described the “Precambrian crystalline core”; and Edwin Larson et al.’s aforementioned 1994 paper was cited. The most recent were papers on the crustal tectonics of the canyon’s Proterozoic rocks, by Bradley Ilig et al. in 1996 and Karl Karlstrom et al. in 2003, and Austin was also aware of the 2001 Timmons paper and 2003 Weil one Chemostrat1646 referred to above, but did not dispute their data (otherwise there seems to be no sign of any creationist paying attention substantively to the three works Chemostrat1646 cited). Drawing on the 1990 and 2003 editions of surveys by John Hendricks and G. M. Stevenson, Austin’s 2005 RATE version summarized how “The Unkar Group sedimentary sequence is comprised of four formations (in ascending order, the Bass Limestone, Hakatai Shale, Shinumo Quartzite and the Dox Sandstone) which are overlain by the 300m plus thick sequence of lava flows of the Cardenas Basalt”—though conventional geology regards the Cardenas as the fifth upper layer of the Unkar Group, and not something separate. Fine enough so far, but the creationists fixated anyway on the diabase sills and dikes, which “are believed to be the intrusive equivalents of the Cardenas lava flows, but they are not found in direct association with the Cardenas Basalt,” this time citing older 1974 work by Hendricks & Ivo Lucchitta, and a 1989 paper by Hendricks.

Austin’s RATE account then began some hand blurring moves, by reminding his readers how the relationship between the volcanic sills and dikes intruding into the lower parts exposed by the Colorado River was “obscure because the direct feeders to the flows have never been recognized among the available diabase outcrops.” How geologists would go about doing that Austin didn’t clarify— would it require perhaps excavating hundreds of feet of rock strata, perhaps back miles to discover the link-up spots? Would Austin care to lend a shovel to that purpose, or carry some of the resulting debris off in buckets? And all while staying away from the millions of outraged citizenry and litigation lawyers objecting to the desecration of a national monument, where taking even one rock off without permission is frowned upon. Andrew Snelling knows this firsthand, as his creationist RATE field work efforts in the area has come to raise the suspicious hackles of the regular geological community, most recently in 2017 when objections were raised over his right to gather yet more rock samples to funnel into his YEC dating game. The flap garnered coverage from Ray Stern at the Phoenix New Times to Amanda Reilly for Science, and Karl Karlstrom came to figure in the fracas, suggesting Snelling needn’t have picked the spot he wanted for his samples (more on that in the Info Box  ). Unless they get bulldozer happy, though, geologists are pretty much restricted to looking at the rock layers that are exposed in any one place by natural processes, and calling attention to the obscurity of the Bass Sill volcanic intrusion without mentioning the difficulty of figuring those connections out in the real world was obscureness of another sort. But given all that, how do the creationists think all that dirt got to be the way it is now via the Flood? But there’s something far more salient about the canyon rock deposits, and it involves specifically what crystals are contained in them. A 2015 piece for the NCSE by Lorence Collins reported on the interlocking science evidence establishing how old the Grand Canyon was (where the age of the rocks in the strata are naturally not identical to the age of the trench cut down through them). One nifty measure he noted was the effect of temperature on apatite crystals, where uranium  trapped in  them  shoots out

  ___________________________________________________________________

The Snelling Affair There was an equally visible religious-political side to the Snelling affair, as it ticked the “persecuted man of faith” box on the conservative cue sheet. The highly political YECer Tony Perkins weighed in at his Family Research Council, a venue where Ken Ham’s creationism is fine science but global warming isn’t. Perkins’ primary Kulturkampf obsessions are abortion (with frequent jabs at Planned Parenthood) and “Religious Liberty” matters, by which he means not the freedom of other religions so much as Christian privilege and dominance in the military and government. Ergo Perkins’ approval for the opening prayer at city council meetings in the Greece v. Galloway Supreme Court case (coauthor JD debated conservative law professor Patrick Garry on the thenpending litigation in 2014, with Justice Anthony Kennedy eventually being the not surprising swing vote which finally affirmed it). In the age of marriage equality Perkins complains of gay and transgender issues, and took to using the “Fake News” trope since the election of Donald Trump (who has enabled the conservative Kulturkampf agenda whenever possible, earning a free pass “Mulligan” from the usually sanctimonious Perkins regarding the President’s porn star hush money payments). On the legal side, Andrew Snelling’s tussle with the National Park Service drew the attention of the equally conservative Alliance Defending Freedom. Founded as the Alliance Defense Fund in the early 1990s by a group of conservative ministers, including antievolutionists Bill Bright (Campus Crusade for Christ) and James Dobson (Focus on the Family), and the overtly YEC D. James Kennedy (Coral Ridge Ministries), in 2014 the ADF successfully litigated for the Hobby Lobby case (where the Christian owners wanted to opt-out of Obamacare on account of its inclusion of birth control). By the time the ADF helped win Snelling his right to pick up rocks, YEC homeschool advocate Michael Farris (founder of Patrick Henry College) had become the organization’s CEO. Meanwhile, as reported by Sofia Resnick, in 2018 ADF

spokesperson Kerri Kupec moved on to be spokesperson for (pre Bill Barr) Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Department of Justice, Office of the Solicitor General and Civil Rights Division.  

___________________________________________________________________

Proto-Grand Canyon Carol Hill & Wayne Ranney in 2008 were among those to argue for a Laramide proto-canyon; in the same year Karlstrom et al. worked out a “Model for tectonically driven incision of the younger than 6 Ma Grand Canyon.” Joel Pederson in 2008 and Ivo Lucchitta in 2011 looked at the Muddy Creek Formation at the mouth of the Grand Canyon regarding traces of prior canyon activity, and Nicole Longinotti included a proto-canyon in her 2012 University of California geology course review. In that same series, Scott Bennett surveyed the main tectonic events and geology after 70 Ma that produced the canyon, matters explored in much more detail by Joel Pederson’s “A review of the geomorphology of eastern Grand Canyon,” along with Karlstrom’s papers with Laura Crossey on travertine springs, with Shari Kelley on apatite fission tracks, and with Timmons on “Faulting and uplift in the Grand Canyon region.” More recently, Gustav Seixas et al.’s 2015 paper identified still more on Colorado River incision based on the Hualapai Limestone, and a 2017 paper by Carmen Winn et al. suggests the western end of the canyon is the youngest, carved in the period around 6 Ma.   fission tracks once the crystal cools below 120°C; the more tracks, the longer it’s been since cooling to that point. The uranium in the crystals also generate helium, which can diffuse easily while the crystal is fairly warm, but stops once it cools below 70°C (the internal radiation can further disrupt helium diffusion, covered in a 2009 review by Rebecca Flowers et al.). By those measures Karl Karlstrom et al.’s 2014 analysis pinned down “two important time periods in which these rocks were exposed: 50-70 million years ago, and 5-6 million years ago.” Their paper further detailed how several paleorivers shifting course over many millions of

years contributed to the distinctive features we now see in Arizona (see the  Info Box for more). Collins further pointed out that creationists like Andrew Snelling avoided dealing with the apatite matter (in his case implying that accelerated decay might resolve it), and we found the two RATE book examples more than amply confirmed that. It’s a tale of temperatures hot and hotter, and worth the telling. In the 2000 RATE volume, Larry Vardiman’s “Introduction” and Steve Austin’s “Geochemical Processes in the Mantle and Crust” mentioned apatite just as a mineral involving radiometric dating, and they cropped up peripherally in Andrew Snelling’s “Radiohalos” chapter (more on those in Volume 2). Apart from Austin noting they acted as a “sink” for strontium (where that element could be taken on from feldspars and micas), none of them mentioned anything about any Grand Canyon fission track implications. Turning to the 2005 RATE volume, there were more mentions, but ones which only highlighted how closely the creationists were tiptoeing around the issue. Russell Humphreys’ helium zircon piece cited one 2000 paper by Kenneth Farley that confirmed the helium closure temperature in apatite, but the creationist did not discuss that content, citing it only on the point that helium does diffuse from such minerals (duh). Austin’s isochron paper likewise mentioned apatite in passing as a mineral present in their samples, but still didn’t think to mention their fission track thermal history implications. Andrew Snelling’s contribution on fission tracks in zircons was a much more curiously jumbled exposition, drawing on several unpublished dates by Paul Green at Geotrack International from 2001 and 2002 that had “pooled ages in the range 62-75 Ma” (dates falling squarely in that earlier paleo-canyon) suggesting some resetting of these Cambrian zircons. That would have normally involved temperatures in the 250 to 300°C range, though even Snelling quoted Green as cautioning “we do have some evidence to suggest that some zircons are more easily reset than others, so it’s not totally unexpected.” Despite Snelling then accepting that the zircon annealing temperature appeared to be much lower still (200°C range) depending on the cooling rate, the creationist claimed these zircon dates were “at variance with the conclusion reached by” a 1989 paper by Charles

Naeser et al.—solely because their “fission track ages of ~1000 Ma obtained from zircons from Proterozoic rocks now exposed at river level indicate that those rocks have been at temperatures of 200°C or less for the last 1000 million years.” Only none of the zircons in the Naeser study were from those far older rocks. Maybe a closer look at the Naeser paper is in order, which was about the thermal history of sections of the Grand Canyon. Remember those crystals act as resettable clocks, whose very existence testified not only to having been melted at some point, but at what temperature ranges in which the crystals could have cooked. And then there’s the matter of time, directly and unavoidably affecting the fission track annealing temperature of apatite: “Short heating times at high temperature can have the same effect on fission tracks as long heating times at lower temperatures.” And for the slow geological process (longer than a hundred thousand years), the “longer the heating time, the lower the temperature required for total annealing.” As for those billion-year-old rocks, and what happened next to the sedimentary slabs that came to be on top of them hundreds of millions of years later, the geography and sequence of things somehow got left out of Snelling’s gloss along with the chronology. We’ve put in bold the geological periods to remind you of the temporal nature of this layer cake outlined as the Naeser paper worked along the exposed tracts of the Canyon (remember Snelling must have known about all this, since he cited the paper):  

Fission-track data on detrital apatite crystals separated from Pennsylvanian and Permian strata near Grand Canyon Village on the south rim of the Grand Canyon indicate that these rocks have never been buried to sufficiently high temperatures for the fission tracks to have been totally annealed, suggesting maximum temperatures of 100 and 4.5 Byr history of the earth and solar system.  

Marcus Chown’s article was just a commentary on Alan Kostlecký & Jay Tasson’s paper, which postulated some theoretical ways deviations from relativity could occur in the nooks and crannies of spacetime and still be detectable by our instruments. But they had nothing to say on the matter of this affecting radioactivity. Just to keep readers abreast, overall relativity keeps getting verified. Thomas Collett et al.’s 2018 paper “A precise extragalactic test of General Relativity” would be just the latest we are aware of. As for Jere Jenkins et al.’s 2010 paper on solar radiation being able to affect nuclear decay rates, once again Snelling seemed to preferentially wave a tentative contention as if it were settled, and neglect to mention how controversial it was even at the time he was writing. For example, Eric Norman et al. had already reported “Evidence against correlations between nuclear decay rates and Earth-Sun distances” in 2009. Jenkins’ group continued to press their claims, in a 2010 paper coauthored with Peter Sturrock. But other labs questioned their findings, starting with Enrico Bellotti et al. in 2012, Karsten Kossert & Ole Nähle in 2015, and most comprehensively, in 2016 Stefaan Pommé et al. “Evidence against solar influence on nuclear decay constants” surveyed all the issues and the pile-up of evidence counting conclusively against the solar effects claim.[12]

While it’s not looking good for Snelling’s scholarly track record in the papers Riddle brought on the scene in his Answers book chapters, it does explain how Snelling may have been feeling pleased as to how well he hit all the right bases in his apologetic hopscotch for his intended audience (fellow creationists who take what he says at face value), and he continued to wax celestial in trying to undermine the implications of rhenium decaying ever so slowly over ever so long. Enter the meteorites:  

Subsequently, Birck and Allègre (1998) obtained a Re-Os isochron age of 4624 Ma for a mixed collection of iron meteorites, which they interpreted as too high compared to the age of the solar system of 4566 Ma as determined by the UPb systematics of Allende CAIs (Manhès, Göpel, and Allègre 1986, 1988). They thus concluded that a better measurement of the

187

Re decay constant and half-

life was highly desirable, but in the meantime the value of the

187

Re decay

constant should be adjusted to a value between 1.66 × 10-11 per year and 1.666 × 10-11 per year.  

With the Birck & Allègre paper, once again Snelling flicked a lot of relevant information to the side. The topic of the paper was a particular meteorite (Kodaïkanal), one which happened to show signs of having accreted from older metal-rich parts (dating ~ 4.6 Ga) smushed in with much younger silicate-rich pieces (~3.68 Ga). Regarding that older core, though, Snelling obviously failed to note how the authors specifically tagged what impact the rhenium factor would have: “Actual ages may be a few percent lower due to uncertainty on the 187Re decay constant.” A few percent. That’s a long way from telescoping billions of years down to a few thousand. And why cite two of Gérard Manhès et al. older 1980s pieces in the first place (one of which was in French, and thus not so immediately accessible to readers unfamiliar with that language) on yet another particular meteorite (the Allende), when so much newer work had been done on it? Such as Gen Shimoda et al.’s 2005 rubidium-strontium dating establishing that a main alteration to the meteorite had occurred around 4.4 Ga, with some lesser episodes after that, to account for its particular ensemble of briefly molten chondrules. Or Yuri Amelin &

Alexander Krot’s new 2007 lead isotope dating of those chondrules. Or Benjamin Jacobsen et al.’s 2008 paper specifying a frisky 20,000 year timeframe for the main components’ formation around 4.6 Ga (though that’s still roughly three times the age of Creation by Snelling’s telescoped measuring rod).[13] The pattern of Andrew Snelling and Steve Austin’s practice as apologetic creation scientists was nothing if not clear. Decide what you want to be true, and selectively invoke technical literature that might appear to support your position, provided nobody looks at the sources you’ve just cited, or bother to read more widely to spot what you might have tactically neglected to mention. And just the person not to recognize any of this was Mike Riddle.



3. Evolution and Evidence The twenty-third chapter of The New Answers Book 1 was authored by British creationist A. J. Monty White and asked, “Hasn’t Evolution Been Proven True?” A physical chemist by training, he is known for formerly holding the position of chief executive of the UK branch of Answers in Genesis. White’s bio at Biblical Foundations says he was raised by atheist parents but became a theistic evolutionist after studying geology Later, he became a fully Young Earth creationist after reading the Bible, determining that science (operational and historical we guess) unequivocally points to a 6,000-year-old Earth. He has a history of writing articles and books about the alleged scientific evidence for a young Earth, so this chapter was well within his normal range of topics. But, why are we proceeding in this manner? That is, having pulled the rug out from creationist claims on radioactive dating, why then jump all the way down to Chapter 23 next? The reason is that we need a clear understanding of what “evolution” means before we can apply the subject to the highly evolutionary evidence of paleontology. It does no one any good if our book discusses “evolution” without clarifying precisely what that means, especially since we’re responding to creationists whose arguments so often show just how certainly they have no idea how evolution works. Monty White is such a one, useful for illustrative purposes, but that’s only because his level of ignorance and evasion is common among grassroots creationists. For example, during the writing of this work, coauthor JW debated with Pastor Sylvester Williams on the Non Sequitur Show hosted by Steve McRae and Kyle Curtis (prior to their dust up and parting of the ways). Although Williams claimed to have read the entirety of Darwin's Descent of Man, JW’s questions made it extremely evident that the Pastor did not read either evolutionist or creationist works, but merely repeated talking points culled superficially from the anti-evolution canon. Unable to answer any questions regarding evolution, speciation, or even topics he’d brought up himself (such as the classic creationist

"living fossils" canard, see the Info Box  ), Williams did show a smiling head-shaking Gish Gallop ability to avoid addressing each point by careening to another subject. So, before we can get into the chapter, we must first spend a few words on the concept of “proof”, since the chapter is about whether evolution has been “proved” (not proven). Here a semantic quibble: proved is a verb, whereas proven is an adjective. You would say “He proved his theorem” or “He knows a proven theorem.” But however worded, proof in science is different from a proof in math or philosophy. For example, in math, there is a set of axioms that are certainly or self-evidently true, and from these, mathematical theorems, such as the Pythagorean Theorem, can be constructed. There can be no argument at all that the lengths of the sides of a right triangle are related, and that the square of the hypotenuse must exactly equal the sum of the squares of the other two sides. No wiggle room there.   ___________________________________________________________________

Living Fossils Coined by Darwin to refer to life that looked seemingly unchanged, examples of such things are actually quite rare in the history of life, but that hasn’t stopped anti-evolutionists from seizing upon them as supposedly showing that life hasn’t evolved at all. Practitioners on the YEC side include Carl Wieland in 1998, a bevy from 2011 (Don Batten with and without Carl Werner, and Michael Matthews), and Randy Guliuzza in 2016 belatedly riffing off a “living fossil” eel reported by David Johnson et al. in 2012. ID has weighed in similarly on the “living fossil” trope via Evolution News in 2017, and a 2018 David Klinghoffer podcast channeling Günter Bechly (“living fossils stand as ‘empirical refutations’ of traditional evolutionary theory”). No, they don’t, Günter. Some “living fossil” examples are a stretch. For a long time monoplacophoran mollusks were known only by their fossil shells, until the living Neopolina turned up in the 1950’s, and Henry & John Morris tagged it as a “living fossil” in the second volume of their 1996 creationism trilogy. That evaded the fact that biologists had

surmised in some detail what those primitive early mollusks would have looked like in the body tissue department, which Neopolina turned out to match quite nicely. Alexander Gubanov & John Peel described some recently found Cambrian monoplacophorans in 2000, Gonzalo Giribet et al.’s 2006 paper linked them phylogenetically to chitons, and a 2009 essay by David Lindberg reviewed their relationships to other mollusks. For shear hyperbole, a 2016 Acts & Facts article by Brian Thomas (“Mesozoic Seafood Menu Caters to Noah’s Flood”) proceeded as though shrimp and mussels are living fossils in the static sense they want. The living fossil poster child is, of course, the coelacanth, though as Didier Casane & Patrick Laurenti noted in 2013, their molecular and morphological data show they are far from unchanged. See also the 2014 paper by Lionel Cavin & Guillaume Guinot, “Coelacanths as ‘almost living fossils’,” and Cavin et al.’s 2017 study of novel Triassic coelacanth body shapes. There’s an ecological insight to living fossils that antievolutionists overlook in their haste to score debating points: forms like coelacanths that hang on over long ages tend to be generalists in habitat or diet, rather than specialists like saber toothed predators that depend on particular prey. There’ll be more on coelacanths and the living fossil notion in later chapters and in Volume 2. There are no such axiomatic principles in science, though, other than that “reality” is real and that we can use observations and inferences to work lots of things out about it. But such conclusions are based on probabilities. Sure, some conclusions are likely to never be overturned (such as water being comprised of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, or the Earth is a globe that revolves around the Sun, and not a flat plate with tiny celestial lights circling overhead), but they are still held as tentative truths anyway. In other words, we could consider ideas functionally proved versus absolutely proved. An idea that is absolutely proved is, say, 1+1=2, for there is no universe where 1+1 could not equal 2. On the other hand, an idea that is functionally proved is one that we can consider so well-supported that it is not likely to be overturned, such as

the water and heliocentrism examples. The sort of ideas that we’ve heard it said you would bet your house on being true. The theory of evolution is another example of this, even though anti-evolutionists vigorously disagree with that. And don’t get thrown off by that term “theory” either. We used it last chapter, too. But theories in science aren’t guesses or speculations. Unlike the vernacular use of the term, in science a theory is the highest level of understanding, an overarching conceptual frame that knits together a whole range of observations and the hypotheses brought forth to successfully account for them. We could similarly consider the theory of gravity, cell theory, atomic theory, the theory of relativity, and the germ theory of disease as also functionally “proved”. Each one is based on a number of hypotheses, which were in turn based on a number of observations, and which underwent intense scrutiny to be verified. Those hypotheses had to be supported by evidence, and after many years, the hypotheses that kept making the grade were joined together to make models (theories) that should (and do) make testable predictions. Don’t forget that. Evolution makes predictions while creationism and Intelligent Design do not. With that in mind, let us turn to what White says about evolution. The second paragraph reads (the italic emphasis his):  

Evolutionists often say that evolution simply means “change.” However, in reality it means a certain kind of change. The word is now accepted to mean the change of nonliving chemicals into simple life-forms into more complex life-forms and finally into humans—what might be called from-goo-to-you-via-the-zoo. We are informed that this change occurred over millions of years, and the dominant mechanism that is supposed to have driven it is natural selection coupled with mutations.

  Ok, there is certainly a lot to dig in here, as White is trying to nudge his readers into a highly truncated cartoon version of evolution. The first thing is that White is being a bit dishonest: he says that evolutionists are pushing evolution as merely change, but this is not the case. A textbook definition of biologic evolution would be a change in allele frequencies in a population over generations (alleles being

naturally mutating versions of the genes contained in DNA), or it could also be defined as natural branching speciation. White is appealing to the general sense of the word evolution, which does mean just “change”. Under that general definition of evolution (not biologic evolution), televisions, cell phones, cars, airplanes, and various other non-living things might be said to “evolve”. That is to say, they change in design over the years due. In the case of technology, this is due entirely to humans. However, no professional evolutionists are teaching that evolution is merely change over time. After all, individuals change over time—they age—but a core insight of evolution is how it is not about individuals. It is about populations. An historical aside on that “from goo to you via the zoo” line White used. It’s a popular one in AiG circles (Josh Bootsma reported Terry Mortenson using it in a 2017 Sioux Center, Iowa lecture), but it goes back at least to 1984, when creationist Harold Hill titled one of his books From Goo to You by Way of the Zoo. Not to be confused with the ebullient flimflam artist of the same name in the 1950s musical The Music Man, the creationist one was an electrical engineer who helped spread a lot of goo himself in his works, including popularizing the ridiculous NASA “missing” day myth in a 1974 book published by the now defunct Christian publisher Logos International (see the Info Box  on the next page). Beyond the gooey alliteration, White also misrepresents what evolution involves, wanting to drag in an ill-defined popular notion that some forms of life (especially us) are somehow more “complex” than others. He confuses the definition of evolution with evolutionary history. Sure, researchers have concluded that after life originated (by whatever means), populations developed different mutations and genetic variations, and those differences were either passed to offspring or they were not. However, that does not make anything more or less “complex”. Really, the word complex has no definition in this context, and anti-evolutionists have no way of quantifying it (not even Michael Behe or Bill Dembski have pulled that off). So how can they say anything is “more” or “less” complex? By the number of cell types it has, how many proteins it uses, whether it employs a nervous system to interact with its environment, or does double entry bookkeeping and play hockey?

Not that aspects of “complexity” can’t be quantified or analyzed, and much learned from it. A 2000 paper by Christoph Adami et al. offered parameters for genomic complexity. By 2008 Matthew Herron & Richard Michod were doing much the same for the volvocine algae, a fascinatingly diverse form of life operating at the cusp of multicellularity—a cusp creationists have taken pains to avoid. Shaun Doyle bounced by the volvocines in a 2009 article, for example, which coauthor JW found a 2012 CMI video credulously relied on (apparently not fact-checking how Doyle had misrepresented the content of his sources, such as Aurora Nedelcu’s  2004 paper with Michod on those organisms that ___________________________________________________________________

The Missing Day myth Surfacing around 1970, the myth recounted how a group of NASA engineers were testing the reliability of a new computer program used to calculate stellar positions for the upcoming Apollo mission. Letting it run on retrograde long into antiquity (and why would they do that?), all went well until in the pre-Christian era it suddenly snagged up and would go no farther. Anyone familiar with computer programing should have smelled a rat on this story at once, since unless you built the “Joshua factor” into it to begin with, a program would literally have no way of knowing when it was supposed to stop. It could “calculate” the positions of the stars back a hundred billion trillion years, if you asked it to, or until you pulled the plug. But in the story no one was so skeptical. The room full of puzzled scientists did everything but rend their garments trying to figure out what had gone wrong. That is, until a humble Christian engineer stepped forward to remind them that, according to the Bible, at just that time Joshua had commanded the sun stand still during the battle of Jericho. Well, as soon as they had taken that added delay into account the program ran right as rain! What a perfect denouement: the haughty priests of the new Apollo shown their comeuppance by the humble servant of the Lord. Although coauthor JD has bumped into creationists repeating the Missing Day claim now and then, the story was so flimsy the

professional creationists disowned it too, from Donald DeYoung 1989 and Bert Thompson 1991, to B. A. Robinson 2001 regarding a 1999 Institute for Creation Research broadcast, and Jonathan Sarfati 2002 on behalf of Answers in Genesis. While Thompson was aware there was something of a backstory, antedating moon rockets and computers, as was Thomas McIver 1988, the import of the quirky details surfaced most clearly in Jan Brunvand’s 2000 reportage. Towit: creationist Harry Rimmer (1890-1952) had retold the tale of astronomers brought to Jesus by the truth of Joshua’s missing day, which he cribbed courtesy of one Charles Totten (1851-1908), a lieutenant who taught military tactics at Yale University 18891892. Brunvand noted Totten was also an anti-Semitic crackpot “whose favorite theory was the racial purity of the Aryan race and whose favorite pastime was predicting imminent apocalypse” (such as that the Antichrist would appear on March 29, 1892). We missed that one.   Doyle wrongly implied presented obstacles to the evolution of multicellularity). In 2010 Daniel Lang’s team were able to relate the complexity of plants to their increasingly known transcriptional regulation system, and the following year, the availability of over 400 fully sequenced organisms allowed Kyung Kim & Gustavo Caetano-Anollés  to work back through their genomes to identify the parameters of organismal complexity operating ancestrally some 3 billion years earlier. At this deep root of the nucleated eukaryotes, by 2013 Lila Koumandou could go further, identifying how many protists, metazoans and plants had acquired further complexity, even as other organisms streamlined, such as the fungi, some algae, most of the protist kinetoplastids, and the now highly parasitical apicomplexans and diplomonads. And just how busy those fungi have been over their billions of years was reviewed in 2018 by László Nagy et al., finding “the pervasive occurrence of complex multicellularity across the fungal tree of life.” On this issue, a 2014 paper by Patrick Keeling surveyed how earlier notions of “primitive” versus “complex” had hampered the scientific understanding of the origin of eukaryotes, while the field is

now grappling with the implications of “chimeric” endosymbiotic processes that can supply a new form of complexity on their own by combining previously separate biological systems. Eugene Koonin’s commentary on a 2015 paper by Michael Lynch & Georgi Marinov hit similar notes, regarding how cell size (affected by the acquisition of the mitochondrial power pack organelles in the immediate ancestor of eukaryotes) changed the odds for how DNA-churning played out. Whereas prokaryotes “cannot fix even a short sequence unless it provides a significant selective advantage,” Koonin noted eukaryotes developed in such a way that genes increasingly sported introns that don’t get activated genetically, and selection can’t “eliminate a gene unless it is translated. Therefore, genome expansion in eukaryotes is possible under a neutral evolutionary regime and does not require any significant increase in energy production.” We hope you dear readers have figured out that figuring out the complexity of life can be very ... complex. But the last thing on Monty White’s creationist mind was delving into the functional complexity of intron-laden eukaryote genomes—or explaining why God seemed so intent on making parasitical apicomplexans and diplomonads. Generally, how complex something is may be often equated with how derived it is. This is one of the major misunderstandings in antievolutionism: everything alive today is equally derived. All of life has had exactly the same amount of time to evolve from a common ancestor with everything else. While some modern living things may be thought of as “less evolved” on account of their diminutive size or absence of appendages they can wave about, such as bacteria, the reality is that all the domains of life show the signs of extensive evolution at the biological roots. So, it’s not just all about us. Let us look again at the explanation of evolutionary history being offered in White’s creationist cartoon. He says that non-living chemicals begat life, which then diversified. That process of non-living chemicals eventually giving rise to organisms is known as abiogenesis, and a lot of research has gone into the topic over the years; however, abiogenesis is not strictly a part of evolution. This is a frequently confused issue in antievolutionism, yet more fallout from that Origins or Bust presuppositionalism noted last chapter.

However you define it, evolution only relates to replicating organisms. If you see evolution as the change in allele frequencies in a population over generations, clearly if you have no alleles, then you have no evolution. Therefore, abiogenesis cannot be evolution. Similarly, if you view evolution as natural branching common descent, until you have those replicators to inherit stuff from, you have no evolution. Also, as a nit-pick, White says that evolution occurred over millions of years, but it actually occurred over billions of years, starting between 4 and 3.8 billion years ago. Not that anyone is going to expect a fussy attention to chronology from any Young Earth creationist, who have already left out most of the zeros in their mental Map of Time. Lastly on this quote, is White’s characterization of evolution’s mechanisms satisfactory? Sort of. It is true that organisms are born with inherent mutations and genetic variations, and that these can be selected by natural selection; however, these are not the only mechanisms of evolution. Mutations and genetic variations are passed to or generated within offspring. These can be harmful, neutral, or beneficial. Harmful mutations are rather straightforward: they are mutations that harm the host, such as hemophilia or phenylketonuria (a rare condition where the metabolism becomes unable to process the amino acid phenylalanine, which builds up in the body to ill effect). Neutral mutations have no selective effect on the host, although they can eventually add up to ones that do (more of that complexity dance in the genome), at which point they have a selective effect on the host. Lastly, beneficial mutations confer selective health benefits to the host. Now, a few anti-evolutionists say they accept beneficial mutations, but they only do it to an extent. Answers in Genesis geneticist Georgia Purdom went full equivocation mode in 2008 in a piece she wrote with Kevin Anderson, summing it up most succinctly that same year in a solo article “Are There Beneficial Mutations?” (her emphasis): “But are there such things as beneficial mutations? In short, no, but let me explain. While I have yet to see evidence of a truly beneficial mutation, I have seen evidence of mutations with beneficial outcomes in restricted environments.”

How bizarre. She acknowledges that mutations can have beneficial outcomes but refuses to call those mutations themselves beneficial because they do not help the organism survive in all environments. And yet, no one is saying that is how mutations work. Of course, they are context-dependent! Why would you need a mutation for a thick coat of fur if you live on the African savanna? This trope of “no mutations are beneficial because they are not universally beneficial” is a complete mischaracterization of how mutations, and ultimately evolution, work. And this misunderstanding tells us a lot about one of the giant conceptual blind spots in antievolutionism (not just the Young Earth creationist version). Organisms must always deal with local environmental conditions. There is no generalized universal organism operating in a generalized universal environment. Some of the environmental parameters are just plain stressful—predators, prey, parasites, space, water access, climate, etc.—which select which traits are passed to offspring. Purdom should know that, since she wrote the chapter (number twenty-two) on natural selection in The New Answers Book 1: “Is Natural Selection the Same Thing as Evolution?” (Hint: it is not, and no one is saying it is.) We’ll have more to say on Purdom’s arguments through the book, but that her chapter starts with a hypothetical conversation is somewhat telling of how often people confuse natural selection with evolution. Although her chapter adequately explains what natural selection is, Purdom couches it in common creationist tropes, like (to paraphrase) “These bacteria aren’t evolving because they’re the same kind.” She even brings up “genetic information” and “kinds”, but without definitions for either, the reader can’t judge what they mean in practice. It’s only by the application to specific cases that terms take on meaning in science, and the usage of such buzzwords as mere talismans in the Answers books is as per usual for creationists. Whether White, Purdom and their fellow creationists like it or not, beneficial mutations do exist and can create new structures and physiological functions and even new species sometimes. However, before we explain some examples, we must point out that the only type of mutation with a beneficial outcome that anti-evolutionists talk about is that which causes them to lose structures. An oft-cited

example is antibiotic resistance in bacteria: bacteria might lose a cellular structure in the process of developing resistance to antibiotics. This is not the only way to develop resistance, though. Antibiotic resistance can be attained through the process of antigenic drift where a bacterial population continually acquires mutations that eventually build up resistance. This often occurs in their surface proteins hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, and these have been extensively studied in the influenza virus (Nicole Bouvier & Peter Palese in 2008, for example, and by Scott Hensley et al. in 2009). Indeed, influenza is a textbook case of how biology follows natural evolutionary patterns, tracked by so many researchers, from a 2007 review by Martha Nelson & Edward Holmes to Jeffrey Taubenberger & John Kash in 2010. There are real world consequences to pretending that biological systems do not operate on natural principles, or that creationists can somehow deal with them in a way evolutionary biologists can’t. The track record of modern medicine testifies otherwise. In fact, there is an entire field of epidemiology (the study of incidence, distribution, and control of diseases) that utilizes evolution to track the origin of diseases, called phylogeography, as blogger EvoGrad (AKA Ration alMind) recounted in a 2017 post on how evolutionary principles were directly employed to deal with viral outbreaks and in cancer research. Within this field, researchers look at the how mutations accrue and spread through populations, and how those populations spread throughout the world. For instance, researchers made use of evolution to track the spread of the Ebola virus in 2014 to Guinea, which twice independently spread to Sierra Leone. So, what about the development of new structures, functions, and species? Here are three examples to whet your apetite, all involving specific natural mutations with significant effect on biology and behavior. A 2017 paper by Emilia Santos et al. in Science identified how gene duplications in the water strider genus Rhagovelia enabled the formation of new propeller fans, allowing them to move upstream against the current and thereby spread into a new environment. Second, a new physiological function was detected in a family in Milan, Italy, by Guido Franceschini, Karl Weisgraber and colleagues

back in the early 1980s, where one man had a mutation in his gene for the protein apolipoprotein-A1, which allowed him and his descendants to consume cholesterol with a decreased risk of heart disease, which is certainly beneficial. Further work on the structural elements of the Milano mutation has been done by Eric Alexander et al. in 2009. Third, new species can occasionally develop due to specific mutations. In plants, the number of chromosomes can change in a single generation, called polyploidy, where the polyploid plants become physically unable to breed with its parent population. This also occurs more rarely in animals, though there are the same natural scientific reasons for that too, such as Julian Gutekunst et al. reported in 2018 on the marbled crayfish Procambarus virginalis. And while we’re on the topic of chromosomes, it turns out there is another form of those (B chromosomes) that can exist in eukaryotes but don’t follow the normal Mendelian law of inheritance. As described by Bengt Hansson’s 2019 commentary on Anna Torgasheva et al.’s “Germline-restricted chromosome (GRC) is widespread among songbirds,” they’d been known since the early 20th century, but were hard to identify because they were restricted to the germline cells that pass on their genetic inheritance to offspring (as opposed to the somatic body cells) and varied so in number “among individuals and among cells within individuals.” Hansson noted that they are apparently derived from “selfish genetic elements that have parasitized the genome,” explored in work like Andreas Houben et al.’s 2014 paper on the “Evolution and biology of supernumerary B chromosomes.” Here we’re diving down into the deepest crannies of biological replication, where the terms “complex” or “simple” (or even beneficial or deleterious) start to blur. Take programmed genome rearrangement (PGR), “an ancient and evolutionarily stable strategy for regulating inherent developmental/genetic conflicts between germline and soma,” as Vladimir Timoshevskiy et al. put it in their 2017 review of the process in lampreys. A 2018 paper by Jeramiah Smith (whose team had sequenced the lamprey genome in 2013) found “that both chromosomal and whole-genome duplications have played significant roles in the evolution of ancestral vertebrate and lamprey genomes,

including chromosomes that carry the six lamprey HOX clusters” that are central to body plan development. And still deeper, programmed DNA elimination, where development in unicellular ciliates and metazoans sometimes involves eliminating “specific DNA sequences, up to ~90% of the genome in some cases,” as Jianbing Wang & Richard Davis reviewed in 2014. That something interesting was going on had been known since 1887 (long before the DNA part was identified), and in 2017 Wang et al. explored the process in a particular parasitical nematode, including its management of repetitive elements (89% of its genome) that “can cause problems in DNA replication and can be deleterious to the genome.” In conclusion, yes, new structures, functions, and even new species can form due to mutations, though what counts as a success for an organism, or the genes composing it, may not be so benign for those they interact with. All of these are observations (the thing creationists so urge science to do in principle, but seem so lethargic to perform in practice). Time to get back to the real evolution creationists have so much trouble getting a grip on.  

How Evolution Works  

We established that both mutations and natural selection occur, but these are not the only mechanisms of evolution. Sexual selection is another mechanism whereby at least one mate chooses another based on phenotypic appearance (the dry sciency way of saying the total physical traits of an organism). We are all familiar with the example of the Indian peacock (Pavo cristatus) and his extravagant tail feathers, called a train. One hypothesis for the train is that female peahens choose male peacocks based on the color of their tail feathers, and that selective pressure has “grown” the feathers over generations. This hypothesis was originally expounded upon by Charles Darwin (1809-1882) in his 1871 book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. More recent work by Rosyln Dakin & Robert Montgomerie have focused on the iridescent eyespots, which apparently reflect most attractively in

the sun (not forgetting that birds can see into the ultraviolet, so how such plumage appears to the bird isn’t necessarily restricted to how things look to our drab primate eyeballs). Darren Naish reminds us, though, that there is another species of peacock, the green Burmese Pavo muticus, where the males and females look nearly identical, but the males only having a train. That seems to be due in part to them being monogamous (where the Indian peacocks are polygamous). The dynamics of sexual selection are literally a sight to behold. There was plenty of time for this peacock differentiation to occur: the green and Indian peafowl diverged from each other about 3 million years ago in the late Pliocene, as Yi-na Ouyang et al. worked out in 2009, although some peafowl, such as Pavo aesculapi, date all the way back to the late Miocene of Greece. Furthermore, extensive research in anthropology shows that high sexual dimorphism (dissimilarities between males and females) strongly correlates with polygamy, while low sexual dimorphism strongly correlates with monogamy. This was also noticed by Darwin (who noticed a lot of things), and subsequent studies have shown this relationship to hold for a wide range of vertebrates: pinnipeds (seals, sea lions, walruses), ungulates (hooved mammals), birds, and amphibians. Anyway, both natural and sexual selection have been extensively researched for years such that even anti-evolutionists acknowledge and accept their existence. Both these mechanisms of evolution are examples of selective mechanisms; however, not all evolution occurs through selective mechanisms. Much of evolution also occurs through non-selective modes, including genetic drift and gene flow, which act like channels that shift a population along paths that were not directly acted on by any adaptive selection, natural or sexual. Genetic drift is the process whereby some allele is randomly distributed throughout a population. In college biology, it is common to observe simulations of this where a population of a certain size has a certain number of alleles, and you can observe the distribution of those alleles over the course of generations. Generally, the larger the population, the less likely one allele is going to become fixed or go extinct in the population. An example of genetic drift is in cheetahs. Back in 1993 Marilyn Menotti-Raymond & Stephen O’Brien identified that about 10,000

years ago, the cheetah Acinonyx jubatus went through a population bottleneck where very few cheetahs survived. Due to the lowered genetic diversity, a suite of genetic defects—such as kinked tails, poor sperm quality, and susceptibility to infectious diseases—spread through the population. In our human species, Ellis-van Creveld syndrome (which causes polydactyly and dwarfism) has similarly spread through genetic drift in the American Amish communities, as Victor McKusick remarked regarding a 2000 paper by Victor Ruiz-Perez et al. We clever humans generate our own genetic bottlenecks. Maybe not so clever. As for gene flow, this is the process whereby specific alleles are spread among populations. One popular example of this is postinfancy lactose tolerance or lactase persistence. Lactose is the sugar in milk, and lactase is the enzyme that breaks down lactose, but humans didn’t evolve with an ability to metabolize cow’s milk, making post-infancy lactose intolerance the norm. That is, until around 5,000 to 10,000 years ago when lactose tolerance originated in Europe (unsurprisingly, Todd Bersaglieri et al.’s 2004 paper found that this correlates pretty well with the European domestication of cattle and the advent of dairying). That European lactose tolerance allele has been passed around since, a 2014 paper by Gwenna Breton et al. tracking it all the way to a population of South African Khoe pastoralists. So, mutations, natural and sexual selection, genetic drift, and gene flow are all different mechanisms of evolution. What happens when those genetic differences accumulate in populations? Well, if one population were to break into two and become geographically isolated, then speciation could occur. Speciation is the process whereby new species are formed (duh). But what a species represents depends again on how that is defined. Animals that look notably different may be regarded as different species (and grassroots creationists often think only in those terms), but the most scientifically useful measure has been that of reproductive isolation (the ability to breed, and hence pass on gene, along with the natural inclination to do so). The aforementioned example of geographic separation can cause such isolation, and hence represent speciation. Known as allopatric speciation, this idea interested Darwin, who intensely studied how geographic variation affected the diet and phenotypes of different Galápagos finch species. Much research on finch speciation there has

been done in the many decades since Darwin, most recently by one of the great teams of modern science, Peter & Rosemary Grant, such as their 2009 paper “The secondary contact phase of allopatric speciation in Darwin's finches.” Speciation can also occur without such geographic splitting. In that case it’s called sympatric speciation, and there are many examples of that too. And species can coalesce too, via hybridization. The take home point right now is that species are not (and cannot be) strictly static fixed designations. In short, genetic changes accumulate in populations until those populations divide. In principle, none of this goes against antievolutionism. If you read material put out by Answers in Genesis, then you can see that they are fine with some beneficial mutations, the selective and non-selective mechanisms, and even speciation. For example, a 2016 excerpt (“Speciation, Yes; Evolution, No”) from a 2006 book by Gary Parker freely accepted these mechanisms of how evolution works but would neither call it “evolution” nor apply those processes over long periods of time, and Paul Garner offered similar waffle talk in 2009. But even though Young Earth creationism doesn’t allow those long periods of time, all the fossil taxa found along the way still existed, and need accounting for in the YEC perspective. (We’ll be showing you how the baraminologists dance around this shortly, as well as in Chapter 5.) Now to get back to Monty White. From the one paragraph we have investigated, we have seen White mischaracterize and manipulate the definition of evolution for his own purposes. Surely, he will not continue to do this throughout the remainder of the chapter? He could not possibly do such a thing. Just watch. Moving slightly down the page, White proposes three different “types” of evolution: stellar, chemical, and biological. Woah, red flag. This is akin to what fellow young Earth creationist Kent Hovind and son Eric are well known for doing, except they divide evolution into six different types: cosmic (the Big Bang), chemical (the origination of all elements following hydrogen and helium), stellar (the formation of planets and stars), organic (abiogenesis), microevolution (uselessly

defined as “changes within kinds”), and macroevolution (also uselessly defined as “change from one kind to another”). In fact, one way to spot Hovind groupies is to hear them spout the “six types of evolution” trope. There is a funny backstory surrounding Hovind’s “types”. Years ago, Hovind offered $250,000 to anyone who could “give any empirical evidence (scientific proof) for evolution.” Of course, this is not difficult; we just explained and provided examples of how evolution works. However, Hovind would only fork over the money if you could demonstrate to the satisfaction of him and his hand-picked group that all the different “types” of evolution did occur, even though all but the last two have nothing to do with biologic evolution. Trying to pin Hovind down on what evidence he’d accept proved a slippery task. And, there was never any verification that Hovind even had the $250,000 to cover this sucker bet. But all that wagering schtick disappeared after Hovind went to jail for structuring (a tax evasion thing, which one might think was not an especially Christianly thing to do). For those interested, Peter Reilly kept up with Hovind’s interactions with a frequently unsympathetic government and penal system in a very extensive series of articles (2012 to 2015) at Forbes magazine. Anyway, White did not explain his trichotomy immediately. Oh, that would be too simple and direct. No, he launched into a rant about how acceptance of evolution necessarily means God is completely irrelevant, which is not true since evolution has nothing to do with God. Indeed, as noted in Chapter 1, numerous Christians accept evolution. But in White’s my way or the highway false dichotomy strawman, if God (their version at least) is pushed out of the origins game (and it’s the creationists doing the pushing), it must mean people can do whatever they want—no one has to abide by any moral rules White dives off the deep end:  

The implication of [evolution] is very revealing: evolution means “no God” and if there is no God, then there are no rules—no commandments, no God-given rules which we must obey. We can therefore live our lives as we please, for according to evolutionary philosophy, there is no God to whom we have to give an account. No wonder molecules-to-man evolution is attractive to so many, for it allows them to live as they please. This is called relative morality.

 

Evidently, White’s grasp on how moral reasoning works and how the neurological processes underlying them relate to evolutionary biology is just as weak as his understanding of how evolutionists define evolution. There’s plenty of science work for creationists not to notice on this, of course. Some recent work on the neural correlates of moral reasoning includes Kristin Prehn et al. and Maria Cuñat-Agut et al., and several papers by Sam Harris et al. have studied religious verses non-religious thinking. Most interestingly, Harris’ 2009 work identified three independent systems on belief: one that believes, another that covers uncertainty, and a disbelief system that hitchhikes off the neural network triggered by physical distaste. Which means we may anticipate some of the brain systems that were lighting up in White’s head while flinging his metaphorical poo at moral relativism. Philosophically, this creationist argument is based entirely on a fallacy: an appeal to emotion. More specifically, an appeal to dire consequences. The truth value of a scientific claim is determined by its supporting evidence, though, not by how it makes you act. Are we to reject physical chemistry too, because people can make bombs as well as polyester fabrics? Yet White tried to scare his audience into believing that if they accept evolution (a genealogical theory of physical descent), they necessarily become immoral heathens. “Dogs and cats, living together,” as Bill Murray roared in the old Ghostbusters. But does this happen in reality? European countries, for example, notably accept evolution far more than Americans, yet in general have notably lower crime rates than the United States (where the ready availability of firearms plays a more direct role than any acceptance of hominid origins). Even overlooking that correlation does not imply causation to begin with, White didn’t even manage the correlation part. Nor is it obvious that relying on a religious model would inevitably inspire people to good behavior at all. We have centuries of track record on that, and coauthor JD would want to remind readers that the non-evolution-believing Christian Middle Ages were not a barrel of laughs. More recently, as Azim Shariff & Mijke Rhemtulla found in a 2012 study, acceptance of a too-forgiving heaven can end up acting

like a sort of Get Out of Consequences Free card, exactly the thing White is trying to saddle exclusively on evolution! White’s anxiety over creeping godlessness may be thought of as part of the reaction to a longer process of cultural marginalization, as former religious privilege and influence began to erode when modern secular political institutions developed in the Enlightenment. This was heightened further in the religiously diverse United States (a nation of immigrants throwing off a distant and haughty divine right monarchy, and not looking back), prompting many a religious conservative to decry the changes in the wind, as Charles Mathewes & Christopher Nichols reviewed in their 2008 Prophesies of Godlessness: Predictions of America’s Imminent Secularization from the Puritans to the Present Day. The Industrial Revolution (churning the economic status quo) and increasing availability of public education fueled further change. A 2018 paper by Damian Ruck et al. found a shift away from religiosity preceded economic change in the 20th century, suggesting that improving economic conditions (and the social safety net they can facilitate) are more likely to have a motivating impact on criminality than whether the person thinks they have a distant ancestor in the therapsids. Now, does “evolution” somehow give people permit to live how they want? No rules at all? No. You can personally choose to ignore societal laws and do whatever you want; however, evolution has nothing to do with this. And to really go for the jugular on this argument, how many people believe that evolution is true for the sole purpose of not believing in or having to answer to a god? Neither authors of this work have ever met one. Indeed, every single person we’ve encountered who accepts evolution does so because of the mountains of evidence in support of the process. Readers should keep in mind that the concept of moral rules is something only conscious or eusocial organisms (animals that must necessarily live in complex, hierarchical groups, like bees or ants) are aware of anyway. Amoebae, plants, fungi, and many other organisms do end up functionally behaving in “altruistic” ways (see for example Suegene Noh et al.’s 2018 paper, “Genetic signatures of microbial altruism and cheating in social amoebas in the wild”), but not because

they have any conscious awareness how their “morality” is the outcome of their natural reactions to environmental stimuli. As if White’s argument on morality couldn’t get any worse, he even misrepresents moral relativism. Moral relativism brings up the long-standing philosophical conundrum, that moral standards can’t easily be carved in stone, immutable and absolute (see Emrys Westacott in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a cue sheet). Plato recognized the problem 2,500 years ago in the Euthyphro Dilemma, wrestling with whether anyone can rest ethical standards on the command of the gods. How would the gods decide what things were moral? Unless there was an absolute moral standard independent of them, morality would be just their whim. Killing is wrong only if the gods say so? Wrong is whatever the gods command? If that’s how it goes, then the same would apply to eating shellfish (or pork, or imbibing alcohol), or wearing clothing composed of mixed fabrics (or how or whether certain sexes need to be covered up in certain spots)—all of which have earned commandments in one religious context or another. But if there is an external absolute morality, one the morally upright gods can appeal to, what prevents the secular moralist from skipping the divine middleman and going for the morality directly? Atheists like Austin Dacey (and coauthor JD) take exactly that path, meaning White’s presumption that morality and evolution must be mutually antithetical is flat out wrong. Though White obviously didn’t want to think about it, real moral reasoning inevitably depends on context, taking into account motives and circumstances. It doesn’t mean anything goes, though, which is what White may have wanted his readers to think. Let’s take a suitably biblical example to illustrate this: that “thou shalt not steal” (generally Mosaic Commandment Eight). If, for instance, you steal a pencil, then you probably will not receive any punishment (who didn’t nick one now and then from grade school?). If you stole the Blue Hope diamond on the other hand, then your punishment would likely be more severe (and make the evening news). But imagine if a mother stole bread from a store immediately following Hurricane Katrina to feed her children, then people might reasonably overlook her theft due to the fact that it helped her children

survive. Such mitigating circumstances are precisely the thing that we humans cannot avoid when navigating the moral landscape our social interactions set before us.[14] Monty White’s own biblical tradition trips over this problem constantly. The most obvious and odious being the quite unsettling history of allowing human slavery. Just read Exodus 21 to get the idea, with the rules on when you can beat your Hebrew slave, and such. And, yes, apologists, they were slaves, not just “servants”. In our theft example, we can invent extenuating circumstances under which it would be allowable for that mother to steal, so instead of saying “thou shalt not steal,” we could amend that to “thou shalt not steal unless…” and fill in the blank on a case-by-case basis. But things like slavery and rape are far more difficult to justify even in extreme cases, leaving modern “moral relativists” in a far less leaky ethical boat than biblical “absolute moralists” who are stuck paddling a vessel that missed prohibiting so giant an abomination as the owning of people. So, let’s leave White’s unsubstantiated moralizing imperatives where they belong, in the circular file. Next, what on Earth is this “evolutionary philosophy” thing? Is this anything like gravitational philosophy, or sedimentary philosophy? This is a meaningless phrase that acts as an ideological bogeyman; just throw everything you reject under one category and give it a name. Evolution is not a philosophy; it is a subset of biology. Anyone who seeks to tack a “philosophy” onto evolution is doing so for their own non-scientific purposes ... like White. It’s a given of creationist apologetics that contributors like White want to lump atheism in with acceptance of evolution, even though we know millions of Christians (and other religious faiths too, don’t forget them) accept evolution. Devout Christian paleontologist Simon Conway Morris in Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe comes to mind, along with the scathing review of Conway Morris’ book by evolutionary developmental biologist PZ Myers, an equally fervent atheist. Entertaining their polarized positions may be, but neither represent a scientific belief (religion or no) nor makes the vast evolution evidence both accept disappear in a puff of philosophical smoke.

Thus “evolutionary philosophy” cannot include the presence or absence of any particular theism. Would it include White’s “types” of evolution mentioned earlier? Probably, but they have nothing to do with philosophy either (unless White wants us to believe one observes stars or chemical reactions only when lubricated by a particular point of view). And it is not as though White goes on to give us a coherent, detailed explanation of what this “evolutionary philosophy” is supposed to mean, since he immediately moved onto another topic. Since White was no help in that area (shocking!), coauthor JW went to Answers in Genesis to find the … Answer. As it happens, David Unfred wrote an article in 1981 titled “Evolution as Philosophy,” in which he authority quoted British biologist Peter Medawar (1915-1987) as saying, “For a biologist the alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all,” a sentiment allowing Unfred to promptly declare evolution a religion without ever explaining what exactly a “religion” is. We find it funny that creationists seem prone (but only when convenient) to tactically use religion as a pejorative. All Medawar’s quote had done was remind people how much evidence there is to support evolution and how important the subject had become to understanding biology (by his time, the bedrock of the field for at least forty years). His view was no more a “religious” declaration than the even more famous 1973 statement of Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975) that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.” Or, hiking back to the 19th century, the one of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) that, “Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all.” Though in his original 1852 version of “The Developmental Hypothesis”, Spencer was defending the Theory of Lamarck, not the Darwinian model that had not yet seen the light of publication. As for old Charles Darwin, we can let him speak for himself. His view of the creationist position in Origin of Species in 1859 was terse: “On the ordinary view of the independent creation of each being, we can only say that so it is;--that it has pleased the Creator to construct all the animals and plants in each great class on a uniform plan.” The

historian Ron Amundson noted the further caveat Darwin added for the 1872 edition: “but this is not a scientific explanation.” At this point we may ask, what science is it that creationism has come to be essential to? White wasn’t about to explore that, and the next page and a half was him off on another rant about how the Genesis creation week was inconsistent with what evolution claims occurred. Duh. Here we must get a bit personal. While we do think the old Bible stories and the science evidence pertaining to evolution cannot be completely reconciled, we don’t require they need to be. But the two of us would much rather live in a world full of people who at least try to reconcile the two by open and fair reason, rather than dogmatically rejecting the one science side of it in a huff. And there was a lot for him to huff about—the whole universe, in fact, as White returned to his “types” of evolution. Oh boy. He first takes a stab at “stellar evolution,” describing it thusly:  

The big bang is the most prominent naturalistic view of the origin of the universe in the same way that Neo-Darwinian evolution is the naturalistic view of living systems. The difference between what the Bible teaches about the origin of the universe and what the evolutionists teach can be summed up as follows: the Bible teaches that “in the beginning God created” and the evolutionists teach, in essence, that “in the beginning nothing became something and exploded.” According to the big bang, our universe is supposed to have suddenly popped into existence and rapidly expanded and given rise to the countless billions of galaxies with their countless billions of stars.  

To begin, “what the Bible teaches about the origin of the universe” isn’t much. It’s not a science book, and scholars from Alexander Heidel (1907-1955) in the 1950s through James Hoffmeier and Wilfrid Lambert (1926-2011) in the 1980s and John Roberts in the 21st century have uncovered how a lot of that “biblical” narrative was borrowed from neighboring cultures, including the Babylonian Enuma Elish creation myth (and their assorted flood stories) and cribs from the Egyptian creation notions. Although the Christian church eventually adopted the common conception of Greek science, including their geocentric globular Earth (a process Christine Garwood chronicled in her entertaining book Flat

Earth), centuries of historical records confirm that before that, what “the Bible” had in mind was a flat earth cosmology with a literal “firmament” arcing overhead, sprinkled with twinkly lights (the planets, stars, Sun and Moon). The Babylonians thought those heavenly bodies were only made after the Earth, and that goof was carried over onto Day 4 of the biblical Creation. Oops. White can’t be accused of overlooking this train wreck, either. He doubled down on it, in fact, filling most of several pages contrasting the “Genesis” sequence with what he believed was the faulty “Evolution” one. It’s quite a list. There were no sources to document any of the contentions, such as whether the sun and the stuff of the earth might have been are coalescing more or less simultaneously, or whether it was an “Evolution” claim at all that dry land had to predate the oceans, or what that meant on an early Earth where water might be condensing even as the crust was cooling. The first six entries weren’t about biological evolution, of course, but going by the known fossil appearance of the categories White brought up, we’ve taken the liberty of adding some bracketed ballpark dates on the earliest known fossil examples for them (Ga for billions of years ago; Ma for millions of years ago; Ka for thousands of years ago), and highlighting the most blatantly wrong assertions with a gray background, further noting the expressly cosmological and paleontological howlers in bold:  

Evolution

Genesis

Sun before earth

Earth before sun

[both ~4.5 Ga] Dry land before sea

Sea before dry land

[oceans by 3.8 Ga] Atmosphere [4.5 Ga]

Sea before atmosphere

before sea Sun before light on

Light on earth before

earth

sun

Stars before earth

Earth before stars

Earth at same time as

Earth before other

planets

planets

Sea creatures [650

Land plants before

Ma]

sea creatures

before land plants [400 Ma] Earthworms [500 Ma]

Starfish before

before starfish [480

earthworms

Ma] Land animals [420 Ma]

Trees before land

before trees [385 Ma]

animals

Death before man

Man before death

Thorns [400 Ma] and

Man before thorns

thistles before man

and thistles

[~300 Kya] TB pathogens &

Man before TB

cancer before man

pathogens and cancer

(dinosaurs had TB and cancer) Reptiles [340 Ma]

Birds before reptiles

before birds [150 Ma] Land animals [420 Ma]

Whales before land

before whales [55 Ma]

animals

Land mammals [160

Bats before land

Ma]

animals

before bats [55 Ma] Dinosaurs [240 Ma]

Birds before

before birds [150 Ma]

dinosaurs

Insects [400 Ma]

Flowering plants

before

before insects

flowering plants [160 Ma] Sun before plants

Plants before sun

Dinosaurs [240 Ma]

Dolphins before

before dolphins [13

dinosaurs

Ma] Land reptiles [340 Ma]

Pterosaurs before

before pterosaurs [165

land reptiles

Ma]

 

You may have spotted something of a pattern here, where all the “Evolution” contentions on White’s chart ring true by the dates, while we get a cloud of gray error over on the “Genesis” side. Clearly White was accusing virtually all working astrophysicists, geologists and paleontologists of having got a whole lot of the sequence of things wrong. What a pity White didn’t think to share with the class any of the science work he needed to support any of these most uncompromising assertions. We’ll be touching on more of that underling paleontology stuff in further chapters, but a few benchmark issues are relevant to note here to see how simplistic White’s approach was. Take that seventh line: how does one define “Sea creatures”? Did White even think about this? If he meant animals that live in the sea, well, that would certainly include sponges and the curious Precambrian Ediacara biota (more on them later), in which case the fossil biomarkers laid out by David Gold et al. in a 2016 paper “Sterol and genomic analyses validate the sponge biomarker hypothesis” justify the 650 million year date we pegged for them (and a whopping quarter of a billion years before the first plants you’d fairly call “trees” show up in the fossil record). And then there are the “Thorns and thistles” on line eleven. Why ever was White bringing those in? Ah, that’s because he’s letting a few Bible verses govern his worldview. Genesis 3:17-18 explicitly mandates that those “thorns and thistles” only came about as a consequence of Adam sinning in the Garden of Eden. As the King James Version (a translation still beloved by so many conservative creationists, including Kent Hovind) put it back in the 17th century:  

And unto Adam he said, Because though hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;  

Well, that definitely settles the origin of agriculture, doesn’t it?

No, actually it doesn’t. Not even close. But that White thought his audience needed to have that scriptural reinforcement affirmed directly in the Answers book said a lot more about the needs of creationist apologetics than it did about the developmental processes and evolutionary adaptive characteristics of thorns or thistles on plants. Creationists are forced by the “logic” of their theology to have defensive prickles originate as a result of sin and a divine curse, and this line continues to be pushed for that reason, as Joel Duff noted of Australian creationist John McKay appearing on Eric Hovind’s Creation Today show in June 2012. Just one month later, an AiG article by David Catchpoole showed how aware he was of the paleontological work that conflicted with the biblical need: a 2007 paper by M. L. Devore & K. P. Pigg that put rose thorns tens of millions ago, and also R. J. Rayner’s 1984 study of the ancient thorn-laden Devonian lycopod Drepanophycus spinaeformis (one of the earliest vascular land plants) living over three hundred million years prior still. And that was just the science Catchpoole tripped over. Things were even worse for the bigger field the creationist didn’t notice, such as Cheng-Sen Li & Dianne Edwards’ 1995 paper on new Drepanophycus fossils showing details of their development that exhibited “the kind of fertile organization that might be anticipated in the ancestors of lycopsids.” Helpful of the Creator (or coauthor JD’s Fossil Genie) to make sure the Flood sorted things out so consistently to fill in the evolutionary cue sheet yet again. And regarding that cue sheet, there is a huge literature documenting the evolution of flora and their transition throughout the Paleozoic. Effective summaries of plant origins and evolution would include Kathleen Pryer et al.’s book chapter on “The Radiation of Vascular Plants” in 2004, and Philippe Steemans et al. reporting the earliest vascular land plants in 2009. The scientists are continually refining their understanding, of course, such as Charles Wellman reviewing the latest views in 2010, and Harald Schneider & Eric Schuettpelz doing likewise in 2016. Jinzhuang Xue et al.’s 2015 paper on “Stepwise evolution of Paleozoic tracheophytes from South China” is representative of how researchers

approach regional evidence (focusing in that case on the adaptive drivers of leaf variation). The short form: small land plants of the Ordovician and Silurian gave rise to the first large plants in the Devonian, diversifying throughout the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic. It should come as no surprise that no researchers are explaining fossil plant distribution as the result of a global Flood, nor have creationists successfully pulled off that task over on their side. But let’s leave the thorny creationist Garden of Eden to jump clear across all time and space to see where White thought to go by bringing up the Big Bang. A bit of history first. The name “Big Bang” to describe the current scientific model White clearly can’t stand came about as an insult, from physicist Fred Hoyle (who didn’t like the idea at all, and thought to his dying day that matter was popping into existence in a “steady state” cosmos). Nothing in the “bang” was a kaboom-like a conventional explosion, though this is a common error made by a lot of creationists. Instead it was the expansion of spacetime itself (the conceptual baby of Albert Einstein), carrying energy and matter along with it, which turned into what we see now because of how the fundamental forces of the universe came into play as the universe expanded and cooled: first gravity, then the strong nuclear force that enabled atoms to hold together, and finally the electroweak force responsible for radioactive decay and electromagnetism. Since stellar means, in an astronomical context, of or relating to stars, it’s strange that White would call the beginning of the universe “stellar” when the first stars and galaxies could not appear at all until the fundamental forces sorted out. Only then could the first hydrogen atoms form from the sea of hadrons (protons, neutrons and the like) and leptons (electrons, neutrinos and such), whereupon the weak but relentless gravity could take over to kick start that fusion thing (twinkle little star). Study of this early phase of the universe has been a fast-moving field, reflected in Scientific American’s 2009 posting of Richard Larson & Volker Bromm’s 2001 review, at which time it was thought star formation preceded galaxies by many hundreds of millions of years. But advances in the technology soon allowed astronomers like Johan

Richard et al. in 2011 and David Sobral et al. in 2015 to peek at some of the earliest stars and galaxies which were arising together in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang. It’s useful to recall the timeframe they’re studying just for that phase represented literally tens of thousands of times what White allows for the whole shebang in Genesis. If this were a book about astronomy and cosmology, we would be inclined to pursue the extensive evidence in favor of the Big Bang model (including the Cosmic Background radiation that was explicitly predicted by Fred Hoyle as a necessary consequence of the Big Bang, and a deal breaker if it weren’t found—which meant when that very thing was discovered in the 1960s, there was a dinner of crow to be eaten at the “steady state” table). However, we can save a lot of time by just recommending the late Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, or Origins by Neil deGrasse Tyson & Donald Goldsmith. Strictly speaking, the Big Bang isn’t even about the origin of the universe, but only a description of what went on once astronomers realized that the expanding galaxies seen in the newer telescopes implied a starting point for it all, when all that matter and energy must have been scrunched together into a singularity. Singularities are weird. It’s the Alice in Wonderland world that goes on inside Black Holes (which turned out to be really common in the universe, even acting as the seeds for galaxy formation). As the physics rules break down at that level, cosmologists still wrangle over what precisely produced that singularity, formulating a number of hypotheses. However, regardless of how well-supported any of those turn out to be, they are completely and entirely irrelevant to whether or not biological evolution has occurred way later, on our little planet. Put it this way. The universe at 13.8 billion years old could have begun when God silently snapped his immaterial fingers, saying “Let there be hadrons,” but then what? The young Earth creationist model would still be invalid, 100% out of whack with the facts. But maybe being out of whack suits White, who went positively ballistic over the idea that the initial singularity meant in a sense that the universe had come from “nothing.” Physicist Lawrence Krauss even wrote a book of that name, A Universe from Nothing, but that involved a lot of very fundamental physics, including the “quantum

vacuum” and how subatomic particles actually do pop in and out of existence all the time.[15] Whether White likes it or not, the universe has some very peculiar physics underlying it, and it’s maybe not worth the effort for creationists to draw too many defense lines in the quantum sands. But rather than taking on the physics directly (White avoided sources completely) he attempted to rhetoric issue away by homing in on that quantum vacuum aspect and saying, “But that’s something, not nothing!” Yes, indeed, nothing has different meanings to different people. To the average person, a beverage bottle with no liquid in it could be described as being empty, having nothing inside. Colloquially, this is a satisfactory usage, even though we know that there are in fact things inside the bottle—such as probably residue beverage droplets, air, and maybe bacteria. In cosmology, nothing has a different meaning. To Lawrence Krauss for instance, nothing is the absence of space, time, and matter/energy, which he concludes from various lines of physicsrelated evidence could produce the singularity that began our universe. White is clearly not interested in discussing the context of nothing but instead just attempts to use the word as a facile “Gotcha!” Forgetting perhaps that Christian creation lore actually posits a God creating ex nihilo (“from nothing”), White then dragooned a parade of non-physics baggage for this truly bizarre tirade:  

For example, we are forced to accept that nothing (which has no mind, no morals, and no conscience) created reason and logic; understanding and comprehension; complex ethical codes and legal systems; a sense of right and wrong; art, music, drama, comedy, literature, and dance; and belief systems that include God. These are just a few of the philosophical implications of the big bang hypothesis.  

Really? This is one of those times where we are surprised we even have to spell out the blatant objections to this. White has blundered into a monumental category mistake, trying to connect things that are not in fact logically related. The Big Bang did not “create” any of these things!

Humans created reason and logic, and we can see the progression of both throughout the centuries from the pre-Socratics to today (not necessarily including Mr. White). Understanding and comprehension are things other animals can do too, so why is that evidence of any god, let alone the very specific version White follows? Complex ethical codes and legal systems are also created by humans and evolve with time. This is even apparent within the Bible tradition: the descendants of the postulated Adam and Eve constructed their own cities and laws rather than God just handing out the moral rules at the very beginning. Sure, God often did not like what the people produced, but that is irrelevant to the fact that they created their own rules before Moses came along with slabs full of commandments. Senses of right and wrong often vary by culture, but generally, that which promotes life is considered moral; that which hinders life is immoral. That’s going to occur whether or not the material universe originated by quantum fluctuation or a divine zot. Lastly, obviously the Big Bang did not create art, music, drama, comedy, literature, and dance. Nor was it responsible for Double Entry bookkeeping, Australian rules football, or Chinese chess. Does White think so little of human ingenuity that he believes we could never create any of these on our own? Regardless, we can see the evolution of each of these things in human history. What Jerry Seinfeld might consider comedic is probably different from what ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes (4th century BCE) considered comedic. But neither would have required acceptance or rejection of the Big Bang to go for their Big Laugh. Now, why is White so concerned with the philosophic implications of the Big Bang? Sure, philosophy is important, but the Big Bang is a scientific model; it must be addressed with scientific evidence—how the speed of light registers the age of the universe, and the expansion of the universe is documented in the spectral redshift of those receding celestial bodies—and explain why that means something else. Only one other author in The New Answers Book 1 sought to sort of deal with this evidence, Jason Lisle. Creationist cosmology will get a thorough going-over in Volume 2, but it’s a bit of a spoiler alert to note that, while his reprinted 2007 piece briefly mentioned the Cosmic

Background radiation, somehow he forgot to include how that phenomenon (the universal occurrence of a radiation wavelength explicitly predicted as the required hot pulse of the Big Bang cooling down over umpteen billion years) was a famous corroboration of the Big Bang model. Hide that evidence ball. White’s racing off to philosophy in a chapter crying out for at least some supportive technical documentation was all too clearly a sign that the one thing the creationists did not have on their side here was the science evidence.  

Origins or Bust  

White embarked his next hobbyhorse, the “chemical evolution” category:  

It is commonly believed (because it is taught in our schools and colleges) that laboratory experiments have proved conclusively that living organisms evolved from nonliving chemicals. Many people believe that life has been created in the laboratory by scientists who study chemical evolution.  

To no one’s surprise, White cites no sources for this claim. Who is teaching that laboratory experiments have proved conclusively this newsworthy thing? As someone who has taken a number of biology classes and knows a number of biology professors (as well as biochemists), coauthor JW has never heard any professor ever claim lab experiments have proved conclusively that living organisms evolved from nonliving chemicals. Nor are there technical papers claiming such a thing. Instead, each experiment regarding the origin of life (abiogenesis) has solely tested proposed hypotheses about organic molecules under certain conditions. The aim has always been to understand more about the possible role of natural processes in the origin of life (certainly a worthy and interesting scientific pursuit), working out the parameters with the eye of sparking further informative research. No one currently working in the abiogenesis field ever set out to create life in the lab from the organic molecules they were investigating. The idea that anyone has done or claimed otherwise is purely a creationist invention.

If you think about it, generating life from scratch would be a laborious task even if it were as natural as all get-out. The process might extend over a continent-sized spatial domain. It could involve geothermal processes taking place under high pressure and temperature. Or require electric sparks from lightning might need to be mixed in very specific ways. Input from impacting asteroids bringing organic materials would need considering—which we know they do naturally, such as Yoshihiro Furukawa et al. reporting on “Extraterrestrial ribose and other sugars in primitive meteorites” in 2019, further expanding what is known about the range of meteorites as “carriers of prebiotic organic molecules to the early Earth,” including “the possibility that extraterrestrial sugars contributed to forming functional biopolymers like RNA on the early Earth or other primitive worlds.” Even while we’re understanding more about the ingredients list every year, try stirring a primeval soup pot over a hundred thousand years—or worse yet, a few million years—and you can see how pulling together all the pieces might not be a snap for any team of researchers. To put this in perspective, it took four hundred years for mathematicians to crack Fermat’s Last Theorem (regarding prime numbers). All that required was pen and paper, and a brilliant mind. 400 years of them. Move over to the natural world, and any physical process can entail variables that practically complicate the task.  It’s hard to imagine a much simpler thing than a lightning bolt, and yet to this day it’s still not fully clear how the electric discharge actually occurs in a thundercloud (where segregating huge charge differences have to take place somehow in a surging mass of water molecules and dust contaminates). The origin of life is much more complicated than that, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that the work there remains ongoing. But even should scientists successfully pull off abiogenesis, anti-evolutionists would still have an out to dismiss the work: goalpost shifting, where they draw attention to how such effort would inevitably involve scientists gathering together the components in their labs, and hence must really be just evidence of Intelligent Design! Heads creationism wins, tails evolution loses.

The classic starter kit experiment in the abiogenesis field took place back in the 1950s when Stanley Miller (1930-2007) and Harold Urey (1893-1981) set out to see if simple electric discharges in a possible primordial atmosphere could produce amino acids, the building blocks of proteins and hence life as we know it. Turned out it could. Like all anti-evolutionists, Monty White can’t let the Miller-Urey experiment stand. Never mind that no one claimed this proved how life began, only that it supplied some interesting clues on how prebiological systems could work. White’s version was: “Because amino acids are the building blocks of proteins and proteins are considered to be the building blocks of living systems, Miller’s experiment was hailed as proof that life had evolved by chance on the earth millions of years ago.” See? White is claiming that the experiment was about creating life, not testing a single hypothetical set of the early Earth’s chemicals. The Miller-Urey experiment was formulated during a time when researchers thought the Earth’s early atmosphere was almost entirely reducing (atoms gaining electrons), composed of methane and ammonia (much like that now known to occur on Saturn’s moon Titan) along with water. Since the 1950s, though, it’s become clear that our early atmosphere was more dominated by nitrogen (still the Earth’s major atmospheric constituent) and carbon dioxide (whose levels can affect surface temperature a lot, as we’re seeing today). A 2012 paper by Dustin Trail et al. directly measured oxidized cerium in zircon crystals confirming how the early atmosphere was at least partially oxidizing (atoms losing electrons). But knowing all the players mattered, such as iron, which James Cleaves et al. determined in a 2008 paper counteracted the stray presence of limited oxygen, allowing amino acids to be produced much as in the original MillerUrey experiment. In 2010 Cleaves reviewed how “A variety of amino acids are easily produced under conditions which were believed to have existed on the primitive Earth or in the early solar nebula,” and 2014 work by Cleaves’ researchers further verified how amino acids could appear under the colder Titan-style conditions too. A 2017 paper by Martin Ferus et al. explored the role formaldehyde might have played in an early atmosphere as an intermediate promoting the formation of the

critical RNA nucleobases, adenine, cytosine, guanine, and uracil (thymine is used in DNA instead, see Appendix 3 for more). Improvements in analytical tools over this period also helped in evaluating the prebiotic stuff that could be generated experimentally, clarifying even some of the old work. Miller and Urey had updated their gas mix in 1958 to include hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide (especially relevant if volcanic emissions were playing a part, including in hydrothermal vents), but the gear at the time hadn’t allowed them to detect all that their experiments were producing. So, they tucked the vials away and forgot about them. That is, until 2008 when Adam Johnson et al. and Eric Parker et al. in 2011 took renewed looks at the seeming gunk in Miller’s old samples with their contemporary equipment, revealing that Miller & Urey had been able to produce even more relevant amino acids than had previously been thought. Incidentally, the Intelligent Design bunch at the Discovery Institute in Seattle dismissed the significance of Parker’s restudy in a 2014 Evolution News posting. Grumpy, grumpy. Despite all this work demonstrating prebiotic amino acid formation in a range of atmospheric conditions, whether there was much oxygen in Earth’s primordial atmosphere has become the obsession of antievolutionists (any oxygen and supposedly there’s no abiogenesis, according to the mantra). And White is no different. “There is no proof that the earth ever had an atmosphere composed of the gases used by Miller in his experiment,” he proclaimed, and plowed ahead with his second main point (our bold):  

The next problem is that in Miller’s experiment he was careful to make sure there was no oxygen present. If oxygen was present, then the amino acids would not form. However, if oxygen was absent from the earth, then there would be no ozone layer, and if there was no ozone layer the ultraviolet radiation would penetrate the atmosphere and would destroy the amino acids as soon as they were formed. So the dilemma facing the evolutionist can be summed up this way: amino acids would not form in an atmosphere with oxygen and amino acids would be destroyed in an atmosphere without oxygen.  

Right off the bat White was slipping in a common but arguable assumption: what makes him think life (if it did originate naturally) had

to be doing so only on the surface, where it was exposed to the atmosphere and UV radiation? If prebiotic processes were doing their thing in many places, including in the oceans, below the surface (and so well away from the destructive glare of ultraviolet light), it would be relevant only how much oxygen was present in the seas of that time, not the concentration in the atmosphere. This anti-evolutionary presumption about ancient free oxygen that ignored the when and where and how much of it has been a persistent refrain in the “Origins or Bust” hymnal. Because White bypassed offering sources, we can’t tell exactly how White was getting into his muddle. But coauthor JW did spot how curiously similar his argument was to one offered in 2004 by creationist Jerry Bergman, “Why the Miller–Urey Research Argues Against Abiogenesis.” Whether or not this was White’s source, it opens a window into the more “technical” side of creationist Origins or Bust argumentation. Bergman says,  

The researchers used an oxygen-free environment mainly because the earth’s putative primitive atmosphere was then “widely believed not to have contained in its early stage significant amounts of oxygen”. They believed this because “laboratory experiments show that chemical evolution, as accounted for by present models, would be largely inhibited by oxygen”.  

Bergman cited a 1977 edition of Sidney Fox & Klaus Dose’s 1972 Molecular Evolution and the Origin of Life. Aside from the fact that Bergman thought to invoke a work almost thirty years old by the time he wrote his article, it is even more curious he chose a book lauded for laying out explicit steps for abiogenesis. Let’s dive in a bit on Fox & Dose’s book. It was (ironically) reviewed in Science magazine by molecular biologist (and soon to be creationist, see the Info Box  ) Dean H. Kenyon in 1973: The book is better characterized as a detailed presentation of the thermal, or proteinoid, theory of origins embellished with only fragmentary excursions into other points of view. However, the authors’ enthusiasm for the thermal theory is clearly based on the impressive body of experimental evidence reviewed in chapters 4 through 6. In fact, the chief merit of the book is that it presents in one continuous argument an array of carefully conducted, reproducible experiments

spanning nearly the whole range of presumed prebiological events up to the appearance of microscopic structures.

  ___________________________________________________________________

Dean Kenyon According to Henry Morris & Gary Parker’s 1987 creationism book, Kenyon became a convert after reading John Whitcomb and Morris’ The Genesis Flood in the 1970s, and in his glowing introduction to What Is Creation Science? Kenyon lauded Morris and Parker for their “superb ability to avoid undisciplined speculation and to keep their reasoning in close conformity with the actual facts of nature.” Those views put rather a stout cap on just how “scientific” Kenyon’s reasons could have been on any subject, given the glaring geological and biological absurdities of both those works. Henry & John Morris’ 1996 book stated more obliquely that Kenyon “had become a creationist, partially through reading creationist books.” Kenyon participated in the court cases MacLean v. Arkansas and Edward v. Aguillard to defend “creation science.” He almost testified at that latter Arkansas case, but according to Fred Edwords’ 1982 article on the trial, was apparently dissuaded by their legal advisor Wendell Bird (though Kenyon did submit a supporting affidavit, available online). That Bird connection was the probable root for Kenyon’s equally enthusiastic preface to Bird’s two volume creationism book, where he described that wandering splurge of tendentious authority quoting as both “clearly organized” and “of great merit.” During this period, creationism was deemed unconstitutional to teach in public schools, and a Louisiana law mandating that creationism and evolution be given equal class time was struck down as unconstitutional. But Kenyon went on to coauthor with Percival Davis several editions of what aimed to be an important creationist textbook, Of Pandas and People, which underwent tactical revision as the content had to be reworded (not fundamentally changed, though) to work around those legal dismissals of “creation science.”

Thus retooled, Pandas achieved its greatest notoriety when it figured as a benchmark of pseudoscience in the Kitzmiller (Dover, Pennsylvania) Intelligent Design case in 2004. There are many accounts of that adjudication, including Matthew Chapman’s 2007 book, and coauthor JD’s 2017 summary for his TIP project (TIP 1.7). In the decades since, Kenyon has downplayed the “young earth” side of his position, and is regarded still as an ally of the Intelligent Design movement. But what exactly is that “thermal theory” of origins? Interestingly, neither Bergman in his article nor White in the Answers book mentioned that option. Sidney Fox summarized it in his 1995 article “Thermal synthesis of amino acids and the origin of life”:  

Thermal energy, being ubiquitous in the Earth, emerges as the sole necessary form of energy. To appreciate the overview of the natural evolutionary sequence it is necessary to recognize stepwiseness in evolution, a principle that has however been often ignored. Since self organization of thermal protein to cells is instantaneous, but only one step in a geochemical ladder, individual steps may be regarded as instantaneous, while the sequence requires measurable time.  

Sidney Fox’s insight that the temperature of reactions is as relevant as the chemical starting mixture has been recognized for some time, from Cristobal Viedma’s 2000 paper, “Formation of Peptide Bonds from Metastable versus Crystalline Phase: Implications for the Origin of Life” to James Cleaves’ “The Origin of the biologically coded amino acids” in 2010. In 2013 Christof Mast et al. reported how that “thermal gradient” got around what had seemed a prior stumbling block in generating autocatalytic RNA ribozymes of suitable length (200 bases or more). And in 2016 David Horning & Gerald Joyce reported “Amplification of RNA by an RNA polymerase ribozyme” capable of producing “a variety of complex structured RNAs, including aptamers, ribozymes, and, in low yield, even tRNA.” White only discussed the dated Miller-Urey experiment, while Bergman similarly conspicuously avoided the various other experiments and collected data that has accrued over the years, including the role of alkaline in a volcanic crucible. This hypothesis suggests abiogenesis may have been favored around more alkaline

hydrothermal vents instead of the smudgy black smokers that had been proposed in the past. This has received much support in recent years, as documented by biochemist Nick Lane’s 2016 book The Vital Question. So, to recap, the citation for Bergman’s claim that oxygen is harmful to abiogenesis comes from a book that supports abiogenesis and proposes a potential pathway for the process to occur. Oh, the pitfalls of secondary source addiction. Now, let us return to White’s quote and the alleged oxygen dilemma. There is a blatant problem with what he says: oxygen was clearly a part of the experiment, since oxygen is a constituent of water. And, need we remind you, the amino acids—including glycine, α-alanine, and ß-alanine—were not hydrolyzed (altered by reacting with the oxygen atoms in the water) in the experiment, which is why they were recovered at the end. Moreover, when life was forming between 4 and 3.8 billion years ago, there was no ozone layer. Indeed, while oxygen molecules can form naturally in the absence of life, because they react so readily with other elements, their incidence is sufficiently rare and specialized that those searching for potential life on other planets take note of that in their studies, such as Shawn Domagal-Goldman et al.’s 2014 “Abiotic ozone and oxygen in atmospheres similar to prebiotic earth.” Of related interest, Paul Rimmer et al. calculated “The origin of RNA precursors on exoplanets” in 2018 based on the abiotic products known to be produced by UV light (the very wavelength ozone layers tend to filter out). Now we understand that the last thing creationists like White can get straight in their Map of Time is the chronology of things, but that doesn’t mean we should overlook the facts of the matter on his behalf. Atmospheric ozone did not form until about 2 billion years ago— sometime after the photosynthetic cyanobacteria began pumping oxygen into the atmosphere. Modern hypotheses of abiogenesis propose that process occurred deep in the ocean, such as around the aforementioned alkaline vents, far below the sunlight zone and exposure to whatever free oxygen there may have been up there. Thus, White’s second point is debunked on all fronts.

His third point is arguably the most technical one that creationists home in on (our bold):  

The next problem concerns the so-called handedness of the amino acids. Because of the way that carbon atoms join up with other atoms, amino acids exist in two forms—the right-handed form and the left-handed form. Just as your right hand and left hand are identical in all respects except for their handedness, so the two forms of amino acids are identical except to their handedness. In all living systems only left-handed amino acids are found. Yet Miller’s experiment produced a mixture of right-handed and left-handed amino acids in identical proportions. As only the left-handed ones are used in living systems, this mixture is useless for the evolution of living systems.  

Sounds oh so conclusive, doesn’t it? But this too has concealed problems. First, some context. Yes, amino acids are found in mirror images of each other in nature called enantiomers. This is true for numerous other compounds, including sugars (which come in a “right-handed” form, just as amino acids favor “left-handed” ones). But the detailed chemistry of this is quite interesting, with summaries like Anne Helmenstine’s 2017 online one showing just how much that left-right thing can vary. The “right-handed” ones are called D-amino acids, such as Dserine, where D stands for dexter (Latin for right); “left-handed” ones are called L-amino acids where L stands for laevus (Latin for left). In eukaryotes, amino acids are almost solely “left-handed” ... except for glycine, where having fewer hydrogen atoms at the main carbon junction exempts it from slipping into the chiral forms of the other amino acids. In bacteria, however, the supposedly forbidden “righthanded” amino acids are very important for structure and metabolism, D-glutamic acid and D-alanine forming part of the cell walls in some bacteria. So, already White’s claim is starting to look shaky, but there is more to dig into. Remember how we thought it possible White might have cribbed from Bergman’s article? Well, Bergman openly admitted that “righthanded” amino acids are found in nature, relying in turn on fellow creationist Jonathan Sarfati: “What Sarfati calls a ‘major hurdle’ is the

origin of homochirality, the fact that all amino acid biomolecules with rare exceptions (such as some used in bacterial cell walls) are all lefthanded; and with rare exceptions, all sugars, including those in nucleic acids, are right-handed.” So, either White had to literally step over relevant information noted even in their own creationist apologetics, or White was too unfamiliar with the primary science literature on his own to recognize he was repeating a faulty claim. Since he does not cite a source, of course, we will never know. Next, this problem of chirality White is referring to is also (unsurprisingly) spoken about by Bergman and should more accurately be called the origin of homochirality, which means having high quantities of amino acids of the same handedness. Again, White does not support his claim with a citation, so we must turn to Bergman’s article to get an idea of what science information the creationists were taking into account (or not). Bergman referenced a smattering of period science sources, including a 1949 work by John Bernal (that Bergman misdated to 1947), a 1951 paper by Warren Garrison et al. (that he misattributed to only the end coauthor Melvin Calvin), and closer to the topic, the 1953 and 1955 papers by Stanley Miller. But Bergman also couldn’t resist a lot of creationist props, including a 1971 piece by James Coppedge (father of fellow creationist David Coppedge), a 1985 one by Siegfried Scherer (at that time still publishing in a regular science journal), several of Jonathan Sarfati’s efforts (more on those shortly), along with a sampling of Intelligent Design pundits (Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box, and Jonathan Wells’ Icons of Evolution). If you’re getting a pattern of rampant and often dated familiar secondary citation, that’s because there is one. Since Bergman cited just as a toss-off that “Calvin” (sorry, Garrison) paper from 1951, its odd the creationist failed to do any follow-up on that, which related to how organic materials (formaldehyde, formic acid and such) could be generated as radiation acted on carbon dioxide. Remember, by the early 21st century it had been recognized there was more CO2 in the atmosphere than thought

back in Eisenhower’s day when Miller & Urey were assembling their experiments. Nikola Getoff et al. picked up on the Garrison example in 1960 to study more of the organics generated in such tests, and in 1973 Antonio Sandoval & Vaneica Young focused specifically on the abiotic production of formic acid and its reducing agent characteristics. It may not come as a surprise that the presence of reactive iron positively amplified the chemistry, studied by Norijoko Fujita & Chihiro Matsuura in 1994. Fast forward a couple of decades (past Bergman’s 2004 article to around the time AiG was trotting out their retread of the Answers book), Becker et al. in 2016 were showing how the organics involved generated the vital nucleobases adenine and guanine easily and in high yield, while the same year the new Answers edition came out, Danna Qasim et al. had explored how water, methanol and formic acid could get similarly busy out in a meteoric context. But why do follow-up or (horrors!) engage in direct lab experiment on this matter, when there are so many authority quotes to be sprinkled. One such non-creationist source Bergman cited was a 1999 article by Massimo Pigliucci titled “Where Do We Come From? A Humbling Look at the Biology of Life’s Origin.” Pigliucci only mentioned homochirality regarding where those amino acids might have originated: on Earth or in space. Pigliucci was unconvinced space entered the picture, saying that the handedness formed too randomly there, not enough in either chirality for life. He never suggested homochirality was a fundamental roadblock for abiogenesis. Of course, it isn’t 1999 anymore, and the evidence has accumulated since then that much chiral preference had occurred out in meteorites and asteroids (as we’ll be seeing shortly). The other two articles Bergman cited came from fellow YECer Jonathan Sarfati: “Origin of life: the chirality problem” from 1998, and “Origin of life and the homochirality problem: is magnetochiral dichroism the solution?” from 2000. Let us look at the phylogeny of this homochirality daisy chain: A. J. Monty White got it from someone like Jerry Bergman, who definitely got it from Jonathan Sarfati. And Sarfati was the only one seriously reading technical material, and not a lot of it at that. Such is creationist “scholarship.”

Both the Sarfati pieces made essentially the same conclusion jump: homochirality must have occurred in the distant past, according to evolutionists, but those materialist researchers have no idea how; therefore, abiogenesis is precluded. As it happens though, there were a variety of natural explanations for the origin of homochirality available for discussion at the time Bergman was announcing the field was empty, such as Robert Hazen et al.’s 2001 paper “Selective adsorption of l- and d-amino acids on calcite: Implications for biochemical homochirality” and Hazen & David Sholl’s 2003 perspective “Chiral selection on inorganic crystalline surfaces.” These papers indicate that crystals, such as calcite, can absorb, polymerize, and even organize homochiral amino acids, pointing the way to at least one natural solution to the origin of homochirality. Even if he never cited any of the works noted above, we know Sarfati was not completely oblivious to science work which undermined the creationist position on homochirality because of a 2010 online update he did of his 2004 article, where he dismissed a 2006 paper by Ronald Breslow & Mindy Levine that showed how evaporation of a phenylalanine solution with only 1% enantiomeric excess concentrated that until it was 90%. Unable to dispute that their experiment had done that, Sarfati invoked the moving Origins or Bust goalpost to declare the experiment represented “unrealistic conditions for prebiotic synthesis.” And how did Sarfati determine those conditions to be so “unrealistic”? Not by citing any corroborating technical literature. Just to be finicky, phenylalanine clearly showed up in a range prebiotic experiments (among a bunch where other biologically relevant amino acids were the main products: alanine, asparagine, glutamine, glycine and serine), reviewed by Liying Jiang et al. in 2014. As it happens, Breslow had cited a follow-up analysis they had just done (lead author Martin Klussmann et al.) identifying multiple pathways to such concentrations, but Sarfati didn’t mention that work. And there’s been more work from Breslow, of course (some which we’ve included in our reference citations in case you want to see more of what the creationists weren’t noticing). Sarfati did note a paper by Klussmann’s team from the following year (2007) on the part played by crystals, where their presence could

generate over 98% chiral distributions, but again he dismissed the results: “this is at a cost of lowering solubility of the racemate crystals, meaning that still less solution would be available,” and cited for this claim a 2010 review paper by Donna Blackmond. Unfortunately for Sarfati’s point, that wasn’t what Blackmond had said. To the contrary, it was because of the ability of chiral crystals to lower solubility of a specifically racemic crystal (one that already included both chiral forms, stacked together in a left or right configuration) that the effect of weeding out one or the other enantiomer worked: “If the incorporated molecule reduces the solubility of the racemic crystal relative to that of the enantiopure crystal, enhanced composition will result.” And remember Klussmann’s team weren’t speculating here, they had shown it experimentally. But let’s be charitable and suppose Sarfati merely misunderstood both Klussmann and Blackmond. Having so gingerly avoided noticing so many of their data point trees, Sarfati naturally failed to see the forest too, not quoting this rather plain summary near the end of the 2007 Klussmann paper (our bold):  

Cycles of rain and evaporation establishing solid—solution equilibrium in pools containing amino acids and appropriate hydrogen-bonding partner molecules could yield enantiopure solutions from a small initial imbalance of amino acid enantiomers. This initial asymmetry could have been delivered to the young earth, as amino acids with an [enantiomeric excess] of up to 15% have been found in carbonaceous chondrite meteorites.  

Klussmann cited for this observation a 2006 paper by Sandra Pizzarello, also not included in Sarfati’s creationist gloss. In fact, although Pizzarello and her colleagues had contributed a considerable technical literature showing how common prebiotic organics (including chiral ones) occurred in meteorites, strangely enough, that body of work has been all but ignored in the anti-evolution apologetic field (readers may check out those citations too, included in our references). The real question is why did White not consult any of these available articles beforehand? We can offer an all too plausible hypothesis: it is that White does not read technical literature. He relies

solely on the works of others who have already filtered the information for him. With nothing left of White’s third point on homochirality, White’s fourth dives off the deep end of an empty design pool:  

Another major problem for the chemical evolutionist is the origin of the information that is found in living systems. There are various claims about the amount of information that is found in the human genome, but it can be conservatively estimated as being equivalent to a few thousand books, each several hundred pages long. Where did this information come from? Chance does not generate information. This observation caused the late Professor Sir Fred Hoyle and his colleague, Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe of Cardiff University, to conclude that the evolutionist is asking us to believe that a tornado can pass through a junk yard and assemble a jumbo jet.  

What a perverse pleasure it is for White to have saved his worst point for last. First off, no one—and we mean no one—other than antievolutionists imagines evolution or abiogenesis operating like a tornado passing through a junk yard and spinning together “by chance” something as complicated as a jumbo jet (or Boeing 747 as we often hear). The main reason for this being that people who accept evolution understand that the process is not just random chance. Sure, the mutations that facilitate evolution come about randomly (in fact, its evidence for there not being some meddling Designer operating in the wings), and some spread of them can be random too, such as allele selection. But non-random selective mechanisms are involved, most obviously that natural selection thing Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) are so famous for putting into the picture. The tornado analogy was used by Hoyle to describe Earth-based abiogenesis, which he rejected. Hoyle strongly believed that the origin of life on Earth was caused by panspermia where life from some other place eventually came to Earth via meteorite. This made him the opposite of what the creationists needed: someone who denied abiogenesis in any form. Not that panspermia resolved the matter. This idea merely pushes origins back to some other place, of course. Why would cells coming together in outer space be any better than ones doing so on Earth?

And let’s not forget how Hoyle dug his heels in on the Big Bang (long after the astrophysical data had turned against his Stead State model), and he even believed such wacky things as the 1918 flu epidemic came from comets, and Archaeopteryx being a hoax (the Info Box back in Chapter 2). So maybe it’s not all that good an idea to call Hoyle as a witness in the first place. But lurking behind White’s misfired attempt to use Fred Hoyle as an unassailable authority figure, we mustn’t forget to ask: whatever does White think he means by “information”? Are nucleotides information? Are protein-coding genes information? Are endogenous retroviruses information? Pseudogenes? Transposons? We saw earlier how mutations and genetic mechanisms can give rise to new structures and functions; if that doesn’t represent “new” information, what would? This is a conceptual problem afflicting more than just the brain of creationist White. It’s endemic in creationism generally, such as bottom-feeding Kent Hovind (as coauthor JW discovered in a 2017 video chat with him), and Mike Riddle repeated all the “information” tropes in a 2008 AiG post (which commenced with a decidedly nonscientific reminder that “The battle of the ages began when Satan deceived himself into thinking he could overthrow the sovereign rule of God”), and again in a 2013 Answers book chapter that cited no works at all from the 21st century (and none of them technical science works either, just general articles and books). The muddle continues all the way over into Intelligent Design Land, where their top pundits William Dembski (Design Inference and No Free Lunch books, and collaborative articles) and Stephen Meyer (in his 2003 paper on “DNA and the Origin of Life” and later Signature in the Cell book and posts) are just as enamored of this seductive “information” trope. It’s also the underpinning for anti-evolutionist disapproval of the existence of nonfunctional “Junk DNA”, including the ubiquitous pseudogenes we’re encountering throughout our study of creationist genetic claims. Just how much of our DNA actually does something came to a head in 2012 with the grand cause célebre of the ENCODE project that intimated that most of our human DNA was functional. But geneticists like Dan Graur were justifiably skeptical about this because

the ENCODE team were not detecting actual metabolic function but only the degree to which RNA translations were being generated. The idea that stretches of DNA might be doing nothing at all flies in the face of a design mantra that cannot differentiate between “information” and function. In this respect the Intelligent Design of Jonathan Wells’ 2011 book dissing junk DNA differs in no fundamental sense (dogmatically or methodologically) from the Young Earth creationism of Jeffrey Tomkins in 2012, dismissing pseudogenes in 2013, or Nathaniel Jeanson that year rejecting junk DNA in Acts & Facts articles. That’s why they’ve been no more willing to define “information” (or more importantly, apply it to actual genetic sequences) than White or Riddle or Hovind were. The magnitude of Riddle’s conceptual blind spot may be seen when he rhetorically asked “It is estimated that the human body is made up of 60 trillion cells (60,000,000,000,000). How long would it take to just assemble this many cells, one at a time and in no particular order.” Only the creationist imagines the process would have to be “in no particular order,” and we need only remind Riddle that his own body did exactly that assembly cell by cell in under ninth months, starting from only a single cell. Tease that process apart into its components (as the working scientists Riddle paid no attention to have been doing), and you have a guidepost to what went on over several billion years before replicating hominids entered the picture. Here’s the problem. Do this thought experiment: just imagine in your head a long string of DNA nucleotides (ACGTs) in any order you wish. Anywhere from a million base pairs (the size of the mycoplasma bacterial genome, among the smallest known) out to a few billion (common in animals from insects to mammals like us) or, if you’re adventurous, all the way to a hundred billion (as with some of those chromosome duplication happy plants and protozoans). As far as we can see from any anti-evolutionist work (including Bill Dembski’s “Complex Specified Information” CSI idea) none of them could be able to identify just from the sequence alone whether that string represented an actual functioning organism or not. Now imagine two such strings, each definitely from living organisms, ones really closely related (maybe ones that even creationists would accept as coming from the same “kind”). Could any

of the anti-evolutionists be able to identify which (if either) reflected any proposed created original, or whether they were descended by natural means from some such? As far as we can tell, no antievolutionist ever stops to think about this either and, hence fails to apply their own notions to the real world. One last one. There are over a million Alu primate retrotransposons knocking around in our human genome (about 10% of us is just that), and because they have a promiscuous “copy me” signal, the number keeps growing (roughly one every 200 births). There’s a nice review of the matter by Andrew Bennett et al. in 2008, and a 2020 paper by Alfredo Hernandez et al. described the selfcleaving ribozyme properties of it and its B2 rodent cousin (350,000 copies known in mice). Anyway, the defender of designed “information” needs to take a stand on whether the mutating Alus represent merely the same “information” or something else, especially those that have taken on functions (including causing diseases) because of stray mutations that put a “read me” signal on the table. Every one of them exists, and the issue is whether any were deliberately designed or intended to be in our genome. If the Designer “information” model has any utility at all, it ought to be able to give an answer on that at least. So far, we’ve heard only cricket sounds from the anti-evolution camp (Icons of Evolution and Contested Bones declined to specify the designed ones). As for White’s argument, what did we glean from his discussion of “chemical evolution”? Only that White pushes a set of almost totally wrong talking points and has really no interest in evaluating any data on abiogenesis. But, on a fundamental level, his claims regarding abiogenesis (even were they correct) have no bearing on evolution, like his arguments regarding “stellar evolution”. Being familiar with all the Origins or Bust mantras will prepare you for a lot of what goes on in grassroots anti-evolution apologetics. Confident lecturers who dwell on them are a dime a dozen, from the omnipresent Kent Hovind to minor figures like Canadian creationist Laurence Tisdall, and both coauthors have had the anti-abiogensis arguments of chemist James Tour (circulating on the religious edges of the Intelligent Design camp) thrust at us on social media.

We’ve listed Tour’s relevant postings in our references (including ones regarding his religious philosophy), along with the extensive work of one of his recent targets of criticism, John Sutherland, including that with his many colleagues (Carole Anastasi, Frank Bowler, Amit Choudhary, David Lilley, Robert Pascal, Bhavesh Patel, Matthew Powner, Paul Rimmer, Dougal Ritson, and Jianfeng Xu). The “information” mantra in particular will be a recurring one in later chapters (especially Chapter 6), but at the moment we have another of White’s evolution types to address.  

There’s No Place Like Homology  

Clearly unaware of how badly he has struck out, White moves onto his third “type” of evolution: biological evolution. He starts with this:  

Comparative anatomy is the name given to the science that deals with the structure of animals. Comparing the anatomy of one kind of animal with another is supposed to prove descent from a common ancestor. This is often put forward as strong evidence for evolution. However, the science of comparative anatomy can just as easily be used as evidence of creation, as we shall see.  

Coauthor JW has another nit-pick: comparative anatomy is not meant to prove evolution; the subject provides evidence in favor of evolution. As was mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, scientific concepts are not proved, like math or philosophy, but evidentially indicated. And sure, one can “explain” comparative anatomy as evidence for a single creator—but then why not multiple similarly thinking ones? Wouldn’t that be just as permissible? The question is not whether one can invent ad hoc rationalizations of the evidence; rather, the question is can either side account for all the available data, and make predictions relevant to their models based on that comparative anatomy? Remember from “At the Starting Gate” that the ability to make verifiable predictions is the hallmark of a good theory. We shall see if White puts his beliefs to the test this time at least. White’s next two paragraphs introduced the concept of homology, which is a term applied when different organisms have the

same structure, i.e. the limb bone configuration in tetrapods, even if that structure eventually is used for different purposes. On the other hand, analogous structures are ones used for the same purpose but made from different components. For example, the wings of insects and birds are analogous; both are used for flying but made from different structures. Bird wings are made from feathers covering a bony arm, while insect wings are boneless foldings of the ectoderm (outer layer of skin). Homologies ultimately relate to very fine details, running the gamut of an organism’s biology (see Gerhard Haszprunar’s 1992 review, “The types of homology and their significance for evolutionary biology and phylogenetics”). But some of them are really obvious. With the exception of the limbless tetrapods (duh) all tetrapods (animals having either four limbs or being descended from ones that did) have the same limb bone configuration: humerus, ulna, and radius in the arms and femur, tibia, and fibula in the legs (terrestrial tetrapods added a wrist, hand, and fingers). This is true of amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, and even some fish (such as Eusthenopteron and Panderichthys). This configuration allows biologists to make predictions about the anatomical structure of various animals, one such being Tiktaalik we bumped into in Chapter 1. Danish paleontologist Gerhard Heilmann (1859-1946) predicted in his 1926 book The Origin of Birds that if birds did in fact evolve from dinosaurs, then theropod dinosaurs, which he had already noted were the most similar structurally to modern birds, should possess a furcula (the wishbone). Just ten years later, the first theropod dinosaur with a furcula was discovered: Segisaurus. This was a small coelophysoid from the early Jurassic of Arizona and was just one of a number of theropods later found to possess a furcula. Work since, including papers by Daniel Chure & James Madsen in 1996, Ronald Tykoski et al. in 2002, and Christine Lipkin et al. in 2007, have broadened the range of theropods with furculas to include dromaeosaurids (Bambiraptor), oviraptorids (Oviraptor), tyrannosaurids (Tyrannosaurus), troodontids (Mei), other coelophysoids (Syntarsus), spinosaurids (Suchomimus), and even in the more distantly related allosaurids (Allosaurus)—an irony there, as Jonathan Kane noted in 2016:

 

If you look closely at the base of its neck, you can see a wishbone in Ebenezer the Allosaurus at the Creation Museum. This is especially significant because as recently as 2012, The Institute for Creation Research [citing Sherwin & Thomas 2012] has used the alleged lack of furculae and clavicles in theropods as an argument that they could not have been ancestors of birds. Visitors to the Creation Museum should appreciate that Answers in Genesis has assembled their Allosaurus skeleton in a way that is anatomically accurate, even though this shows that another creationist organization’s claim about theropods is false.  

The link between dinosaurs and birds goes much deeper, though, all the way to experimental paleogenomic verification. Work over several years by Bhart-Anjan Bhullar and colleagues literally retroengineered the dinosaurian snout lurking within the developmental structure of the beak, directly applying evolutionary principles to the biology, and verifying it experimentally, leaving in the dust creationists like Daniel Anderson, who in 2006 somehow thought evolutionists thought bird beaks “were modifications of scales around a reptile’s mouth.” He neglected to offer source citations on that one. Consider then how creationists reacted to that Bhullar work. In 2015 Answers in Genesis’ commentator Elizabeth Mitchell valiantly tried to dismiss Bhullar’s explicit transformation of the avian skull form (without, of course, noting how they had specifically and correctly predicted what the transition would have looked like). Having dumped on the research from a distance in 2011, the AiG spin now was that they had just “poisoned two gene products” to make “defective chick embryos.” Mitchell had a tradition of evasion to emulate here, such as Carl Wieland’s dismissal of Matthew Harris’s 2006 work experimentally generating teeth in chickens (as though it was something that was just to be expected in extant birds having no teeth at all). So it was that Mitchell dumped on Hans Larsson’s spotting the somites of the dinosaurian tail in bird embryos in 2010 (which many prior investigators had missed). Larsson’s efforts continued in a 2014 paper by Dana Rashid et al. identifying the specific genetics, suggesting “a relatively small number of mutational events” were involved (further work that passed unnoticed at AiG). In 2016 Mitchell played the same

flushing game with João-Francisco Botelho’s ongoing work on the dinosaurian underpinnings of bird limb bones. Nor has the paleobiology work stopped. In 2018 Daniel SmithParedes et al. showed how two bones absent in the adult bird skull (the prefrontal and postorbital) were still transiently present in their embryos, writing that “The presence of a dinosaur-like ossification pattern in bird embryos is more than a trace of their evolutionary past: we show how persistent modularity of ossification centres has allowed for evolutionary re-organization of skull architecture in evolution.” That new work has so far also not been discussed at AiG. And then there are the fossils. The famous Archaeopteryx dated from 1861, at first a lonely (but spectacular) hint at the evolutionary chronicle. Only five more fossil birds were added in the 1870s (including toothed ones), but nothing more turned up until two were found in the 1970s. The 1980s looked better, adding another seven. But come the 1990s and nineteen new taxa were discovered. One of them was the Early Cretaceous Eoalulavis (living 125 million years ago in Spain), described in a 1996 paper by José Sanz. In 2000 Fucheng Zhang & Zhonghe Zhou found a still earlier bird, Protopteryx (from 131 Ma), representing a very basal enantiornithine— the “opposite birds” (with shoulder arrangements differing from that in modern ornithines) that dominated the Mesozoic. And new examples of the enantiornithine birds have been found since, described by Dongyu Hu et al. in 2011 and 2012 papers. Archaeopteryx even got a fresh look, as a 1998 paper by Larry Martin compared the adaptive implications of Archaeopteryx with the Late Jurassic toothed bird Confuciusornis, and the flurry of new taxa prompted Christian Foth & Oliver Rauhut to undertake a reevaluation of one of the fragmentary original Archaeopteryx finds in 2017. It would appear the Cretaceous flock were picking up right where Archaeopteryx left off. Step by incremental step, they were losing their theropod features: the specialized gastralia bones lining the belly wall, their tails (a 2008 paper by Chunling Gao et al. tracked that), and eventually their teeth (though evidently not the genes for them). Concurrently, the keeled sternum got bigger, the forearm lengthened, and the fingers of their theropod hand embarked on a carpometacarpal

fusion and possible developmental frameshift in their fingers (we’ll return to that in Chapter 6). The whole process took 160 million years, traced in papers by Stephen Brusatte et al. in 2014 and Andrea Cau et al. in 2018. Besides the information on the evolution of bird lungs noted back in the Chapter 1 Info Box, along the way there are fascinating sidebars, such as the fragmentary Rahonavis (a Late Cretaceous critter from Madagascar, around 70 million years ago, described in several 1990s papers by Catherine Forster et al.) that appears to have had sickleshaped maniraptoran-style foot claws. How close to the bird lineage was it? In 2011 Gabe Bever et al. brought in tyrannosaur data to illuminate the development of the avian endocranium (the base of their skull), while 2018 papers by Daniel Field et al. showed how a complete skull of the late Cretaceous bird Ichthyornis illustrated the “mosaic assembly of the avian head,” and Jingmai O’Connor reported gastroliths (a feature “commonly linked to herbivory in theropod dinosaurs”) in the basal Early Cretaceous bird Jeholornis. Regarding the avian sternum (attachment spot for the muscles that allow birds to take off directly from the ground, without running or jumping from a height) it’s revealing that this didn’t appear full blown all at once, the pertinent fossil data reviewed by Xiaoting Zheng et al. in 2012 and 2014 papers. Which makes us wonder, wouldn’t a Designer have got all that right in one go? So much persistent science, finding the dino bits buried in the bird developmental processes, pulling together all the data available from every discipline, which may be compared with the collective nothing going on among the creationists, drawing the line at birds being specially created kinds and disallowed to be anything else. Now, if all life on Earth were created by some all-powerful deity, then there is no reason why we should be able to make predictions like this about what features organisms should have since the deity can give any organism any features he/she/it/they want(s). But that is not what we see in the fossil record and in modern organisms; instead, we see distinct categories of organisms which tie inextricably to their evolutionary history. Even when organisms convergently evolve similar features, those features do not erase their evolutionary trail.

For example, we can still see that whales are definitely mammals (descended from terrestrial mammals), even though they have streamlined bodies and fins like fish (see the Info Box  on the next page). There is no explanation other than the ad hoc rationalization that Darwin spotted, that it’s just how the deity likes to make things. Or worse, that the deity had such a soft spot for evolutionary paleontology that he/she/it/they kept making stuff to fit the evolutionary predictions. White ended his venture into creationist analogy versus homology with the sentence: “However, the fact that the two structures are similar does not necessarily mean that they are derived from a common ancestor.” But, how do we know when similarities are derived from a common ancestor? We know because of the genes. Your physical characteristics, the phenotype, are products of all the genes you have, the genome. Geneticists have been showing for years how genes produce phenotypes, and they understand how genes are passed from parent to offspring. You can then do genetic testing to show where some specific traits came from. That is why shows like the Maury Povich Show can say “You are the father!” Companies such as Ancestry.com and 23 and Me also do genetic tests but on a larger scale, showing how your ancestors can be traced through different geographic areas across  the world.  One important  way to  do this is   ___________________________________________________________________

Convergence A classic example of independent convergence involves the streamlined shape of sharks, dolphins, and ichthyosaurs, an adaptive form driven by the physical constraints of moving efficiently through the water. However, how they acquired this shape is different for each. Sharks are fish, and since fish are already streamlined, they just adapted their form from the earlier acanthodians, though with specialized biological underpinning, explored by Jeanine Donley et al. in 2004. There’s lots of work on the Devonian acanthodians in relation to later evolution, from Martin Brazeau’s 2009 paper on

braincase and jaw features, to John Maisey et al.’s 2017 exploration of pectoral morphology leading to sharks. The ichthyosaurs were descended from terrestrial amniotes, however, and share commonalities with Triassic fossil groups like hupehsuchians (Xiao-hong Chen et al. covered recent finds in 2014 and 2015) and thalattosaurs (see Olivier Rieppel et al. on a Triassic Chinese specimen in 2000). Similarly, Johan Lindgren et al. reviewed the convergent aspects among the aquatic mosasaurs in 2010. All these animals developed their shape as they became more aquatic, as did dolphins. But because of their particular lineage (cetaceans are mammals related to terrestrial artiodactyls) they swim by undulating their spine vertically, unlike the marine reptiles and fish that swim by swinging their tail side to side—a difference in muscle usage that is shown by the horizontal tail flukes of mammals, while all the others are oriented vertically. Anti-evolutionists dismiss convergence as merely “common design,” but do so at a generic level high enough above the details to avoid their common descent implications, as Matthew Herron and Philip Senter have noted. It seems particularly a complaint for Intelligent Design, especially the verbose Cornelius Hunter, though Günter Bechly, David Klinghoffer, Casey Luskin, Denyse O’Leary and Lee Spetner sing similar tunes, occasionally with a chorus from Fazale Rana in the OEC pew and John UpChurch from the galleries at AiG. Convergence of course occurs at the molecular level, as we’ll be taking note of many times throughout our book. with mitochondrial DNA haplogroups, which are sections of mitochondrial DNA that show mutations based in part on geographic locations. Anti-evolutionists understand and accept this but only to an extent. For instance, they have no problem with the idea that all canids (the dog family) are related because of certain physical and genetic characteristics. However, anti-evolutionists generally arbitrarily assert that canids are not related to felids despite a large number of physical characteristics. They also do not believe that bears, pinnipeds (seals, sea lions, and walruses), and mustelids (raccoons, weasels, sea otters) are also related to canids, even though we can see from their

genes that these animals are more closely related to canids than felids are. This is where the anti-evolutionist concept of “kinds” or baramins comes in. Meaning “created kind” in Hebrew, creationist Frank Marsh (1899-1992) coined the term in the 1940s. We’ll return to baraminology in due course (especially in Chapter 5), but we have this sideswipe of comparative anatomy by White to consider:  

We have to realize that the entire line of reasoning by evolutionists is based upon a single assumption: that the degree of similarity between organisms indicates the degree of supposed relationship of the said organisms. In other words, it is argued that if animals look alike, then they must be closely related (from an evolutionary point of view), and if they do not look very much alike, then they are more distantly related. But this is just an assumption.  

The word that comes to mind when reading passages like this is disingenuous. We know that White believes some organisms are related to each other based on physical and genetic similarities because he makes as much clear later in this very chapter! The fact that physical and genetic similarities imply common descent is very much testable as was just shown. The only time you ever have to assume similarity implies common descent is with the fossil record when all you have to look at is the physical characteristics. But, even here in some cases it can be shown that physical characteristics are indeed evidence of common descent, because today scientists can peek under the genomic hood and look at the genetics that make them, as we saw above regarding birds. The developing field of paleogenomics can look at the DNA of recently deceased species (measured in terms of thousands of years of course, way off the YEC time stick) and compare those with modern species. Take members of the clade elephantimorpha: they were originally categorized by their hyoid bones, which is a horseshoeshaped bone in the neck, reflected in a study by Jekeskel Shoshani et al. in 2007. Later paleogenomic studies confirmed the elephants’ relationships to each other, in 2007 and 2010 papers by Nadin Rohland et al. and Eleftheria Palkopoulou et al. in 2018.

There were some surprises, though: the extinct mastodons turned out to be the most basal elephantimorphs, followed by gomphotheres and stegodontids, then the living African elephant—though spawning along the way the now-extinct straight-tusked Eurasian offshoot, Palaeoloxodon, as reviewed by Matthias Meyer et al. in 2017. There followed the Asian elephant (also still around), and finally mammoths (which many people tend to confuse with the superficially similar mastodons that were actually distant cousins at the root of the bunch). With the genomes of mammoths available from their fossils, paleogenomics could track their dispersal across Laurasia (the name given to the northern counterpart of Gondwana, as the Pangaea supercontinent broke up). Papers here would include Hendrik Poinar et al.’s 2006 “Metagenomics to Paleogenomics: Large-Scale Sequencing of Mammoth DNA,” Jacob Enk et al’s “Complete Columbian mammoth mitogenome suggests interbreeding with woolly mammoths” in 2011, Adrian Lister & Andrei Sher’s 2015 paper “Evolution and dispersal of mammoths across the Northern Hemisphere,” and Dan Chang et al.’s 2017 “The evolutionary and phylogeographic history of woolly mammoths: a comprehensive mitogenomic analysis.” Fossils and genes nest up with paleogeography and geological sequence. But no, we have White to tell us that all this work (which he may never have bothered to look for) must be just an “assumption” (driven by nothing more than a casual “if they look alike”) as though structural morphology was all we have to go on. Was White truly unaware that it was the 21st century, and science had the genomes to look at directly? That would explain why he chose to only investigate homologous structures and the fossil record, while missing most of that too. White then lays out what he believes to be the correct explanation for similar structures:  

In fact, there is another logical reason why things look alike—creation by an intelligent designer using a common blueprint. This is the reason that Toyota and Ford motor vehicles look so much alike. They are built to a common plan—you only have to look at them to realize this. However, the problem with the living world is that in many cases either explanation (i.e., evolution or creation) appears to be logical and it is often impossible for us to tell which is the more reasonable

explanation. This is why it is important for us to understand which worldview we are using to interpret the evidence.  

Baloney through and through. The first problem is the concept of a designer using a common blueprint in the first place. What does that even mean? Life varies wildly in phenotype and genome, so do different designers create the differences? About the only similarities among all organisms are the really deep ones: usages of DNA, RNA, proteins, ribosomes, and a few other molecular structures. Did one designer create these while other designers each worked on the differences? To continue with White’s automotive analogy, are we talking some really long assembly line, where the prokaryote idea got passed on to the eukaryote gift box set, and all that down to the finishing departments, where the plant, invertebrates and vertebrate teams got to fiddle with the component parts? It’s worth noting that, just as no anti-evolutionist has ever specified what manner of transitional forms they’d accept, none of them have stopped to think how could one even test this idea? In science, if you propose a hypothesis, it has to be testable. The idea that a common designer designed living organisms is testable only if its proponents could propose a mechanism for how the designer could design living organisms. And conversely, what would qualify as not common design? Might it include putting useless stuff on the product? Say, putting a gas tank on a Tesla? Well, we have examples of that in the real world, such as the tooth enamel genes found in the baleen whales, animals that do not have teeth (though their ancestors did). In fact, as Robert Meredith et al. worked out in several papers, all toothless mammals still have the remnants of those tooth enamel genes.[16] Odd, isn’t it? It’s almost as if the hypothesized Designer insisted on putting those gas tanks on all the mammalian Teslas, regardless of the model. Like the tornado through a junkyard analogy, White’s comparing living organisms to vehicles was a terrible analogy. For one thing, we know cars weren’t made by the same designers—so maybe White should have avoided yet another slippery slope analogy, if his idea was to keep us thinking only of one allowed Designer.

Even more importantly, man-made vehicles do not grow; nor have any metabolic processes; nor give birth, meaning they cannot vary in allele frequency from one generation to the next like organisms. Indeed, if cars did replicate with heritable mutations in the manner of living things, you can bet your bottom dollar (or drachma, or bitcoin) that they’d be subject to much the same Darwinian selection mechanisms as mammoths, kinorhynchs and people are. Another thing. An intelligent designer can go back to the drawing board anytime and create completely new vehicles entirely unlike previous ones, but we see nothing like this in nature. The fossil record is a monotonous chronicle of variation only on what was already on hand: almost tetrapods before the first tetrapods, almost dinosaurs before the first dinosaurs, almost mammals before the full mammals, almost birds before the first birds, almost humans before the first humans. Kind of a pattern, isn’t it? Were the designers restricted by contract to keep within the existing model range? Don’t make a winged Pegasus or a vertebrate without an inverted retina? No dealer warranty on those. In nature, all organisms can be classed into various nested clades like so many Matryoshka dolls. Humans, for instance, have all the characteristics of hominids, primates, placental mammals, tetrapods, sarcopterygians, vertebrates, chordates, bilaterians, animals, opisthokonts, and eukaryotes. Not just in our physical morphology, but down to the intricate details of our genetics (including those pesky primate Alus). If we were designed, then why were we given a set of characteristics such that it obviously seems like we evolved from ancestors with precisely those characteristics? Again, all the antievolutionists have are ad hoc rationalizations—and not discussing much of the data. Consider just vertebrates. In regular cladistics, this term describes a set of animals possessing vertebrae or a backbone, and they have this because they all share a common ancestor (we’re in that bunch). In anti-evolutionist lore though, what a patchwork of features the designer included. It must have been just a coincidence the creator made numerous “kinds” of vertebrate animals, each purportedly unrelated, yet which all develop their anus before their mouth

embryonically as deuterostomes do, along with chordate-style pharyngeal slits in the embryo, with a post-anal tail, a notochord, and a dorsal hollow nerve chord. And all of that while showing a familiar bilaterian symmetry with triploblastic three germ layers, involving the multiple cells and internal digestive tract of animals generally, though with every cell nucleated in the eukaryote manner, down to opisthokont gametes equipped with one flagellum that pushes from the rear. This nested hierarchy makes no sense in anti-evolutionism, where the creator ought to have had unlimited options and yet ended up with so restricted a parts toolkit. Was the result just wanton caprice? Or was it because all those features, occurring as they do and when they do in our developmental process and their ongoing metabolic activity, are necessarily evolutionary ones, because each clade had to inherit their characteristics from their last common ancestor. We have then competing models: common descent versus common design. Is it possible for us to tell which explanation best accounts for the facts, evolutionary or creationist? Oh yes. We can ask which side makes verifiable predictions based on their model, as well as how those predictions have worked out on the verification end. And you won’t need many guesses to do the count: it’s not the antievolutionist. Take all those genes science has identified, each one of which might have been there on account of common descent, or by common design. The 2013 paper by Timothy White et al., “Beyond Reasonable Doubt: Evolution from DNA Sequences,” tested the notion that “as predicted by evolutionary theory, sequences of homologous proteins from different species converge as we go further and further back in time. The converse, a non-evolutionary model can be expressed as probabilities, and the test works for chloroplast, nuclear and mitochondrial sequences, as well as for sequences that diverged at different time depths.” Yes, it can be shown quantitatively that genetic similarities are indicative of common ancestry. Oh, a designer might have magicked up all the similar genetic sequences, but why? Just to make it look like evolution? Well, just like those tooth enamel genes, that would not be playing fair. Now, as if we might have run out of creationist deep ends, Monty White managed to find another one with his next paragraph:

 

There is, however, one discovery that appears to make the evolutionary view of descent from a common ancestor look illogical and flawed. This discovery is that structures that appear homologous often develop under the control of genes that are not homologous. If the structures evolved from the same source, you would expect the same genes to make the structures. The fact that these structures are similar (or homologous) is apparent, but the reason is not because of Darwinian evolution. It is more logical and reasonable to believe in a common Creator rather than a common ancestor.  

Citation please (of course he provides none). What on Earth could he be referring to? In tetrapods, for instance, all their limbs are patterned by homologues of the same bilaterian gene family: hedgehog (so named for the hedgehog-like bristles it was known to cause in fruit flies—yes, we vertebrates draw on the same core signaling that originated very deep in bilaterian evolution, some 560 million years ago, late in the Precambrian). Genes that determine the development of an organism at that level are known as Hox (or homeobox) genes, and their homologies across large groups of organisms provide further clues on their relatedness, reviewed recently by Philip Ingham et al. in a 2011 paper.[17] But the technical literature of the 21st century was clearly less on White’s mind than channeling a trope that originated in 1998 over in the Intelligent Design camp: “Homology: A Concept in Crisis” by Jonathan Wells & Paul Nelson (a Young Earth creationist by the way). The actual genetic underpinnings of developmental biology were just then kicking into the homeobox era, but Wells & Nelson were doing their best to not understand it. Apparently, they passed on their fervent hope on the impending dissolution of evolutionary homology to a credulous Monty White. White’s last paragraph on homology is a bit large, so we’ll will break it down into two parts; the first a general claim and the second more specific. First the general part: “Many evolutionists readily admit that they have failed to find evidence of the evolution of large structures such as bones and muscles, so instead they argue that they have found homology among the complex organic molecules that are found in living systems.”

Here as elsewhere, we have no idea what White is referring to (and he provides no citations). Which evolutionists are “admitting” this? Certainly not the ones working in the field, from Neil Shubin to Andrew Gillis and Brian Hall (we direct you to their works in our references). And what bones and muscles? Take the example provided earlier: tetrapod limb bones. By the time White was opining, there had come to be a very detailed understanding of how these bones evolved from the lobe fins of early sarcopterygian fish, such as Guiyu, to tetrapodomorphs (the aforementioned Eusthenopteron), to crown tetrapods, like Acanthostega. The homology between the front limbs of Eusthenopteron and Acanthostega are pretty obvious, so what bones could he be thinking about? As for muscles, they too have detailed evolutionary histories. The muscular system is understood to have started as some primordial myocytes (muscle cells) in our distant animal ancestors as documented by Katka Seipel & Volker Schmid’s 2005 paper “Evolution of striated muscle: Jellyfish and the origin of triploblasty.” Some of the components trace back further still, into unicellular organisms, per Patrick Steinmetz et al.’s 2012 paper, “Independent evolution of striated muscles in cnidarians and bilaterians.” The complex evolution from diploblasty to triploblasty (having two germ layers to having three) and the origin of bilateral symmetry have been painstakingly worked out—albeit, not by creationists—showing the gradual evolution of metazoan musculature. This work is, of course, couched in years of genetics, evolutionary developmental biology, embryology, and comparative anatomy and is constantly growing. Meanwhile, White’s Young Earth creationism was still kicking around the same arguments that were debunked fifty years ago— literally, since coauthor JW owns an old 1967 creationist book from the Jehovah’s Witness Watch Tower (Did Man Get Here By Evolution Or By Creation?) that played just the same designer tune. White’s next claim might just as well have been written in 1967:  

One of these is hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in red blood cells. Although this protein is found in nearly all vertebrates, it is also found in some invertebrates (worms, starfish, clams, and insects) and also in some bacteria. Yet there is no evidence of the evolution of this chemical—in all cases, the same kind

of molecule is complete and fully functional. If evolution has occurred, it should be possible to map out how hemoglobin evolved, but this cannot be done. To the creationist, however, hemoglobin crops up complete and fully functional wherever the Creator deems it fitting in His plan.  

At least White correctly explains what hemoglobin is. Good job for him. But is it true that there is no evidence of its evolution when White was writing? No. There are plenty of works on the subject. Biologists pretty much universally agree that hemoglobin and myoglobin (a protein similar to hemoglobin found in muscle tissue, where myoglobin stores oxygen while hemoglobin transports it) arose by gene duplication from an ancient globin protein in the ancestor of jawed vertebrates after lampreys branched off (some 525 million years ago in the Cambrian). And it’s not a news flash bulletin, either. Morris Goodman et al.’s “Darwinian evolution in the genealogy of haemoglobin” came out in 1975, and come the genetic revolution of the 21st century, we have Ross Hardison’s 2012 paper “Evolution of Hemoglobin and Its Genes,” along with a series of relevant team efforts by Federico Hoffmann, Juan Opazo and Jay Storz. Their work explored hemoglobin diversification in placental mammals and teleost fish, widening to study the globin gene superfamily in chordates and vertebrates, including the role of whole-genome duplications in that vertebrate variety. Researchers have also figured out that, around 70 million years after hemoglobin and myoglobin split, yet another spate of gene duplications some 450 million years ago in the Ordovician, which produced the α and ß-chain hemoglobins. The α-chain hemoglobin later underwent yet another gene duplication about 10 million years ago (the Miocene), resulting in two types of α-chain hemoglobin: HBA1 and HBA2, as recorded by Elizabeth Zimmer et al.’s 1980 paper “Rapid duplication and loss of genes coding for the alpha chains of hemoglobin” and the Storz et al. 2011 paper. So, the question becomes why White said there was no evidence for the evolution of hemoglobin. Did he not do a simple search because of laziness or malice? It’s worth reminding that because the Answers book was originally written in 2006, but which contained plenty of more recent citations

sprinkled in the 2017 reprint, Goodman’s first paper had been available in some form or fashion for forty-two years. As a further comparative measure of the practical skillset of scholarly research on display in the Answers book, it took coauthor JW only a few minutes of searching to find that 1975 article. Let us just give them the benefit of the doubt and go with their merely being bad scholars. But if White still doesn’t get Brownie points for that, neither do Bryan Anderson (“Shared mutations in the human and chimpanzee βglobin pseudogenes is not evidence for a common ancestor”) in 2011, and especially Jeffrey Tomkins, who put up three articles in 2013 endeavoring to dismiss the evidence, citing along the way Ana Moleirinho et al.’s paper on “Evolutionary Constraints in the β-Globin Cluster,” Nathan Sheffield et al.’s work on patterns of regulatory activity involving those genes, and farther afield, Emily Giannopoulou et al.’s 2012 paper “showing that a single base mutation in the HBBP1 pseudogene is associated with a blood disease called betathalasemia.” Whether Tomkins (or Rupe & Sanford who relied on Tomkins in Contested Bones) even realized the slippery slope of theodicy he was on here by implication (a designed functional not-pseudogene containing a mutation segment inviting a blood disorder), a 2017 post by Laurence Moran took Tomkins to task for plainly misrepresenting the Moleirinho work, where the region being activated wasn’t actually in the pseudogene, but only near it. Now, that wraps up White’s discussion of homology. You saw how badly he misrepresented the process by which researchers determine what organisms are related to each other, completely ignoring genetics (and that the geneticists among them, like Tomkins, were doing no better). White also made an entirely unsubstantiated and wrong assertion regarding the evolution of hemoglobin. Do his arguments ever get better? To find out, let us turn to the next section, which finally got around to discussing fossils.  

Uncommon Descent  

The first paragraph of his “Missing Links” section is just an explanation of what fossils are, which is fine. Then, he dives straight

into apologetics (his emphasis): “Charles Darwin proposed the gradual evolution of life forms over a long period of time. If this has happened, you would expect to find this gradual evolution of one kind of life form into another kind to be recorded in the fossil record. However, this evolutionary account of one kind of life form changing into another kind is not recorded in the fossils.” Oh brother! That is so not true (see the Info Box  on that matter of “gradual”). To begin, we must say that we agree that changing from one “kind” to another “kind” is not recorded in the fossil record, but that’s only because no one has any idea what a “kind” is, least of all creationists. As we’ll be exploring in this section, the term is merely a buzzword—totally devoid of meaning. In the slippery way creationists use it, a kind could encompass a few organisms or a vast number, depending on how outwardly similar they appear. The demarcation of different kinds also cannot depend on genetics or morphology because both of these demonstrate that many different organisms, especially ones which are considered by creationists to be part of different kinds, are actually related to each other. Anti-evolutionists then just arbitrarily divide clades (or segments of clades) into different kinds without ever explaining their decisions. And, we do see gradual evolution in the fossil record. It’s evident whether we look to the evolution of little bitty things (foraminifera, diatoms, coccolithophores), bigger ones like angiosperms, arthropods, or early chordates, or still more familiar critters like fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. In fact, paleontologist Donald Prothero wrote an entire book on such transitions titled Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters. The book not only provides great evidence of transitions in the fossil record, but it also shows why creationism is not even science. But White was hardly to be deterred by the mere occurrence of transitional fossils, since he never bothered to study any of them. Instead he had a firm grip on what he imagined to be the case:  

There are many instances where variations within a kind are found (for example, different varieties of elephant or dinosaur) but there are no examples of in-between kinds. Both evolutionists and creationists agree that the intermediate transitional forms expected on the basis of slow gradual change of one kind of creature into

another kind is not found fossilized in the sedimentary rocks. In other words, the transitional forms are missing—hence the term “missing links.”  

Here is an example of what we mean when we say creationists have no definition of kind. White mentions “varieties of elephant or dinosaur.” But elephants are contained within the order proboscidea, while dinosaurs are all contained within the much larger clade (at least a super-order, which is larger than an order) dinosauria. Does White really imagine kinds exist that high up the systematic ladder? Like we’re in the order of primates? White tossed out the elephant and dinosaur as mere stage props  in the creationist  magic show,   ___________________________________________________________________

“Gradual” evolution You’ll note White made a point of specifying that the evolution needed to be “gradual.” But that’s coming from somebody who thinks the Earth is 6,000 years old. Twenty-thousand years (let alone a million) would shoot way off their allowed timeframe. In anti-evolution apologetics, gradual evolution is regularly contrasted with punctuated equilibrium. That’s the idea (originated by Niles Eldredge & Stephen Jay Gould in the 1970s) that because most speciation occurs by geographical isolation (the allopatric mode we mentioned early in the chapter), the speciation event would tend not to get trapped all that often in the fossil record. The same would be true for the comparatively rarer sympatric speciation where the older forms morph into the newer, pretty much all in one place. Either way, the process is really slow (tens of thousands of years at times), and of course the genetics of that shift would be unavailable for study today. Add to that the idea that a clade of organisms could undergo relatively little morphological change over a long period of time after speciation, and you had a recipe for “abrupt appearance” without “fossil transitions” tailor-made to attract the attention of anti-evolutionists, who played up the alleged “controversy” (which had pretty much cooled off after the 1990s as the concept got applied more broadly).

Gould devoted some of his 2002 opus magnum The Structure of Evolutionary Theory to Punk-Eek, as well as his final major work (posthumously published in 2007). Curiously, the Answers book did not play that Punk-Eek card, though they wouldn’t have been rare if they had. Coauthor JD keeps tabs on how antievolutionists have addressed this matter, the TIP 1.3 posting at his TIP website (included in our references for this volume). In summary: all antievolutionists (YEC, OEC or ID) who think to bring up punctuated equilibrium manage to get the basics wrong. Surprise. but forgot to position the smoke and mirrors first. Part of the reason, we think, that creationists continually fail to define the term kind is that they know if they ask evolutionists to tackle the specifics, we’re liable to do it. Take those elephants. We noted their evolution earlier in the chapter, and science now recognizes that they are closely related to sirenians (manatees and the dugong) because of genetics, consistent with the fossil fact that early elephants and terrestrial sirenians, like Pezosiren, look very similar. Elephants have also changed dramatically since the Paleocene, some 60 million years ago—going from pig-like, semi-aquatic grazers to the large familiar species we know today. All that within a kind? As for dinosaurs, Sterling Nesbitt et al.’s 2017 paper “The earliest bird-line archosaurs and the assembly of the dinosaur body plan” traced their evolution from early diapsid reptiles, a group with two holes in their skull called temporal fenestrae (recall our synapsid branch with just one, currently morphed into our cheekbone), through basal ornithodira to the true dinosaurs Researchers understand the evolution of early dinosauriformes littering the Triassic, such as the lagerpetids (agile little bipeds), Prorotodactylus (presently identified only by its trackways), Marasuchus (a bit bigger than the lagerpetids) and the silesaurids (early quadrupedal forms systematized recently by Nesbitt et al. in a 2010 paper). Meanwhile, creationists are still insisting the dinosauriformes are missing. And they do this chiefly by not looking for them.

Bumptious evangelist Ray Comfort, for example. In a 2013 study guide to one of his videos (which hadn’t mentioned dinosaurs at all), Comfort decided to slip in an archosaur/dinosaur phylogeny shown in David Lambert’s The Dinosaur Data Book. Comfort wasn’t claiming to have read this himself, mind you. Instead, he’d nicked it secondarily from a 2011 web posting by creationist Carl Kerby. As Comfort put it (his italics):  

But, as Carl Kerby points out, notice the fine print at the bottom of the chart: “Tinted areas indicate solid fossil evidence.” Another way of saying it is “only the dark areas are proven fact.” The white areas have no proven evidence, so if they’re not fact, they’re merely speculation (fiction!). Keep in mind that these white areas are where evolution had to have taken place for Darwin’s theory to be true— and those are the areas with no evidence.[18]

More recently, a 2017 YouTube video “Fossil Record: Noah's Flood or Evolution?” by the group Genesis Apologetics presented Young Earth creationist Carl Werner quoting paleontologist David Weishampel: “From my reading of the fossil record of dinosaurs, no direct ancestors have been discovered for any dinosaur species. Alas, my list of dinosaurian ancestors is an empty one.” A bit more of the scholarly daisy chain came into focus in a 2018 Institute for Creation Research posting by Jake Hebert titled “Secular Scientists Admit Dinosaurs Appeared Abruptly,” that attributed the quote to Werner’s 2007 book, Evolution: The Grand Experiment, wherein the creationist identified this as coming from an email exchange. Besides the issue of how reliable that very secondary quotation might be (creationist Luther Sunderland was notorious for trawling for such authority quotes back in the 1980s, sprinkling them in his 1988 book), the fact that the email had to have originated prior to 2007 put it well back on the field relative to the state of the paleontology when Genesis Apologetics or Hebert were waving it about. But we have further cause to be rather suspicious that the “quote” was as advertised because Weishampel had coedited The Dinosauria in 1990, in which Michael Benton had noted the many archosaurs closely related to dinosaurs, and specifically that “Lagosuchus, a slender, long-limbed animal from the Middle Triassic of Argentina

shares all of these synapomorphies with the Dinosauria as well as with the Pterosauria.” Unless Weishampel overlooked the content of his own volume and subsequent paleontology over a decade when prodded by Werner’s undated emails, we must express some skepticism that the exchange occurred as Werner intimated. But even if so, we don’t have to rely on a decade-old authority quote from Weishampel, we have a parade of taxa to know what the ancestors of dinosaurs looked like. And when we coauthors had a video chat with Mike Riddle (an Answers in Genesis lecturer) in 2018, during which the creationist denied there were any dinosaurs ancestors, JW inquired whether Riddle had ever heard of Marasuchus or the lagerpetids. He said he had not. What we’re hitting here is a notable fact snag: while a perfectly fine guide to the dinosaur taxa known when the book came out (in 1990), it was presumptuous of Comfort (and Kerby and Cameron) to think no paleontology had gone on in the quarter century since The Dinosaur Data Book. And it was equally lazy of Genesis Apologetics or Jake Herbert in the knowledge at your fingertips 21st century to similarly think fossil hunting had stopped in 2007. Or for Mike Riddle to forget how to use his mouse on an internet search of dinosaur ancestors. Moving on to White’s “both evolutionists and creationists agree…” transitionals are lacking. Do they now? And who might these be? If any sentence in White’s presumptuous argument screamed out for “citation needed!” it was this one. We’ve never heard someone who accepts evolution say there is no evidence of transitions in the fossil record. And we noted Prothero’s book is full of transitions. Worse, at just about the time the fresh edition of the Answers book was coming out, Young Earth creationist Nathaniel Jeanson was busily sawing off even that limb, declaring in his 2017 article “Finding Adam in the Genome: A Response to Chapter 1 of Adam and the Genome” that  

both YEC scientists and evolutionists predict the existence of “transitional forms,” it doesn’t matter how many fossil gaps are filled; none of these filled gaps will distinguish between creation and evolution. (Of course, if gaps never were filled in, evolutionists would have a lot of explaining to do, as Darwin’s own writings reveal.

In formal terms of a previous article, the gaps in the fossil record represent a type2 experiment—the existence of gaps would spell trouble for evolution; the lack of gaps would say nothing about either model.)  

Yes, Jeanson is saying that transitional fossils are predicted by creationism—the very same belief system that has denied tooth and toenail the existence of every transitional fossil turned up over the last century. Not that he was all that quick to describe how one determines what transitional forms are, and the criteria creationists would apply to the acceptance of them, or what further ones might be expected to drop from the creationist wonder mill (all tasks antievolutionists have been conspicuously inept at). But while Jeanson earns points for audacity, they come along with a strong jangle of mendacity, for the vast community of creationists most certainly did not accept (let alone predict) transitional forms in the fossil record, as James Kidder reminded in a tart “Jimpithecus” web post in 2017 (and to which sentiment coauthor JD can most heartily concur from his own familiarity with a long trajectory of creationist writing spooling back decades). To borrow from a humorous internet commentator, Jeanson’s claim is downright Orwellian: “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.”[19] Or we can just quote Kurt Wise from his 1995 piece “Towards a Creationist Understanding of Transitional Forms.” After acknowledging a laundry list of known ones (which he renamed “stratomorphic intermediate fossil” groups), including the mammal-like reptiles and the phenacodontid horse ancestors, plus series for birds, tetrapods, whales and Cenozoic mammals like elephants, primates and hominids (!), Wise recommended creationists “accept this fact,” and added what had apparently eluded Jeanson’s perception twenty-two years later, that “It certainly CANNOT be said that traditional creation theory expected (predicted) any of these fossil finds.” Here we pause to offer some insights into Jeanson’s cursory methodology, and the culture of parasitical enablement that sustains it. In 2018 Jeanson debated Herman Mays over the creationist’s Replacing Darwin book. Mays explicitly noted rudimentary and glaring errors in that volume, such as Jeanson somehow thinking the North American River Otter was endemic to Hawaii, when it’s not found there at all (had it been thus, that would have been a puzzle for evolution).

That non-nugget was in a chapter drifting past the issue of biogeography, a topic which anti-evolutionists of all stripes should by now be wary of blundering into, since the actual distribution of animals provides the nitty-gritty of evolution evidence. On this matter of Hawaiian fauna, Jeanson was correct only that there is a species of monk seal found there, though that is an evolutionary offshoot of the now-extinct Caribbean models, as documented by Dirk-Martin Scheel et al.’s 2014 systematic review. Incidentally, there’s also an endangered species of bat there, covered by Amy Baird et al. in 2015, and another fully extinct one whose fossils have recently turned up in volcanic vent deposits, described by Alan Ziegler et al.in 2016. Bats, of course, can fly, just as oceanic seals can swim, hence their showing up out in Hawaii. But the many relevant biological topics of endosymbiosis, retrotransposons, and the like, that further reinforce the evolutionary paradigm didn’t come up in Jeanson’s book at all, and “DNA duplication” only surfaced in passing in a footnote, with no citations involved. The scientifically curious are supposed to be impressed by that? After AiG complained of May’s criticisms, with Jeanson spinning this as Mays supposedly not addressing the content of his book (!), the webcaster nemesis of Ken Ham’s operation, Paulogia, responded by assembling Mays and the online critical observers (Steve McRae, Kyle Curtis, Jon Perry, and Shannon Quillan) for a thorough post mortem (including, for comic relief, the curious circumstance of Georgia Purdom persistently mispronouncing the creationist’s name as “Jeaneson”). Whether accepting the existence of transitional fossils is just the next logical step for creationists, only time will tell. But some of them already acknowledge large swaths of evolution, not just all canids or felids being related to each other. Don’t believe us? Let’s take an equestrian gallop into the wonders of baraminology. It has been a staple of creationist apologetics that the horse sequence (much of it worked out well back in the 19th century) cannot be true. Robert Kofahl’s 1996 Handy Dandy Evolution Refuter or Jonathan Sarfati’s 1999 “The non-evolution of the horse” are typical of the position.

But in 2003 the new breed of baraminologists weighed in. David Cavanaugh, Todd Wood, and Kurt Wise all agreed in their article “Fossil equidae: a monobaraminic, stratomorphic series” that every stage in the evolution of horses from little Hyracotherium to the modern Equus fell within their analytical boxes and constituted one monobaramin, which is their term for naturally evolved lineages within some larger hypothetical kind. That is a lot of morphological change to lump together, from the evolution of toes to teeth to size. So how did the creationists react to this ground-breaking acceptance of a macroevolutionary lineage? They pretty much ignored it. In 2012 Ken Ham was still insisting the horse sequence was just a pile of evolutionary dung, as did grassroots apologist Todd Turner in the third of a series of anti-evolution videos done in 2018. To be fair, it was likely both creationists hadn’t kept up on their own side’s literature, where even they tended to not dive in on this matter. But that could hardly be said of Barnabas Pendragon’s 2015 creationist technical paper on the “Phylogeny of the horse—from tapirlike hyracotheres or from equine anchitheres?” that tacitly accepted considerable equid speciation, deciding all the browsing and grazing horses were one kind, but drawing the line at the little hyracotheres at the base of the sequence. For Pendragon, they represented  “the fundamental  phenotypic  hiatus  between   ___________________________________________________________________

Horse evolution and Huxley’s million mutations In assailing the evolution of the horse, Molén mentioned a 1953 general book by Julian Huxley (1887-1975), biologist grandson of Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), where the scientist had speculated that “at least one million positive mutations were required for the modern horse to evolve. He believed that there is a maximum of one positive mutation in a total of 1,000 mutations. With the help of these values he calculated the probability for the horse to have evolved from one single unicellular organism was 1 in 103,000,000. He believed, however, that natural selection would be able to solve this problem.”

Leaving aside why Molén thought an example that old was relevant in 2009 (DNA as the medium of inheritance was a new thing in 1953, decades away from identifying the genetic sequences of any genes), Huxley’s point was that such a pile of mutations happening all in a block and without benefit of selection was indeed preposterous. But he stressed that was not how evolution rolled. Time played a factor (he pegged the bacteria to horse frame at about two billion years, which is about right), as mutations accumulate in populations: “once a rare favorable mutation crops up, selection can and does convert it, in the course of a mere few hundreds of generations, into a normal character of the group; and so on with the next and the next.” Either Molén did not comprehend what he was reading, or intentionally ignored it to keep his dated creationist roadblock propped up. horses and hyracotheres indicative of separate kinds, or families.” Here we trip over an interesting daisy chain of omission. For Pendragon had taken no note of the Cavanaugh/Wood/Wise work a dozen years earlier that called such a distinction into question within their own domain of baraminology. Yet Pendragon presumably must have known about it, since he’d cited a 2009 piece by Swedish creationist Mats Molén for this minor detail: “Browsing horses and grazing horses are sometimes treated as two separate kinds, or families, of animals.” While Molén couldn’t resist one parting potshot regarding Julian Huxley’s guestimate of the number of mutations that may have been involved in evolving a horse (see the  Info Box), the main topic of Molén’s paper was to take aim at the Cavanaugh horse baraminology work. Armed with a Masters in physical geography but no discernable expertise in paleontology, Molén had complained the Cavanaugh study “was based mainly on statistical data from one 1989 source” that Molén declined to identify (it was the extensive phylogeny by Robert Evander), and suggested their conclusions would have been undermined had they included newer data from David Froehlich’s 2002 analysis of the various Hyracotherium fossils (without actually providing any such examples, though, to show that any of these physically similar variants would have exceeded the measuring stick

the baraminologists had applied to the other taxa, that had diversified so much more widely). This was probably a wise omission, as Joel Duff reviewed in an updated 2019 Naturalis Historia series just how extensive the known data on horses are, suggesting how no creationist model is ever going to make them all fit. And that, even as the paleontological literature has continued to show no reluctance to address them, from Ross Secord et al. suggesting in 2012 the “Evolution of the Earliest Horses Driven by Climate Change in the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum,” to José Prado & María Alberdi’s 2017 book on horse evolution.[20] To complete this sorry tale of horses racing about with no creationist barn door available to be opened or closed, Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter tacitly accepted the broad revisionist version of creationist systematics by selecting as the representative of the horse kind none other than Dinohippus, arguably the worst taxon to have selected to avoid the evolution of the group, as that was the genus in which the side toes were being lost (a 1981 article by Michael Voorhies noted how variant toe forms were seen in those preserved in the Ashfall Beds of Nebraska), a feature of that genus ironically acknowledged even in the caption on the Horse Kind stall in the Ark Encounter. For those anxious for more detail, Eric Scott surveyed many fossil horses in 2006, and more recently, a 2017 paper by the aptly named Brianna McHorse et al. reviewed the “Mechanics of evolutionary digit reduction in fossil horses (Equidae),” while Nikos Solounias et al. covered “The evolution and anatomy of the horse manus with an emphasis on digit reduction” in 2018. Frankly, for 21st century baraminologists to cave on something so big as the horse evolution series is, to put it mildly, far from “kind” to their own beliefs. But that hasn’t been the end of it. Hot on the discovery of the late Triassic (220 million years ago) fossil turtle Odontochelys by Chun Li et al., a transitional form with teeth and only the lower half of the shell (plastron), no upper carapace, Todd Wood put his shoulder to the goalpost to shift it notably in a 2009 paper: “While Odontochelys does appear to be an excellent morphological intermediate between turtles and non-turtles, it’s precise relation to the turtles remains ambiguous due to lack of data.”

Nice of him to notice. But one thing we can be reasonably certain of, whatever relationships they do have, and the biological reasons for them, those were unlikely to be worked out by Wood’s creationism. And we can know this first because nothing more seethed in the brow of creationism on it, while at the same time the evolutionary paleontologists (and are there like any other kind?) proceeded to do it. In a series of papers since Wood’s article, Walter Joyce, Tyler Lyson, Ritva Rice and their associated colleagues were methodically delving into the developmental biology of turtle shells, living and fossil. By 2013 Zhuo Wang et al. had the genomes of several turtles on hand to open that window onto more of the specific genes involved in why turtles appear as they do. Then in 2015 Rainer Schoch & Hans-Dieter Sues discovered a shell-less stem turtle Pappochelys from the middle Triassic (240 million years ago) that revealed still more about what led up to the more familiar shelled forms, and by 2017 it had become possible for Tomasz Szczygielski in “Homeotic shift at the dawn of the turtle evolution” and Christine Böhmer & Ingmar Werneburg ‘s “Deep time perspective on turtle neck evolution: chasing the Hox code by vertebral morphology” to identify even more about the genes whose modifications were required to generate the observed fossil examples.[21] If turtles are too slow for you, another 2010 article by Todd Wood titled “Baraminological Analysis Places Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, and Australopithecus sediba in the Human Holobaramin” claims that an australopithecine (the very primate that we will see White totally dismiss shortly) is in the human kind (a holobaramin being their term for the fossil representations of a baramin, and all their descendants within it). That’s right, Wood’s elastic baraminology meter managed to plop an australopithecine into our genus, a lumping that goes way beyond what any evolutionary anthropologist would be comfortable with, given how much morphological change was involved, just to name a few: bipedality, brain size, teeth, and tool usage. Not that Wood paid attention to all that much of that, as Bill Ludlow commented in a pair of 2019 video posts on Wood’s cursory treatment of hominin fossils in a 2017 video. But, things get even worse—yes, worse than placing an australopithecine in the human kind. In a 2009 piece, “Mammal Kinds,

how many were on the Ark?” Kurt Wise offered that “Vestigial legs and hips in modern whales confirm legged ancestors of the whales existed only a short time ago. It is possible that the purely marine cetaceans of the present were derived from semi-aquatic or even terrestrial ancestors on the ark.” What!? Yes, according to Wise, Noah could have taken a legged Indohyus or Pakicetus on the ark, and those terrestrial cetaceans somehow flipped totally marine in less than a few thousand years (certainly by the time the Romans were hunting grey and right whales, as Ana Rodrigues et al. showed in a 2018 paper), along with the total disappearance of the many legged cetaceans known from the fossil record, like the ones swimming around far from Mt. Ararat, described in the 2019 paper by Olivier Lambert et al., “An Amphibious Whale from the Middle Eocene of Peru Reveals Early South Pacific Dispersal of Quadrupedal Cetaceans.” And so it came to pass that Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter theme park in Williamstown, Kentucky blithely included a furry Pakicetus amongst the “kinds” aboard (a photo in James Pilcher’s 2015 Cincinnati Enquirer article on the project shows their craftsman Joel Briggs as he “puts fur on a pakicetus”)—oh so casually implying the very macroevolutionary relationship that prior generations of creationists had so fervently denied. This is yet another place where creationists have drawn lines in the sand for years only to have them evaporated with ease by their own side. Maybe we just have to wait a little longer for creationists to say all mammals are related, and so on to all other amniotes, and tetrapods, vertebrates, chordates, bilaterians… Heck, maybe everything is one giant monobaramin? Oh, yeah, we already have that idea. It’s called Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. But rather than paying attention to the available paleontology or even the slippyslide of baraminology, Monty White waxed nostalgic by quoting Charles Darwin as saying that the absence of transitional fossils is problematic for evolution, as though the venerable scientist’s opinion in an era when the word “dinosaur” was new mattered when it came to the torrent of fossil data coming after his demise in 1882. Interestingly, there is a book titled Darwin’s Fossils by Adrian Lister that discusses what sorts were available to Darwin (and even

those held many a clue to evolution, such as what Darwin spotted in South America), but the important point is that by the time White was writing in the 21st century, the finds of paleontology had gone far beyond anything old Chuck could have dreamed. White then made the disastrous blunder of getting way too specific, showing right off that he must have been unaware of Cavanaugh et al.’s creationist paper on the horse monobaramin (his emphasis):  

All the evolutionists ever point to is a handful of highly debatable transitional fossils (e.g. horses), whereas they should be able to show us thousands of incontestable examples. This is very noticeable when looking at the fossil record of some of the more peculiar kinds of animals such as the cetacean (whales, dolphins, and porpoises), the sirenian (manatees, dugongs, and sea cows), the pinnipedia (sea lions, seals, and walruses), kangaroos, bats, dragonflies, and spiders.  

This odd selection of animals may have reflected White’s recollection of the sort of beasties creationists had suggested over the years lacked transitional forms. We didn’t even get the popular carnivorans (cats and dogs), let alone less familiar critters, such as hyracoidea (hyraxes), rodentia (mice, gerbils, hamsters), platypuses, shrews, ants, and trilobites. Don’t they count? And its curious that White didn’t include ants in his list. Was he aware of the predicted transitional Sphecomyrma and preferred to ignore it? Coauthor JD devoted a section of his Evolution Slam Dunk book to a survey of the many creationists and Intelligent Designers tripping around that basal wasp-ant, ranging from Duane Gish repeatedly in the 1990s to Michael Denton in his 2016 retool of Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Regardless, as we know, Kurt Wise already threw in the towel on the issue of transitional cetaceans, booking terrestrial ones on the Ark. You may recall too our mentioning the transitional sirenian Pezosiren earlier, and we may add the still terrestrial Prorastomus known from the Eocene (40 million years ago) as another example. The transition of sirenians from land-dwelling to swimming herbivores is well-documented, and if creationists (or at least some of them) were already able to grant whales descended from terrestrial ancestors, then why not sirenians too? Annalisa Berta et al. have

some nice chapters on all that in their 2015 book on marine mammals, in case the creationists ever want to catch up with more of the transitionals their dogma mandates must not be there. And what about walruses? They have a fairly gradual evolutionary history from the early, bear-like Neotherium (15 million years ago), noted in a 1994 paper by Naoki Kohno et al., and the slightly later Proneotherium, all the way up to the modern walrus. Pinnipeds generally have an extensive evolutionary history, starting with the Miocene Puijila, which looks conspicuously like a mustelid (weasels, raccoons, otters)—no surprise, since mustelids are closely related to them. Potamotherium and Enaliarctos are considered basal pinnipeds (see the recent review by Irina Koretsky & Daryl Domning), and identifying ancient examples of some subfamilies of seals, such as Acrophoca and Afrophoca (how is that for confusing?), which are related to the modern monk seals (check the  Info Box for more on pinniped systematics). And kangaroos? There are numerous studies on their fossil record and phylogenetic placement, none of which White deigned to mention. Let us look through some, such as Susanne Gallus et al.’s 2015 study. First and foremost, kangaroos are marsupials, meaning they have a pouch (the marsupium) for holding their young while they develop. The last common ancestor of placental mammals and marsupials lived about 160 million years ago (meaning way back in dinosaur times, around the time birds were branching off from theropods). From there, the marsupials diversified into a number of lineages, reviewed by Maria Nilsson et al. in 2004, “Marsupial relationships and a timeline for marsupial radiation in South Gondwana,” and 2010, “Tracking Marsupial Evolution Using Archaic Genomic Retroposon Insertions.” The most basal of the living marsupials are the New World opossums (didelphimorphia) followed by the shrew opossums (paucituberculata). Then, the monito del monte, a tiny tree-climbing marsupial and the sole representative of the clade microbiotheria, split off from the remaining marsupials. What makes microbiotheria so special is that its extinct members have been found in South America, Antarctica, and Australia, detailing the biogeographical radiation of marsupials across Gondwana (an ancient supercontinent comprising the southern half of Pangaea).  

___________________________________________________________________

Pinniped systematics The available fossils and genetics haven’t been able to tell whether the similar mustelids or ursids are most closely related to them. Robert Hunt & Lawrence Barnes argued the bear case in 1994, while Gina Lento et al. solidified the case for general pinniped monophyly in 1995. Moving into this century, the issues have been thrashed over by John Flynn et al. in 2005, “Molecular Phylogeny of the Carnivora (Mammalia): Assessing the Impact of Increased Sampling on Resolving Enigmatic Relationships,” Jun Sato et al.  “Evidence from Nuclear DNA Sequences Sheds Light on the Phylogenetic Relationships of Pinnipedia: Single Origin with Affinity to Musteloidea” and Ulfur Arnason et al. “Pinniped phylogeny and a new hypothesis for their origin and dispersal” in 2006, and Jeff Higdon et al. “Phylogeny and divergence of the pinnipeds (Carnivora: Mammalia) assessed using a multigene dataset” in 2007. Some new fossil finds by Natalia Rybczynski et al. in 2009 (“A semi-aquatic Arctic mammalian carnivore from the Miocene epoch and origin of Pinnipedia”) are relevant, as is the pinniped chapter in Annalisa Berta et al. from 2015. Whatever the case turns out to be, no one has come anywhere close to concluding scientifically that seals were specially created. The current Australian marsupials entered that continent from Antarctica (way warmer in those days) around 60 million years ago, diversifying over the next 50 million years in increasing isolation as continental drift moved Australia farther from the Gondwanan cluster. In time we get lots of funky endemic critters: the diprotodontia (containing kangaroos), the peramelemorphia (bandicoots and bilbies), notoryctemorphia (marsupial moles), and the dasyuromorphia (quolls, dunnarts, the numbat, thylacine marsupial “wolves”, and the Tasmanian devil—a beast few of us can think of without recalling the wildly spinning scenery chewing troublemaker in the old Warner Bros. cartoons). Regarding the Tasmanian Devil, creationists like Frank Sherwin in 2008 or CreationWiki in 2014 have not ventured whether they’re

related to anything in their kind. One of the anatomical details they’d need to account for if they ever do so is the absence of an articular disc, a common feature in mammals related to strengthening the developing jaw during suckling. The basal egg-laying monotremes and one placental mammal (the armadillo) also lack that feature, per work by K. Hayashi et al. in 2013 and 2015. What we are interested in though are the diprotodontia, which are known from some famous mammal fossils: Diprotodon and Thylacoleo, the “marsupial lion.” Within that clade, the koala and wombats branched off first, followed later by the macropodiformes (meaning having large feet, flop flop). The most basal members of this group belong to a family of quadrupedal kangaroos called balbaridae, which includes Nambaroo from the Oligocene, described by Benjamin Kear et al. in 2007. Following them is the living Hypsiprymnodon moschatus. Also known as the musky rat-kangaroo, a 2014 paper by Hayley Bates et al. revealed their fossil record going back to the Miocene some 16 million years ago (H. bartholomaii). Bettongs, potoroos, wallabies, and kangaroos all form a monophyletic clade in which kangaroos and wallabies are classed within the family macropodidae, as worked out in recent phylogenetic papers, such as Gavin Prideaux & Natalie Warburton’s 2010 "An osteology-based appraisal of the phylogeny and evolution of kangaroos and wallabies (Macropodidae: Marsupialia)” and Bastien Llamas et al.’s 2015 “Late Pleistocene Australian Marsupial DNA Clarifies the Affinities of Extinct Megafaunal Kangaroos and Wallabies.” Hopping and the complex stomachs of modern macropodids only developed later in the evolution of these marsupials, studied by Angela Burke et al.’s 1998 “The Phylogenetic Position of the Musky RatKangaroo and the Evolution of Bipedal Hopping in Kangaroos (Macropodidae: Diprotodontia)” and her 2000 paper with Mark Springer on “Intergeneric Relationships Among Macropodoidea (Metatheria: Diprotodontia) and The Chronicle of Kangaroo Evolution.” Concerning the when of hopping, in 2014 Christine Janis et al. identified that the now extinct short faced kangaroos Simosthenurus (living around 50,000 years ago) and its descendant cousins, like Procoptodon, were non-hoppers, though in 2019, Wendy Den Boer et

al. identified that gait versatility tracked back much earlier, some 20 million years.[22] Why hopping eventually took hold apparently related to environmental factors. A 2009 paper by Gavin Prideaux et al. spotted that the salt-heavy diet of these weightier kangaroos made them more dependent on a good water supply, rendering them less resilient to drought than their more gracile hopping relatives that have survived to the present. The final nudge involved where they lived and how that impacted their diet as the climate continued to change. Aiden Couzens & Prideaux showed in a 2018 paper, “Rapid Pliocene adaptive radiation of modern kangaroos,” that the big hit came later as grasslands proliferated. By then the short-faced kangaroos had moved into browsing niches, while their kangaroo cousins that survived adapted to that expanding grassland habitat. A question for design advocates: would that mean the Designer couldn’t figure out how to give the short-faced kangaroos a hop up, or the natural mutations that facilitated munching on the increasingly available grass? Was there one Designer doing the plants and another the animals, and neither comparing notes to get their acts straight? So maybe kangaroos are not hopping keen to help the creationist cause, as White’s litany of fossil absence seems the opposite of the facts. Now, what about those bats? These are a favorite among creationists, being picked on by the Genesis Apologetics creationists in the video mentioned earlier, and runs the gamut from conventional creationists like Carl Werner in 2012 to proponents of Intelligent Design like Casey Luskin (dissing a systematic paper from that year by Liliana Dávalos et al.). Sure, the fossil record for early bats has been historically thin, and there are darned good reasons why: bats are very small flying animals with very small bones that are arguably the perfect candidate for not getting preserved in a fossil deposit. The same is true for other vertebrate fliers (the earliest pterosaurs and birds were all small). As Gregg Gunnell & Nancy Simmons noted in their 2005 survey of the fossil record of bats,  

Bat skeletons are delicate and seldom preserved, leaving teeth and isolated postcrania as the most commonly represented elements. The dilambdodont

dentition [possessing a pair of distinctive Λ-shaped ridges] of primitive bats is very similar to teeth of a number of insectivoran groups (Talpidae [moles], Soricidae [shrews], Tupaiidae [tree shrews]) making definitive identification of isolated teeth and dentitions a difficult task.”  

But even with that taphonomic specter, biologists have a pretty good handle on bat phylogenetics in relation to other mammals (they are laurasiatherians), see Thierry Smith et al.’s 2012 “Systematics and paleobiogeography of early bats” or Georgia Tasgkogeorga et al.’s 2013 “Phylogenomic Analyses Elucidate the Evolutionary Relationships of Bats” for useful reviews. With about a thousand species flapping about, though, if antievolutionists are going to bring them up, the least they should do is offer a stab as to how many bats (fossil and living) were specially created, and how many were naturally evolved within some baramin, but from the creationists to Casey Luskin, they don’t. It’s not that there aren’t bat fossils at all, just that those that have turned up have not flown in the face of evolution. As covered by Simmons & Jonathan Geisler in an extensive 1998 monograph, and Simmons et al. in a 2008 on newer paleontology, the earliest bats appear a little over 52 million years ago, such as Onychonycteris and Icaronycteris. How far back bats originated (perhaps even in the later Cretaceous) will require new fossils to settle, but the ones known already show that flight emerged before echolocation, since the older ones do not have the neck bones indicative of an echolocating larynx, details laid out by Gareth Jones & Emma Teeling in 2006, Nina Veselka et al. in 2010, and Kalina Davies et al. in 2013. By 48 million years ago though, Palaeochiropteryx shows evidence of echolocation. To put that in perspective (about 4 million years), that’s roughly the time separating us from australopithecines! As for the genetic side of how echolocation evolved, pertinent mutations in the prestin gene have been identified by such researchers as Gang Li et al in 2008. Lacking the clinching earliest fossils for bats, what would an evolutionary approach suggest about what their transitional ancestors should have looked like? Kristin Bishop suggested in 2008 they would have initially been gliders. The development of flapping motion and the

extended membranes are matters of musculature and mutation in the relevant bones. On that front, Darren Naish observed in 2011:  

The fact that the key, characteristic chiropteran innovation—those incredibly long, slender hands and arms—might have evolved thanks to changes in a single gene (BMP2) (Sears et al. 2006) indicates that the early stages of bat evolution happened extremely quickly (potentially in less than a few million years). This rapid evolution means that those early “protobat” phases were short-lived. This of course lowers the probability that we’ll find them as fossils  

We’ll take a further look at bats, their biogeography especially, in Chapter 5 regarding what the baraminologists have thought to make of them, but for the moment we’ll move on from vertebrates, whose bits (like hardy teeth) stand a much better chance of getting preserved than fragile arthropods. Or at least that may have been how Monty White felt, on safe turf when he included dragonflies and spiders, small animals with soft parts splendidly ill-suited for fossil preservation. The same is true on a much larger scale for the eukaryotic protists, of course, where there are a few billion years of protistan evolutionary history we will simply, sadly never know. When White was writing his Answers chapter it might have seemed the gaps were firmly in place. He made no mention of specifics, but fossil dragonflies (like Meganeura) and spiders (such as Idmonarachne) represented too many stray wings or pieces to reveal much about the origins of their groups. That was the case for one of the oldest insects known, the fragmentary Rhyniognatha hirsti from the Devonian, described by Michael Engel & David Grimaldi in 2004. But it is of relevance that when paleontologists put their thinking caps on and work out what ancestors ought to have looked like on evolutionary grounds, the Fossil Genie has an odd habit of coming through for them now and then, as we saw with the predicted wasplike ancestor of ants. And even without the Fossil Genie’s beneficence, the analytical toolkit of cladistics and modern Evo-Devo have greatly refined our capacity to make sense out of even the bits and pieces that might come down to us in the fossil record. There are actually many ways for flight to have originated in insects, surveyed by Timothy Bradley et al. in a 2009 paper on

“Episodes in insect evolution.” One possibility involved tracheal gills, and the water skimming traits of stoneflies and some mayflies drew the attention of researchers like Joel Kingsolver & Mimi Koehl, James Marden & Melissa Kramer, Laurence Ruffieux and others. Whether modified gill flaps could have enlarged sufficiently for flight was unclear, and scientists like Ivar Hasenfuss turned to thoracic body segments as a source for insect wings, especially as more fossils were uncovered from the Palaeodictyoptera, an extinct group of the most primitive winged insects. Andrew Ross reviewed the mounting evidence in 2017 regarding the new paleontological assessment by Jakub Prokop et al., “Paleozoic Nymphal Wing Pads Support Dual Mode of Insect Wing Origins” whereby those thoracic body segments were linked with leg tissues. And a 2018 paper by David Linz & Yoshinori Tomoyasu supported that conclusion from the developmental and genetic end, showing “that novelty can emerge through two previously unassociated tissues collaborating to form a new structure.” It may well be that, as with the origin of long-fingered bat flappers noted by Naish, the steps from non-flying to flying insects may have involved comparatively rapid modification of the already existing biology and genetics. There would have been no shortage of opportunities for natural selection to play a role, given how pervasive controlled insect gliding has turned out to be (highlighted by David Alexander in a 2018 paper). In any case, a 2019 analysis by Benjamin Wipfler et al. further indicates the origin of insect flight occurred in terrestrial conditions, with those aquatic larval forms like stoneflies as derived offshoots. Maybe bringing up fossils was not so good idea for White, after all. Which left but one line in the sand to be defended, at all costs. The hominids.  

Planet of the Apes  

White offers another list, this time concerning primates. His object was to show that all apes can be broken down into three categories: extinct ape, living ape, extinct human, or living human. Nothing else allowed. It also sported two gutsy explanatory asterisks:

 

Name Australopithecus afarensis,

such as “Lucy”

What is it?* Extinct ape

Australopithecus africanus

Extinct ape

Australopithecus boisei

Extinct ape

Australopithecus robustus

Extinct ape

Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus (chimpanzee) Gorilla gorilla and Gorilla

Living ape Living ape

beringei (gorilla) Pongo pygmaeus and Pongo abelii (orangutan) Ramapithecus

Living ape Extinct ape (extinct orangutan) Junk category

Homo habilis

mixing some human and some ape fossils

Homo floresiensis

Human (dwarf, pygmy)

Homo ergaster

Human

Homo erectus, such as

“Peking man” and “Java

Human**

man” Homo neanderthalensis

Human

(Neanderthals) Homo heidelbergensis

Human

Homo sapiens (modern &

Human

archaic) *An accurate classification of these kinds of fossils depends on an accurate starting point. Some fossils have been misclassified. The ones labeled as humans (Homo heidelbergensis, Homo erectus, etc.), indeed show variation, but they are still human. This is also true of the different ape kinds. Variation, not evolution, is what we would expect from the clear teachings of the Bible.

**For the most part these two classifications are anatomically human. However, a number of finds that are not human but rather apelike have been included as part of the Homo erectus category, due to evolutionary beliefs. These apelike finds should be classified.

  White had a footnote here, “For more on supposed human evolution,” and referenced David Menton’s chapter in the 2008 edition of Ken Ham’s The New Answers Book 2. While get to those claims in due course. But first, we need to take note of how much White left out of this scheme. Starting with more of the taxa, many of which were known by the time White was writing (as may be seen in the dates of relevant papers). And how about adding some of those sources, so the reader can do their own follow-up? And then there’s the chronology—when did all this take place? All contemporaries in or out of Eden? Here’s White’s chart with that stuff put in (his examples are in gray):  

Name

When were they?

Ramapithecus

12.2 Ma Chaimanee

(Sivapithecus)

2003

Sahelanthropus

6-7 Ma Wood 2002 re

tchadensis

Brunet 2002

Orrorin tugenensis

6 Ma Wood & Lonergan 2008

Ardipithecus

4.4 Ma Wood re Tim

ramidus

White 1994, Kimbel 2014,

(Australopithecus

Tim White 2015

ramidus) Australopithecus

4.2-3.9 Ma Leakey 1995

anamensis Australopithecus afarensis Kenyanthropus

3.9-3.0 Ma HaileSelassie 2010

3.5 Ma Leakey 2001

platyops Australopithecus

3-2 Ma Green 2007

africanus Australopithecus

2.6-2.3 Ma Wood &

aethiopicus

Lonergan 2008

Australopithecus

2.5 Ma Asfaw 1999

garhi Homo habilis

2.4-1.44 Ma Spoor 2007

Australopithecus robustus (Paranthopus

2-1.5 Ma Constantino 2013

robustus) Australopithecus boisei (Paranthopus boisei) Pan troglodytes & Pan paniscus (chimpanzees)

2.1-1.1 Ma Suwa 1997, Wood & Constantino 2007

2 Ma divergence Glazko & Nei 2003

Gorilla gorilla &

2 Ma divergence

Gorilla beringei

Langergraber 2012

Homo ergaster Homo georgicus

1.9-1.4 Ma Leakey 1976 1.8 Ma Vekua 2002 &

(Dmanisi)

Gabunia 2002

Homo erectus Australopithecus sediba

1-8 Ma to 300 Ka 1.78-1.95 Ma

Balter 2010 re Berger 2010, Pickering 2011

Homo antecessor

1.2 Ma to 800 Ka Bermúdez de Castro 1997

Homo

500 Ka

heidelbergensis Homo

430-40 Ka

neanderthalensis

335-236 Ka Homo naledi

Berger 2015-2017, Dirks 2015-2017

Pongo pygmaeus &

334 Ka Mailund 2011

Pongo abelii (orangutan) Homo sapiens (modern & archaic)

300 Ka 100-60 Ka

Homo floresiensis

Brown 2004, Morwood 2004-2005

  The list is now two-thirds longer, and you can see there’s a lot of natural overlap, especially as the persistent australopithecines branch in many ways (not just our lineage) over the millions of years they were around, reflected in surveys such as Bernard Wood’s 2000 one with Brian Richmond, or his 2011 paper with Terry Harrison (by which time the speciating shrubbery in the hominid family tree had only grown more apparent). You’ll notice also the several “robust” australopithecines that are regarded by some systematists as a different genus, Paranthropus. That reminds us how fossil taxa are characterized. The australopithecines are regarded as our direct ancestors because they possess a number of synapomorphies (the cladistic term for derived characteristics) that we also have—as opposed to the inherited apomorphies organisms features shared by their being within a lineage or clade. In our case, our synapomorphies include similar pelvises, feet, dentition, and being able to make stone tools. We could wonder why the Creator thought it was a good idea to make humans and the hominid gang (especially those australopithecines) so similar, but hey, the Lord is purported to work in mysterious ways. We wouldn’t have expected the fellow to be quite so sneaky, though. Only by leaving out so much of the accumulating data, and not bothering with any references for even what he left in (tempting his readers to fact check the claims), could White indulge in his creationist simplification game. In this trimmed mode, the australopithecines and Ramapithecus are just “extinct apes”; the chimp, bonobo, gorillas, and orangutans are “living apes”; all species of Homo except habilis and sapiens become “extinct humans”; and Homo sapiens are living humans. Oh, so simple.

Let us go through them to see how less simple things really are. Ramapithecus or Sivapithecus (either is correct) is a close relative or direct ancestor of the modern orangutan, not humans, and this has been known for decades. Back in the 1960s, the idea that it might have been part of the initial divergence along the line leading to man was not at all implausible, especially for anthropologists trained in the “British school,” where human evolution was thought to have begun tens of millions of years ago (the species was initially dated to around 15 million years ago), rather than occurring during the most recent five million years. After a more complete specimen turned up, though, by the early 1980s proponents like David Pilbeam recognized that Ramapithecus belonged with its similar relatives on the stem group leading to orangutans. The coverage of the paleontological history by Roger Lewin in his 1987 Bones of Contention and 1988 In the Age of Mankind, Maitland Edey & Donald Johanson’s 1989 Blueprints, and Ian Tattersall’s 1995 The Fossil Trail may be compared to the dated spin in the contemporary creationist works, including main books by Henry Morris in 1985, Morris & Gary Parker in 1987, Duane Gish in 1993 and 1995, and Percival Davis & Dean Kenyon’s 1993 “Intelligent Design” apologetic Of Pandas and People. White may then have only included it because “Ramapithecus” used to pop up a lot in those older creationist apologetics, as a tale of a rejected ancestor. But the truth is that it was improving paleontological skills, and the increasing theoretical impact of molecular links underlying primate phylogeny, that brought about its reinterpretation in the natural course of scientific advance. As Ian Tattersall put it in his 1995 account, “the fragmentary Ramapithecus could never have achieved distinction as humanity’s remote ancestor had we known in the 1960s what we know today about how to extract information from fossils.” In the same vein, White wrote off all the other living non-human primates as just “living apes” even though we can show through genetics and morphology that we are closely related to them, and that they had been undergoing their own branching speciation just as our lineage has. As we noted on our expanded chart, the current species of orangutan, for example, split off only around 300 thousand years

ago, right about the time our human species was appearing from the Homo erectus bunch. More data left out. Australopithecines are now accepted among paleoanthropologists as the ancestors of humans due to a large number of morphological similarities (that data thing White seemed so reluctant to engage in). The australopithecines are in fact a useful study guide into how many factors have to be taken into account in assessing fossil remains, especially fragmentary ones. Are differently sized specimens of the same relative bone examples of separate species, or of a single sexually dimorphic species where one sex is bigger than the other (as can happen when males mate with more than one female, known as polygyny, which is observed to happen in primates, surveyed by Timothy Clutton-Brock back in 1985). Or suppose you find a bit of a stray jaw, which you can date, but which has features a lot like an earlier known species (Australopithecus afarensis), but not identically so. Are we dealing then with a naturally varying descendant of that taxon, or has that variation come from a new offshoot species? This is no hypothetical, as Brian Villmoare and colleagues found exactly that in Ethiopia in 2015, and there was considerable back and forth with John Hawks and other critics over whether that find (dating much later than the standard A. afarensis) represented a new species or not. Such data still exists, of course, and needs to be accounted for in any creationist taxonomy, but it’s easier to ignore such problems if you just ignore them. After all, look at the quandary Todd Wood got himself into, letting Australopithecus sediba slip into the “human kind.” Because sediba was added to the parade only around 2010, we can surmise that the dated (and unrevised) White didn’t know of it, but that oversight could hardly be granted to the Answers book editors skipping past it in a 2017 edition, or Christopher Rupe & John Sanford’s Contested Bones from that same year. Due to the similarities, both morphological and behavioral, that australopithecines generally share with Homo, the problem in paleoanthropology has been how to delineate the two groups, where does one stop and the next begin? But it’s now getting to the point where the creationists are not only avoiding that side of things, they’re starting to overlook their own side’s work too.

Then, White takes a stab at Homo habilis, calling it a “Junk category mixing human and some ape fossils.” This is a persistent and necessary position for them to take, because any functional overlap with our genus and the merely “ape” australopithecines cannot be allowed. You see, the australopithecines have turned out to be quite a diverse lineage, first appearing about 4.5 million years ago and only finally going extinct some 1.78 million years ago, by which time the first Homo were on the field, about 2.4 million years ago. The earliest known Homo species is H. habilis, named in 1964 by paleoanthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey. Because of its physical similarities with both australopithecines and later Homo, debate has gone on for years over its placement (not its existence): is it the most advanced australopithecine or the most primitive Homo? Which ambiguity is just what would be expected for a transitional form, isn’t it? One straddling the australopithecine-Homo gulch. Either way, no one thinks of the fossils as a “junk category,” since there are a number of specimens of it—including OH 62, KNM ER 1813, OH 24, OH 7, and KNM ER 1805. We would ask where White got the claim that H. habilis is a junk category, but as usual, he provides no sources. He could have simply made up the claim, or likely copied it from somewhere but forgot to give credit for it. If copied, though, from whom? Checking with Answers in Genesis, apart from White’s own article, there is none indicating that H. habilis was regarded as not real (remember that Todd Wood used habilis in his 2010 article). One candidate from about the time White was writing, though, was Philip Bell’s 2007 article “Homo habilis hacked from the family tree,” which sadly misunderstood the implications of Fred Spoor’s paper on a new H. habilis find dating to 1.44 Mya (about a hundred thousand years after H. erectus was on the scene). It is understood in regular paleoanthropology that H. habilis is the direct ancestor of H. erectus, which is the direct ancestor of H. heidelbergensis, in turn the direct ancestor of both H. neanderthalensis and our H. sapiens. There remains some debate as to whether H. ergaster and H. erectus are the same species, though. None of that was overturned by Spoor’s new evidence, but it does remind us of a persistent confusion in antievolutionary apologetics: how speciation happens.

The Spoor paper argued for the cladogenesis origin of erectus (speciation by splitting, where the branches can continue as contemporaries) versus the anagenetic model (where one species morphs gradually into another and so is replaced by the new one). The scientists explicitly did not claim that habilis was unrelated to erectus, or that erectus had not evolved from them at some point. In a shameless play of the “why are there still monkeys” trope that crops up in so much bottom-feeding creationist apologetics (especially online), Bell failed to appreciate what the article was discussing, and decided habilis couldn’t be an ancestor now solely because it persisted alongside erectus. This is exactly like saying your grandparents can’t be your ancestors because they’re still alive and giving you birthday presents—an argument so lame and refuted by any recognition of what systematics means, that even Answers in Genesis had to put up a post (by Tommy Mitchell in 2010) to warn believers to stop using it! The “junk” version of habilis does circulate in creationist apologetics, however, surfacing in all its superficial glory as recently as Christopher Rupe & John Sanford’s 2017 Contested Bones book. Which view in turn seeps down through the anti-evolutionist daisy chain, though sometimes the trail can be very convoluted. For example, in April of 2019 coauthor JD read a Twitter creationist’s invocation of a 10 July 2018 posting by the ostensibly Intelligent Design-favoring Uncommon Descent that in turn channeled one of theologian Joe Miller’s postings on human evolution, and Miller turned out to be cycling swathes of Contested Bones. And, what about White’s treatment of the other Homo species? He calls H. floresiensis a dwarf, and all the rest are merely humans (Rupe & Sanford’s book would continue that refrain at greater, but no less tendentious length). While H. floresiensis is small compared to other Homo, it has characteristics that relate it to H. erectus, meaning it is not just some microcephalic modern human. With all the other species, they have characteristics similar to our own (that is why we are in the same genus), but they also have characteristics that differ from us. For instance, all the prior hominids have cranial capacities less than ours, except for Neanderthals, which have a larger cranial volume. They also have obvious skull and pelvis shape differences, which inevitably get overlooked by creationists

anxious to clump them all into their narrow Adamic version of the human family. While we only have fossils of most hominins (apes more closely related to us than chimps), we do in fact have DNA from Neanderthals and Denisovans (a species of Homo that White neglected to mention). Their DNA informs us directly that Neanderthals and Denisovans are not just modern humans but separate species that interbred with humans, as indicated by a series of papers by Sriram Sankararaman and colleagues starting at just the time White and his creationist colleagues were not thinking about them. There was “The Date of Interbreeding between Neandertals and Modern Humans” in 2012, “The genomic landscape of Neanderthal ancestry in present-day humans” in 2014, and “The combined landscape of Denisovan and Neanderthal ancestry in present-day humans” in 2016. The take home point: Europeans interbred with Neanderthals, while southeast Asians did so with Denisovans. Yet more data White’s creationism neither uncovered nor has been able to make much sense of (other than to decree they all must have been just humans, as Christopher Rupe & John Sanford tried to in their book). As for that double asterisk White put on H. erectus, did he really think David Menton’s “Did Humans Really Evolve from Apelike Creatures?” provided a solid base to rest on? Menton’s chapter is just as abysmal as White’s, making the same bold and incorrect claim— that some non-human apes have been classed with Homo species— yet citing no specific examples. This is apparently what passes as credible scholarship among creationists in the 21st century. Which you’ll see even more of when we poke around in the basement of Menton’s method in Chapter 6. So, we see that White is completely unable to assail the fossil evidence for human evolution. Instead of grappling with the data (which is really interesting stuff), he just name-drops some species and declares them as this or that. Does he ever stop to explain why paleoanthropologists consider the australopithecines as links between Homo and earlier apes (such as Sahelanthropus) in the first place? No, and this is just par for the creationist course. In 2014 Adam Benton did an analysis for the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) showing how selective their writers were in

what taxa they brought up, easily obsessing on the Lucy fossil while shying away from all the others that had continued to accumulate. In failing to fairly lay out the available data and cogently account for it, White’s incompetence is not some aberration, he is the norm. One of the most amusing things (if that’s the right word) about how creationists have stumbled around the hominid fossil record is how not easy it has been for them to pigeonhole the samples according to their model. In 2008 Jim Foley looked at several decades of creationist apologists to see how they classified the same six fossils (ones paleontologists deem to be Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo ergaster, and a trio of Homo erectus, the older “Java” and “Peking” man designations from the early years of the science, and the more recent WT 15000 “Turkana Boy”). Foley reviewed books by Sylvia Baker, Jack Cuozzo, Marvin Lubenow, and two by Duane Gish, plus geocentrist Malcolm Bowden (yes, he doubts the Earth revolves around the Sun), a deluge of Paul Taylor pieces (a 1992 book, and a 1996 article contrasting with an earlier 1995 version done with Mark Van Bebber), along with some articles by Peter Line, David Menton and Bill Melhert. Michael Keesey built on that in his 2016 book chapter for the Kane anthology, adding the 2004 updated version of Lubenow, and we’re including Todd Wood’s 2010 offering in our own chart. Besides the obvious fact that none of the fossils are uniformly classified by   Creationist Skull Classification Wood 2010 Line 2005

H. habilis

H. rudolfensis

H. ergaster

 

H. erectus

KNM-ER

KNM-ER

KNM-ER

Java

Peking

KNM-WT

1813

1470

3733

Man

Man

15000

Human

Human

Human?

Human? Human Human Human Human



 

Human Human Human Human

Cuozzo 1998

Ape

Ape

Mehlert 1996

Ape

Ape

Human Human Human Human

Ape

Human

Human Human Human Human

Ape

Human

Human

Ape

Human

Human

Lubenow 2004 Lubenow 1992 Taylor 1996 &

Ape

Ape

Ape

Ape

Ape

Human Human Human

Human Human

Van Bebber ‘95 Taylor 1992

Ape

Human

Human

Ape

Ape

Human

Menton 1988

Ape

Human

Human

Ape

Ape

Human

Bowden 1981

Ape

Human

Human

Ape

Ape

Human

Gish 1985

Ape

Ape

Human

Ape

Ape

Human

Gish 1979

Ape

Human

Human

Ape

Ape

Human

Baker 1976

Ape

Human

Human Human Human Human

the eleven creationists, there are the several flip-flops by the same analyst, such as Duane Gish nudging the KNM-ER 1470 Homo rudolfensis skull from human to ape in 1985, Paul Taylor deciding after a few years that the Java and Peking Homo erectus specimens (found in the 1890s and 1920s respectively) were not apes after all, and Marvin Lubenow similarly shunting Java Man from ape to human. And then there’s the fence-straddling Peter Line, not being able to go all the way with ER 1813 or ER 1470 being unquestionably human, unlike the baraminologist Wood, who effectively embraced all of genus Homo as human. This confusion has not stopped in the years since, as Joel Duff mused regarding the initial creationist reaction to the Homo naledi finds. First uncovered in 2015, they appeared to involve deliberate burial in an African cave by that hominid some 300,000 years ago (see the collaborative papers by Lee Berger, Paul Dirks, William HarcourtSmith, John Hawks, Ralph Holloway and Tracy Kivell from 2015 to 2018). Anatomically naledi had a mosaic of traits, though, many of them prompting Berger’s team to suspect the species was several million years old (though the best dates that have come up so far put them much more recent than that, only around 300,000 years ago).. In any case, naledi’s relatively small brain raised interesting questions if they were indeed hauling their dead deep into a relatively inaccessible cave, but without prior fossils it couldn’t be known how much earlier their species had originated. There were so many specimens in the cave, though, that their collective anatomy ruled out that their being some dwarfed human population. But the creationist pigeonhole does not permit such tantalizing ambiguity; it’s either ape or human. So Duff found Ken Ham, Frank

Sherwin, and Elizabeth Mitchell (relying specifically on David Menton) pegging them as apes, while Kurt Wise favored their being humans. In 2015 Marc Ambler at Creation Ministries International (CMI) laid precautionary roadblocks, disparaging the regular scientific interpretation as “pseudo-scientific” and dropping such fossil data in the waste bin of “origins science” (inherently “unobservable, untestable”) yet managed to observe these hominids anyway as putatively “ordinary human beings with some unique anatomical variations” (like those Homo erectus). Peter Line (inclined to see just about everything as humans) similarly nested naledi in erectus territory and thereby filed them as just particularly odd Homo sapiens, as did Christopher Rupe & John Sanford in their 2017 Contested Bones book. Meanwhile, a trio of articles at ICR by Tim Clarey in 2015 and 2016 added more fences to be straddled, asking “Could these paleontologists have fabricated a new species by cobbling together parts from unrelated kinds?” (short answer from science: no), but avoided taking a stand as to where they fell on the baraminological scale, though remaining confident “they were likely deposited late in the Flood year, making them about 4,500 years old.” Enter “Independent Scholar” Jean O’Micks in 2016, who managed to tick both ends of the range in one year, employing the creationist baraminological techniques to concur with the human designation— and then doing another recalculation paper that decided exactly the opposite, which sparked pushback from Todd Wood and a flurry of rejoinders by O’Micks. Moreover, O’Micks’ additional insistence that the naledi remains were deposited catastrophically during the Flood was challenged by fellow creationist Matthew McLain in 2017, who stuck by the human designation because of those signs of deliberate non-cataclysmic burial (which apes weren’t permitted to do in the creationist dogma, but which wonky humans might). Late that year Tim Clarey sidled off the fence and drew on O’Micks’ version to opt for a non-human designation for naledi, but didn’t press the issue of whether the Flood year deposition frame needed to be junked. For comparison, Ann Gauger, Douglas Axe and Casey Luskin’s 2012 Science & Human Origins book reflected the Intelligent Design perspective: there was an Adam & Eve (at some point) while none of

the hominid set are our physical relatives. Casey Luskin went all Peter Line though by contending that “Subsequent members of the genus Homo appear very similar to modern humans, and their differences amount to small-scale microevolutionary changes” (the caliper details of which he neglected to specify). That vagueness prevailed when it came to Homo naledi, which Casey Luskin thought didn’t justify that Homo designation, while offering no alternative ID systematics. Uncommon Descent channeled Glen Martin’s University of California (Berkeley) press release on Tim White’s suspicion that naledi might be just an erectus offshoot, but offered no systematic interpretation of their own as to whether any of the various Homo bunch were our slightly varied relatives (as Luskin implied in the 2012 book). Evolution News weighed in again in 2017 to crow about the younger dating of the finds, and in 2018 to delight in Charles Egeland et al.’s new paper suggesting the naledi bones might have got there by natural predation after all (which would remove that head-scratcher of so primitive a taxon doing such things). So much text offered, yet not explaining what the ID model said had happened. The latest entry in the pigeonholing parade is Jeffrey Tomkins in a January 2020 Acts & Facts article, intimating naledi rests on the ape side of things. These examples regarding hominid fossils reflect the manner antievolutionists employ to dispose of all the physical evidence: selectively highlight ambiguities in the science work none of them contributed to, while hiding as much as possible their own (not worked out) alternative. And that’s what we get in Monty White’s concluding section, “Evolution of New Kinds?” in which he explains how Darwin came to the conclusion that organisms are related to each other by studying the Galápagos finches. His summary was mostly fine except for the end, when the creationist inserted his own creationist obsessions: “From these types of simple observations and conclusions, Darwin developed not only the idea of the evolution of species but also the idea of chemicals-to-chemist evolution!” White continues:  

But let us consider exactly what Darwin actually observed—finches living on different islands feeding on different types of food having different beaks. What did he propose? That these finches had descended from a pair or flock of finches. In other words, he proposed that finches begat finches—that is, they reproduced after their own kind. This is exactly what the Bible teaches in Genesis 1.  

A lot to unpack here. Yes, Darwin demonstrated through his work on finches (among a lot of other organisms) that it is reasonable to think all life is related to each other. If all the Galápagos finches are related to each other, then are they also related to the finches on the Ecuador mainland? Are all finches related to each other? Are finches related to grosbeaks? Creationist Mike Riddle was unable to answer this question, but it’s even worse than that. In her 2013 creationist analysis proposing 196 bird “kinds”, Jean Lightner casually accepted the standard evolutionary cue sheet by allowing all the genera of finch (a whopping 1200 species) as being within the same kind. In other words, accepting a range of variation that in and of itself opens the floodgates to all manner of morphological change. With such elasticity in play, where can the creationist put on the brakes? What about the yellow-crowned euphonia? What about the brambling? The golden pipit? The northern grey-headed sparrow? The olive warbler? The Asian fairy-bluebird? The pink-tailed bunting? Parrots? Falcons? Owls? Hawks? Waders? Sandpipers? Flamingoes? Petrels? Pigeons? Hummingbirds? Nightjars? Fowl? Ratites? Mike Riddle could not even say if the kakapo (the night parrot, in case you were wondering) was related to the sulfur-crested cockatoo. Is creationist systematics completely worthless? This is what science communicator Aron Ra calls the Phylogeny Challenge; it is the inability of anti-evolutionists everywhere to delineate organisms that are related to each other from organisms that are not. Sure, anti-evolutionists will happily say that the Komodo dragon is not related to something highly divergent like the kakapo (even though we can show genetically and morphologically that they are indeed related if you track back far enough), but they cannot tell us if snakes, skinks, geckos, iguanas, crocodiles, and turtles are related to the Komodo dragon or to one another.

And yet, despite their consistent failure to do so, anti-evolutionists would have us believe that all organisms can be broken down into “kinds” or “types”—what a pathetic display. What Darwin proposed is that the environment unconsciously shapes the pool of available traits in a population (that’s natural selection). And if you rewound the clock, you could go back to a point where two different species were one species, and that their population split with members being affected by different environments. Over time, those different populations became different species, which is exactly what we observe. White accepts all of this (theoretically), but he does not accept that the speciation process just keeps going back through history. Why? Because he doesn’t think to look, to apply that finch beak-sized variation stick to the whole available data field. White and all other creationists believe there is some mysterious—and as yet undefined— genetic mechanism preventing organisms from speciating “too much.” But all the while they avoid looking too much at the actual data, even as at the same time, creationists expand the definition of kind to the point where small, terrestrial artiodactyls can evolve—sorry, vary—into gigantic, totally aquatic cetaceans. Let’s take those finches again, the bunch Lightner conceded en bloc to be a kind. All finches are collected into a family called fringillidae. So, does that mean a “kind” is a family? Traditionally that’s exactly what “kind” meant in prescientific animal husbandry, as Harriet Ritvo covered. But if so, aren’t humans, chimps, gorillas, and orangutans all the same kind too, being taxonomically ranked in the primate family? Well, that won’t do—we must be special. Grease up that sliding scale. Some examples. Kent Hovind skipped the whole kind = family thing to adopt (not without irony) the standard biological species concept, where the defining line is the reproductive isolation of a population. By that means Hovind could also accept the existence of ring species (where a population, like the Ensatina salamanders or greenish warblers, can speciate around some geographic barrier such that the last population around the ring can no longer interbreed with the first). What he clearly didn’t think through was how to cram all the known species onto the Ark.

Speaking of the Ark, John Woodmorappe wrote in Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study that kind is about a genus. That too is rather too far down the systematic rung for Noah to comfortably book them all into stalls. Understandably Woodmorappe did not include a list in his book. For those interested, ex-creationist Glenn Morton offered some pungent criticism of the feasibility of Woodmorappe’s feasibility study. And then there’s the 2014 debate Ken Ham had with Bill Nye, in which Ham tossed off examples (dogs and elephants) that meant he had just allowed created kinds to be simultaneously a family (canidae) and an order (proboscidea). Georgia Purdom went even further in the loose language department in a 2019 video for Answers in Genesis when she referred to bird and dinosaur kinds (those would be a class and a clade even larger than a class). Where does it end? With a beached boat. Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter recreation of Noah’s vessel (out of historically authentic wood and reinforced concrete) did at least supply a list of the kinds purportedly aboard: roughly 1,500, which mainly ran along the old family designation. They had way more bird kinds aboard than Lightner’s list, by the way, largely because they included ones that had gone extinct. In fact, according to their own reckoning, over half of all the kinds put aboard the Ark went extinct post-Flood. But wasn’t the whole idea of the Ark to preserve the animals of God’s creation? By their own measure what happened afterward makes one want to hunt for the receipt to get a refund. Inherent in the whole creationist dogma of kinds are two intractable bottlenecks. First, all the diversity caught in the fossil record (virtually all of which is attributed by YECers to the Flood) must have proliferated from the original created kinds in only some 1,600 years (the time between Eden around 4,000 BC, to the Flood around 2,350). Then a second bottleneck occurs in which all extant species must have proliferated from the kinds aboard the Ark again, and that had to have taken place since the Flood and before humans started bumping into them and taking stock of their existence (once again in around 1600 years or less). To do that requires not only accepting the reality of natural speciation, but that it can occur at a rate totally unjustified by all the work on speciation processes and the genetics underlying them. Because there’s so much fossil and living taxa to account for, this

leads to a hilarious muddle in the creationist community, noted by critics from ex-creationist David MacMillan in 2015 to Joel Duff in 2017, where grassroots creationists are still holding the line on rejecting speciation (“change within kinds”) even as the professionals in their field are sliding the animals down a baraminological funhouse ride. All of which makes this bluff of White unintentionally hilarious:  

It cannot be overemphasized that no one has ever seen one kind of plant or animal changing into another different kind. Darwin did not observe this, even though he proposed that it does happen. There are literally thousands of plant and animal kinds on the earth today, and these verify what the Bible indicates in Genesis 1 about plants and animals reproducing after their own kind.  

We most certainly agree that Darwin did not observe, nor claim to observe, “one kind of plant or animal changing into another different kind,” especially since this sounds like metamorphosis (a rhododendron changing into an earwig perhaps?). Darwin reasoned that organisms are related to each other due to their morphological similarities, which we understand are inherited from parent to offspring. Since creationists have no idea what a kind is, no one could possibly observe one of them changing into another. But wait, maybe White will be kind enough to tell us what a kind is after all:  

For example, we see different varieties of Brassica—kale, cabbage, cauliflower are all varieties of the wild common mustard Brassica oleracea. Furthermore, another perfect example of a kind is the hundreds of different varieties of dogs, including spaniels, terriers, bulldogs, Chihuahuas, Great Danes, German shepherds, Irish wolfhounds, and greyhounds, which are all capable of interbreeding, together with wolves, jackals, dingoes, and coyotes. All are descended from the two representatives of the dog kind that came off Noah’s ark.  

Well that settles that, doesn’t it? Or maybe not. For kale, cabbage, and cauliflower, these are all varieties of the same artificially selected species, tracked in considerable detail in a 2018 paper by Lorenzo Maggioni et al. And the same goes for domestic dog breeds. They are exactly the same species (Canis lupus familiaris) and all are descended from the

grey wolf (Canis lupus). So is a kind a species then? Second, “jackal” is not a single species though, and the term is used in reference to many small canids. In modern taxonomy, the only true “jackals” are the black-backed jackal (Canis mesomelas), sidestriped jackal (Canis adustus), and golden jackal (Canis aureus)— three different species within that genus (as we are with Homo habilis). Third, what the dingo is has been hotly debated for over 200 years with the most recent taxonomic placement making it Canis familiaris, according to Stephen Jackson et al.’s 2017 paper “The Wayward Dog: Is the Australian native dog or Dingo a distinct species?” Fourth, the coyote is Canis latrans. Now, notice that all the “dogs” are members of the genus Canis— which are mostly capable of interbreeding with each other—however, not all members of the family canidae are capable of interbreeding. The blogger “Roostertail” surveyed the hybrid breeding that had been done, indicating members of Canis are incapable of interbreeding with South American canids, foxes, African wild dogs, bat-eared foxes, or raccoon dogs. And, to make things worse, the black-backed and sidestriped jackals cannot successfully interbreed with the other species of Canis. So, is more than one kind contained within the genus Canis? Are multiple “dog kinds” within canidae? Even White’s perfect example of a kind is a failure. The problem posed by Ra’s Phylogeny Challenge is that this level of naturally observed variation cuts the rug from under all the systematics. Everything in a macroevolutionary sequence is just a pileup of just such incremental natural variation. And the only thing stopping the creationists from connecting those dots is that they don’t notice most of the dots and make no effort to connect them. White reached his conclusion by not doing any research or factchecking the few creationists he relied on to reassure him that evolution is false. Having tracked a familiar terrain of bad arguments, White finished with a quote-mine from a 2004 Interview Bill Moyers had with Richard Dawkins: “It’s just that [evolution] hasn’t been observed while it’s happening.” Should anyone be surprised that Dawkins had gone on to say something that, had White been fair with the quote, would have been relevant to attend to? Here’s what Dawkins said next:  

It is rather like a detective coming on a murder after the scene… The detective hasn’t actually seen the murder take place, of course. But what you do see is a massive clue… Huge quantities of circumstantial evidence. It might as well be spelled out in words of English.  

Yes, the evidence for evolution has been observed, but no one was directly watching and recording the evolution of life on Earth. No one can live long enough to follow the entirety of a macroevolutionary transition that spans millions of years, but the forensic clues at the “change in allele frequencies in a population over generations” level supplies that crime scene forensic measure. In his book The Greatest Show on Earth Dawkins titled an entire chapter “Before Our Very Eyes” wherein he recounted direct observations of evolution seen in African elephants, the Italian wall lizard on Pod Mrčaru, and guppies. For the African elephants, the proportion of members without tusks is increasing due to artificial selection from poachers. For the Italian wall lizards (Podarcis sicula), a population of them was moved from the Adriatic island Pod Kopište to Pod Mrčaru, and within twenty years, the population on Pod Mrčaru had undergone behavioral and anatomical changes from the original population (they became primarily herbivorous instead of insectivorous, like the original lizards, so they developed cecal valves in their intestines). Lastly, the guppies showed distinct morphological differences in populations that underwent predation versus those that did not. While creationists may just scoff that these are all example of mere microevolution “within a kind”, they are the very engine of evolution. In the end though, what a single scientist says about evolution is irrelevant. What matters are the data pertaining to evolution, which is overwhelmingly in favor of evolution occurring both today and in the past. White blatantly misrepresents the little data he does attempt to evaluate and ignores so much more. Instead of carefully investigating the vast field of evolutionary studies, White opts for the most superficial jabs at concepts he shows little understanding of. Worst of all though is that White is not alone in his unsatisfactory scholarship. All anti-evolutionists are like this. As a body they have ignored huge swaths of data (the data their model would need to

account for too)—upwards of 90% of it—as we will be seeing in the chapters to follow.



4. On Creationists Who Should Know Better Already, you have seen failure after failure of anti-evolutionists to address the evidence in favor of evolution. We saw it in Roger Patterson’s failing to think about the epistemology of science in the first chapter, Mike Riddle’s inability to present radiometric dating accurately in the second, and A. J. Monty White’s complete misunderstanding of evolution and lack of credible citations for his arguments in the third. In a way though, this is not too surprising: anti-evolutionists already miss over 90% of the relevant technical data relating to evolution. But, you must understand that not all anti-evolutionists are created equal. At the bottom of the anti-evolutionist barrel we have the grassroots dilettantes. These are people who have no ties to traditional creationist organizations like the Institute for Creation Research, Answers in Genesis or its offshoot Creation Ministries International, or the more recent Intelligent Design promoting Discovery Institute, but reflect at arm’s length the arguments put forth by these groups.[23] For instance, at a gem and mineral convention, coauthor JW met a woman who was trying to spread young Earth creationism— completely unaware, we guess, that she was surrounded by pieces of evidence for an old Earth that you could literally hold in your hands. Some of these people have never learned about evolution, of course; they are merely told that “Evolution is bad!” by their pastors or parents, and for many of them, that is enough. As someone who lives in the American “South”, JW can understand this attitude. We could have a hard time faulting these people for their beliefs, unless we remember how easily the genuine science information is available these days, and wonder what stops them from even trying to look. Above these honest if misguided anti-evolutionists, there are many who are all too familiar with the claims of the aforementioned organizations, because they slavishly copy them. The bloggers and YouTubers who believe they have a pretty good handle on the

evidence against evolution because they’ve relied on sources that have told them what they want to be true. We have met a number of them, and they rarely know anything about how evolution actually works—the pitfalls of letting other people do their thinking for them, trying to get both sides of an argument from sources dedicated to not giving both sides. Interestingly, many at this level of anti-evolutionism get their arguments from a plethora of sources, mixing young Earth creationist (YEC) with Intelligent Design (ID) without realizing how mutually incompatible many of those arguments are (such as mushing the “fine tuning” argument for the physical universe that comes from the ID side, with a YEC cosmology that denies the accuracy of the very astrophysics that identified the supposed fine tuning). We may call them “smorgasborders”—and coauthor JD has spent many a (fine?) hour following their circuitous paths in his TIP research. A case in point: ID can incorporate the old age of the Earth and large swaths of common descent, as ID proponent Michael Behe points out in his book Darwin’s Black Box:  

Evolution is a controversial topic, so it is necessary to address a few basic questions at the beginning of the book. Many people think that questioning Darwinian evolution must be equivalent to espousing creationism. As commonly understood, creationism involves belief in an earth formed only about ten thousand years ago, an interpretation of the Bible that is still very popular. For the record, I have no reason to doubt that the universe is the billions of years old that physicists say it is. Further, I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it. I greatly respect the work of my colleagues who study the development and behavior of organisms within an evolutionary framework, and I think that evolutionary biologists have contributed enormously to our understanding of the world. Although Darwin’s mechanism – natural selection working on variation – might explain many things, however, I do not believe it explains molecular life.

  Down on the grassroots floor, busy smorgasborders can easily take from Michael Behe’s “Irreducible Complexity” notions on the bacterial flagellum (that their components are too intricately matched to have evolved, despite experiments and observations to the contrary), and combine that with arguments from creationists on

different subjects, like Duane Gish’s “irreducible complexity” argument concerning the bombardier beetle (that all of its chemical constituents must have been formed together in order to have worked). These two, though, have very different positions: Behe saying that some things could not have evolved even over long periods (which he allowed to exist); Gish that nothing evolved over long periods (in part because there were no long periods). Up at the The New Answers Book 2 level, Georgia Purdom recognizes the deep conflict between ID and YEC, criticizing ID for being insufficiently creationist in her chapter “Is the Intelligent Design Movement Christian?” This same sort of contradictory argumentation occurs when creationists nick quotes from paleornithologist Alan Feduccia on why he thinks birds did not evolve from dinosaurs. Feduccia has never argued that birds did not evolve at all—quite the opposite; he is arguing that birds are not theropod dinosaurs but instead share a common ancestor with dinosaurs somewhere in the archosaur/thecodont past. This is an extremely minority view within biology and paleontology (lest anyone complain “Ad populum fallacy!” we will return to the evidence for birds being dinosaurs and Feduccia’s positions on that in later chapters). The point is that Feduccia recognizes very keenly that birds are evolved archosaurs and contained within the clade of diapsid amniotes. This fact has to be ignored every time he is invoked by creationists, which happens a lot. Of course, more likely than not, the smorgasborders stealing their Feduccia quotes have never read anything by Feduccia directly, but are mining them from Answers in Genesis or some other anti-evolutionist (including Harun Yahya, as we noted of Kent Hovind in Chapter 2). In fact, coauthor JW’s very first foray into YouTube concerned a video series titled “Evolutionless” put together by a smorgasborder. The series had quotes from YECs Mike Riddle and Georgia Purdom as well as from ID proponent (and AIDS denialist) Jonathan Wells, and the video even quote-mined an evolutionary biologist! Yes, most of the videos were just long quotes with no substantive arguments—and remember, a quote is not data. Interestingly, most quotes grassroots anti-evolutionists use were not found by the anti-evolutionists using them. Instead, most trace back along “daisy chain” copying trails. For example, a quote about the

eye in Origin of Species is not independently discovered by each antievolutionist; rather, the quote has a long history of being cited in antievolutionist literature. In fact it’s so ubiquitous that coauthor JD just calls it “the Darwin quote.” In case you have never seen it: “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” Now, you can be reasonably certain that anyone who cites the eye quote as a cudgel against evolution has not read Origin of Species, since Darwin wrote this just two sentences later:  

Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.  

These people who are just stealing quotes and arguments from other YECs or ID proponents are what we call “non-fact claimants” because they do not invent original arguments. (A less charitable term might be “parasitical secondary source addicts.”) The vast majority of anti-evolutionists are non-fact claimants, simply using recycled (and debunked) arguments. A part of the reason for this is that fact claimants have to read scientific technical literature and construct their arguments as best they can from that. In truth, reading technical literature can be daunting; there is much complex jargon that one has to know to fully understand a paper, and most

people will not take the time to learn said jargon (again as we saw with Kent Hovind). But what of anti-evolutionists who seek to make their arguments based on the technical work? How many genuine fact claimants are there operating today? As it happens, coauthor JD keeps track of this sort of thing in his TIP project. As of this writing, he has compiled a set of over 60,000 articles and books. Of these, over 9,400 are authored by anti-evolutionists, written by some 2,500 individuals. But most of those are secondary quote miners; only 64 of those 2,500 qualify as notable fact claimants. Yes, you read that correctly. Only about 2% of active current antievolutionist authors draw on primary source science work directly (occasionally even their own). How sad (or at the very least, methodologically revealing) is that? In case you were wondering, here’s the current Fact Claimant list from the TIP data field. Around half have also published technical work in standard scientific publications dealing with evolution-relevant topics (biology typically for the ID side, and more geology for the YEC advocates) who we’ve highlighted in bold. See how many names ring a bell for you:

  Intelligent OEC Design 1.

Douglas

Axe

1.

Young Creationists Earth Mark

1.

24. Henry

Morris

Fazale Armitage Rana Günter

2.

Bechly

Christopher

2.

2.

Hugh

Ashcraft

25. John

Morris

26. Paul

Nelson

Ross 3.

Michael  

Behe

Austin William

4.

 

Dembski 5.

Steve

3.

Michael  

Denton 6.

Egnor

Michael  

4.

William F.

27. Michael

Oard

Basener 5.

John

28. David

Plaisted

Baumgardner 6.

Bergman

Jerry

29.

Purdom

Georgia

Ann  

7.

Gauger

Peter

7.

Borger Wolf-

8.

 

Ekkehard

Rupe

Leonard

8.

Christopher

30.

Brand

John

31.

Sanford

Lönnig Casey

9.

 

Luskin

Brown Scott  

10.

Minnich  

Meyer Sewell David

 

Snoke Lee

 

Spetner Richard James

David

13.

Joe

14.

Andrew

35.

36.

Brian Thomas

37.

Jeffrey

 

Tomkins

Robert

15.

38.

Royal Truman

39.

Larry

Gentry  

16. Alan

Gillen

Tour

Vardiman

Jonathan  

Wells  

Emil

34.

Snelling

Deweese

Sternberg

17.

Sherwin

Coppedge

14.

16.

Timothy

12.

Frank

33.

Silvestru

Clarey

13.

15.

Arthur V.

Chadwick

Granville  

12.

David

10.

11.

Jonathan

32.

Sarfati

Cavanaugh

Stephen

11.

Walter

9.

17.

Duane

40. Davis

Randy

41. Carl

Werner

Gish  

18.

Wieland

Guliuzza  

 

Jake

19.

42. Jay

Wile

Hebert  

 

20.

Nathaniel

43. Kurt

Wise

Jeanson  

 

Jean

21.

44. Todd

Wood

Lightner  

 

22.

Jason Lisle

45.

John

Woodmorappe  

 

23.

Elizabeth

Mitchell

 

 

If you think we’ve missed anyone, or overlooked some of their regular published science work, let us know (both authors are active in social media, including Twitter, and have YouTube channels). We’ve shaded Paul Nelson (who operates in the ID camp), and the late giants of YEC, Gish and Morris). Altogether, the output of the ID/OEC and YEC fact claimants directly represent well over half of their side’s apologetic literature, and of course influential beyond that by all the secondary copyists who repeat their claims. A lot. Meanwhile, every researcher who makes a new observation or experiment regarding evolution is a fact claimant, meaning the vast majority of biological researchers, paleontologists, geologists, astrophysicists, etc. are fact claimants. Again, in the TIP data field alone as of this writing, that’s a set of over 66,000 working scientists, producing a body of over 27,000 technical papers. As you can see from the table above, almost all of these fact claimants are “upper echelon” anti-evolutionists—the ones who work through Answers in Genesis or the Discovery Institute. But, you must understand that not all the authors at those organizations are fact claimants. For instance, Roger Patterson, Mike Riddle, and A. J. Monty White are not fact claimants; they are secondary redactors. This means they themselves are not out reading the technical literature but are cribbing the information from someone else who did claim to have read the technical work. You’ll recall the case of Mike Riddle in Chapter 2, where both coauthors were able to grill him on his lack of technical knowledge. Far more common, though, are the broad body of antievolutionists who are getting the information from someone who read somebody else’s summary of a technical work. Remember how White used (1) Jerry Bergman’s article where Bergman was getting his information on homochirality from (2) Jonathan Sarfati; and of them, only Sarfati was reading the technical work on homochirality. The daisy chain lives on. This latter daisy chain approach is precisely what goes on at the Answers in Genesis biweekly show Answers News. The usual crew is Ken Ham, Bodie Hodge, and Georgia Purdom (though they sometimes substitute others, like Avery Foley), and they stick to reading just secondary works. That is, they read a popular magazine summary of a technical work and critique that.

But why waste time attacking a popular article when you could take on the data directly? The reason they do this is that two of them (Ham and Hodge) plainly do not have technical expertise. Purdom does, though—however, she repeatedly declines to employ her technical expertise out in the open for anyone to see (her efforts will be one of our case studies in this chapter). If that was not strange enough, she also does not even reliably deploy her education in genetics (Purdom has a PhD there) to help the baraminology effort.  

Case Study 1: Jeffrey Tomkins and Human Chromosome 2  

Fact claimant Jeffrey Tomkins does employ his education in genetics now and then, appearing as a coauthor in the literature, but his expertise regarding really assessing the claims of creationism is another matter. For example, when interviewed by Brian Thomas in 2018, Tomkins told how impressed he’d been with Henry Morris’ 1985 Scientific Creationism: “it all meshed—science fit the Bible. There were no contradictions, and the science was totally solid.” From which we may deduce Tomkins never tried to honestly fact-check what he’d read in that volume. Tomkins is probably most renowned among creationists for coming up with the argument that the chromosome 2 fusion never happened, his claims filtering down through the creationist daisy chain via regular reinforcement in their apologetic literature, such as Nathaniel Jeanson in a September 2013 Acts & Facts update. Readers can peruse the many articles we’ve included in the references by Tomkins and Jeanson repeating what Steven Novella calls their “sophisticated nonsense” on the DNA of humans and our chimpanzee cousins. The result are statements like that of Russ Miller in 2015, who in between conducting creationist-friendly tours into the Grand Canyon, boldly asserts that “claiming that Human Chromosome 2 is proof of goo-to-the-zoo-to-you evolutionism is nothing more than Humanistic propaganda.” The background for this is a most interesting tale, with many thanks to the biologists who have recorded the saga in their online pieces, EvoGrad and Nesslig, and likeminded bloggers, such as Itsdemtitans at The League of Reason in the UK and Alec MacAndrew.

First, some basics. Our DNA is held in the cellular nucleus, and when cells need to undergo replication, they coil the DNA into long linear strands called chromosomes. Non-hominin hominids (nonhuman great apes) have 24 pairs of chromosomes with 2 pairs being homologous to our single pair of chromosome 2’s. The primates that are our next closest relatives, the hylobatids or gibbons have members with wildly varying karyotypes (26, 25, 22 and even only 19 pairs). All the other simians (monkeys) have even a greater variety of karyotypes. Meaning chromosome variations are not uncommon in primates. So, what happened to our extra pair of chromosomes? They couldn’t have simply disappeared, since they carry functional genes and hence their absence would have been lethal to the carrier. Rather, biologists predicted that (a) either the common ancestor of great apes had 23 chromosome pairs and thereafter the non-human great apes had to experience a chromosome fission giving them 24; or (b) the common ancestor had 24 pairs, and somewhere along the line leading to humans after splitting from the chimpanzee line, two of the chromosomes fused end-to-end, resulting in us having 23 pairs. The latter hypothesis is far more parsimonious since that would only require one fusion event compared to three independent fissions among the other apes according to the other hypothesis. Thus, scientists expected to find one human chromosome that was the result of a fusion and is homologous to the two ancestral chromosomes that remained separate in the other great apes. Voila, our modern chromosome 2. Now, researchers know chromosomes have fused because these structures have specific parts, called a centromere and telomeres. The centromere occupies the center of the chromosome, and telomeres are on the ends. The telomere is pretty easily recognizable, since it’s specified by repeats of the sequences TTAGGG. Having two or more genes conserved in the same location on the comparable chromosomes of different species is called synteny, and comparing our human chromosome 2 with the ape chromosomes 13 and 14 (2A and 2B), researchers predicted that if a fusion had occurred, they should find buried remnants of the old telomeres and centromere at specific locations in the new longer fused chromosome.

These predictions were met by the work of J. W. Ijdo et al. in 1991, and Rosamaria Avarello et al. in 1992. At this point we feel that it’s necessary to drive home this point about the prediction. It isn’t the mere fact that there was a chromosomal fusion that is strong evidence for evolution and our shared ancestry with the other apes—after all, humans could have been specially created with 48 chromosomes and experienced the fusion event in the same way. But when a model makes a specific, risky prediction that is then found to be accurate, this is a good indication that the model is true. The chromosome prediction was based purely on the premise that humans share a common ancestry with apes. The fusion event logically followed from common ancestry, reinforced by the observation of different chromosome counts in humans versus the other apes. In other words: all the available data was taken into account. Meanwhile, creationists using their model of separate ancestry not only would have had no reason whatsoever to think that so specific a fusion had occurred (their model would have explained the difference in the number of chromosomes by saying “that’s the way God made us”)—we know no creationist ever made such a prediction. The likes of Tomkins only jumped on the bandwagon post hoc to try and explain away the successful evolutionary prediction. There’s been extensive technical work over the years over the details and dynamics of chromosomal variation in general, and our chromosome 2 fusion in particular. On that latter, there’s the 2004 paper by Pawel Stankiewicz et al. and Julie Horvath et al. in 2005 on duplication events clued by our chromosome 2, and Rebecca Capper et al. clarified telomere fusions in 2007. Mario Ventura has contributed papers from 2001 to 2012 on fusions in the primates. As more archaic hominin DNA became available, in 2016 Karen Miga was able to peg the hominin C2 fusion as occurring well before our last common ancestor with the Denisovans and Neanderthals (possibly as far back as 3.5 million years ago), and Stankiewicz penned a work guaranteed to pique the curiosity of creation/evolution watchers: “One pedigree we all may have come from—did Adam and Eve have the chromosome 2 fusion?” On the parallel matter of chromosome inversions (where a chromosome gets flipped in the genome end to end, and can cause

problems if any of the DNA gets lost in the process), Hreinn Stefansson et al. detected “A common inversion under selection in Europeans” in 2005, and there are useful reviews of inversion processes by Mark Kirkpatrick and Nick Barton in 2006 and 2010. Sex chromosomal fusions have occurred as well, a 2015 paper by Matthew Pennell et al. exploring examples of those in fish and reptiles. Most recently, a 2018 paper by Vladimir Lukhtanov et al. worked out how the staged sequence of meiosis can end up favoring chromosomal hybrids in a population (butterflies in the case they studied at the genetic level). So, biologists made a prediction based on evolution, and that prediction turned out to be true, buttressed by years of follow-up work. Then, we’re done, right? Not even close. This is where Jeffrey Tomkins comes in. He and Jerry Bergman had been trying for years to destroy the chromosome 2 fusion argument, though without notable success, as documented by PZ Myers in “Basics: How can chromosome numbers change?” in 2008, “Creationist FUD refuted” in 2012, and “Jeffrey Tomkins is up to his old dishonest tricks again” in 2017. By then things had got more technical, as Tomkins had coauthored a pair of papers in creationist journals on “The chromosome 2 fusion model of human evolution” with Bergman in 2011, and in 2013 his solo article confidently proclaimed “Alleged Human Chromosome 2 ‘Fusion Site’ Encodes an Active DNA Binding Domain Inside a Complex and Highly Expressed Gene—Negating Fusion.” Glenn Williamson (blogging as roohif) has similarly pointed out Tomkins’ inability to dismiss evidence for the chromosomal fusion. For example, Tomkins displayed along the way a picture of repeats of the reverse telomeric sequence—that would be CCCTAA, because in the DNA base pairing game, adenine matches up with thymine, and cytosine pairs with guanine. The existence of so many repeats of this sequence at the other end of the fusion site is directly indicative of the vestigial telomere region. Imagine the THECATSONTHEMAT as analogous to the TTAGGG, with thecatsonthemat as the counterpart. Researchers not only found the expected repeats of THECATSONTHEMAT at one end of the fusion cite, but also the reverse thecatsonthemat filling out the

opposite end. Those distinctive book end repeats betrayed Tomkins’ own argument. Tomkins tried to end run this problem in his 2013 paper, quibbling that “the putative fusion sequence is highly degenerate given the inferred evolutionary timescale.” Strange, right? Is Tomkins suggesting that the telomeric region should be in perfect condition after 6 million years? Although himself a Young Earth creationist, for the purpose of slamming the fusion matter, Tomkins temporarily allowed the standard chronology to prevail, correctly positing that it occurred between 3 and 6 million years ago. Why then shouldn’t the vestigial telomeres be degenerating after so long a time? Here’s why. You see, telomeres are “eaten” away during each cell division in humans as DNA polymerases can’t finish the job completely at the lagging strand. When it is time to form new telomeres, enzymes called telomerases repeatedly add a specific motif of nucleotides, that TTAGGG or CCCTAA, to make new telomeric repeats at the ends of chromosomes. The core RNA component of the telemerases has an evolutionary story to tell, by the way, as “The conserved structure of plant telomerase RNA provides the missing link for an evolutionary pathway from ciliates to humans” (the title of a 2019 paper by Jiarui Song et al.). Down at the business end, mutations that happen in telomeres are simply erased when new telomeres are created. The only way for the telomeres to change in sequence is by changing the enzymes such that they add a different motif. So it’s not as though the telomeric sequence at the ends of chromosomes are highly conserved because any mutation in the telomeres is deleterious and wouldn’t be passed on to the next generation. Thus, the sequence of the vestigial telomeres in chromosome 2 isn’t highly conserved because the mutations that happen there aren’t erased by the process of telomere shortening and replacement, which only happens at the ends of chromosomes. The fusion put them all in the middle of the new larger chromosome. So, again, why shouldn’t we expect it to be a bit degenerate? But, this trip up isn’t Tomkins’ main argument. Tomkins’ heavy hitter is that the fusion site itself—that is, where the telomeres crashed into each other—is part of the DDX11L2 regulatory RNA helicase gene. Now it’s important to understand how

the telomeric region started doing this. Tomkins insists that because the region is part of a gene, it could never have resulted from a fusion of telomeres. So, is this argument valid? Let’s take this in five parts. First, Tomkins claims that the DDX11L2 is a gene that is “highly expressed.” Only it’s not, it’s a pseudogene with no known function, as a check of the stats at Gene Cards or PubMed would have quickly shown. The claim that it’s functional because it is expressed is bunk because the expression level is so small, it’s indistinguishable from random noise. Here is one place where Tomkins (as a geneticist) should have known better, since he cited multiple papers that had covered that very thing (two by Yuxin Fan et al. in 2002, and ones by Valerio Costa et al. in 2009 and Chunlei Wu et al. in 2013). With that, he should be able to distinguish “high expression” from random noise, especially when Tomkins was the one generating the random noise. Second, the pseudogene itself doesn’t actually span the fusion site. The whole sequence of the gene sits on one side of it. The claim that it does span the fusion site comes from an alternative transcript that does spill over into it. This alternative transcript has one extra exon that is further up-stream at the other side of the fusion site. But this alternative transcript isn’t recovered very often, most transcripts don’t span it, which is why it is concluded that the gene itself doesn’t span it. The reason for that alternative transcript can be easily explained by the presence of a promoter-like sequence further upstream at the other side of the fusion site, where RNA polymerase would occasionally start transcribing the DNA and thus would make the fusion site part of an intron of a transcript that is longer than usual. Naturally evolving genetic systems do that sort of thing. As Michael Keesey put it in 2016, if this is the result of design, we’d have to believe “that for an unknown reason, the Creator placed a gene normally found at the end of chromosomes into the middle of one.” Further clues can be drawn from looking at the sequence of other DDX-genes that are functional (and the fact that there is a whole family of such genes is yet another reflection of an evolving natural genome). All of these have similar sizes, structure and sequence of their exons so we can see that the entirety of the DDX-related sequence of DDX11L2 resides on one side of the fusion site and that the extra exon

(that is located at the other side of the fusion site) of the alternative transcript is an unrelated sequence, totally alien from DDX-sequences. These facts shows that the entire DDX11L2 gene was there at one end before the fusion event and that the alternative transcript came after it. So Tomkins is cherry picking one weakly expressed alternative transcript that doesn’t represent the gene itself to support his claims. Third, even assuming that the gene is functional and that it does span the fusion site. So what? Are fusion sites within a gene impossible? No. Tomkins’ argument relies on the false premise that a gene can’t form that spans a fusion site after the fusion event. But he doesn’t give any evidence for why that is the case. And there is evidence to suggest that it is possible. The 2017 paper by Andrew Farr et al. “Adaptive evolution by spontaneous domain fusion and protein relocalisation” details how the gene for cytosolic di-guanylate cyclase (a prolific membrane and signaling protein group) fused with the gene for fatty acid desaturase and generated a new adaptive phenotype in the bacterium Pseudomonas. So even if Tomkins is right about it being a functional gene and spanning the fusion site, that doesn’t make the fusion site not a fusion site. It simply means that the gene formed after the fusion event. Fusion sites and genes aren’t mutually exclusive things, and it was another instance of data suppression for Tomkins to intimate that it was. Fourth, in chimps and humans, all the genes of the DDX11L gene family are located right next to telomeres at the ends of chromosomes. DDX11L2 is one exception being located in the middle of a chromosome right next to telomeric sequences. The presence of a gene like DDX11L2 (a member of a telomeric specific gene family) near the alleged fusion site is only more evidence for the chromosomal fusion event, not evidence against it. Fifth and last, synteny between all the chromosomes of humans and other great apes is already a strong indication that chromosome 2 is a result of a fusion event, it isn’t just about the telomeric sequences around the fusion site, which Tomkins wants to fixate on. Interestingly though, we will return to our similarities with chimps in Volume 2. So, there you have it. Tomkins’ anti-chromosome 2 argument is a failure, and he should know it is. And the many anti-evolutionists who have relied on Tomkins to hold to that (see the Info Box  on the next

page) should have known it too, unless they never fact checked the claim. One should form the question then: why does Tomkins present an argument he should darn well know is wrong? Well, the same question should be asked of Purdom. And interestingly, there are a number a potential answers, the most obvious of which is that she simply does not know her arguments are wrong; however, both coauthors find this unlikely. For instance, in 2009 creationist Todd Wood pointed out on his blog,  

Evolution is not a theory in crisis. It is not teetering on the verge of collapse. It has not failed as a scientific explanation. There is evidence for evolution, gobs and gobs of it. It is not just speculation or a faith choice or an

  ___________________________________________________________________

Chromosome 2 minions A sampling of creationists riffing off the chromosome matter: Will Brooks 2009, Dave Nutting 2011 (for those unfamiliar with Dave & Mary Jo Nutting, the testy PZ Myers endured and recorded audio of their lecture at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in 2018), Charles Creager 2013 (a fellow whose massively evasive incompetence on the reptile-mammal transition was explored in a chapter of coauthor JD’s Evolution Slam Dunk), and Christopher Rupe & John Sanford’s Contested Bones. Some Intelligent Design supporters have weighed in too. Richard von Sternberg took on the fusion in a short 2009 post, selectively citing only one technical paper (Marta Farré et. al.’s 2009 “Interstitial Telomeric Sequences (ITSs) Are Not Located at the Exact Evolutionary Breakpoints in Primates”) to imply the example in chromosome 2 didn’t signify a fusion. Sternberg overlooked that the “Interstitial Telomeric Sequences” the paper was characterizing were not just the repeats associated with chromosomal fusions, but ones also due to “recombination at telomeres” and “repaired double-strand breaks” (see the work of Solomon Nergadze et al. in 2004 and 2007 for further details, both works cited by Farré but not by Sternberg).

That nothing in Farré’s work disputed or undermined the chromosome 2 fusion is further evidenced by their 2013 paper, “Recombination Rates and Genomic Shuffling in Human and Chimpanzee—A New Twist in the Chromosomal Speciation Theory” in which they matter-of-factly “confirmed and refined the breakpoints” involved in that fusion event. Others in the ID field were even less detailed or merely secondary. Cornelius Hunter assailed Ken Miller and Carl Zimmer in 2012, and again denied the fusion in 2016 when going after the theistic evolutionist BioLogos website. Plugging their new Science & Human Origins book by Ann Gauger, Douglas Axe & Casey Luskin, Evolution News (ironically titled “Cherry-Picking Season”) reprised the misfired invocation of Farré in 2012. The chromosome section in Luskin’s chapter was quite brief, citing only one of the 2002 Fan papers (the one coauthored with Cynthia Friedman) and relying on Sternberg’s 2009 spin for the main counterpunch. In 2014, in a piece pompously recommending the scientists do more fact-checking (!), Luskin claimed Miller had admitted Jeffrey Tomkins was right on the fusion, an egregious misrepresentation that Itsdemtitans documented in a 2015 web posting after contacting Miller directly. assumption or a religion. It is a productive framework for lots of biological research, and it has amazing explanatory power. There is no conspiracy to hide the truth about the failure of evolution. There has really been no failure of evolution as a scientific theory. It works, and it works well.  

Now, why would a creationist who is a regular author at Answers in Genesis and even appeared in the creationist movie Is Genesis History? say something so pro-evolution? Well, he clarifies: “It is my own faith choice to reject evolution, because I believe the Bible reveals true information about the history of the earth that is fundamentally incompatible with evolution. I am motivated to understand God’s creation from what I believe to be a biblical, creationist perspective.” Is it possible that Tomkins is operating under the same guise? We can’t rule it out, but in the case of Georgia Purdom we can suspect that very thing. Jon Perry’s wonderful YouTube series “Stated Clearly” and “Stated Casually” goes farther, suggesting Ham, Purdom, and

most of those at Answers in Genesis understand that evolution works, but they believe that teaching the Bible (inspired directly by the Creator and hence absolutely authoritative) is more important. In that mindset natural evolution must still be attacked because, to them, it is antibiblical, and they continue to fund “research” into creationism in the hopes that one day evidence for it will appear. At the very minimum, Ken Ham’s own Answers in Genesis “Statement of Faith” page offered no official wiggle room as of 2015: “By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record.” But it’s equally plausible that the creationists just live under a particularly snug Tortucan mind shell, where such scriptural constraints function as a filter for content, and where the ability of their brains just not to think about things they don’t want to think about manifests whenever they have to deal with things they want to match up with their desires. More bluntly, their lab coat gets chucked in favor of religious raiment.  

ORFans in the storm  

We can see an example of this regarding orphan genes, since Jeffrey Tomkins is among the small set of anti-evolutionist apologists who have weighed in on the subject. The term comes from an acronym, ORFans, for Open Reading Frame. Many are quite short (100-150 codons long), but regardless of their length, they refer to genetic segments which have a start codon (triggering their transcription copying into RNA) and a stop codon to signal their termination, and consequently get processed by the normal genetic machinery. In the case of structural proteins, the ribosome draws on that RNA transcript as a template to generate the molecule one amino acid at a time. They became an object of study only in the 21st century, but have garnered the interest of anti-evolutionists because they tend to be restricted to particular taxa, or even individual species, and don’t show (at least at first look) any apparent homology with existing genes, leaving open the prospect that they had appeared de novo out of nowhere—maybe by Design!?[24]

That’s the implication Tomkins offered in his 2013 piece, “Newly Discovered ‘Orphan Genes’ Defy Evolution,” riffing off Liandong Yang et al.’s “Genome-wide identification, characterization, and expression analysis of lineage-specific genes within zebrafish,” and Daniel Simola et al.’s “Social insect genomes exhibit dramatic evolution in gene composition and regulation while preserving regulatory features linked to sociality.” For Tomkins, “The problem for the evolutionary model of animal origins is the fact that these DNA sequences appear suddenly and fully functional without any trace of evolutionary ancestry (DNA sequence precursors in other seemingly related organisms).” But the Yang paper had simply identified the genes, and had whittled a lot of them down as to their “orphan” status the broader they cast their comparative net—meaning it was Tomkins who jumped the gun by presuming their origins shall remain ever murky. And in so jumping, not pondering whether there might be darned good reasons why genetic search algorithms might not catch a homology, at least on the first pass (as noted in several 2003 reviews, Naomi Siew & Daniel Fischer found that as more genomes were sequenced, the number of new ORFans rose, but also more of those formerly classified as such were discovered to have homologous connections). If the gene originated a long time ago, or accumulated lots of mutations relatively quickly at any point, that would be enough to mask the original sequence. That can happen if mutations have altered its observed folded protein conformation too, making it harder to spot the homology with its components until more study was done. Harder perhaps, but not impossible, and two 2014 reviews by Sara Light et al. and Seth Frietze & Judith Leatherman neatly describe the many challenges in properly identifying and characterizing orphan and new genes. It’s revealing that Tomkins didn’t address at all the details of what the Yang paper spotted regarding the zebrafish orphans: their lower “average gene size, average protein size, and average exon numbers per gene,” which mirrored what had been found in “primates, insects, and plants.” He was even more tactical in extracting the ants from the Simola paper, highlighting how they had identified thousands of “taxonomically restricted genes” among them, but not noting they had also found “relatively few TRGs” among the honeybees.

What would, for an evolutionary scientist, count as clues to what might be making a pattern of reduced genetic scale for orphan genes generally, and why the ants were so different from honeybees specifically (and we’ll get to that in a bit), for Tomkins it was an occasion to repeat the rote theological mandate: “Only an Omnipotent and Wise Creator could have been the source of these widely diverse, and yet complicated and precise genetic arrangements.” But neither omnipotence nor wisdom could be the excuse for a 2016 post by Tomkins returning to this orphan gene issue, which he described as genes “found in no other type of creature and therefore have no evolutionary history.” As example of this, he announced (our bold) “In a recent research report, scientists describe a new set of 1,307 orphan genes that are completely different between humans and chimpanzees,” citing Jorge Ruiz-Orera et al.’s 2015 “Origins of De Novo Genes in Human and Chimpanzee.” Tomkins continued (our bold), “In yet another recent research report, scientists describe 634 orphan genes in humans and 780 in chimpanzees. In other words, we now have a new set of 1,307 genes that are completely different between humans and chimpanzees,” citing ... the same Ruiz-Orera paper. Beyond this double-dipping of one work as if they were two, blogger Glenn Williamson wondered how Tomkins succeeded in adding 634+780 to arrive at something other than 1414, but that was the least of Tomkins’ gum-ups. 1307 happened to be the number of genetic transcripts detected by their analysis, not a gene number (ORFan or otherwise). How did geneticist Tomkins manage to miss that? The scientists had counted 34,188 human genes (which generated 99,670 transcripts), meaning the 634 new de novo gene candidates represented a whopping 1.9%. A similar case pertained to the 35,915 chimpanzee genes evaluated (102,262 transcripts there), putting the 780 targets at 2.2%. That would suggest around 98% of their genomes weren’t isolated ORFans, and Williamson went one better by testing Tomkins’ claim chromosome by chromosome with the Ruiz-Orera dataset available via their links in the paper (a tale nicely covered by Paulogia in a 2017 video). Williamson chose (his bold) “to exclude any sequences shorter than 30 base pairs because short sequences will almost certainly find a match somewhere on the corresponding chimpanzee chromosome, and that would only serve to inflate the final result.”

Recalling how many ORFans tend to fall in the 100-150 base pair range, it was revealing what his random searching for similarities found (again Williamson’s bold): “These human genes which supposedly had no evolutionary history have corresponding sequence in the chimpanzee genome which is—on average—about 95.41% identical.” Based on Williamson’s criticisms, Tomkins adjusted his numbers a bit, to an 88% match. But in a race to see what methods could be selected to minimize the similarity of humans and chimps, the YEC game plan was no farther ahead than they were in 2006, when Todd Wood recognized how far from resolving the matter they were. When a fresh study by Wood arrived at a 98.2% value in 2011, Uncommon Descent over in ID Land was so discombobulated they reflexively described him as an “evolutionary biologist”! Tomkins pressed on, though, producing papers in 2011, 2012 and 2013 with Jerry Bergman defending their version of the data field, dissemminated downstream in 2015 by James Johnson, Frost Smith, and Jay Wile (running with Tomkins’ 88% value). Johnson even complained (with considerable cheek) how evolutionists were supposedly “cherry picking” their human-chimp differences. But it was a losing battle, one which Tomkins himself confirmed, if backhandedly, in short 2018 posts (“New Chimp Genome Confirms Creationist Research” in October, and “Separate Studies Converge in Human-Chimp Dissimilarity” in November). Bouncing around the new great ape genome study by Zev Kronenberg et al., Tomkins preferred to quote botanist Richard Buggs (more on him shortly) as showing a number Tomkins preferred to defend: “The percentage of nucleotides in the human genome that had one-to-one exact matches in the chimpanzee genome was 84.38%.” Which was a dicey underestimation of correlation, unless you addressed how many of those were synonymous substitutions (where the same amino acid for a protein is specified by different codon triplets). But something Tomkins didn’t authority quote was Buggs’ observation in passing that in in our human DNA, “4.06% had no alignment to the chimp assembly”—a most oblique way of saying 95.94% of it did directly align with chimpanzee DNA, a value right in Williamson’s bullseye range.

But remember genes do things, and on keeping us separate from any potential ancestry Tomkins vintage 2013 was most confident of his position (our bold): “Needless to say, the numerous gene differences that scientists discovered between humans and chimps cannot be accounted for by Darwin's theory of common ancestry.” Which may be contrasted with what the Ruiz-Orera paper had to say on this (our bold): “After performing exhaustive sequence similarity searches, we identified 2,714 genes which were specific of human, chimpanzee, or their hominoid ancestor. This is more than one order of magnitude greater than the number of human or primate-specific genes reported in previous studies.” The scientists suspected there were still more undetected new genes, but what they had uncovered in this pass “showed characteristic promoter and splicing signals and were expressed in a consistent manner across different individuals. However, they had very weak purifying selection signatures in general. This is interesting because it means that even if these genes are expressed in a stable manner, many of them are likely to lack functionality and thus can be considered protogenes.” Kinda looks like they’re detecting genetic signals not only of taxa that had evolved from a common ancestor, but also ones that were still in the process of evolving. Or we can take Tomkins’ word that none of this means what the scientists indicated, and trust the judgment of someone so clouded by his dogmatism that he can’t even do sums unsupervised. Which brings us to Paul Nelson, one of the major players in modern Intelligent Design theory (even while he is actually a Young Earth believer). Orphan genes as a supposed problem for evolution has long been one of his hobbyhorses, featuring in his public lectures and (as we’ll see) one notable written presentation. In 2006, Ian Musgrave took aim at “Nelson vs. Mycoplasma: ORFans redux” concerning how the creationist had come to think the ORFan content of Mycoplasma genitalium was 28%, when it was actually about zero, per Siew & Fischer’s 2003 “Analysis of Singleton ORFans in Fully Sequences Microbial Genomes.” Whether anyone should be anxious to perceive deliberate design in any aspect of M. genitalium (a sexually transmitted bacterium that

dwells in the human urinary and genital tracts) remains to be properly documented. Nothing precludes the same natural processes that can originate orphan genes that end up doing nice things doing the same in less benign contexts, such as the orphan viral TNF (tumor necrosis factor) receptor found in the lymphocystis disease virus (an affliction affecting “more than 140 marine and freshwater fish species”) described in a 2013 paper by Sergio Pontejo and colleagues. Or the several dozen “orphan” retrogenes that have developed “different regulatory machinery than their parents” in us humans, including seven of them figuring in human diseases, covered in another 2013 paper by Joanna Ciomborowska et al., who noted that “the phenomenon of replacing parental genes with their retrocopies has been taking place over the entire span of animal evolution.” And by that we do mean all over, including the orphan gene dauerless that has come to regulate the dauer phase of parasitical nematode worms (the ubiquitous little critters can go dormant to lie low on their hosts, isn’t that neat?), explained by Karley Mahalak & Helen Chamberlain in 2015 regarding Melanie Mayer et al.’s technical paper. Now Nelson’s most recent opinion on ORFans would appear to be in a 2017 interview by IDist Brian Miller, but unfortunately the podcast link was not functional when we investigated for this book in 2019, so we are spared whether inconveniently parasitical organisms or misery causing virulence have become at last part of the recognized (post-Fall or Flood) designer kit bag. Fortunately for the world of ORFan Fiction, though, in 2016 Nelson teamed up with botanist Richard Buggs for a not quite frontal assault on the “taxonomically restricted genes” matter (published in a regular science anthology, by the way). Although as noted, he is a Young Earth creationist, Nelson has avoided advertising it, and actively encourages uniting the godly (even theistic evolutionist ones) in a “Big Tent” to oppose materialistic Darwinism. That aspect may have been how he came to partner with Buggs, a religious plant geneticist ___________________________________________________________________

Richard Buggs

Buggs’ flirting with designer arguments may be tracked over posts he’d done, declaring Intelligent Design “a science, not a faith” in 2007. In 2016 he slipped orphan genes into a commentary piece on a paper he coauthored with Elizabeth Sollars et al. on the genetics of European ash trees, and a 2017 letter on “The deepening of Darwin’s abominable mystery” of higher plant origins could easily have been penned by an anti-evolutionist aiming at sowing doubt among the Darwinist flock. More interestingly, also in 2017, Buggs criticized theistic evolutionist Dennis Venema for offering a genetic bottleneck argument against the idea that there had been a literal Adam and Eve anytime in our human lineage. Buggs countered, “Even if the results of this study are entirely correct, the authors do not make any statements about population size more than 200,000 years ago. This would appear to leave open the possibility of a bottleneck in the previous 5.8 million years.” Somehow we think the idea of the Edenic couple living before even the australopithecines is not quite what Paul Nelson would have in mind (for whom “more than 200,000 years ago” is not an allowable date). It is possible, though, that on this matter they have not compared notes.   who’s been sending pro Intelligent Design vibes for some time, but hasn’t overtly jumped onto the ID bandwagon (see the  Info Box). Whether the orphan gene train had already left the station without any design aboard was the looming question, though, as by then a lot had been worked out about how such genes originated. But as far as Nelson/Buggs were concerned, all remained at the tentative level, which they reinforced at every stage by a fog of selectively chosen data points and authority quotes. For example, those ants. The Simola paper Tomkins had waved back in 2013 had been quite specific about what they’d uncovered, as summarized in their abstract:  

Comparison of orthologous gene promoters between eusocial and solitary species revealed significant regulatory evolution in both cis (e.g., Creb) and trans (e.g., fork head) for nearly 2000 genes, many of which exhibit phenotypic plasticity. Our results emphasize that genomic changes can occur remarkably

fast in ants, because two recently diverged leaf-cutter species exhibit faster accumulation of species-specific genes and greater divergence in regulatory elements compared to other ants or Drosophila.  

Just as a chronological reminder, that divergence of the leaf-cutter ants occurred around eight to twelve million years ago, at a time when the most basal hominids were a long way from bipedality or toolmaking. Young Earther Tomkins of course had ventured no details on when he thought all this “complicated and precise genetic arrangements” were being arranged, or even how many ant kinds he thought there were among the twenty thousand or so known ant species. Niggling details. And more niggling details from another paper from that same year of 2013, by Lothar Wissler et al., devoted to the “Mechanisms and Dynamics of Orphan Gene Emergence in Insect Genomes.” While Tomkins hadn’t cited it, Nelson/Buggs did in 2016, but not about any of their particular findings, putting it on the table only for the surface factoid that around “13% of all genes lack a homologous protein in any other species.” That certainly skipped past the substance in the same way Tomkins had that of the Simola work. Again, here’s what was available to any reader, right up front in their abstract:  

First, we find that recently split lineages undergo accelerated genomic reorganization, including the rapid gain of many orphan genes. Second, between the two insect orders Hymenoptera and Diptera, orphan genes are more abundant and emerge more rapidly in Hymenoptera, in particular, in leaf-cutter ants. With respect to intragenomic localization, we find that ant orphan genes show little clustering, which suggests that orphan genes in ants are scattered uniformly over the genome and between nonorphan genes. Finally, our results indicate that the genetic mechanisms creating orphan genes—such as gene duplication, frameshift fixation, creation of overlapping genes, horizontal gene transfer, and exaptation of transposable elements—act at different rates in insects, primates, and plants. In Formicidae, the majority of orphan genes has their origin in intergenic regions, pointing to a high rate of de novo gene formation or generalized gene loss, and support a recently proposed dynamic model of frequent gene birth and death.  

Along the way, Nelson/Buggs stepped over another of the clues to their seeming “orphan” status, as the Wissler paper had written, “The ‘unexplained’ category may include genes that are not necessarily new but rapidly evolving so that their sequence diverged beyond recognition.” Remember, ants emerged back in the Cretaceous, so there would have been plenty of moments for such things to have happened (even only 8-12 Ma, as in the leaf-cutter case). Was it that the Young Earth creationist Nelson and his IDish coauthor Buggs were as reluctant as Tomkins to bring any Map of Time sensibilities onto the field to better understand the data? We can throw in Cornelius Hunter, too. In a 2018 Evolution News posting, “A Problem for Evolution Grows Worse: Brochosome Proteins Encoded By Orphan Genes,” Hunter linked to the Wissler paper and dismissed it with the current anti-evolutionist mantras (his bold):  

As the paper explains, most of these proteins “appear to be restricted to the superfamily Membracoidea, adding to the growing list of cases where taxonomically restricted genes, also called orphans, encode important taxon-specific traits.” And how did all these orphan genes arise so rapidly? The paper hypothesizes, “It is possible that secreta exported from the organism may evolve especially rapidly because they are not strongly constrained by interactions with other traits.” That evolutionists can so easily reach for just-so stories, such as this, is yet another illustration of how false predictions have no consequence for evolutionary theory. Ever since Darwin evolutionists have proclaimed how important it is that the species fall into the common descent pattern. This has especially been celebrated at the molecular level.  

For those of you who aren’t up on your leafhopper biology, brochosomes are microscopic globular secretions that keep that insect’s cuticles dry. Hunter might have been advised to have secreted a few of those himself, since his argument by now was getting damp. To start, the Wissler paper had not discussed that subject at all; Hunter had linked to the wrong paper. The quotes turned out to have come from a much more recent and completely different work, a study by Roman Rakitov et al. in 2018. As Hunter’s posting was about a debate Nelson had with philosopher Joel Velasco, we may surmise in

the rough-and-tumble world of Intelligent Design scholarship, the “Wissler” tag somehow came to be connected to the Rakitov work. But we were talking damp here, and the moisture’s rising. Hunter was aware of Michele Clamp et al.’s 2007 paper suggesting many orphan genes identified in the human genome were spurious hits by the homology algorithms. Of that, Hunter declared (without citation): “This was all wrong.” Apparently other researchers in the field failed to get Hunter’s memo on this, such as Adam Siepel in 2009 or Suganthi Balasubramanian et al. in 2011. But even taking the orphan gene status of the brochosomins as given (and we have no reason to dispute the finding), the Rakitov paper was literally the first to have identified the genes involved, published only a month before Hunter latched onto it to miss-attribute it to Wissler. Were the scientists supposed to have worked out everything about these genes in that go? In the way Hunter wasn’t even getting the attribution of the paper straight? Or taking into account the scale and chronology of things. But it’s that short bit on the “Membracoidea” that piques our interest. Yes, Rakitov’s work had found the brochosomins were restricted to that superfamily. That they were in a superfamily, though, should have been ringing alarm bells on what “restricted” meant in this context, as this group of sap-sucking insects (a large group found globally) consists of the Cicadellidae leafhoppers (some forty subfamilies involving 20,000 species, as many as all the ants), and the Membracidae treehoppers (another 400 genera with 3,200 species, giving us mammals a run for our diversity). Restricted, indeed. The leafhoppers trace back at least to the Early Cretaceous, based on ones that turned up in the Santana Formation in Brazil (per a 1990 study by Andrew Hamilton), and going by the available phylogenies (from Jason Cryan’s in 2005 to Nan Song et al.’s in 2017), those Membracidae apparently split from their nearest insect relatives back in the Triassic. Meaning, just as with Nelson/Buggs and Tomkins, Hunter seemed disconnected from what role time (some two hundred million years of it) might have played in the development of orphan genes originating quickly and blurring their surface homological connections by their accumulated mutations.

Leaving Hunter under his metaphorical water, let’s go more literal and return to Nelson/Buggs’ orphan gene wading concerning Hydra, the diminutive tentacled cnidarian with a knack for cell regeneration. Nelson/Buggs found a 2010 paper on them by Johanna Franne et al. of interest, titled “In an early branching metazoan, bacterial colonization of the embryo is controlled by maternal antimicrobial peptides.” They quoted a paragraph from that work that included a mention of the organism’s “effective chemical warfare system that facilitates the disarming of taxon-specific microbial attackers.” Fascinating indeed, but what had that to do with orphan genes? The Franne paper had not mentioned them, but had at that point cited Konstantin Khalturin et al.’s 2009 paper, “More than just orphans: are taxonomically-restricted genes important in evolution?” After reviewing the ways in which TRGs arose, Khalturin had explored the biological impact of some of them in Hydra (especially the epithelial proteins that figured in their vital defensive tentacles). Odd then that Nelson/Buggs hadn’t noted that, citing the Khalturin paper instead (surprise!) only elsewhere in their paper, regarding the generic fact that TRGs existed and could be functional. We get that. Perhaps Nelson & Buggs preferred not to reflect on how Khalturin had concluded their paper (something which they definitely didn’t quote):  

The emergence of evolutionary novelties appears to stem from several processes that act simultaneously and cooperatively: cis-regulatory changes, gene duplications, and the emergence of genes de novo. Our understanding of the evolutionary significance for TRGs does not overturn a general consensus concerning the role of deep homology and conserved transcription factors in generating diverse adaptations and in the evolution of novelties. Instead, it uncovers previously unknown components, revealing a more complex picture of morphological evolution in early metazoans.  

Only it looked like the last thing Nelson/Buggs wanted was to uncover such things. They were sprinting at full speed through AnneRuxandra Carvunis’s influential 2012 paper, “Proto-genes and de novo gene birth,” conceding their work identified “hundreds of these ORFs” in yeast, and had “found something of a continuum from short, little expressed, unannotated ORFs with restricted taxonomic distribution

through to long, highly expressed, well annotated ORFs with broad taxonomic distribution.” But it was that something of a continuum which rather gave the whole game away on how such orphan genes might originate naturally. Let’s slow down to see how the Carvunis paper had put it:  

Evidence of associations between non-genic transcripts and ribosomes has suggested that non-genic sequences may occasionally be translated, which could provide raw material for natural selection. It has also been speculated that genes that originate de novo could initially be simple and gradually become more complex over evolutionary time. These ideas are consistent with reports showing that genes that emerged recently are shorter, less expressed and more rapidly diverging than other genes. We developed an integrative evolutionary model whereby de novo gene birth proceeds through intermediate and reversible protogene stages, mirroring the well-described pseudo-gene stages of gene death.  

Papers cited along the way in this paragraph supported the ubiquity of these short gene fragments, some of which Nelson/Buggs cited (Yuri Wolf et al. from 2009 on the expression rate of younger versus older genes, Henrik Kaessmann’s 2010 paper on the adaptive role of these new genes, and Benjamin Wilson & Joanna Masel’s 2011 work confirming the low translation rates on noncoding sequences, a feature making the origination of de novo genes “more plausible”), and some not (Deyou Zheng & Mark Gerstein’s 2007 paper on the blurry boundary between genes and pseudogenes, and James Cai & Dmitri Petrov reporting in 2010 on the weaker selection governing newer genes in primates). Nelson/Buggs drew on the Wolf paper only for peripheral analytical issues, but Kaessmann and the Wilson/Masel works were deployed several times for authority quotes, intended to highlight uncertainties in the process. They averred that (our bold) “Kaessmann (2010) argues that pervasive transcription of non-genic regions might make de novo gene origination common, but notes ‘the regulatory, sequence, and structural requirements for the functionality of long noncoding RNAs are so far poorly understood and hence the probability of such gene formation events is hard to predict.’” The one from Wilson was selected to mark a barrier rather than an opportunity for study again our bold): “Conversion from noncoding

to coding seems too unlikely an event to happen in a single evolutionary step. The sequence in question must be transcribed, escape degradation at the nuclear exosome, associate with ribosomes, be translated, and again escape degradation by the proteasome. Finally, it must avoid toxic conformations such as amyloid, for example, in favor of a stable protein fold.” All of which begged the question of what might happen over more than a single step, in a biological environment in which lots of genetic fragments are getting churned into the mix. We’ll return to Kaessmann’s work shortly, but just one paragraph down from the bit Nelson/Buggs quoted, Wilson/Masel wrote that the focus of their new paper was “on the evolutionary stage just before a noncoding sequence is co-opted as a new protein,” by which time strongly deleterious variants would have been purged, leaving many others which they predicted would be associated with the ribosomes. Which turned out to be the case (“The ribosome is a well-known target of small molecules,” as Matthew Disney’s 2018 paper on RNA dynamics put it). Wilson/Masel noted further that “A low level of expression is ideal for purging strongly deleterious sequences, whereas benign sequences remain effectively neutral,” citing Masel’s own 2006 paper and a 2011 one she coauthored with Etienne Rajon (neither of which made it into Nelson & Buggs’ review). Another source of ORFans was discussed by another paper Nelson/Buggs cited, Vincent Daubin & Howard Ochman’s 2004 study “Bacterial Genomes as New Gene Homes: The Genealogy of ORFans in E. coli,” but once again only regarding a side issue, their having “identified characteristics correlated with degree of taxonomic restriction.” Nothing was said about their establishing that, at least in E. coli, that bacterium’s TRGs were largely derived from horizontal gene transfer from bacteriophages. Fixated as they were on functionality (the influence of Nelson here, perhaps?), Nelson/Buggs were aware that functional TRGs were known among bacteriophages, but in not thinking about their showing up as viral HGT insertions in a bacterium (explicitly discussed in one of their own cited sources), apparently it slipped their minds to connect those obvious dots regarding how this would have affected their initial misidentification as ORFans.

But Steve Newton’s 2008 criticism of Meyer’s Explore Evolution had not been so limited, noting of Daubin & Ochman’s work that “Bacteriophages are viruses, which is why they didn’t turn up in bacterial database comparisons.” So we have transposable elements ... and they have to make their way through cellular networks. Certainly nothing can be worked out about that, right? Take yeast. A variety of relevant papers on the subject failed to surface in Nelson/Buggs’ review. Yeast are very old organisms, with lots of time for their evolutionary steps to be masked in the examples we can see in living ones, with a 2008 paper by Diana Ekman & Arne Elofsson (cited by the Carvunis paper, by the way) finding less than 2% de novo genes in the nineteen fungi genomes they studied. But that didn’t mean the dynamics of what were known couldn’t be studied. In 2013 György Abrusán and colleagues set about “Turning gold into ‘junk’: transposable elements utilize central proteins of cellular networks.” As Abrusán summarized it in a commentary paper, they found that “New regulatory interactions emerge rapidly within a few million years, while the number of protein-protein and genetic interactions increase slowly” over tens of millions of years. In that process, though, “Gene essentiality evolves relatively quickly, the youngest essential genes appear in proto-genes ~14 MY old.” Out of this often disorderly mix, orphan scraps with useful genelike traits click into utility as proto-genes, as further confirmed when Benjamin Wilson worked through yeast and mouse examples in a 2017 paper. Compare that to the hundreds of millions of years involved in those ant and leafhopper orphans. Perhaps the roadblocks to the scientists working out the nature of orphan genes weren’t nearly as robust as Nelson/Buggs would have had us believe in 2016. And what about papers that had by then explicitly identified examples of these de novo genes, putting the theoretical models to the test? Nelson/Buggs veered around them in one paragraph (we’ve highlighted in bold two of the papers and particular phrases, because they carry a hidden kick):  

Several studies have identified possible cases of de novo gene evolution as defined by Cardoso-Moreira and Long, with sequences orthologous to orphan

genes in the non-coding DNA of other species (e.g. Knowles and McLysaght, 2009, Levine et al., 2006, Wu et al., 2011, Zhou et al., 2008). One particularly detailed study shows a gene, Poldi, in mouse with expression in the testes, three exons, alternative splicing, and a knock-out phenotype, that has orthologous regions in human and rat that appear not to be capable of expression (Heinen et al., 2009).[25]  

Those two highlighted papers were noteworthy since literally on the page before, Nelson/Buggs had tried to minimize what they had found:  

A mechanism increasingly invoked for the origin of TRGs is the evolution of genes from non-coding sequence, sometimes called “de novo” gene evolution. Some researchers cite this mechanism for TRGs without identifying an orthologous noncoding region in a close relative (Zhou et al., 2008, Levine et al., 2006, Begun et al., 2007, Toll-Riera et al., 2009); as such “de novo gene evolution” is more an observation of orphan gene existence than an understood mechanism of gene origination.  

You may have noticed in that first paragraph how Nelson/Buggs specifically identified only one of the candidate genes (Poldi), and after that, readers of their paper would discover they never alluded to even that again. Perhaps the content was why. Mia Levine’s 2006 paper on noncoding DNA in Drosophila melanogaster had found five new genes in those fruit flies, operating “predominately in the testes”—data which supported “the idea that these novel genes are derived from ancestral noncoding sequence and that new, favored genes are likely to invade populations under selective pressures relating to male reproduction.” Qi Zhou’s 2008 paper “On the origin of new genes in Drosophila” had extended that, finding 11.9% of their new genes had derived from such noncoding sequences. Subsequent work has only confirmed that reality, such as Nicola Palmieri et al. on “The life cycle of Drosophila orphan genes,” and Li Zhao et al. on the “Origin and Spread of de Novo Genes in Drosophila melanogaster Populations”—two 2014 works (not cited by Nelson/Buggs) that built on the findings of the 2007 Begun paper alluded to so cursorily by Nelson/Buggs above. Interestingly, another

paper Nelson/Buggs cited peripherally was the 2003 “An Evolutionary Analysis of Orphan Genes in Drosophila” by Tomislav Domazet-Lošo & Diethard Tautz that had found twice as many orphan genes were showing up in expression searches of the adult fly than in their embryos. Testes were mentioned only that once by Nelson/Buggs, but that didn’t mean there weren’t plenty of implications about them that were literally (even if not proximately) under their nose. Besides the Begun paper, Dong-Dong Wu’s 2011 work on “De Novo Origin of Human Protein-Coding Genes” (that Nelson/Bugg had citation dropped so casually above) had found “60 new protein-coding genes that originated de novo on the human lineage since divergence from the chimpanzees,” with “their highest expression levels in the cerebral cortex and testes, which might suggest that these genes contribute to phenotypic traits that are unique to humans, such as improved cognitive ability.” A similar field of data being stepped around concerned that 2009 paper by Macarena Toll-Riera on primate orphan genes; we’ve included in our references their 2009 and 2012 follow-up papers on the part played in their origin and spread by those frisky transposable elements and “low-complexity sequences” composed of singleton or short amino acid strings (yet more relevant work not cited by Nelson/Buggs, by the way). To continue with testes, Wu’s paper had specifically highlighted Kaessmann’s 2010 study that Nelson/Buggs had preferred to authority quote on things being “hard to predict.” After noting the “diverse mechanisms” that could produce new genes, “including gene duplication, chimeric origin, retrotransposition, and de novo origin,” Wu and colleagues focused on how often the result of those processes turned out to be “specifically expressed or function in the testes.” And that’s where Kaessmann came in, for the Wu paper had been rather specific on this, (our bold):  

Henrik Kaessmann hypothesized that the testis is a catalyst and crucible for the birth of new genes in animals. First, the testes is the most rapidly evolving organ due in part to its roles in sperm competition, sexual conflict, and reproductive isolation. Second, Henrik Kaessmann speculated that the chromatin state in spermatocytes and spermatids should facilitate the initial transcription of newly

arisen genes. The reason for this is that there is widespread demethylation of CpG enriched promoter sequences and the presence of modified histones in spermatocytes and spermatids [Wu citing Kenneth Kleene’s 2001 paper, “A possible meiotic function of the peculiar patterns of gene expression in mammalian spermatogenic cells”], causing an elevation of the levels of components of the transcriptional

machinery,

permitting

promiscuous

transcription

of

nonfunctional sequences, including de novo originated genes.  

Gee, a natural process that facilitates the production of new genes in the very organ where selection for reproductive success would have the most relevance in tinkering with whatever came into play. More evidential dots in their own cited work that Nelson/Buggs somehow failed to connect up. Maybe they’d been distracted by too much deselection on their part, such as their effort to categorize one of the relevant papers off the field. Nelson/Buggs had noted “the term de novo evolution is sometimes used to describe a new ORF that appears to have evolved by ‘overprinting’ in an alternative reading frame of a pre-existing ORF” and (our bold) “this mechanism cannot directly result in a TRG as defined by homology searches, and authors of studies on these do not normally use the term orphan or TRG to describe the overprinted ORF.” Because Dan Li’s 2010 paper (“A de novo originated gene depressed budding yeast mating pathway and is repressed by the protein encoded by its antisense strand”) fell into that arbitrary category, “we will not discuss them further here.” But that didn’t mean the data in the Li paper wasn’t pertinent, and we can know that because of how it popped up in another of the papers Nelson/Buggs had cited: Diethard Tautz & Tomislav DomazetLošo’s 2011 “The evolutionary origin of orphan genes.” Now that title might make you think it was discussing the evolutionary origin of orphan genes, and you’d be right. But while Nelson/Buggs brought them onstage repeatedly, it was never about that specifically. They cited it on methods issues, how functional and common the orphans were, how “unclear” their origin still might be. They even pitted them against Art Deco biology, where Nelson & Buggs claimed the idea that ORfans “must rapidly diverge from their progenitor sequences, beyond the threshold of similarity searches”

(concerning which they cited Tautz/Domazet-Lošo and the aforementioned 2008 Zhou paper) was somehow a phenomenon that “does not fit easily with a gradual mutation/selection mechanism of evolution” as proposed—wait for it ... back in 1930 by Ronald Fisher (1890-1962) and Sewall Wright (1889-1988) in 1931. Really? Let’s get this straight. The scientists of the 21st century were to hold those 1930s models prohibitive concerning tools unavailable to the pioneering geneticists of that era ... to evaluate DNA data Fisher and Wright literally had no knowledge of decades before the discovery of DNA as the medium of genetic inheritance ... concerning a circumstance neither Tautz/Domazet-Lošo or Zhou alluded to as a problem (both papers having included “random mutations” and the like in their evaluations) ... and regarding which incriminating instances of putative ORFan impediments Nelson & Buggs submitted exactly none. We can’t even rank this one as a nice try. Something that clearly didn’t “fit easily” into the Nelson/Buggs argument, though, were the candidate de novo genes highlighted in their cursory review. For as it happens, two of the “possible examples” they alluded to only by their cited papers had been covered by that 2011 Tautz/Domazet-Lošo work in considerably more detail than the nothing the reader got from Nelson/Buggs. Starting with how Tautz & Domazet-Lošo were notably less tentative in categorizing them as (our bold) “Examples of unequivocally identified de novo evolved genes.” On top of that, a third example in Tautz/Domazet-Lošo’s list derived from that Li paper Nelson/Buggs hadn’t included in their summary (which bracketed citation we’ve highlighted in italics). And two more besides showed up, ones documented by papers Nelson/Buggs hadn’t thought worthy to even include in their paper (we’ve highlighted those in bold):  

The most stringent criteria for a de novo evolved gene require evidence that a genomic region that is non-coding in multiple outgroup species is transcribed into a distinct RNA in the ingroup or focal species and that this RNA is translated or can be shown to be functional. Ideally, one should show that a non-coding RNA in the outgroup species has assumed a functional ORF in the ingroup species. The following examples fulfil these criteria. BSC4 in Saccharomyces cerevisiae The gene is expressed as a non-coding RNA in closely related species. It evolved an ORF encoding a peptide of 132

amino acids in length in S. cerevisiae. The new protein appears to be involved in DNA repair. Its functionality is supported by population genetics, expression, proteomics and synthetic lethal data [citing Cai et al. 2008. Of their findings, Dong-Dong Wu & Ya-Ping Zhang noted in 2013 (a paper not cited by Nelson/Buggs): “Since BSC4 functions in DNA repair, any beneficial mutation would be rapidly selected, given the expression of BCS4 us unregulated during the stationary phase.”]. Pldi in Mus musculus The Pldi gene has three exons; it is specifically expressed in the testis, and it evolved about 3 million years ago. The gene region was subject to selective sweeps in some populations. Although short ORFs are present, the gene is most likely to act as a non-coding RNA that is involved in chromatin organization. Knocking out this gene leads to a lowered mobility of sperm cells [citing Heinen et al. 2009]. CLLU1, C22ORF45 and DNAH10OS in humans These genes were identified as human-specific genes that have syntenic, non-transcribed regions in other primates. Functional evidence for CLLU1, C22ORF45 and DNAH10OS comes from polymorphism data, expression data and proteomics. CLLU1 was first identified as an upregulated gene in chronic lymphocytic leukaemia [citing Knowles & McLysaght 2009]. MDF1 in Saccharomyces cerevisiae MDF1 originated de novo from a previously non-coding sequence. It functions as a suppressor of mating efficiency in a rich medium by binding MATα2 and thus promotes vegetative growth. It is regulated by the antisense gene ADF1, which acts as a transcriptional suppressor [citing D. Li et al. 2010. In another paper that eluded Nelson & Buggs’ attention, “Pleiotropy of the de novo-originated gene MDF1” from 2014, Dan Li’s team reported follow-up work that “filled in the missing piece of the MDF1 growth puzzle and formed a comprehensive picture of how a de novo gene confers an evolutionary advantage by incorporating mating and growth pathways into one molecular network”]. FLJ33706 in humans FLJ33706 is a six-exon gene with a human-specific ORF of 194 amino acids that evolved from a non-coding region that is generally present in eutherian mammals. The first exon and some splice junctions were partially created by the insertion of Alu elements. The RNA and protein are expressed in the brain, and elevated expression is observed in Alzheimer’s brain samples. Polymorphism data support functionality of the reading frame [citing C. Li et al. 2010].  

Work on orphan genes didn’t grind to a halt in 2016, either. Research continued on ferreting out the natural mechanisms that

generate them. Recalling how short orphan genes tended to be, a 2017 paper by Vyachelsavo Tretyachenko et al. discovered experimentally that random protein sequences built on strings of 100 residues (two to three times the size of the typical orphan length) were actually tolerated by the cellular machinery, “Contrary to early hypotheses about the toxicity of random and disordered proteins.” That finding was noted in a 2019 commentary by Erich Bornberg-Bauer & Brennan Heames on a new paper by Li Zhang et al. showing “Rapid evolution of protein diversity by de novo origination in Oryza” rice, with about 50 of them being retained every million years. That’s where things sit in 2019. Orphan genes are prolific, but arise by many means as a natural byproduct of biological processes, including the intrusion of viral elements. Over time the new genes can mutate sufficiently that detection algorithms can slide right past them, requiring more study to suss out their origins. Now consider the perspective from the Intelligent Design bastion. A 2013 Evolution News posting by Ann Gauger inserted the prospect of a designer option among the available natural modalities (her italics): “Perhaps we see so many species—and clade-specific orphan genes because they are uniquely designed for species—and clade-specific functions.” She enthused how these were “Exciting times! Much more work has to be done before we can determine which of the possibilities above are true,” and laid down this challenge (again her italics), “What now needs to be determined is whether or not naturalistic processes known to be operating are actually capable of generating so many new proteins.” Well, we’ve reviewed gobs of work on this, as you’ve seen, and observed the reluctance of the anti-evolutionists to come to grips with much of it. But something else is glaringly absent over those six years (as well as the many years before that): where is the substantive experimental work by the anti-evolutionists regarding orphan genes? While fairly long, the Nelson/Buggs piece was just a review of the literature, and a sidestepping selective one at that, not an exploration of any competitive designer model of the sort Ann Gauger was dangling in 2013. If the dedication to the science is measured by doing the work, in this instance anti-evolutionists aren’t even on the field.

We can see another measure of this regarding salamanders and the orphan gene Prod1 involved in their limb regeneration, which Nelson/Buggs bumped into peripherally as they cited one of Acely Garza-Garcia’s papers on it, from 2010. Limb regeneration is rare among animals, and still more so for living vertebrates, which is why biologists found the salamander case so interesting. As reviewed by Jonathan Slack in 2017, though, there are actually many modes of regeneration, involving a range of genes and developmental systems, making sorting out the entangled processes quite a challenge for the scientists. Salamanders have another noteworthy specialty, by the way: their paws develop unlike that of the other tetrapods, showing a preaxial pattern where digit II condenses first, as opposed to the postaxial mode where digit IV forms initially. Further complicating things, most salamanders have lost the full set of digits on front or hind feet, as illustrated in a 2012 paper by Trip Lamb & David Beamer and the more general review of tetrapod digit loss by Aditya Saxena in 2017. All that adds to the challenge of working out the genes involved, but the work goes on, and in 2018 Ryan Kerney et al. pinned down the role played by the sox9 and col2a1 genes. Keep that preaxial/postaxial thing in mind, though, as we press ahead with how Cornelius Hunter pounced on the Prod1 orphan in a 2017 Evolution News post, “Salamander Offers Two Evolutionary Quandaries: Non-Homologous Development and an ORFan.” After authority quoting a 2011 review paper by Nadia Fröbisch & Neil Shubin on how salamanders were “plagued by homoplasy” (where a trait has been gained or lost independently in separate lineages), Hunter then dove off three more recent papers, two from 2015 (Fröbisch et al.’s “Deep-time evolution of regeneration and preaxial polarity in tetrapod limb development” and Anoop Kumar et al.’s “An orphan gene is necessary for preaxial digit formation during salamander limb development” on Prod1), and Acacio Nogueira et al.’s 2016 “Tetrapod limb and sarcopterygian fin regeneration share a core genetic programme.” Of which Hunter enthused that the salamander “uses genes unique to its lineage, and that contradicts the hypothesis that the salamander’s unique capabilities were there all along,” as well as the “longstanding, but rapidly fading, hope that ORFans would go away.”

What wasn’t going away were the content of his own sources, though, starting with that Nogueria paper, work lending (in the words of their abstract) “strong support for the hypothesis that tetrapods inherited a bona fide limb regeneration programme concomitant with the fin-to-limb transition.” That should have given him pause to slow down and study more of what was being found, but as he would do with those leafhopper brochosomes the next year, Hunter offered nothing further on salamander orphan genes in that or subsequent posts that we’re aware of. As with the leafhoppers, Hunter showed no interest in the chronology of the thing. But let’s pick up the trail Hunter could have followed had he only bothered to look. Salamanders do have a fossil record, though not vast, tracking back 200 million years into the Jurassic, per 2003 and 2012 papers by Ke-qin Gao & Neil Shubin. The living salamanders show slow core bone (“diaphyseal”) growth rates and delayed sexual maturity, and in 2008 Sophie Sanchez et al. reported signs of that in the Early Permian seymouriamorph Discosauriscus, a group “phylogenetically closer to living amniotes than salamanders,” suggesting such processes might have been more widely spread some 80 million years before the salamanders proper came along in their descendants.[26] A 2014 paper by Nadia Fröbisch et al. further showed “that the 300-million-year-old temnospondyl amphibian Micromelerpeton, a distant relative of modern amphibians, was already capable of regenerating its limbs,” and the 2015 Fröbisch paper Hunter cited had pressed further, determining “that preaxial polarity in limb development was present in various groups of temnospondyl amphibians of the Carboniferous and Permian periods, including the dissorophoids Apateon and Micromelerpeton, as well as the stereospondylomorph Sclerocephalus.” Those first two were small (only a few inches long) while Sclerocephalus was considerably larger, but all lived in freshwater habitats. Think about that. The Kumar paper noted that the “limbs arise late in aquatic larval development in many salamanders, and there are significant functional demands on the developing limbs. In ponds or streams there is a requirement for anchorage, balance or movement, and this may be served by selective digital extension.” Furthermore, Kumar’s work found that the Prod1 gene kicks in well down the

developmental path, not affecting “embryonic, larval or limb development before the stage of condensation of the radius/ulna and digits I and II.” More pegs on the Map of Time chart, knowable by Hunter because they were in the papers he cited, and yet there was no consideration of them in his ID sideswipe. Was Hunter not even a little excited by the incoming data, fossil or biological? No spark to set his analytical imagination afire, seeking to incorporate it into the ID model? Which is, after all, what scientific models aim to do: explain the data. Unless, of course, there is no “ID model” into which anything can be put, nothing more than a fervent hope that “it mustn’t be Darwinism.” Now let’s see where someone not so constrained by the lack of a theoretical conceptual model can run with the evidence. In 2019 Lorenzo Alibardi drew the developmental clues together to recognize what was implied by the occurrence of broad organ regeneration in anamniotes (fish and amphibians) but not in amniotes (reptiles, birds and mammals). Those amniotes evolved adaptively in a terrestrial environment, and that involved a tradeoff whereby the larval metamorphosis stages were shut down, involving such genes as the Ras-dva small GTPases studied by Anastasiya Ivanova et al. in 2018. “The cellular immune system that in anamniotes was operating in metamorphic destruction of larval tissues, in amniotes became no longer tolerant to embryonic-larval antigens,” which Alibardi noted has a back kick for modern medical attempts to induce such things in humans today, as the process “must overcome these genetic and immune barriers to induce organ regeneration.” So, how would genes like that Prod1 orphan be fitting into the picture Alibardi laid out? Remembering the chronology of it, the earliest land animals were running on an underlying developmental system inherited over millions of years from the fish, which new genetic switches (like those frisky de novo genes) could hardly avoid not affecting now and then, on occasion successfully triggering regenerative cascades in organisms that had not evolved into the amniotic cul-de-sac. Work by Robert Blassberg et al. in 2011 had continued exploring the role of Prod1 in newts. and in 2015 Jie Geng et al.located them more generally in “basal and other salamander families,” supporting

the supposition that those orphans were in play when the salamanders emerged some 200 million years ago, but at that time Geng’s search for homologs among the three-finger proteins (Tfps) in the frog Xenopus and zebrafish had still turned up nothing. But a tantalizing one emerged in 2019 when Maria Tereshina’s group found the “Agr2-interacting Prod1-like protein Tfp4 from Xenopus laevis is necessary for early forebrain and eye development as well as for the tadpole appendage regeneration.” So a possible homolog of Prod1 has turned up, in the frogs, another member of that bunch that Alibardi’s analysis places as the biological transition zone between the regenerating fish and the larvae averse amniotes. With hundreds of millions of years of independent variation in the frogs and salamanders, Tereshina’s team were not proclaiming success in the way Hunter has the failure of the evolutionary model, but (as good scientists tend to) laid down criteria for expanding their understanding. Despite the two genes’ structural and functional homologies, work on how the Prod1 gene interacts with the newt’s anterior gradient (Agr) protein was just beginning, such as Kathrin Grassme et al.’s paper in 2016 and Frederic Delom et al.’s in 2018, prompting the Tereshina study to caution that “we cannot firmly demonstrate that Tfp4 and Prod1 are real orthologs, because of the lack by the moment of the data on the local genomic organization in the vicinity of Prod1 gene in newts.” In other words, wanting to understand how the genes are used in the organism, at the detailed biochemical level, to better comprehend what this may tell about counterpart functions and origins in the salamanders. And mammals, too, where the decreased regeneration capacity there could have turned the loss of such genes in the long path the synapsids took to endothermy. Anyone want to place bets on where that work may lead? And will any of it be done by the advocates of Intelligent Design or creationism? Going by what we’ve seen so far, we have our doubts about that. The hope that orphan genes will stay that way is part of the general anti-evolutionist requirement that nothing new or helpful can ever arise by natural means. And if you found the ORFan argument strained and evasive, just see how creationists address the fundamental drivers of evolution: mutations, and not only whether they

can be good, bad or indifferent, but under what diverse conditions they manifest.  

Case Study 2: Georgia Purdom and Beneficial Mutations  

As the last section looked at how evolution works, our next example is Georgia Purdom trying to discuss exactly that, her 2013 chapter “What About Beneficial Mutations?” from The New Answers Book 4. But, before we can jump into this, we must give you a heads up warning about something that will become apparent throughout the rest of her chapter: Purdom (and later Bodie Hodge) have a massive a priori Tortucan rut to defend: they can never allow a mutation to be called beneficial, even though the definition of a beneficial mutation is merely one that provides a selective advantage to the individual. So, even when a mutation is plainly beneficial by what it does, Purdom will try to look for some loophole to avoid calling it that. “It’s just amplification”... or “it’s occurring in a gene that already exists.” No Beneficial Mutations is a party line she cannot cross. At least until Nathaniel Jeanson starts sawing off that branch too. And it’s an increasingly shaky limb, as by 2017 Philip Senter & Jared Mackey spotted a rise in acceptance of beneficial mutations among 21st century creationists, where roughly half of those surveyed allowed them, based on their “interpretations of transposons and similar phenomena as divinely programmed machinery for beneficial mutations that were allegedly loaded by God into the genomes of the originally created organisms.” But on to Purdom’s chapter, defending the old ramparts. Purdom starts by drawing the boundary line for her trench (her emphasis), “However, all observed mechanisms, including beneficial mutations, do just the opposite – they cause the loss of or slight variation in preexisting traits.” This is incorrect. As described in the last chapter, there are numerous examples of mutations that cause new proteins or structures to form without the loss of any previous components, such as the propeller fans in Rhagovelia or the anti-freeze glycoproteins in notothenioid icefish. We also brought up the example of the apolipoprotein-A1 mutation in a family in Milan, Italy.

And we’ll add another to the list: garter snakes have repeatedly developed resistance to tetrodotoxins in their prey, the rough-skinned newt, as Chris Feldman and colleagues have shown in 2009 and 2012 papers. As for the newts, their resistance to the toxin in their own bodies has a natural evolutionary explanation too, where a 2015 paper by Charles Hanifin & William Gilly identified specific mutations in various species, “empirical evidence that complex physiological adaptations can arise through the accumulation of beneficial mutations in the coding region of conserved proteins.” Further work on the intricate reciprocal garter snake-newt toxin arms race has been done by Michael Hague et al. in 2016. Curiously, these examples are rarely discussed by creationists, including Purdom, and even when they are, the creationists sidestep that these new functions arose by identifiably natural means, blustering things like, “It’s still the same ‘kind’ of animal.” Heads they win; tails you lose. Think about this. All mutations that occur in traits must necessarily occur in pre-existing genetic systems. How would a mutation occur in a nonexistent trait? We doubt she is arguing for that degree of de novo formation (truly “poof” out of the middle of nowhere), so what does her argument even mean? Purdom is not alone in this argument though; we have heard numerous creationists make it, and yet none could tell how a mutation would occur in a non-pre-existing trait. It would have been splendid had Purdom shed some light on this. However, instead of going straight into data, she chose to carefully quote mine geneticists Nicola Nadeau & Chris Jiggins from their 2010 paper “A golden age for evolutionary genetics? Genomic studies of adaptation in natural populations.” First from their abstract, as saying “…most studies of recent evolution involve the loss of traits, and we still understand little of the genetic changes needed in the origin of novel traits.” Yes, most studies do—but not all studies. Most houses are not burnt in volcanic eruptions, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some that are. On that crucial distinction (most versus occasionally), what does Purdom think of those other studies? Hmm, let us see if they come up. She quote-mined Nadeau & Jiggins next saying “…over the broad sweep of evolutionary time what we would really like to explain is the

gain of complexity and the origins of novel adaptations.” Ok…and? Researchers seek to explain the origin of novel adaptations that they currently do not have data for. What is wrong with this? Is admitting that they do not know everything a mark against them in Purdom’s eyes? Instead, she sprinted onto a third quote: “Of course, to some extent the difference between loss and gain could be a question of semantics, so for example the loss of trichomes [hair-like appendages on flies] could be called gain of naked cuticle.” Here is where things get really interesting from a Source Methods perspective. In fielding that quote snippet Purdom had to step right over the technical source Nadeau & Jiggins had cited regarding those trichomes, David Stern & Virginie Orgogozo’s 2009 paper asking “Is Genetic Evolution Predictable?” Although over eighty genes are involved in producing them in the fruit fly, only one of them (shavenbaby) has “accumulated multiple evolutionarily relevant mutations.” And the reason why concerns how developmental signaling pathways function. Rather than changes in the underlying protein being involved, it’s in the regulatory cascade that novel forms can emerge by the when or where of their deployment. It turns out shavenbaby is in just the right place in the chain to effect such (entirely natural) changes. Stern’s paper reported, “In the entire regulatory network governing development of the Drosophila embryo, only shavenbaby, with its specialized function to rally the entire module of trichome morphogenesis, can accumulate mutations that alter trichome patterns without disrupting other developmental processes.” There were lots of details to overlook on just that single point, flagged by her own source. And yet, Purdom offered no discussion of it (let alone a viable creationist explanation). Instead, she unhinged: “The authors have decided that the whole loss-gain issue is merely one of semantics! In order to get the gain required by molecules-toman evolution they will just change the wording and say it is a ‘gain of loss.’” This was singularly disingenuous. Nadeau & Jiggins were clearly stating that what we humans consider a gain or loss is contingent upon how we use the words, for which nature has no care. That should not

be especially difficult to understand; which raises the prospect that Purdom was being purposefully obstinate. Let us take two examples beyond the world of trichomes. Whales are descended from terrestrial artiodactyls, a fact of paleontological history even some creationists have been compelled to accept in their more expansive baraminological moments (as we saw last chapter with Kurt Wise), though most anti-evolutionists hold the line against whale evolution (including Casey Luskin at Evolution News in 2010 and 2011, and Old Earth Creationist Fazale Rana filing vestigial whale pelvises as “common design” in 2014). See the  Info Box for the tale of Rodhocetus’ tail flukes and other creationist whale tales. But the facts remain. Yes, whales lost their exterior hind limbs and fingers on their front limbs; the clade of baleen whales, mysticeti, even lost their teeth. However, whales gained a stream-lined body, tail fluke, and flippers, and their nostrils shifted back on the skull for the blowhole, so they gained some traits even as they lost others. And those toothless whales nonetheless left “Morphological and Molecular Evidence for a Stepwise Evolutionary Transition from Teeth to Baleen in Mysticete Whales,” from Thomas Deméré et al. in 2008, as well as the continuing vestigial presence of tooth enamel genes (as we noted last chapter regarding the work of Robert Meredith). While we’re on teeth, and the evolutionary backstories that can be extracted from them, here’s more of the genetic backstory that has turned up in recent years, and how it contrasts in a most practical way with the ball of   ___________________________________________________________________

Rodhocetus tales Relying on fellow creationist Carl Werner’s DVD interview quotemining spin, in 2011 Don Batten castigated paleontologist Philip Gingerich for briefly speculating (based on initial fragmentary finds in 1994) that the early whale taxon Rodhocetus might have had a prominently fluked tail. Gingerich himself reported on newer fossils in 2001 that prompted him to revise that view (see Hans Thewissen & E. M. Williams’s 2002 review for more on that taxon’s status in the whale parade), and yet Werner’s tendentious claims still circulate among YEC bottom feeders online.

Meanwhile, Troy Lacey strove to cram the baleen evolution side of things covered in Graham Slater et al.’s 2017 paper “Independent evolution of baleen whale gigantism linked to PlioPleistocene ocean dynamics” into the Flood box, attributing that to “intense erosion carrying increased nutrients scoured off the land and washed into the seas” that “could have been a catalyst for phytoplankton blooms, which would have spurred larger zooplankton and krill populations.” Never mind how creationists don’t like it when evolutionists use such terms as “could have,” the big problem for the Flood scenario is how the whales could physically adapt to all that so rapidly, for which Lacey offered not a shred of scientific support. Nor did he venture an opinion on why the toothless baleens have tooth enamel genes. nothing that is creationism. In 2002 and 2010 papers Isaac SalazarCiudad & Jukka Jernvall tracked much about the gene networks that generate mammalian teeth, and in 2014 that knowledge allowed their colleagues Enni Harjunmaa to experimentally recreate the evolution of a bunch of the distinctive teeth forms known among them (including a particular model that only existed in extinct mammals living a hundred million years ago). So not only do the scientists know how these tooth novelties originated, they could literally replay the process in the lab. Paleogenomics presses on. From chompers to peepers, the Mexican tetra or blind cave fish (Astyanax mexicanus) lost its eyes as an adaptation to a subterranean realm, but also developed more sophisticated mechanoreceptors for sensing its environment in the dark, as documented by two 2013 papers: Daphne Soares & Matthew Niemiller’s “Sensory Adaptations of Fishes to Subterranean Environments” and Sylvie Rétaux & Didier Casane’s “Evolution of eye development in the darkness of caves: adaptation, drift, or both?” This point about “losses” spurring on functional “gains” is really too fundamental to contemporary biology for Purdom to have skipped knowing about it. But skipping things is what Purdom’s creationism is all about. As with the trichomes, she failed to address the data gold directly raised by Nadeau & Jiggins in the paper she sought to mine for quotes. In the very next sentence in the paragraph of that 2010 paper we read:  

However there clearly are complex structures that are gained during evolution, such as butterfly wing patterns, and we currently know little about how this process takes place. Promising systems include rapidly evolving ornaments such as the colour patterns of butterflies and cichlid fish, the elongated eyes stalks of stalkeyed flies and the swords of swordtail fish, all of which are being characterised at the molecular level, and progress is likely to be rapid in the near future.  

Six papers were cited by Nadeau & Jiggins for just that single sentence, and it’s worthwhile to stop and take a look at them— especially since Purdom didn’t. First off, they noted their own work on that butterfly wing subject, being coauthors in Simon Baxter et al.’s 2010 paper “Genomic Hotspots for Adaptation: The Population Genetics of Müllerian Mimicry in the Heliconius melpomene Clade,” along with Brian Counterman et al.’s 2010 “Genomic Hotspots for Adaptation: The Population Genetics of Müllerian Mimicry in Heliconius erato.” Next, they went genetic fishing: Frederico Henning et al.’s 2010 paper “Genetic, comparative genomic, and expression analyses of the Mc1r locus in the polychromatic Midas cichlid fish (Teleostei, Cichlidae Amphilophus sp.) species group,” and Yohey Terai et al.’s 2003 “The complexity of alternative splicing of hagoromo mRNAs is increased in an explosively speciated lineage in East African cichlids.” Then some specific traits: Richard Baker et al.’s 2010 “Genomic analysis of a sexually-selected character: EST sequencing and microarray analysis of eye-antennal imaginal discs in the stalk-eyed fly Teleopsis dalmanni (Diopsidae),” and Nils Offen et al.’s 2009 “Identification of novel genes involved in the development of the sword and gonopodium in swordtail fish.” These are all works detailing, as the original paper says, gain of function mutations, many of which were shaped extensively through natural selection. Purdom, therefore, saw the aforementioned sentence and citations for all these papers but refused to include it in her attack on this article, possibly because they completely undermined her point. This is one of those examples of things (data suppression) she should know better than to do—especially around people who can read footnotes. Nor was the scientific engine of discovery restricted to just the work Purdom neglected to explore this time. Very close to home, Alan

Rogers et al. had identified in 2004 “Genetic Variation at the MC1R Locus and the Time since Loss of Human Body Hair” participating in our own variations in skin pigmentation as our by then comparatively hairless species spread into varied climates. In 2012, Baker’s team continued their work on “Gene duplication, tissue-specific gene expression and sexual conflict in stalk-eyed flies (Diopsidae).” And there had been plenty of new work clarifying the natural evolutionary mechanisms and their adaptive aspects underlying those butterfly wings: Swee-Peck Quek et al. on “Dissecting comimetic radiations in Heliconius reveals divergent histories of convergent butterflies” in 2010, and two 2011 works, Heather Hines et al. on “Wing patterning gene redefines the mimetic history of Heliconius butterflies” and Robert Reed et al.’s “optix Drives the Repeated Convergent Evolution of Butterfly Wing Pattern Mimicry.” If Purdom’s idea was to undermine the reality of naturally occurring mutations beneficial to organisms, she was off to a very bad start. The next creationist subchapter “Do Beneficial Mutations Exist?” retreads exactly the same argument that we encountered in our White chapter (Purdom’s emphasis): “It is more appropriate to say that some mutations have beneficial outcomes in certain environments.” We already explained that this is the case for every single mutation ever. And, it would necessarily have to be, as organisms adapt to their own environment, not environments they do not live in (duh). But, this time, she shakes things up: she decides to look at some examples of allegedly beneficial mutations. Goodie! Fasten your seatbelts, gang, we’re about to embark on a lengthy and often bumpy ride.  

Richard Lenski’s E. coli studies  

Starting at the driveway, Purdon’s first example is the Richard Lenski et al. Escherichia coli experiment. Some background: back in 1988 Lenski and his colleagues began to track the development of a dozen populations of E. coli bacteria over many thousands of generations (over 64,000 as of 2016, as the work has been going on for two decades). E. coli was chosen because it reproduces asexually and lacked plasmids, meaning any changes

would be related directly to mutation and genetic drift, a simpler task to follow than the comparative free-for-all gene shuffling of sexual reproduction, and so permitting the effects of natural selection to be easier to spot and measure. The populations could be kept in static environments, or varied ones, and with or without active selection. In this way, a slimmed down restricted view could be had of the nuts-and-bolts basement of genetic mutation and variation, a baseline that could be used in teasing out the dynamics of the much more complex interactions taking place in the rest of life. With such a long observation frame, literally every possible point mutation in their genome would have occurred multiple times, hundreds of millions of them. Most of those weren’t beneficial, or were neutral ones that still never reached fixation in the lineages studied (there are genetic rules to that too, see Sarah Otto & Michael Whitlock’s 1997 paper “The Probability of Fixation in Populations of Changing Size”). But 100 were preserved long term. Most of these were neutral, along with a smaller array of 10-20 beneficial ones. Though what “beneficial” meant wasn’t entirely static, either. For example, in 2009 Nadège Philippe et al. found that a more rounded shape in the bacterium occurred when the expression of a penicillin-binding protein mutated. This mutant outcompeted its rivals in its glucose environment, but there was a flip side: they were more affected by osmotic stress (sudden shifts in water circulation due to changes in salt concentration) and when stuck in a stationary mode they were less likely to survive than their non-mutant rivals. Another trade-off involved a specialization to the glucose culture Vaughan Cooper & Lenski identified in 2000, which a 2014 analysis by Nicholas Leiby & Christopher Marx found involved a web of neutral mutation losses in genetic regions unused in that specialized environment. Such are the many yins and yangs in the churning sea of mutation at the bacterial level, and Lenski’s experiments are justifiably renowned for tracking these processes with an unprecedented degree of precision. But one rather interesting variation involved citrate usage and this brought down the wrath of anti-evolutionism. Normally E. coli can’t grow directly on a citrate substrate when oxygen is present, though in the wild it can get around this because (1)

it has a complete citric acid cycle that can metabolize it in conjunction with other processes (when those are active), (2) can grow anaerobically by fermentation using a citT gene, or (3) can take advantage of a plasmid that contains a necessary citrate transporter. But remember the strains used by Lenski lacked plasmids. Turning to citT, it’s related to a translocator found in plant chloroplasts, per 1998 work by Klaas Pos et al., and it turned out to have some novel twists in store for Lenksi’s long-term experiments. Some 33,000 generations along, one of the populations showed an ability to grow on citrate aerobically. Now how did that happen? Papers with Zachary Blount and colleagues in 2008 and 2012 reported that 2933 base pairs containing the citT gene had undergone a duplication, abutting it to another gene that got triggered when oxygen was present. This natural shuffling of inevitably mutating regulatory and protein coding regions is what brought about that new way of metabolizing citrate. In that way a system that didn’t initially trigger in an aerobic environment ended up activating when oxygen was present. Lenksi’s efforts garnered some critical grumps from the Young Earth Creationist end of things, such as Brian Thomas proclaiming “Evolution’s Top Example Topples” in 2015, even while citing Erik Quandt et al.’s 2014 paper on “Recursive genomewide recombination and sequencing reveals a key refinement step in the evolution of a metabolic innovation in Escherichia coli” that was not doing any such toppling. But much more pushback came from the Intelligent Design side, from Michael Behe in 2011 and 2012 posts, and more technically in a 2016 Journal of Bacteriology paper by Dustin Van Hofwegen, Carolyn Hovde & Scott Minnich (Minnich being an ID advocate). Subjecting their samples to week-long selection rather than the day-length protocol in Lenski’s work, Minnich’s group found these root variations were fairly common, and in 2016 John Roth & Sophie Malsnier-Patin recognized that length of selection accounted for the differences between the two experiments. Lenski and Behe have continued to joust, including his joining with Nathan Lents and Joshua Swamidass in unfavorably reviewing Behe’s latest book, Darwin Devolves, in Science in 2019, as well as a series of Telliamed Revisited blog posts.

Time for some perspective. No grand new species of E. coli resulted from the experiments, of course—in fact, who would expect them to, given that speciation at the bacterial level depends on things like lateral gene transfer from disparate bacteria and ecological interaction with a wide range of other organisms, something expressly excluded from the limited single lineage of E. coli used in the studies. Though there were signs of incipient speciation, noted by Marin Vulic et al. in 1999, and chromosomal rearrangements cropped up over 100 times, as Colin Raeside et al. chronicled in 2014, with beneficial fitness effects detected among that sample too. Taken altogether, none of the Lenski work constituted a repudiation of how natural variation could shuffle and modify existing pieces to make an organism react positively in ways it originally couldn’t. That Raeside paper arose in an exchange between John Sanford and physicist Gerard Jellison. According to Jellison’s 2014 Amazon review of Sanford’s “genetic entropy” claims (which we’ll cover at more depth later in this chapter), Sanford offered that work in a rebuttal to Jellison, along with Sanna Koskiniemi et al.’s 2012 paper on selection pressure for gene reduction in some bacteria. Supposedly those works showed genetic entropy in bacteria—which Jellison noted they had not. We’re not the only ones to play the Source Methods game with creationists. That Lenski’s work was not intended to explore bacterial speciation dynamics was lost on fledgling antievolutionist Josh Greenberger in 2018, claiming “Charles Darwin Was Not A Scientist.” His misunderstanding of that and other evolution matters got a sharp retort from Jerry Coyne’s “More dumb antievolution statements from Jews.” Incidentally, Greenberger’s slim 76-page 2012 book claiming Fossil Discoveries Disprove Evolution Beyond A Doubt managed not to actually discuss fossils (such as dinosaurs or therapsids) or evolution relevant biological subjects (like mitochondrial endosymbiosis). So, what was Lenski’s experiments about? Nathan Lents summarized that in a 2019 article for Skeptic magazine:  

The long-term evolution experiment (LTEE) was designed to be extremely simple, minimizing as many factors as technically possible. As Lenski explained to me, “It

was not intended to mimic the complexities of nature, nor was it meant to be a test-bed for the evolution of new functional abilities.” Instead, temperature is kept constant, glucose is the main carbon source, and the cultures are free of competitors, viruses, antibiotics, and host defenses. This is a recipe for streamlining, not innovation, and Behe can be rightly faulted for not understanding this fact, especially since Lenski has spelled it out clearly in all of the papers and his other writings on the LTEE.  

As tempting as it may be to investigate more of Michael Behe’s misconceptions about the LTEE experiments, we have AiG’s notions on them to study. Compared to Behe, Georgia Purdom’s sideswipe at Lenski was surprisingly superficial, focusing on the citrate case, but Scott Whynot conveniently took aim at the larger body of work in a 2014 Answers in Genesis posting, portentously titled, “Hijacking Good Science: Lenski’s Bacteria Support Creation.”And so did a 2015 posting by Christopher Rupe & John Sanford with somewhat less hyperbole: “The most famous evolution experiment of all time shows that evolution goes the wrong way” as they characterized the citT mutation as merely one of “Loss of regulation.” By then there was quite a body of work to evaluate (including papers published after their pieces)—sixty-four that we’re aware of. Those newer papers only confirmed the continuing fitness gains in the E. coli lineage, though, including the role temperature played, and how much of the many variations were driven by relatively brief periods of hypermutability. We thought it might be helpful to chart that LTEE record, identifying the works Purdom, Whynot and Rupe & Sanford touched on in their respective works in gray. Altogether they were hitting most of the LTEE work, but Whynot in particular bumped into enough of it to allow us to take a good measure of the creationist’s mode of analysis on the Lenski data set. We’ve numbered in bold those papers Whynot relied on for his main points.  

Long term Richard Escherichia Experiments Lenski’s coli

Lenski

et

al. 3-Cooper

1991

&

Schneider et al.

10-Stanek et al. 2009

2001 Lenski & Mittler Remold & Lenski Barrick et al. 2010 1993

2001

Lenski

& Cullum et al. 2001

Travisano 1994 Vasi et al. 1994

11-Meyer et al. 2010

De Visser et al. Khan et al. 2011 2002

Travisano

&

4-Cooper et al. 12-Woods et al.

Vasi et al. 1995

2003

Travisano

5-Lenski

&

2011 &

Mongold et al.

Winkworth et al.

1995

2003

Travisano

&

Lenski 1996 Elena

et

Wielgoss

et

al.

et

al.

2011

Lenski & Ofria et

Le

Gac

al. 2003

2012

al. Elena & Lenski 13-Blount et al.

1996

2003

2012

Travisano 1997

Riehle et al. 2003

Wielgoss

et

al.

2013 Souza

et

al.

Lenski 2004

Covert et al. 2013

1997 Sniegowski

et Schneider

al. 1997

&

Lenski 2004

Elena & Lenski 6-Crozat 1997a

et

Barrick & Lenski 2013

al. Wiser et al. 2013

2005

Elena & Lenski Rozen et al. 2005 Raeside 1997b Lenski

al.

2014 et

al. 7-Woods et al.  

1998 Elena

et

2006 et

al. 8-Pelosi

et

al. Lenski et al. 2015

1998

2006

De Visser et al.

Bennett & Lenski

Tenaillon

1999

2007

2016

Papadopoulos

Blount et al. 2008 Deatherage et al.

et al. 1999

2017

et

al.

Vulic et al. 1999

Sleight et al. 2008 Maddamsetti

et

al.2017 Rozen & Lenski 9. Rozen et al. Couce et al. 2017 2000

2009

Cooper

&

Philippe

et

al. Good et al. 2017

Lenski 2000

2009

1-Schneider et

Barrick & Lenski

al. 2000

2009

2-Cooper

Peng et al. 2018

& Barrick et al. 2009 Lamrabet et

Bennett et al.

al.

2019

2001

  Whynot hit eleven areas where mutations were detected. One (the citrate matter) we’ve already looked into. And there could have been a twelfth, since Sean Sleight et al.’s 2008 paper (“Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Adaptation by Escherichia coli to Stressful Cycles of Freezing, Thawing and Growth”) had found a mutation that disrupted the uspA/B gene, which allowed more fluidity in the membrane. The cell rigidity that uspA/B triggers is how E. coli wards off the bad effect of ethanol, which fluidizes the membranes. A cell well dissolved into guck is not a good thing, but since there was no ethanol in the Lenski experimental environment, the relaxed membrane structure was in this context completely beneficial. Whynot missed that opportunity to tag this as a “loss of function.” Seven of the points he did cover drew on sources 1-9 & 12 from the table (his italics, but in all cases our bold). For each we’ll present Whynot’s full text, so you can see exactly what he elected to mention. To start:  

First is the pykF gene. This gene encodes one of two pyruvate kinase enzymes that catalyzes the transfer of a phosphate group from phosphoenolpyruvate (PEP) to adenosine diphosphate (ADP) yielding a molecule of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). PEP is also used to help drive the uptake of glucose, a limited energy source in the experiment. The researches [sic] noted an insertion in this genetic region that they hypothesized to have inactivated this gene leading to a greater amount of PEP available to drive glucose uptake.  

Let’s look closer. In 2000, the Schneider paper (Citation 1) determined an insertion IS150 (which popped up in multiple insertion and deletion events, as we’ll see) had appeared in the pykF gene, inactivating it—nothing “hypothesized” about this, it was observed. At this stage they weren’t sure “whether the mutations were beneficial or merely hitchhiked to fixation,” and it was not until the 2006 Woods paper (Citation 7) that they hypothesized the availability of PEP as the possible benefit (and which text Whynot clearly drew on for his summary). Not directly mentioned was the 2006 Pelosi paper (Citation 8) pointing out how this singular mutation involving pykF stood out from the overall pattern where adaptive pressures worked on the parallel occurrence of relaxed gene expression in cropping up in multiple lineages, or the follow-up Woods 2011 (Citation 12) on multiple experimental replays of the pykF mutation. As it happens, a 2013 paper by Yinhua Wang et al., delved into the isolated pykF mutation in further detail. They did this by directly examining their fitness effects, measuring the interactions in multiple samples. You know, that experiment thing. They found the benefits of the pykF changes involved its interplay with the topA gene (one that makes an enzyme involved in DNA coiling and uncoiling in replication and transcription), and those fitness pairings were observationally related to strains with slower growth rates. Later still, a 2018 paper by Lenski’s team, Fen Peng et al., tracked how “Effects of Beneficial Mutations in pykF Gene Vary over Time and across Replicate Populations in a Long-Term Experiment with Bacteria.” Along with identifying the eight specific mutation points in the molecules that were altering its topology, some 30,000 generations in the series had revealed the effects were occurring because of their interaction with other beneficial mutations (consistent with the bigger picture spotted in the 2006 Pelosi paper). The next issue on their plate is to characterize more of the exact biochemical mechanism whereby those mutations resulted in the observed fitness gains (which may be contrasted with the “not doing the work at all” approach of the creationists taking potshots from the AiG sidelines). Whether Purdom was aware of the earlier Wang paper in her contemporaneous 2013 Answers writing is unknown, but Whynot

definitely didn’t cite it in his 2014 piece, and so didn’t connect those dots when he brought up the topA matter. But Whynot and Rupe & Sanford were aware of the 2005 Crozat paper (Whynot’s Citation 6) regarding the rates and effects of the DNA supercoiling (think old telephone handset cord tangling) and the part fis played in it (another “Reduction” according to Rupe & Sanford). Whynot framed those findings this way:  

DNA coiling is an important factor in gene regulation, and a mutation was found in the topA gene that encodes an enzyme that relaxes DNA coils. Along with this, a mutation was found in the genetic region upstream of the fis gene. The product of fis reduces activity of DNA gyrase which itself increases DNA supercoiling. A loss or decrease of function in the protein products of both the topA and fis genes would contribute to the observed increase in DNA supercoiling.  

Whynot’s contorted way of putting this was truly Byzantine. The topA mutation was a single amino acid shift at position 33 of the molecule (tyrosine replacing histidine) that increased supercoiling. Now doing nothing but supercoiling would not be good, as the Crozat paper plainly wrote that “complete inactivation of topA is lethal unless compensatory mutations in the gyrAB genes decrease supercoiling.” But the increase in supercoiling (an interesting topic, see the  Info Box) was doing something the opposite of hurting the strain studied, so why was that not a beneficial mutation? Crozat’s paper offered an explanatory hypothesis (which Whynot did not mention): “An increase in supercoiling would facilitate transcription of the rRNA operons. A higher rate of rRNA synthesis could be advantageous because the evolved lines have substantially higher exponential growth rates than does the ancestor.” We may point out that 2014 (when Whynot was writing) was six years after work with those topA mutants by Imad Baaklini et al. in 2008 that confirmed how an excess of “Hypernegative Supercoiling Inhibits Growth by Causing RNA Degradation.” Whynot’s next example was the pbpA-rodA operon. But while Rupe & Sanford relegated it to “Reduction” status, Whynot couldn’t find a way to pigeonhole it as somehow a loss of function thing, waving instead the supposed absence of an identified mechanism:  

Second was an insertion mutation in the regulatory region of the pbpA-rodA operon. This operon (which is a cluster of genes under the control of a similar regulatory unit) encodes two important proteins involved with cell wall synthesis. As all 12 E. coli populations evolved larger cell volumes, the authors

  ___________________________________________________________________

DNA supercoiling Purificación López-García suggested in 1999 that supercoiling had an adaptive side, relating to high temperature biochemistry early in the history of life, and lots of work has identified how intricate the coiling dance has become in the billions of years since. Ye Liu et al. 2001 showed how it promoted enhanced action over large distances along the DNA; in 2002 Frédéric Marc et al. spotted the roll of histones in determining the direction of supercoiling in Archaea; and Brian Peter et al. 2004 explored what can go awry in E. coli when supercoiling doesn’t occur. 2011 work by Guillaume Witz et al. traced how “Tightening of DNA knots by supercoiling facilitates their unknotting by type II DNA topoisomerases” while Chu-Chun Huang et al. found “Histone H3-variant Cse4-induced positive DNA supercoiling in the yeast plasmid has implications for a plasmid origin of a chromosome centromere.” In 2014 Airat Gubaev & Dagmar Klostermeier uncovered “The mechanism of negative DNA supercoiling: a cascade of DNA-induced conformational changes prepares gyrase for strand passage” and Yue Ding et al. characterized “DNA supercoiling: A regulatory signal for the λ repressor. Stay tuned for further discoveries. hypothesized that altered cell wall synthesis or timing of synthesis may have been beneficial. The exact mechanism of this mutation regarding a gain or loss of novel information is unknown.  

The insertion character was our old pal IS150, and Schneider (Citation 1) suggested it was a likely target for future study to see how it affected the regulation of the operons downstream, both involved directly in generating the rod shape of E. coli: pbpA that “encodes penicillin-binding protein 2, which is involved in peptidoglycan

synthesis and elongation of the cell wall” and rodA “involved in determining cell shape”). That the mutants “underwent large increases in cell volume” made the idea that this mutation in the regulatory region for two essential cell-size relevant genes a rather obvious inference. That natural selection was playing its part was indicated by the later Woods 2006 paper (Citation 7, which Rupe & Sanford also cited) that compared the substitution rates with that of the same region in parallel strains that didn’t have the insertion. Whynot going on about no “novel information” being needed was missing the whole point in his own cited literature: the adaptive change came about by a single natural mutation that affected the regulation of the existing “information.” Unless Whynot wanted to argue that nothing about cell size could ever be advantageous in principle, there was no reason to consider this as anything other than a putative “beneficial” mutation. Whynot’s next example pointedly left something out in his sprint for “merely a hypothesis”:  

The hokB-sokB gene locus in E. coli is a toxin-antitoxin system. When found in bacterial chromosomes, these systems are commonly involved in responding to stresses and bringing about programmed cell death. The authors hypothesized that the observed insertion mutation would have knocked out this gene, and a disruption of hokB/sokB would likely be beneficial in the experimental environment.  

Schneider’s paper (Citation 1) and Woods’ 2006 one (Citation 7) had explicitly noted the pivotal role of plasmids, identifying that hok encodes a toxin and sok encodes the antisense RNA that blocks it. This was not about relieving stress per se, it was about killing off any cells that lose the plastid. Since the strain used in the Lenski experiments were deliberately plasmid-free, a mutation shutting that suicide switch down would seem a really beneficial trait to kick in for this E. coli line. The Schneider paper noted that “Repeated inactivation of these loci suggests that their function is deleterious to the host, at least in the absence of plasmids,” but didn’t rule out the possibility that the mutation could “simply indicate a preferential insertion site because only IS150 and IS186 are found in the loci.” But the later Wood

analysis (comparing substitution patterns with the non-mutant strains) dispensed with that caveat, as they found the inactivation tendency an adaptive one. If Whynot wanted to take a stand on how and why plasmids got to be inside bacteria like E. coli in the first place, fine, but offering an explicit alternative creationist model was not what he did here. It was just hand-waving. And there would be a lot to wave away. In the roughand-tumble world of bacteria in the wild, plastids that can slow growth rate (and deploy their suicide toxin kit) can be very useful in getting their way when hunkering down matters. And that includes resisting antibiotics, as Kenn Gerdes & Etienne Maisonneuve covered in their 2015 commentary (“Remarkable Functional Convergence: Alarmone ppGpp Mediates Persistence by Activating Type 1 and II Toxin-Antitoxins”) on Natalie Verstraeten et al.’s paper (“Obg and Membrane Depolarization Are Part of a Microbial Bet-Hedging Strategy that Leads to Antibiotic Tolerance”) where hoksok played its part by collapsing the membrane potential of the cell wall, effectively pulling up the drawbridge on the approach of antibiotic invaders. Does Whynot really want to implicate the Designer in a rather creepy scheme of constructing bacteria to be better at evading human medicine? That would have been an interesting read, but doing the work or even working out much of his own creationist model was far from his game, as his next examples only dug his avoidance trench even deeper. First came the rbs operon. Tersely catalogued by Rupe & Sanford as due to “Deletion”, Whynot was a bit more descriptive:  

The researchers observed that all 12 populations of E. coli lost the ability to catabolize D-ribose, an energy source that was not available in this experimental environment. Furthermore, this loss of function was remarkably quick—within 2,000 generations all populations had lost the ability. It was noted that this loss was caused by deletion mutations in the rbs operon. Interestingly, ribose is one of the energy sources that commensal E. coli use in the intestine.  

Once more we were looking at effects of that busy IS150 element, including mutant versions covered especially in Cooper & Schneider 2001 and Cooper 2003 (Citations 3 & 5). That the bacterium thrived

without this genetic baggage was clearly beneficial, and by 2011 when Aisha Khan et al.’s paper appeared (which neither Whynot nor Rupe & Sanford cited), it was clear these mutations contributed to a network of varying fitness. Independent experiments by Matthew Herron & Michael Doebeli in 2013 revealed still more about how that rbs operon fitted into the adaptive genetic landscape. They found:  

Timelines of allele frequencies extracted from the frozen ‘‘fossil record’’ of three evolving populations showed parallel evolutionary dynamics, suggesting that mutations causing one type of physiology changed the ecological environment and allowed invasion of mutations causing an alternate physiology. The results provide empirical evidence of adaptive diversification as a predictable evolutionary process.  

In fact, it turned out that two more of Whynot’s “loss of function” candidates (nadR and spoT) were part of this intricate adaptive dance, but all the creationist could see was, well, a “loss of function.” Rupe & Sanford labeled the adaptive impact of the nadR mutation as due to “Inactivation” and spoT a “Reduction.” Let’s look closer. Of nadR, Whynot contended:  

The nadR gene encodes a bi-functional protein involved in aspects of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) metabolism. Specifically, this protein represses several genes involved in NAD synthesis so a disruption of this gene and its corresponding protein, especially the repressor function of the protein, would result in more NAD. Dr. Lenski and colleagues observed an insertion mutation into the nadR gene and hypothesized that an increased intracellular concentration of NAD may be beneficial in this environment. This increase in NAD would be due to a loss of function in the repressor component of the protein.  

Whynot got this basic information from the Schneider paper (Citation 1), but only someone with the lens turned the wrong way round could characterize the expansion of a molecule’s use in the metabolism as a loss of its function! Especially since the Woods paper (Citation 7) had specifically noted of this bifunctional protein, that “A knockout of one function could leave the other function intact; and, in

the case of the repressor function, a knockout could elevate expression of the de-repressed genes.” With the next example (spoT) Whynot, Rupe & Sanford tripped right past that alarmone ppGpp (guanine tetraphosphate) molecule that we noted above regarding hok-sok. Alarmone mainly inhibits RNA synthesis when there’s a shortage of amino acids available—the structural basis of which was worked out by Irina Artismovitch et al. in 2004. But (as is so common in natural evolution) it has taken on a variety of regulating functions too. As laid out by Lisa Magnusson et al. in 2005, this involves the favoring of genes inducing starvation and virulence over regular growth (rendering bacteria like E. coli both essential and yet easily turning nasty). But Whynot was again too busy trying to contort the square biological peg to fit his round creationist hole to take note of those distracting factual details:  

Dr. Lenski and colleagues noted a mutation in spoT, the product of which is involved in the stringent response through a cell signaling molecule (ppGpp). The precise physiological basis for this advantage is unknown; however no two mutations were identical among bacterial populations that evolved a mutation in this gene. This finding suggests that any fitness benefits from these mutations were due to a disruption of function.  

Whynot, Rupe & Sanford apparently did not follow their own cited sources too closely, since Cooper 2003 (Whynot’s Citation 4) had experimentally tested the mutation in multiple strains (including reconstructing the ancestral pre-mutant version) to verify its positive effects. Of course other mutations could affect that (the scientists suspected there was one in a particular lineage that effectively beat the spoT mutation to the punch), but were Whynot, Rupe or Sanford claiming such interactions were impossible? We can’t say, since they didn’t get that far into the data field or their own vague design model, but it would be a risky gangplank to walk out on if they did.[27] And as for that “precise physiological basis for this advantage” being unknown, Cooper’s paper explicitly identified spoT as more than just “involved” with ppGpp—it was one of two main regulators of its concentration. Rozen 2009 (Citation 9) went into some detail on the growth effects of the ppGpp variants, and given how important and

promiscuous alarmones are (regulating a host of genes including the ones showing up in that antibiotic resistance), just how “precise” would the scientists’ breakdown have to be before Whynot would permit the mutation to be judged just a smidge advantageous? Compounding his oversights, Whynot notably spared his readers any idea of what “function” it was that he thought was being disrupted here. The remaining three of Whynot’s points cited sources 10-11 & 13 from the table, and his argument kept on that “loss of function” track. One concerned the findings of Blount (Citation 13), which you may recall involved that citrate+ mutant. Whynot didn’t bring that up in his snippet:  

A single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) mutation was found in the mutS gene. This SNP produced a premature stop codon and truncated the MutS protein leading to a defect in DNA repair. This particular mutation was of importance because it greatly increases the number of mutations a bacterial population will accumulate over time.  

The Blount paper noted this mutation occurred after the original Cit mutation and only in that one lineage; its relaxation of mutation repair changed the mutation rate from a fairly steady one every 300 generations to a brisker one every 20. The paper did not identify whether this condition was beneficial or deleterious to the E. coli; but then neither did Whynot. What would his creation model predict would be the result? Mutations are the raw material of evolution, and three 2013 papers by the Lenski team addressed the intricacy of it, but were not cited by Purdom or the 2014 Whynot. Sébastien Wielgoss et al. found a “tension between adaptation and genetic load” in replication error correction genes, as mutations in mutT shot up the rate 150-fold, only to be lowered again up to 60% by compensating mutations in mutY. Even more interestingly, in another paper that didn’t make it onto the creationist analytical scope, Arthur Covert et al. laid out “Experiments on the role of deleterious mutations as stepping stones in adaptive evolution.” That’s right, deleterious mutations. As the Covert paper put it, even these may become stepping stones in the evolutionary process as “a later mutation that is conditionally beneficial may interact with a +

deleterious predecessor before it is eliminated, thereby providing access to adaptations that might otherwise be inaccessible.” In their 2013 review, Jeffrey Barrick and Lenski recalled Darwin’s “tangled bank” metaphor, which isn’t a bad way to describe the multilayered interactions the E. coli and other experiments identified among naturally mutating populations. In the creationist context are these only the degenerate fluff of a Fallen Bacterium? We don’t know, because going that far in the design game was not on the “loss of function” creationist cue sheet. Returning to Whynot, his next mutation example (glmUS) came from Stanek 2009 (Citation 10). Rupe & Sanford ricocheted off it secondarily, citing Barrick et al.’s 2009 paper and characterizing it as another “Reduction.” Here’s how Whynot described it:  

The researchers found a small insertion mutation upstream of glmUS, an operon involved in cell wall biosynthesis. It was hypothesized that this mutation inhibited normal binding of a transcriptional activator to this region thereby reducing glmUS expression.  

That was one way to put it. Stanek had another. The relaxation of constraints on cell wall size was measurably a good thing for the bacterium, resulting in bigger cells with an overall 5% increase in fitness. And it was rather more than a “hypothesis” that the mutation was affecting the organism. “To demonstrate conclusively that the BoxG18A mutation in glmUS was responsible for the fitness increase of the REL10247 strain, we moved that mutation into the ancestor” where increase fitness was directly measured. Their hypothesis related instead to why the change mattered: “a reduction in glmUS expression caused by the BoxG18A allele may provide an advantage in GlcN6P by better balancing metabolic flux between catabolic and anabolic processes,” although this could be “further complicated by the observation that GlcN6P interacts directly with NagC to reduce its affinity for at least some binding sites.”[28] But the relevance also concerned their context in the main experiment. The Stanek paper abstract summarized it:  

The 1-bp insertion in the BoxG1 region near glmUS was demonstrably beneficial in the environment in which it arose. The absence of similar mutations in the other

evolved populations suggests that they substituted other mutations that rendered this particular mutation unimportant. These results show the unpredictability of adaptive evolution, whereas parallel substitutions at other loci in these same populations reveal the predictability.  

Finally, Whynot tried to turn a mutation in the malT gene onto his “loss of function” expressway. Relying on the account by Pelosi et al. in 2006, Rupe & Sanford pegged it as a “Deletion/Reduction,” while Whynot drew on Justin Meyer 2010 (Citation 11) to contend (his italics):  

Interestingly, many bacterial populations evolved resistance to a certain virus even though they were not exposed to that virus throughout the experiment. The protein that the bacteria use to transport and metabolize maltose, an energy source that was not present in their experimental environment, is the same protein that the virus targets to infect the bacteria. Since there is no maltose in the growth media, downregulating this unused metabolic pathway would be beneficial for the bacteria and just so happens to confer viral resistance as well. Genetically this change resulted from a mutation in the malT gene, the regulator of maltose metabolism through positive regulation of the LamB surface protein. Mutation in malT likely rendered its protein product nonfunctional thereby eliminating expression of LamB.  

The subject of this set of experiments was to explore “the dynamics of host susceptibility to parasites,” and how much of this turned on “trade-offs between the costs and benefits of resistance.” There were three viruses involved in the study. The original strain of E. coli was immune to the T6 bacteriophage because “a point mutation generated a premature stop codon in the tsx gene” that was normally the binding target of the phage. The original strain was somewhat affected by a mutant T6* that had broader binding range, and also by the λ bacteriophage that bound to the LamB protein. The ability of any bacterium to resist a viral attack would depend on the availability of its binding partners, which begged the question of why a creationist designer would have gone to the trouble of making the viruses in the first place. Unless, of course, viruses were arising as a part of the natural evolution of things. Shun the prospect! Most interestingly, it turned out that those lambda bacteriophages were doing exactly what Michael Behe and company were insisting

was impossible: multiple mutations (four in this case) cropping up repeatedly in them—mutations which individually had selective value in dealing with one thing (binding to the LamB receptor), but which together enabled an entirely new capacity in the phage, the ability to bind to a completely different molecule, OmpF. All four of the mutations were required to do that (sounds like Irreducible Complexity, doesn’t it?)—and yet that very thing took place in six different lambda populations in only eight days. And all this experimentally verified in 2016 by Alita Burmeister with Lenski & Meyer, and further with a 2018 analysis by Rohan Maddamsetti with Meyer’s full team. Lenski described the delightful details in his 2019 Telliamed Revisited post on Behe’s latest book claims, “Evolution goes viral! (And how real science works).” But even without the lambda example shown in this recent work, Whynot (and by inference, any anti-evolutionist who argued like him) failed to follow through on the implications of what was happening in the LTEE work: the pleiotropic effect of a mutation, where changes in one gene can have a side effect seemingly peripheral to it. This can even happen with genes being turned down or off (the “loss-offunction” they so obsess on). What Lenski’s experiments observed close-up at the micromutation level in principle could occur all through the genome, pulling its attendant biology and phenotype along with it. All scientists had to do was look. And look they have. By now it shouldn’t be a surprise to our readers that there’s an extensive literature on this, running across the full range of life. Here’s a bit of a sample. Andreas Wagner was investigating overlapping gene functions in 2000. By 2007 Nora Scarcelli et al.’s paper studied the FRIGIDA locus (a gene regulating flowering time in Arabidopsis thaliana). David Liberales et al.’s 2011 one was hot on the trail of enzymes and signaling proteins. Gene networks in yeast were being studied by Zhi Wang et al. in 2010, and by Wenfeng Qian et al. in 2012. In 2015 Shengzhan Luo & Bruce Baker worked on the doublesex gene in fruit flies. Move up to the level of populations of organisms, and there is an ecological impact of pleiotropy, from the bacteria investigated by Craig MacLean et al. in 2004, to moths and butterflies by Chris Jiggins et al. in 2005, and the ecological alteration of the fitness landscape by the bacteria studied by Djordje Bajić et al. in 2018. As a reminder, fitness

landscapes can be comparatively static or quite dynamic, altering as the environment shifts. In that latter case, the experimental work suggests bacterial populations can adapt three times faster than when trying to climb a static fitness peak, and unlike the static mode where the organisms can end up adaptively stuck, populations can flow towards dynamically shifting peaks much more easily, as shown graphically by some cool 2014 work by Randy Olson & Bjørn Østman. It plays a role in speciation too, as Montgomery Slatkin recognized in a 1982 paper, with recent work including Kerry Shaw et al. 2011 on insect mate recognition, and Masato Yamamichi & Akira Sasaki finding in 2013 how even a single gene can trigger speciation in a particular snail. At the other end of the spectrum, down deep in the body plan department, in 2014 Nicolas Lonfat et al. found that the body axis Hox loci were not immune to the pleiotropic dance, and many researchers have been delving into how evolutionary novelties and biological complexity have built on that side of things, with vertebrae variation being one tractable target, such as Frietson Galis & Johan Metz in 2007, and particularly interesting, Irma Varela-Lasheras  et al. in 2011 on the homeotic mutations underlying the stand-out sloths and manatees (the only mammals that vary from the otherwise monotonously prevalent seven neck vertebrae). ___________________________________________________________________

Zeno Slicing Coauthor RJ described this phenomenon in his TIP analysis, named for the 5th century BCE Greek philosopher Zeno who sought to “prove” motion was an illusion by pitting the fleet-footed Achilles against a tortoise, but giving the slow reptile a head start. By the time Achilles reached where the tortoise had been, it had trundled on a bit, and by the time he reached that spot, the tortoise had pressed on a tiny but farther. By that “logic” Achilles could never catch up, but his snag was trying to sum up an infinitely shortening series. Knowing how to resolve the paradox also explains why Zeno failed at it. What Zeno needed was the ability to add up functionally an infinite series of increasingly smaller turtle steps, and for that he needed calculus, but that math tool wasn’t invented until the 17th

century when Gottfried Leibnitz (1646-1716) and Isaac Newton (1643-1727) independently hit on it. William McLaughlin did an informative Scientific American article on “Resolving Zeno’s Paradoxes” in 1994.   In just this one niche of Lenski’s E. coli experiments, the level of interconnecting science work stood in marked contrast with the creationist approach, which was to carve up the issues as Whynot did, into as thin of slices as possible, and avoid connecting any of these now isolated blips in any way (even within their own hypothetical designer model)—a dodge coauthor RJ has dubbed Zeno Slicing (see the  Info Box). This spectacle of sidestep and evasion was distilled in Purdom’s Answers book treatment, with the “no beneficial mutations” mantra very much in force as the creationist pressed on from the Lenski case to address her next example, the nylon-eating bacteria Arthrobacter sp. K172 (formerly Flavobacterium). Background: in 1975 Shinichi Kinoshita et al. discovered that the bacteria had developed the ability to hydrolyze (break down) the macromolecule nylon that was popping up in the waste water of a Japanese nylon factory. This had to have taken place quite recently, as nylon was only invented in the 20th century. Adaptive evolution on the fly. Now how exactly had this come about, and what did it all mean for the evolution issue? Figuring this out took lots of hard work (none of it done by anti-evolutionists). In 1984 Susumu Ohno speculated that it might have arisen by a combination of gene duplication and frameshifting (where the reading of the DNA jumps ahead or behind). Many a new protein has popped on the scene through such novel frameshift translation, as surveyed by Kohji Okamura et al. in 2006. In the nylon case, the active character turned out to be just one of three plastids in the bacterium, explored by Hirosuke Okada et al. in 1983, Seiji Negoro et al. in 1992, and Ko Kato et al. in 1995. Kato et al. 1991 had also identified two amino acid replacements (aspartic acid and asparagine) essential to digesting the oligomer, and in 1992 Tetsuya Yomo et al. had uncovered another tantalizing clue in the nylon degrading gene: the antisense strands (that would be the

half of the DNA that gets used as the template for the RNA versions that actually make proteins) lacked stop codons (there being three to choose: TAA, TAG and TGA). By not having terminator signals at the translation end, the Yomo paper suggested those dangling loose ends could be a source for new functional enzymes (like the one that could munch nylon). In 1983 Negoro et al. found they could carry over the nylon degradation into another bacterium by transplanting the plastid, but in 1995, Irfan Prijambada et al. induced the same capacity in another bacterium (Pseudomonas aeruginosa) by the draconian approach of restricting its diet to just that substance, so whatever was going on was not restricted to just Arthrobacter. By 2005 the dimensional structure of the β-lactamase fold was well enough known for Negoro et al. to explore more of the effects in the actual molecule, which made any hunt for duplicated genes or frameshifts unnecessary. It turned out the Asp181 lay on a specific turn of a spiral segment of the lactamase, and the Asn266 was positioned just opposite it on an exposed molecular prong. In a 2007 paper they accounted for why this mutated arrangement still retained useful esterolytic activity (the ability to split an ester into its component alcohol and acid), and continued this work in Yasuyuki Kawashima et al. in 2009 and Kengo Yasuhira et al. in 2010. Citing only Seiji Negoro et al. 2007, Purdom was certainly aware of the forensics (her italics):  

Instead it was discovered that mutations in a pre-existing gene resulted in a protein that is capable of breaking down nylon. The protein, known as EII, normally breaks down a substance very similar to nylon. Slight alterations in what is called the “active site” of the protein (where the activity of breaking down the substance occurs) changed its specificity such that it could now also break down nylon.  

What a surprise, new functions arising from previously existing genes. But all evolution proceeds in that manner. There can be no saltational appearance of genes out of nowhere—that would require special creation or a scientist doing so by Intelligent Design. So Purdom’s admission here is an attempt to put spin on the obvious: that a new function occurred as a result of completely natural mutations to a gene.

If she does not think these sorts of mutations occur in evolutionary history, then she needs to detail specifically what she would accept as evidence of a genuinely “beneficial” mutation contributing to evolution. However, she palpably did not do that. Nor have the other antievolutionists who have sideswiped this issue over the years, such as creationist Don Batten in 2003. Just like Whynot, Batten devoted more effort to disputing the beneficial angle than Purdom did. And, just like Whynot, looking at the details didn’t help his case. Back in 1985 critic of creationism William Thwaites (“New Proteins Without God’s Help”) had accepted Ohno’s initial gene duplication and frameshift proposal, and Batten spent a lot of effort dismissing that now-dated issue, reminding readers the capacity was found on a plastid (as if that somehow rendered it a design feature), without dealing with what was going on in the plastid. Remember, by 2003 those specific amino acid replacements had been identified, but Batten didn’t mention those. Instead he insisted boldly (and most incorrectly) that the system represented “a new gene family. This seems to rule out gene duplications as a source of the raw material for the new genes.” Kevin Anderson & Purdom took a more detailed swing at the nylon matter in their 2008 “A Creationist Perspective of Beneficial Mutations in Bacteria”—detailed in that they now caught up with more of the Negoro team’s accumulating work, acknowledging that “point mutations in a carboxyesterase gene lead to amino acid substitutions in the enzyme’s catalytic cleft,” but dug their heels in on the mantra: “The ‘beneficial’ phenotype of nylon degradation requires the a priori existence of the enzyme and its specificity. Its degeneration is not a mechanism that accounts for the origin of either the enzyme or its specificity.”[29] Brian Thomas repeated this degeneration theme when he summarized their paper: “the genes of nylon-eating bacteria show that they have been degraded through mutation.” To the contrary, natural mutation and selection is the mechanism that accounts for it, and “degeneration” is merely a buzzword the creationists preferred to use as a way of dismissing what was by then an entirely confirmed observed phenomenon. We can agree with Anderson and Purdom that such biological systems are indeed “a

testament to the versatility of bacterial adaptation,” only it’s a naturally evolving one, not designed. Batten’s line of attack by misdirection continued on steroids in a quartet of 2015 articles by creationist Royal Truman attempting to “show that this waste degradation is not evidence for purposeless evolution but is consistent with a creation model of flexible organisms and ecologies, front-loaded to be adaptable to future environments and contingencies.” He devoted one of the papers to “refuting Ohno’s frame-shift theory” (implying this particular case study somehow removed the whole concept from the field, or made the observed mutations responsible for the new feature any less point specific or any less natural). This distractive focus on the Ohno frameshift side of things was continued when Don Batten returned to the nylon topic in 2017, accepting furthermore how easily such variations could occur naturally, citing Fusako Kawai’s 2010 paper on “The Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of Xenobiotic Polymer Degradation by Microorganisms.” By then the naturalistic cat was already out of the molecular bag, as Truman’s third 2015 piece had blithely acknowledged how the recent Negoro “data revealed convincingly how new activity towards nylon oligomer could easily arise with minimal changes while still retaining esterolytic functions.” Having functionally given the game away, his final paper insisted notwithstanding that such things did not arise by mere natural selection, but instead involved a creationist “Coded Information Systems theory” consisting of (his italics) “four generic refinement components: coded messages, sensors, physical hardware, and preloaded resources (which includes the ability to reason).” Truman apparently thought that overtly designer tailored analogy somehow “explained” anything in this nylon-chomping context, such as which features were supposedly the ones “preloaded” here. Another interesting feature of the recent creationist apologetics was how willing they were to draw on the parallel claims of Intelligent Design (never mind the IDers’ functional acceptance of long geological ages that YEC holds to be anathema). Don Batten freely channeled Ann Gauger’s 2017 accounting of the nylon matter, and Truman invoked the 2010 Quarterly Review of Biology paper by Michael Behe,

describing it as “a comprehensive study of reported adaptive mutations in viruses and bacteria.” Anti-evolutionists who likewise welcomed Behe’s analysis included IDers Casey Luskin and Denyse O’Leary in 2010, and P. J. Levi in 2011, but also Brian Thomas (“Four Scientific Reasons That Refute Evolution”) over in the YEC camp in 2012. None dwelt on the limitations of Behe’s claims. Indeed, Truman and these others overlooked the pithy companion piece the QRB paired with Behe’s paper in 2010: Maarten Boudry et al. on “Irreducible Incoherence—A Look Into the Conceptual Toolkit of a Pseudoscience.” And what were the limitations of Behe’s “comprehensive study”? The work he surveyed (including Lenski’s) pointedly had not involved examining the in vitro dynamics of gene duplications (something Truman tacitly accepted in his own analysis). Jerry Coyne noted in a 2010 series of comments on Behe’s paper that these experiments were trying to identify the impact of purely internal mutations in very restricted selective environments, leaving out also the role of lateral gene transfers, and none of this work was aimed at the impact of these factors among eukaryotes, where the evidence for gene duplication as a driver of biological change was by then very extensive. Regarding that HGT matter in lowly E. coli, early in 2019 a paper appeared by Tin Pang & Martin Lercher that studied 53 lineages and found (surprise!) “Each of 3,323 metabolic innovations in the evolution of E. coli arose through the horizontal transfer of a single DNA segment.” By now we hope it’s a bit clearer why there was so much more to Lenski’s bacterial mutations or nylon degradation than Georgia Purdom let on in her Answers book account, where the issue involved how much new could occur by entirely natural means, and whether any anti-evolutionist could allow any of that to qualify as an adaptive improvement. So it was that Purdom’s third example involves mutations in a gene called ebg in E. coli. Yet again, we have an example of a gene Purdom herself brought up where mutations resulted in new proteins, structures, or functions. In this case, Barry Hall’s 2003 paper “The EBG system of E. coli: origin and evolution of a novel β-galactosidase for the metabolism of lactose” which said, “What was the minimum

number of mutations required to give sufficient activity for growth? One. A single mutation in ebgA is sufficient for slow growth on lactose.” Interestingly, instead of relying on the original technical work directly, Purdom chose to cite the 2008 creationist paper she coauthored with Kevin Anderson! At this point Purdom’s Answers piece dangled a nebulous “genetic limit” concept, while refraining from defining what exactly that limit was. If creationists want regular geneticists to accept some kind of barrier to genetic change, then they need to lay out in detail what that means (it certainly hadn’t stopped bacteria from munching on a completely new polymer diet). As a geneticist, Purdom should have been the perfect person to do that, and yet she failed to do so. One possibility why, of course, is that in the end the concept has no meaning at all, which is why she flopped so utterly here. Moving on, her fourth example involves the TRIM5-CypA mutation in monkeys. Background: this is a new gene that resulted from two previous genes: the primate TRIM5 gene which blocks retroviral infection (we as a primate have that too, such as the TRIM5α version explored in 2005 by Sara Sawyer et al.), and cyclophilin A, one of a family of intracellular folding proteins found in vertebrates along with eukaryotes and prokaryotes (reviewed by Ping Wang & Joseph Heitman in 2005). A 2004 paper by Sébastien Nisole et al. found this fusion protects Old World monkeys against HIV-1, and in 2008 Ruchi Newman et al. worked out that an alternative splicing event had occurred in the primate line 5 to 10 million years ago, with the results independently coming to play active roles in two species of macaque. Ironically, this very argument throws a monkey wrench (if we may expropriate a phrase) into Tomkins’ aforementioned point that a fusion site could not exist in a gene or come to have specialized advantageous effects on account of it. Anyway, all Purdom did here was just repeat the mantra that there was only a change to a pre-existing gene. At this point in her Answers argument, Purdom is about to dash through that barn door of gene duplication Truman had left wide open, so let us recap how she got there. Purdom either misrepresents or suppresses her sources, and when she does accurately reflect her information, she fails to explain why the types of mutations that she

brings up (where new functions, proteins, or structures plainly appear) are contrary to what evolution expects or in any substantive way supportive of a designed life system—pet ideas about creationist concepts, like genetic limits, entirely without limits themselves. It is no wonder then why such a fractional minority of geneticists are creationists. The barn door awaits. Purdom claims that genetic duplications are, in spite of reality, not helpful to the evolution of new structures or proteins. Remember that Rhagovelia example? Yeah, those propeller fans are the result of genetic duplications of two genes. So, no evolution of new structures, right? But, she moves onto another example, this time involving colobine monkeys and their leaf-eating propensities. Purdom brings up John Schienman et al.’s 2006 paper “Duplication and Divergence of 2 Distinct Pancreatic Ribonuclease Genes in Leaf-Eating African and Asian Colobine Monkeys.” Background: there is a duplicated version of the gene RNASE1 (RNASE1B) in leaf-eating colobine monkeys that breaks down RNA in their gut bacteria for their own macromolecules. Purdom quotes this paper as saying (her ellipsis), “Gene duplication has long been thought by evolutionary biologists to be the source of novel gene function… We believe our data to be another example that do not support this hypothesis.” Now something that always piques our scholarly curiosity about anti-evolutionists, is what lurks in the “...” ellipses that pop up in their authority quoting now and then. What might Purdom be hiding in that space? Why not take a look at the original paper (our bold on what lay in the ellipsis):  

Gene duplication has long been thought by evolutionary biologists to be the source of novel gene function. One of the first hypotheses to describe what happens to paralogues [the duplicated genes] after the duplication event was put forth by Ohno (1970). His hypothesis stated that after gene duplication, one gene copy would be entirely redundant and thus freed from all selective constraint. This copy would accumulate mutations at a neutral rate and in most cases become a nonfunctional pseudogene. Occasionally, these accumulated neutral mutations could eventually resurrect the gene

with a new function. We believe our data to be another example that do not support this hypothesis.  

So, the paper was not arguing that gene duplication failed as a source of novel gene function. Clearly not (that is another count of data suppression). The paper was saying that one specific hypothesis regarding what happens to duplicated genes was not supported by the particular example covered in the paper. That’s not at all what Purdom wanted to imply, and we can know more about that by reading what a later paper had to say in citing the 2006 Scheinman work: Hideki Innan’s 2009 “Population genetic models of duplicated genes.” Instead of Ohno’s thirty year old redundancy model (in which one of the copies might remain under selection while the other was not), Innan argued for a “concerted evolution” view of gene duplication that he and Ryuichi Sugino had proposed in their 2006 paper “Selection for more of the same product as a force to enhance concerted evolution of duplicated genes.” Rather than one of the redundant duplicates going off automatically in a new direction as Ohno originally thought, “After a gene duplication event, the duplicated genes might be subject to concerted evolution, which is the phenomenon whereby duplicated copies coevolve by homogenizing [making some sequences the same] DNA sequences between each other.” How curious that Purdom hid exactly the parts of a quote that shed light on its context and undermined her argument to boot. We are shocked—shocked to learn this (as we are handed our science winnings)![30] Far from confuting gene duplications, then, the colobine case represented one of the many ways in which duplicated genes could evolve. The technical literature there was extensive, far more than the hit-and-run Purdom tried to pull off, including some papers we’ve included in our references by Jianzhi Zhang and colleagues from 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2006, and the 2006 and 2010 work by Li Yu with Ya-ping Zhang and others. Want the Big Picture? Innan & Fyador Kondrashov laid out the parameters in their 2010 review “The evolution of gene duplications: classifying and distinguishing between models.”  

Not Frozen Fish: More than one way to make an antifreeze protein  

Next, Purdom took on the origin of antifreeze glycoproteins in fish. We were truly excited to see how she addressed this one, since it is an obvious example of a beneficial mutation that we noted earlier in the book. She discusses a particular example, how the antifreeze gene AFPIII in zoarcid fish is derived from the SAS gene that synthesizes sialic acid and has a minor anti-freeze function (covered in a 2010 paper by Cheng Deng et al.), which allowed her to scoff that this duplicated gene merely amplified the function of a pre-existing one, with again the implication that somehow, this is not kosher within evolution. In reality, Purdom cannot allow any mutation that simply amplifies a function (even if that function is selectively beneficial) to be called beneficial, a tacit admission that beneficial really does point to evolution. For a revealingly strange contrast, in a 2011 take on the same Deng paper, Casey Luskin dug his ID heels in further than Purdom had, demanding to know “a step-by-step explanation of how SAS-B’ changed into AFPIII. Were there selectively neutral—but necessary— steps encountered along the evolutionary pathway? Are there intermediate stages that are in fact maladaptive or non-functional?” He then listed “a number of important questions which should be addressed before a “just so story of genetic evolution can be made plausible:”  

Did the rearranged gene product … start out functional? If not, how quickly could it gain function? How was it preserved from loss until it became functional? Are proteins really as malleable as this story would suppose or would the new combined gene encounter folding or other contextual problems? What mutational pathway was taken to evolve Gene A … into a new gene with function B? What selective advantages were gained at each small step of this evolutionary pathway?

Were any “large steps” (i.e., multiple specific mutations) ever required to gain a selective advantage along the evolutionary pathway? Would such “large steps” be likely to occur? Could all of this happen on a reasonable timescale?  

“Alas, the paper addresses zero of these questions,” Luskin harrumphed (his bold). Luskin should have read more closely. The paper established by direct experimentation what one of the modules was capable of on its own: it was bifunctional, with “incipient antifreeze activity.” As for the precise steps of how that got into play, their work identified that “In one duplicate, the N-terminal SAS domain was deleted and replaced with a nascent signal peptide, removing pleiotropic structural conflict between SAS and ice-binding functions and allowing rapid optimization of the C-terminal domain to become a secreted protein capable of noncolligative freezing-point depression.” Both of those circumstances would seem obviously sufficient to qualify as “selective advantages” as Luskin demanded, and with no “large steps” involved at any point. The authors further noted that “The emerging AFPIII would require a signal peptide for extracellular export of the mature protein. We discovered a precursor signal peptide coding sequence appropriately located in the extant LdSAS-B,” and with that component at the ready in the variant duplicate, only one further change was needed: “An intragenic deletion from the seventh codon of E1 through E5 of LdSAS-B and linkage of the new E1, the old I5, and E6 would complete the formation of the nascent two-exon AFPIII gene encoding the secretory antifreeze protein.” Would a few hundred thousand years, or even a million, be adequate for this to have occurred? Luskin “addresses zero of these questions,” but we have one of our own. Is this the only example of fish antifreeze to account for from a design perspective (ID or creationist)? As it happens, more than just the zoarcid fish have an antifreeze protein, and the AFPIII gene is not the only one responsible for it. Purdom at least definitely knew about this because she oh so briefly mentioned it in her Answers foray. There are five classes of antifreeze proteins, with many routes to them, including proteins that originated

as a result of the duplication of a gene that was responsible for a wholly unrelated function. One particularly pertinent example that Purdom elected not to mention to her book readers concerns the notothenioid fish, described in a pair of 1997 papers by Liangbiao Chen et al.: “Evolution of antifreeze glycoprotein gene from a trypsinogen gene in Antarctic notothenioid fish” and “Convergent evolution of antifreeze glycoproteins in Antarctic notothenioid fish and Arctic cod.” These documented how a functionally unrelated gene for pancreatic trypsinogen (a precursor of trypsin, an enzyme that breaks down proteins) was duplicated and eventually came to express a new function in cellular antifreeze.[31] The story got even worse for Purdom (if that is indeed possible) in the years since she wrote, when we look to the Arctic cod Boreogadus (mentioned in the Chen work), which has independently and convergently evolved antifreeze proteins. The gene responsible for the one in Arctic cod evolved from a non-coding sequence of DNA. Yes, a sequence of nucleotides that did not code for any proteins at all evolved functionality, as was shown in a 2018 paper by Helle Baalsrud et al., “De Novo Gene Evolution of Antifreeze Glycoproteins in Codfishes Revealed by Whole Genome Sequence Data.” Peruse Adam Levy’s 2019 Nature commentary on their work to see how this fits into the burgeoning understanding of how de novo genes originate and objectively contribute to biological change. Also in 2019, Xuan Zhuang et al. worked out the specific step by step stages of the “Molecular mechanism and history of non-sense to sense evolution of antifreeze glycoprotein gene in northern gadids.” As Jerry Coyne noted in a posting on it, this involved “the moving of bits around by translocation, duplication of sequences, etc.” (the pieces of which were observable in related species) and which didn’t kick into the functional system until a promoter sequence (a region of DNA where transcription initiates) got attached to it, as classic a stepwise generation of a seemingly “irreducibly complex” system as you’d like, and thus “a fish-slap at Behe.” Since these mutations occurred in DNA sequences that did not code for any pre-existing traits, would creationists consider any of these as a novel gene occurring through evolution? This is hardly the

first occurrence of a non-coding sequence becoming functional; in fact, in E. coli, they can turn a random sequence of about 100 nucleotides into a promoter region, which can kick in to the evolving biology by many means. For example, we humans have five pancreatic amylase genes, which Linda Samuelson et al.’s 1990 paper showed all originated (our bold) “during primate evolution from one ancestral gene copy and that the retroviral insertion activated a cryptic promoter.” Move on up to 2018, and the paper “Random sequences rapidly evolve into de novo promoters” by Avihu Yona et al. (again our bold) “studied de novo evolution of promoters in Escherichia coli by replacing the lac promoter with various random sequences of the same size (~100 bp) and evolving the cells in the presence of lactose. We find that ~60% of random sequences can evolve expression comparable to the wild-type with only one mutation, and that ~10% of random sequences can serve as active promoters even without evolution.” Is this the sort of evolution Purdom is asking for? Of course, she’s no more likely to tell us than Casey Luskin. Things are looking rather fishy for how much of the antifreeze evolution story wasn’t making it into the Answers book version. By then a lot of background understanding had been achieved, as evolutionary researchers had worked out why the sequences of amino acids for many of the antifreeze proteins were so similar—they contain the amino acids threonine and large quantities of alanine. This configuration turns out to be extremely energy efficient, as Kuo-Chen Chou laid out in the 1992 paper “Energy-optimized structure of antifreeze protein and its binding mechanism.” What are the odds that nature working over millions of years might hit on the same useful configuration now and then? Well, we know the answer to that: at least five differing ways manifesting in ten living species, surveyed by John True & Sean Carroll’s 2002 paper “Gene Co-Option in Physiological and Morphological Evolution.” Regarding specifically the path taken by the notothenioid fish, they evolved in southern waters when ocean temperatures were much warmer, and early branching groups stayed in that habitat, reviewed by Chiara Papetti et al. in 2016. Somewhere from 42 to 22 Mya, however, the AFGP antifreeze glycoprotein gene evolved in the notothenioids,

and when the climate cooled in spurts, that peripheral mutation turned out to be very handy. These notothenioids radiated in the cooling environment, further involving how landmasses were moving there, especially Australia’s northward shift that triggered cold circumpolar currents, as explored over the years by Guido di Prisco et al. on the “Biogeography and adaptation of Notothenioid fish: Hemoglobin function and globin-gene evolution” in 2007, Michael Matschiner et al.’s “On the Origin and Trigger of the Notothenioid Adapative Radiation” in 2011, and “Ancient climate change, antifreeze, and the evolutionary diversification of Antarctic fishes” and “Identification of the notothenioid sister lineage illuminates the biogeographic history of an Antarctic adaptive radiation” by Thomas Near et al. in 2012 and 2015. Not all of that bunch stayed in the deepfreeze, though, as ChiHing Cheng et al. identified in 2003, where one species that split off around 11 million years ago was living in temperate waters off New Zealand while still retaining functional (though at the moment unneeded) antifreeze glycoprotein genes. And Arcady Balushkin reported in 1994 how a Late Eocene Antarctic fossil (around 35 Mya) thought to be a gadiform fish (cod and their relatives) was actually one of those early diverging notothenioids. Gadids show up in that region and period as well, per a 2008 paper by Jürgen Kriwet & Thomas Hecht, reminding how much warmer the oceans were at that stage. There is so much research for creationists to ignore. And ignore it they do. Apart from Purdom’s potshot in the Answers book on the zoarcid case, we have found no articles at AiG on the notothenioids or the polar cod Boreogadus. A 2015 article at CreationWiki glided past the issue when defending a 2002 piece by fellow-creationist Carl Wieland from critic Paul Poland. The website declined to go into details on one of the 1997 Chen papers Poland had cited, but instead outsourced their argument (that parasitical pattern again) by invoking IDer Michael Behe’s The Edge of Evolution (pages 77 to 83) to harpoon them. CreationWiki summarized Behe’s dismissive view of these proteins thusly: “They are nothing like the complex interacting proteins that comprise molecular machines, but rather just gum up ice crystal seeds and prevent them from

expanding. Repeated sequences of DNA were duplicated, making them more effective at gumming up ice crystal growth.” From the fish’s point of view, that “gumming up” opened up whole new habitats over millions of years, an ecological adaptation of considerable magnitude that ultimately benefited certain featherless bipedal vertebrates in boats who trawled through the cold waters in search of lots of dinner. Prudent providence if designed, but just “gumming up” if evolved, is it? Here flounders the Double Standard creationism style, especially when we look closer at what Behe had argued and how he thought to do it. Citing one of the 1997 Chen papers, and Chen’s 1999 one with Chi-Hing Cheng “Evolution of an antifreeze glycoprotein,” Behe had not gone the “gumming up” route, describing them as “some amazing proteins that literally stop water from freezing,” and even conceding that the notothenioid case “seems pretty convincing as an example of Darwinian evolution by natural selection.” Exactly the thing CreationWiki was not willing to allow. The creationists were accurate enough in reflecting Behe’s relegation of this to the biologically trivial, though, with Behe lumping them among “Genetic debris,” far from anything so glitzy complicated as the “sophisticated molecular machinery” of life (including that allegedly “irreducibly complex” bin containing things like bacterial flagella). But if biology can take one, two, or five steps in a restricted case like the antifreeze proteins (which even Behe conceded happened many times), what prevents nature from piling up hundreds and thousands and millions of them, especially during the long windup of prokaryote and eukaryote evolution tracking across literally billions of years? It’s that Map of Time thing again, but appreciating that isn’t on Behe or CreationWiki’s minds. In a section subtitled “So Far, But No Further” Behe hoped to buttress this line with two sentences quoted from Peter Davies et al.’s 2002 “Structure and function of antifreeze proteins,” Behe’s emphasis: “A number of dissimilar proteins have adapted to the task of binding ice. This is atypical of protein evolution.” Behe wouldn’t be playing the same selective quotation gambit as Georgia Purdom has done, now would he? Here’s where those two sentences came from (the parts Behe left out in bold):

 

The remarkable diversity of AFP types in fishes shows that a number of dissimilar proteins have adapted to the task of binding ice. This is atypical of protein evolution. Most proteins that serve the same function in different organisms do as a result of direct descent from an ancestral form. For example, citrate synthase, an enzyme in the tricarboxylic acid cycle, is essentially the same protein in all aerobes, having been required throughout their evolution.  

In other words, the majority of those proteins stem from natural common descent (which Behe concedes in principle in his work but never applies to anything), and Behe’s authority is then invoked just as selectively by overt creationists who reject the whole common descent framework altogether. Left adrift in both ID and YEC frames are the data. Following up on the ID tradition of deck stacking, Ann Gauger and Douglas Axe have attempted to draw comparable lines in the sand. In a 2011 paper, and a 2014 follow-up with coauthor Mariclair Reeves, they attempted to show that new functions in the “biotin pathway” in E. coli could not have arisen by natural mutations. Strictly speaking, biotin is vitamin B7, which functions as a coenzyme for the carboxylase enzymes that help synthesize fatty acids and glucose, but their papers covered a broader field that included a variety of structurally similar enzymes, especially the PLP pyridoxal phosphates (the vitamin B6 coenzyme) reviewed by Andrew Eliot & Jack Kirsch in 2004 (which they cited) or Riccardo Percudani & Alessio Peracchi in 2003. Gauger and Axe selected two examples for their mutation study, ones which still differed by some 250 amino acids, and showed that even selected mutations could not successfully flip one into the other (noting along the way that changing one to the other loses the initial function). A clever try, but an evasive one, for the evolutionary question would involve something quite different: whether each of the derived forms could have emerged from a common ancestral molecule by always functional intermediaries (and not necessarily the functions the derived molecules eventually performed).

Incidentally those pyridoxal phosphates are an interesting bunch, with multiple independent routes to comparable functions, as various papers (that Gauger and Axe did not cite) have shown: Jianghai Zhu et al. “A New Arrangement of (β/α)8 Barrels in the Synthase Subunit of PLP Synthase” in 2005, Terese Fitzpatrick et al. “Two independent routes of de novo vitamin B6 biosynthesis: not that different after all” in 2007, and Juhan Kim et al. “Three serendipitous pathways in E. coli can bypass a block in pyridoxal-5´-phosphate synthesis” in 2010. And in 2019, Kim’s team “identified a 4-step bypass pathway patched together from promiscuous enzymes that restores PLP synthesis” after they deleted “the essential gene pdxB” that acts as a critical catalytic oxidizer. All of this work would suggest that the backwards approach of Gauger and Axe was leaving out too many of the relevant variables to be as conclusive as they believed, or the anti-evolutionists who have relied on them since, from Casey Luskin in 2012 and 2015, Jonathan McLatchie jousting with Martin Poenie in 2013, and YECer Brian Thomas joining the parade in 2014, asserting that “experiments have demonstrated that selection of mutations cannot invent them.” And one final neat thing: there’s a good case to be made that those vitamin B6 molecules may have been very ancient players in the biology game, existing in prebiotic times, judging from experiments by Sabrina Austin & Thomas Waddell in 1999, and Nigel Aylward & Neville Bofinger in 2006. But enough of the ID approach. We have more Answers to answer. We’ve gone on a long journey in and around the issues Purdom brought up so casually in her Answers book chapter, but it was a trip that had to be taken to reveal the rich and fascinating data field that is only getting noticed in snippets by the anti-evolutionists. But unlike the vague design sensibilities of a Michael Behe, who believes in a particular Designer but keeps that Catholic one hidden in the wings, Purdom holds to a very specific Designer that must always be right up front in their apologetics, and she spent another subchapter explaining how she thinks her misunderstanding of beneficial mutations fits into a biblical perspective. If one is diligent enough, practically anything can be shoehorned into a religious model (nonYECers Hugh Ross and Ken Miller have their own versions, as do

apologists for other faiths far from the biblical one), but in our view that is completely irrelevant to a scientific perspective and so we’ll skip delving into that issue. Especially when Purdom moved on from the biblical perspective to do something most interesting: she brings up epigenetics. This is a pretty new field within genetics that seeks to explain changes to DNA that do not involve changing the nucleotides themselves, but how the genetic reading apparatus deals with them. A big factor here is DNA methylation. This is the process whereby a methyl group (the formula for which is CH3) is added to DNA and changes how a sequence is read by enzymes. Typically, DNA methylation represses some sequence of DNA such that a protein is not made. An example of this is when embryonic stem cells differentiate and become specialized for certain tasks: some parts of their DNA have to be repressed for this to occur. It is all very interesting and new work, but one that is being flirted with by anti-evolutionists as somehow undermining “Darwinism” (coauthor JD took note of that effort regarding ID apologists in a 2017 TIP posting on “The Big Theory: Natural Common Descent”). It is in exactly that spirit that Purdom brings it up:  

Until these findings, many evolutionists dismissed the ideas of Charles Darwin’s contemporary, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who believed that animals could acquire new traits through interactions with their environment and then pass them to the next generation. For instance, he believed giraffes stretching their necks to reach leaves on trees in one generation would cause giraffes in the next generation to have longer necks. Many science textbooks today reject Lamarck’s ideas, but epigenetics is a form of Lamarckism.  

Is it though? Notice the subtle shift here: Purdom says that epigenetics, which involves genetics, is similar to Lamarckism, which is about acquiring new traits; however, how did Lamarck think traits were inherited? In his day, no one knew about genetics. Darwin thought that there were little representative cells of each organ system in gametes, called pangenesis. Today, we know this is false. Sperm and eggs carry all the necessary DNA instructions for building a person. Since Lamarck had no concept of genes (and certainly no

concept of DNA methylation), how could we attribute epigenetics to Lamarckism? Lamarck thought that if you physically alter the phenotype, the suite of your physical traits, then that would be passed onto offspring (Purdom’s giraffe example is typically used to describe Lamarckism). If, for example, you cut off part of a mouse’s tail, then that short tail will be passed onto offspring. This is nothing like how epigenetics works, so again, how can we attribute epigenetics to Lamarckism? And, she surprises us yet again, writing: “The theory of evolution is based on random changes or mutation occurring in DNA. If a change happens to be beneficial, then the organism will survive via natural selection and pass this trait to its descendants.” This is a completely satisfactory explanation of evolution, which we think only adds to our case that Purdom understands (and tacitly accepts) evolution. She does, as we know, accept all of this, but she never tries to apply this thinking to long spans of time. Why? She’s a Young Earth creationist, so in a fundamental sense “long spans of time” cannot exist in her Map of Time. Untethered to that chronological ground, Purdom can easily float off into counterfactual land (her emphasis):  

Although evolutionists do not deny the reality of epigenetics, its existence is hard to explain! Epigenetic changes are not random; they occur in response to the environment via complex mechanisms already in place to foster these changes. These non-random epigenetic changes imply that evolution has a “mind.” Creatures appear to have complex mechanisms to make epigenetic changes that allow them to adapt to future environmental challenges.  

What on Earth? Where did she get the idea that epigenetics is adapting organisms to future environmental changes? She did not provide any inkling of evidence in support of this view (which would have been entertaining to see, had she tried, since there isn’t any). And, as far as the changes being enacted via complex mechanisms, this makes sense, though they are still just as routinely natural as anything in the standard “Darwinism” she deplores—for ___________________________________________________________________

Epigenetics in Deep Time

Just how many factors remain to be discovered in the epigenetic game is unclear, but because those methylation tags involve RNA as well as DNA, as reviewed by Gidi Rechayi, Chuan He & Dan Dominissini in 2016, this is a clue that this dance has likely been going on for a long time. The deep evolutionary roots of epigenetic regulation are suggested by the way noncoding RNA operates in the very ancient yeast investigated by Aurélie Lardenois et al. in 2011, reinforced since by the discovery of a common epigenetic methylation site in algae (Ye Fu et al. 2015), nematode worms (Eric Greer et al. 2015) and fruit flies (Guogiang Zhang et al. 2015), discussed by Jenny Rood in The Scientist. As Nina Fedoroff summarized in a 2012 review in Science, the epigenetic system arose deep in the history of life to protect their DNA from external invaders: from bacteriophages to viral retrotransposons (packages of RNA with “copy me” instructions that allow their spectacular proliferation in eukaryotic genomes, such as the Alus noted in Chapter 3).   example, Wolk Reik’s 2007 study on the “Stability and flexibility of epigenetic gene regulation in mammalian development.” Epigenetic changes occur in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes, so the systems involved are likely very old, even if Purdom’s YEC mythologies don’t allow anything to be very old. It then makes complete sense that they would be finely tuned by evolution in the billions of years from their origin to now (see the  Info Box). And here, finally, we are at the end of Purdom’s chapter. As you can see, she is just as bad a scholar as all the creationists we have previously investigated. Her degree in the relevant field does not mask the fact that she cannot and will not address the mountain of genetic evidence against her viewpoint, so she reflexively suppresses or ignores data to compensate.  

Case Study 3: Bodie Hodge and Genetic Mutations  

Having now seen how badly Georgia Purdom mangles data on mutations, let us look at another creationist who takes a whack at the

subject: Bodie Hodge. He authored chapter seven of The New Answers Book 2, “Are Mutations Part of the ‘Engine’ of Evolution?” Unlike Purdom, though, Hodge does not have a degree in the relevant field; he is a mechanical engineer (an accomplishment to be sure, but not helpful here). Let us see how his analysis compares to Purdom’s. He starts his chapter with this:  

In the evolutionary model, mutations are hailed as a dominant mechanism for pond-scum-to-people evolution and provide “proof” that the Bible’s history about creation is wrong. But are we to trust the ideas of imperfect, fallible men about how we came into existence, or should we believe the account of a perfect God who was an eyewitness to His creation? Let’s look at mutations in more detail and see if they provide the information necessary to support pond-scum-to-people evolution, or if they confirm God’s Word in Genesis.  

To start, mutations are not the “dominant mechanism” of evolution. They merely provide a genetic basis for natural selection and the other mechanisms to act upon. The grist is not the mill. Second, Hodge has set up an entirely arbitrary dichotomy: the science of “fallible men” versus “the account of a perfect God” (only his version allowed) that happens also to have been written by “fallible men.” Hodge’s creationism does not allow historical provenance to apply, of course, but that is an issue for some other time. Our topic is the science, where the only relevant issue is whether the data are accurate or not. Does someone actually have to explain these fundamentals to Hodge (a grown man)? Hodge then spends the next two paragraphs simply explaining the basics of DNA, which is fine enough. Then, he tries to compare genetic mutations to Morse code, which is not so fine enough. Antievolutionists have a nasty habit of reifying analogies; that is, they say something like “DNA is like a computer code, and computer code requires a coder; therefore, DNA requires a coder!” They make the mistake of confusing their analogy with the real thing and asserting that the real thing acts like the object in the analogy. In reality, though, DNA does not require a coder of any sort. It’s a molecule that interacts with other molecules in ways that alter the biology of the living system without any apparent guidance from any

coder hypothesized to be responsible for the original replicating organism. For example, researchers understand quite well how DNA polymerase creates new strands of DNA, quite independently of how the polymerase came into existence biologically billions of years earlier. Trying to interpolate coders at this present stage acts as a distraction from what those molecules objectively do, quite on their own. Generally, the word code is merely applied to make DNA understandable in everyday terms. You can correctly apply the word code to DNA: sequences of three nucleotides, called codons, “code” for amino acids. For instance, the sequence AUG (adenine-uracilguanine—where thymine in DNA is traded out for uracil in RNA) codes for the amino acid methionine. But, “AUG” is a set of molecules, whereas the code that programs are made of are abstract surrogates for other things, ways to model something in a way to produce the desired output program. In this sense the medium is irrelevant. Your computer’s programs are composed of electricity, but they could just as well be done with plumbing. In any case they would not be like DNA which is a collection of molecular components that directly do what they do for explicit biological reasons; they are not an external representation in the same sense as binary or hexadecimal. So, what does Hodge say? He explains how Morse code works and explains how to form the word SOS in Morse. He points out that changing the code for the first S changes the meaning of the whole code. Acceptable, but be cautious. He then points out that mutations, which are not static (I guess he means neutral), cause either a loss or gain of information. This is problematic because he does not define information; instead, he says, “For a definition of information that is based on the laws of science, see W. Gitt, In the Beginning Was Information (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2006).” Why not just provide the definition? Is it so hard? Or is the concept perhaps so nebulous that not even a fellow creationist understands the “definition.” We noted in Chapter 3 how Mike Riddle among others couldn’t manage this “information” notion any better than Hodge. But if you do actually have the misfortune to look up Werner Gitt’s truly useless

book, which is fully available online, then you will find he makes a number of basic creationist mistakes. For example, he has a little Q&A session with himself where he ejaculates this:  

Q16: Can new information originate through mutations? A16: This idea is central in representations of evolution, but mutations can only cause changes in existing information. There can be no increase in information, and in general the results are injurious. New blueprints for new functions or new organs cannot arise; mutations cannot be the source of new (creative) information.  

As we saw with Purdom earlier, creationists do not define how mutations could do anything other than cause changes in existing nucleotides. In general, the results of mutations are nothing because most mutations are neutral. But unless they’re claiming all nucleotide combinations contain the same “information,” they’re smack up against the all too obvious fact that new biological functions arise by exactly those point mutation shifts occurring in the genome. Beyond that, there are very good evolutionary explanations of the origin of various organs and physiological functions, as we explained for example with hemoglobin in the last chapter. Creationists are playing a game where rules exist but not the ones they want. So they make up their own set, based on a notion of “information” that is devoid of true meaning. To ram this point home, all structures and functions were built from modifications or amplifications of pre-existing structures. Take chimeric genes, where new ones emerge by separate pieces getting spliced together. That’s what happened with the jingwei and sphinx genes in Drosophila fruit flies Jingwei formed when the genetic locus for an alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme got plugged onto the Yellow Emperor gene, per studies by Manyuan Long & Charles Langley in 1993, “Natural selection and the origin of jingwei, a chimeric processed functional gene in Drosophila,” with follow-up papers by Long et al. in 1999, and Wen Wang et al. in 2000. Meanwhile, sphinx runs in the fly’s brain and originated from an ATP synthase (chain F gene) flipped from their chromosome 2 to chromosome 4, covered by another of Wen Wang et al.’s papers,

“Origin of sphinx, a young chimeric RNA gene in Drosophila melanogaster” in 2002. Those fruit flies have been a handy platform for investigating genetic mechanisms in the lab, such as the “selective sweeps” identified by Dmitry Nurminsky et al.’s 1998 paper “Selective sweep of a newly evolved sperm-specific gene in Drosophila.” If all that chimeric stuff in fruit flies doesn’t impress you, let’s dive down even deeper into the functional nuts and bolts of life. That ATP synthase that played a part in the origin of sphynx is an enzyme that makes the “currency” of cellular energy, ATP or adenosine triphosphate. And that was built from an enzyme involved in DNA replication called hexamerical helicase that was coopted for a different function (a neat topic on their own, per the  Info Box). Following successive well-documented mutations (such as connecting up with the ubiquitous phosphate-binding P-loop, reviewed in 2002 and 2003 papers by Detlef Leipe et al.) it became the modern ATP synthase. Those P-loops in turn play a parallel evolutionary role in the guanosine triphosphate hydrolyzing GTPase enzymes, which Hyman Hartman & Temple Smith’s 2010 paper linked to “the origin of the ribosome.” The ribosome is the cell’s protein assembler, the biological gizmo that turns those AUG’s into working molecules. That’s pretty deep in the origin of life game. Anti-evolutionists naturally do not see the helicases or ATP synthase that way, where the Gee Whiz features take precedence (advocates highlighting the complexity of the system, though not diving too deeply into whether that came about by entirely natural means). ATP synthase  resembles  a rotating  stalk of   ___________________________________________________________________

Helicases These are protein rings that cradle the DNA during replication, nested next to primases (required to jump-start replication as DNA won’t start on its own), through which the DNA threads. The reviews of the process in various organisms by Smita Patel & K. Picha from 2000, Panagiotis Tsonis’ 2003 Anatomy of Gene Regulations, and Jung-Chi Liao et al. in 2005, are accompanied by informative graphics.

Primases have revealed some of their secrets too. In 1998 Lakshminarayanan Aravind et al. identified “Toprim—a conserved catalytic domain in type IA and II topoisomerases, DnaG-type primases, OLD family nucleases and RecR proteins” that showed their part in bacterial DNA repair proteins. The “Structure of the RNA Polymerase Domain of E. coli Primase” was worked out in 2000 by James Keck et al., and their subsequent specialized diversity was studied in 2010 by Robert Kuchta & Gudrun Stengel’s “Mechanism and Evolution of DNA Primases.” That repair role arose again in Stanislaw Jozwiakowski et al.’s 2015 paper showing “Archaeal replicative primases can perform translesion DNA synthesis,” with implications for primases originating “in prokaryotes and bacteriophage to perform a diverse range of roles in DNA metabolism, including DNA repair.” broccoli embedded in the cell membrane, and that spinning feature was the focus of 2009 and 2012 pieces by YECer Brian Thomas (citing only a few works, Daniela Stock et al.’s 1999 and Holger Seelert et al.’s 2000 papers, but also 2000 and 2010 ones by IDer Douglas Axe trying to limit the evolutionary range of protein folding). Over in that Intelligent Design camp, Jonathan McLatchie likewise focused on the “complexity” angle in 2013 posts, citing dozens of papers on the “what” of the helicases and ATPases, but way fewer on the “how they came about” side, such as noting Sriram Vijayraghavan and Anthony Schwacha’s 2012 book chapter on “The Eukaryotic Mcm2-7 Replicative Helicase,” but not Stephen Aves et al.’s “Evolutionary Diversification of Eukaryotic DNA Replication Machinery” from the same volume. Some of the work was older, from the period when the parts were being identified, such as Alfried Vogler et al.’s “Salmonella typhimurium Mutants Defective in Flagellar Filament Regrowth and Sequence Similarity of FliI to F0F1, Vacuolar, and Archaebacterial ATPase Subunits” from 1991, or Fiona Hughes & Michael Romanos’ 1993 paper on “E1 protein of human papillomavirus is a DNA helicase/ATPase.” But two more recent works found McLatchie preferring the venerable “Argument from Personal Incredulity” approach. He wondered how the connecting stalk part of the ATP formed, even though his cited 2006 source by Mark Pallen et al. “Evolutionary links

between FliH/YscL-like proteins from bacterial type III secretion systems and second-stalk components of the F0F1 and vacuolar ATPases” had explicitly addressed that. Still more tendentiously, McLatchie asked “Are we to expect the broken protein translocase to stick around through multiple generations while we wait for it to evolve into the membrane ATPase system?” Only there were no “broken” proteins involved, nor any stages of non-functionality proposed in Armen Mulkidjanian et al.’s 2007 “Inventing the dynamo machine: the evolution of the F-type and V-type ATPases.” Indeed the stator stalk elements have even been known to fuse in E. coli, and still show their functionality, per a 2013 paper by Cathurada Gajadeera & Joachim Weber. Another team of scientists McLatchie cited, Katsumi Imada et al.’s “Structural similarity between the flagellar type III ATPase Flil and F1ATPase subunits” from 2007, brings to mind the contrasting behavior of the ID camp versus the working scientists. While the former hasn’t progressed from head-scratching “this is much too complicated to have evolved” from the sidelines (but without specifying what or how many design events were involved in any of them), the Imada team continued with their work, and we’ve included in our references two other of their papers, from 2010 and 2016, for curious readers to follow up on their own concerning how the scientific community has this tendency not to stay put. As for how close McLatchie got to the not staying put part, here’s something the 2006 Pallen paper noted: “the assertion of homology allows us to make new predictions, for example, that the structures of the C-terminal domains of the FliH/YscL-like proteins will, at least in part, resemble the δ subunit,” and “Similarly we can predict that homologous protein–protein interactions in the proton-translocating ATPases and in the flagellar and nonflagellar type III secretion systems (e.g., OrgB-InvC, Spa47-MxiN) will involve similar intermolecular interfaces.” Subsequent work, by Tohru Minamino and colleagues in 2011 and 2014 on protein exporting and energy transduction processes in type III flagella, and Ryan Notti et al. in 2015 on “A common assembly module in injectisome and flagellar type III secretion sorting platforms,” would suggest McLatchie has still more catching up to do.

The tag team process of biological systems developing new functions as components modify and connect up in fresh ways is at the heart of how “macroevolution” comes about. The origin of eukaryotes happened when an archaean and a bacterium entered a symbiotic relationship and exchanged genetic material with each other, evidence Cymon Cox, Lionel Guy, Tokumasa Horiike, Eugene Koonin, and Natalya Yutin in many collaborative papers since 2002. Retroelements may have played a part too, providing “the ancestors of the spliceosome components,” proposed by Gloria Lee et al. in 2018. Though understandably harder to find than animals with nice skeletons, there’s an identifiable fossil record for eukaryotes, reviewed by Emmanuelle Javaux and colleagues, and tiny multicellular ones are on the scene by 1.56 billion years ago, their fossils described by Shixing Zhu et al. in 2016. As you might expect, anti-evolutionists don’t like the eukaryote from prokaryote scenario, either, though their counterarguments have not exactly set the scientific house on fire. They run from the glib Bob Harsh of the Creation Science Fellowship in 2003 relying on no sources at all, to the equally glib Jonathan McLatchie in 2010, proclaiming “The Darwinian Basis of the Prokaryote-to-Eukaryote Transition Collapses,” doubling down on it in a 2012 post. McLatchie’s argument was based entirely on misreading Nick Lane & William Martin’s article “The energetics of genome complexity,” a paper that had not disputed the endosymbiotic model (see the Info Box  next page on endosymbiosis), but instead had rightly noted how further prokaryote complexity had not occurred because only the endosymbiotic event resulting in eukaryotes had involved acquiring the cellular power pack, the mitochondria, “the key innovation en route to multicellular life.” Though you’de never know it from reading anti-evolution apologetics, multicellular life did not have to build everything from scratch. The cell signaling and adhesion apparatuses in multicellular animals—including receptor tyrosine kinases, integrins, and cadherins —were present in unicellular protists long before animals arrived and were coopted for a new function. Some work on the kinases would include Gerard Manning et al. in 2008 and Hiroshi Suga et al. in 2012; Arnau Sebé-Pedrós et al.‘s 2010 paper laid out the “Ancient origin of the integrin-mediated adhesion and signaling machinery”; and in 2008

Monika Abedin & Nicole King tracked “The Premetazoan Ancestry of Cadherins.” A big factor here turns out to be predation, which can act as a very rapid selector at times, as Lutz Becks et al. showed in a 2010 paper, followed up by Teppo Hiltunen et al. in 2018, and recent experimental work has shown how defensive clumping against predators directly contributes to multicellularity, explored in papers from 2012 through 2015 by William Ratcliff, Michael Travisano and colleagues involving the yeast Saccaromyces cerevisiae and green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Margrethe Boyd, Frank Rosenzweig and Matthew Herron joined in the Chlamydomonas side of the research in 2018, and with Ratcliffe’s team, Herron et al. in 2019 experimentally induced a permanent multicellular state in that organism. Which creationist Jeffrey Tomkins didn’t like at all, objecting to their “extravagant claim that they had observed the evolution of multicellularity” in a dismissive 2019 ICR post. Tomkins glibly asserted (without offering evidence, of course) that somehow “a loss of information had occurred” in this process, earning a deservedly trenchant online rejoinder on the  26th of March  from   ___________________________________________________________________

Endosymbiotic fusions A major biological insight (popularized famously by Lynn Margulis, and in extensive technical studies by Debashish Bhattacharya, Fabien Burki, Sabrina Dyall, Michael Gray, Kwang Jeon, Patrick Keeling, Wolfgang Löffelhardt, Geoffrey McFadden, John Stiller, Andreas Weber, Hwan Yoon, among others) is how complex features come from previously independent organisms merging, while retaining elements of their prior function. Mitochondria (the power plant in metazoan cells), and plant chloroplasts (derived from cyanobacteria) are major examples, but endosymbiotic relationships are still occurring in nature, as Birger Marin et al. spotted in their 2005 paper, “A Plastid in the Making: Evidence for a Second Primary Endosymbiosis,” and scientists have begun experimentally reconstructing the steps in the

mitochondrial endosymbiosis, such as Angad Mehta et al.’s 2018 paper employing a yeast and E. coli. Not unexpectedly, anti-evolutionists don’t much like endosymbiosis, though relatively little has been done by them to dismiss it. Among those on the YEC side: Timothy Standish 1999, Georgia Purdom 2006, Daniel Criswell 2009, and Jeffrey Tomkins 2015. Representing the ID trench-digging would be Albert de Roos 2007, Uncommon Descent 2011 and the aforementioned Jonathan McLatchie 2012, both drawing upon de Roos. Interestingly, Douglas Axe’s 2016 book Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed skipped endosymbiosis and mitochondria (along with all the fossil record, and major drivers of natural biological organization and change, such as homeobox genes, gene duplications and transposons).   Matthew Herron, who “would love to know how Dr. Tomkins knows that a loss of information occurred.” Think of this as a biological deck of cards, one that starts out all the same number. But over time the hands accumulate more of the same card, and mutation works to transform individual cards into new numbers. These in turn generate still more collections (some of which we now call plants and animals), with more mutations, and so on. Roll on down the line a few hundred million years and you have terrestrial animals adapting their inherited parts in ways that mirror one another. Take flight. The wings of insects aren’t arriving out of nowhere —they’re extensions of the ectoderm, while the wings of pterosaurs, birds, and bats are modified front limbs, and the gliding limbs of the Triassic reptile Sharovipteryx were modifications of the hind limbs, as noted in a 2006 paper by Gareth Dyke et al. Endless combinations, most beautiful—and adaptable. The lesson is clear: Evolution only modifies existing structures; how would it be possible to modify a non-existing structure? But what about all this “new information” notion that Tomkins waved to dispose of the physical experiments Herron and colleagues

had done? Here we may let Bodie Hodge’s Answers chapter jump off this gangplank (his emphasis):  

Virtually all observed mutations are in the category of loss of information. This is different from loss or gain of function. Some mutations can cause an organism to lose genetic information and yet gain some type of function. This is rare but has happened. These types of mutations have a beneficial outcome. For example, if a beetle loses the information to make a wing on a windy island, the mutation is beneficial because the beetle doesn’t get blown out to sea and killed. Genetically, the mutation caused a loss of information but was helpful to the beetle. Thus, it was a beneficial outcome.  

That’s it? Again, no explanation of what “information” is. And as we have already established, most mutations cause neither a gain nor loss of function of protein-coding genes. And, his example with the beetle is framed in the same way as Purdom’s example of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. What a surprise. But, Hodge goes on (again, his emphasis):  

Besides mutations that cause information loss, in theory there could also be mutations that cause a gain of new information. There are only a few alleged cases of such mutations. However, if a mutated DNA strand were built up with a group of base pairs that didn’t do anything, this strand wouldn’t be useful. Therefore, to be useful to an organism, a mutation that has a gain of new information must also cause a gain of new function.  

If by “gain of new information” Hodge means that a new proteincoding gene appeared, then there are actually very many examples of these, a number of which have been discussed in this chapter. And, for a mutation to be useful, it does not necessarily have to cause some totally new organ or function to occur; the mutation could merely slightly enhance the functioning of an existing gene, like what occurred in the zoarcid icefish Purdom tiptoed past. It seems like even creationists do not really agree with each other as to what mutations do. Hodge then makes another analogy in an attempt to explain mutations to his audience. He does a poor job yet again. This time he attempts to explain how codons code for amino acids by comparing it

to a sentence in English: “The car was red. The red car had one key. The key has one eye and one tip.” This is not a good idea because each letter could be changed to any one of twenty-five more letters, which completely changes the meaning of the word. That is decidedly not what happens in codons. Remember that DNA is composed of only four “letters”: A for adenine, C for cytosine, G for guanine, and T for thymine (replaced with U for uracil in RNA). Even disregarding how many letters there are, the core issue is what happens when you trade out those letters. All but one of the amino acids in the genetic code have more than one possible combination to specify them (tryptophan is the oddball loner, coded by UGG). The amino acid leucine, for example, can be specified by any one of six codon triplets: UUA or UUG or CUU or CUC or CUA or CUG. Those are six different combinations of letters that all specify the exact same amino acid. But UAC would get you a tyrosine, so order very much matters in this genetic code biz. This is why the code is called “redundant” or (more maliciously sounding) “degenerate”; many amino acids can be specified by a number of different combinations (see Appendix 3 for more on the codon assignments, and their evolutionary implications). The words in human languages, on the other hand, cannot. The word red can be spelled one and only one way. Though of course, regional variations have developed over the years with words that can be spelled more than one way: paleontologist/palaeontologist, archeologist/archaeologist, color/colour, etc. But that’s due to the spelling conventions diverging over time (dare we say, evolving). Hodge does not use words of those types; he chose ones he knew would result in solely a loss of meaning for the overall sentence. So, Hodge tries to explain point, inversion, insertion, deletion, and frame shift mutations using his aforementioned three sentences. The results are abysmal. First, point mutations are when only one nucleotide is changed. To go back to our leucine example, if we changed UUA to UUG, then leucine is specified regardless. In Hodge’s sentence though, he changes the second car to cat, so—what a surprise!—the original meaning is lost. The same conclusion is made when the second car is changed to caa. Hodge then mentions that point mutations cause Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, which is a devastating disease

causing premature aging (see Annachiara De Sandre-Giovannoli et al.’s 2003 study that identified the mutational causation), and many other medical issues. To be sure, point mutations can be harmful, but they can also be beneficial. And we’d be entitled to ask whether any of those mutationdriven diseases were intentionally caused by any alleged designer, but Hodge doesn’t slow for that (check out the  Info Box on this prickly notion of designer pathogens). Remember from the last chapter the apolipoprotein-A1 protein that helps us digest cholesterol? And how in a family in Italy, there is a mutated version of the protein called apolipoprotein-A1 Milano that allows the members to digest higher levels of cholesterol than the average person, meaning a lower risk of heart disease. Gee, how did this manifestly beneficial mutation come about, you ask? It came about via a single point mutation causing the amino acid cysteine to be specified instead of the pre-mutation arginine, as covered in Karl Weisgraber et al.’s 1983 paper on it. When Don Batten dismissed this as merely “a net loss of specificity, or, in other words, information” (and recommending Werner Gitt for “incisive” writing on the creationist notion of “information”) Ian Musgrave et al. noted how this was a misrepresentation of the facts (including that in no sense was the mutant apolipoprotein less specific in its binding). So, what happened next? Going by the chatter at Conservapedia on mutations from 2007 to 2009, where most of the substantive input came from critics of the creationist position, not much. Indeed, in 2016 Jonathan Kane found “Neither AiG nor CMI has made any further attempt to discuss the issue.” Odd how such things fizzle out in creationist circles when beneficial mutations are brought up.   ___________________________________________________________________

Designer pathogens This issue surfaced regarding two posts by Frank Sherwin and Cornelius Hunter that Matthew Herron took note of at his blog in 2019 for a different reason: “A clever little two-step” on the tendency of anti-evolutionists to minimize the implications of natural variation by restricting what “evolution” is supposed to involve.

Sherwin’s 2019 ICR piece had cheered the potential pathogeninhibition features of an alkaline-friendly Streptomyces strain studied by Luciana Terra et al. in 2018, the creationist filing it under God’s providential concern to presumably counteract the less providential features exhibited by another of that same God’s design. Sherwin also drew on Steve Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt to question where the resistant genes came from (a topic Meyer hadn’t actually addressed either). Hunter’s November 2016 post had been vaguer, minimizing the evolution being found in bacterial studies like Michael Baym et al. as just “adaptation.” Baym’s team had actually “found that evolution is not always led by the most resistant mutants; highly resistant mutants may be trapped behind more sensitive lineages.” A skeptic might ask what the God was up to in contriving such intricate hurdles, and how much time a person afflicted with the relevant diseases might want to waste reading about it at ICR or Evolution News while the designed organisms go about their perilous business. Hodge closed out his Answers book segment on point mutations with this quote from Lee Spetner: “All point mutations that have been studied on the molecular level turn out to reduce the genetic information and not to increase it.” And who is this Lee Spetner that Hodge trusts so much? He is the creationist physicist we noted back in Chapter 2 regarding his belief that Archaeopteryx was a fraud, a position so untenable that no major creationist organization supports it today. As for his notions of “information,” check out Thomas Schneider’s 2000 paper “Evolution of biological information” for some of the reasons why Spetner (and Michael Behe along the way) operated far from the field. Interesting how Hodge could not choose an evolutionist geneticist to offer this mutation claim—perhaps for the reason that it would be tougher to turn up one who would make a claim they knew full well wasn’t true. Hodge moves next onto inversion mutations. Unlike point mutations, which alter the DNA at the nucleotide level, this mutation takes place way above that level. First, let us allow Anthony Griffiths et al.’s 2000 textbook An Introduction to Genetic Analysis (7th Edition) to explain what inversion mutations are:

 

If two breaks occur in one chromosome, sometimes the region between the breaks rotates 180 degrees before rejoining with the two end fragments. Such an event creates a chromosomal mutation called an inversion. Unlike deletions and duplications, inversions do not change the overall amount of the genetic material, so inversions are generally viable and show no particular abnormalities at the phenotypic level.  

Now, let us compare this to what Hodge says (his bold):  

The car was red. Yek eno dah rac der eht. The key has one eye and one tip.  

With inversion mutations, we can lose quite a bit of information. We lost several words from, and the meaning of, the second sentence. These mutations can cause serious problems to the organism. The bleeding disorder hemophilia A is caused by an inversion in the Factor VIII (F8) gene.  

Again, yes, inversion mutations, like all changes to DNA, can under certain circumstances cause harm to the individuals. The hemophilia A concerns several variant inversions that can disrupt otherwise functional genes or their introns (see the papers by Delia Lakich et al. in 1993 and Astrid Brinke et al. from 1996). However, unlike Hodge’s simplistic picture, inversions can also be explicitly beneficial and even trigger speciation events. An inversion mutation in the yellow monkeyflower caused a split in lifestyle, according to David Lowry & John Willis’ 2010 paper “A Widespread Chromosomal Inversion Polymorphism Contributes to a Major Life-History Transition, Local Adaptation, and Reproductive Isolation.” One type, the annual form, became adapted to dry inland climates, while the other, the perennial form, became adapted to cool, wet climates. So, the inversion mutation is associated with adaptive phenotypic traits. Over in the vertebrates, inversion mutations have been partly responsible for the shift from marine to freshwater environments among the three-spine stickleback fish, per Felicity Jones et al.’s 2012 paper. Another example, documented by Sally Potter et al.’s 2017 paper “Chromosomal Speciation in the Genomics Era: Disentangling

Phylogenetic Evolution of Rock-wallabies,” demonstrates how inversion mutations affected speciation in those animals. Inversion mutations appear to have played a part in the speciation event between our and chimps ancestors, according to Tomàs Marquès-Bonet et al.’s 2004 paper “Chromosomal rearrangements and the genomic distribution of gene-expression divergence in humans and chimpanzees” and their 2007 paper “On the association between chromosomal rearrangements and genic evolution in humans and chimpanzees.” Let us submit another example which further blurs the lines between what is “beneficial” and not. And it’s close to home. Our human chromosomal region 17q21.31 encodes a number of genes including corticotropin releasing hormone receptor 1 (involved in stress response) and microtubule-associated protein tau (which promotes cellular microtubule assembly and stability). In Icelandic individuals, one specific lineage of the inversion mutation, called H2, is positively correlated with increased offspring, meaning there is positive selection for it in humans. The story gets more interesting though, for according to the 2015 paper by Marta Puig et al. “Human inversions and their functional consequences,” this particular inversion carries a double kick: “but at the same time, H2D, the most common H2 haplotype in European populations, has been associated to disease-causing microdeletions. Therefore, the haplotype associated to the detrimental duplication architecture predisposing to intellectual disability is also the one conferring advantage to female carriers, and is protective against neurodegenerative diseases.” This is an example of heterozygote advantage, another of those Scorched Earth Defenses like sickle-cell anemia. Two mutation examples down, and it’s not looking good for Hodges’ argument. Next, he took a whack at insertion mutations. An insertion mutation is when one or more nucleotides are added to a DNA sequence. Technically, a point mutation is a type of insertion mutation, but Hodge here is referring to cases where more than one nucleotide is added. Of course, in his example with the sentences, meaning is lost; therefore, all insertion mutations make sequences lose functionality, right?

Concerning DNA though, obviously the addition of multiple nucleotides can disrupt the reading frame, and that is why most insertion mutations are indeed deleterious, as Yue Wu et al.’s 2015 paper “Dynamics of bacterial insertion sequences: can transposition bursts help the elements persist?” attests. But according to that same paper, insertion mutations do, however, “create more genetic variation through which occasional advantageous mutations can help organisms adapt.” Transposable elements can do likewise, as Elena Casacuberta & Josefa González reviewed in 2013. The functional side of this has been studied among bacteria, such as Fatima El Gharniti et al.’s 2012 paper “IS30 elements are mediators of genetic diversity in Oenococcus oeni.” A more specific example investigated in 2011 by Kristel Mijnendonckx et al. is how insertion mutations helped the bacterium Cupriavidus metallidurans adapt to an environment with heavy metals, which would be toxic to it. In 2010 Daniel Stoebel & Charles Dorman found insertion mutations helped adapt Escherichia coli to a high osmolarity (high amount of solutes in a solution) environment. Computer modelling by Manuel Bichsel et al. in 2012 “Estimating the fitness effect of an insertion sequence,” prompted them to point out “Occasional beneficial effects may thus have played an important role in the fast spreading of insertion sequences like IS5.” And regarding what occasional can mean, however much Young Earth creationists would like to disallow it, the history of life is replete with plenty of time for them. If it were possible for Hodge to miss more than 100% of the data field, then by this point he has accomplished it. Let’s see how much further down he can sink. Fourth, Hodge brings up deletion mutations—simply described as when one or more nucleotides are deleted from a sequence—and covers them with his usual song and dance: they are a loss of information and cause deadly diseases. In this case though, there is nothing we could bring up that creationists would not just dismiss as a “loss” of information. They can’t wrap their head around the evolutionary idea that the loss of structures or functions can be beneficial to organisms. Remember Purdom’s example of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. And while it is true that some examples of antibiotic resistance involve a loss of

structures, most don’t, and regardless, these confer selective advantages to the organism. In evolution, that’s all that matters. So let us venture where the creationists fear to tread: where losing things becomes a very good thing. Start with teeth. The 2012 paper by Jacob Esselstyn et al. describes the shrew-rat (a rat, not a shrew) Paucidentomys vermidax that has no molars. Rodent jaws are generally characterized by having continuously growing incisors, a gap called a diastema, and molars. Thus, a rodent with no molars is a very odd sight. In this case, though, Paucidentomys lost its molars as result of specializing on an earthworm diet. While creationists love to seize upon such occurrences as mere degeneration, as Elizabeth Mitchell’s 2012 posting “Shrew-Like Rodent Evolving Backwards?” did, there is nothing about this discovery that is inherently anti-evolutionary. Sure, the shrew rat did not represent some “new kind of animal”—but it was absolutely a functional adaptation, which is the issue we’re wrestling with here in the realm of deletion mutations. Casey Luskin took a similar position in 2009 when dismissing the evolution of dermal armor in three-spine stickleback fish as merely (his italics) “microevolutionary devolution.” The science refused to go whoa! though, as a landmark 2010 paper “Adaptive Evolution of Pelvic Reduction in Sticklebacks by Recurrent Deletion of a Pitx1 Enhancer” by Yingguang Chan et al. identified a deletion in the enhancer (a region of DNA that increases the likelihood of transcription of a gene) of the Pitx1 gene responsible for the reduction of pelvic spines, which provides a naturally selective advantage to the fish. On top of that, the 2019 paper by Kathleen Xie et al. “DNA fragility in the parallel evolution of pelvic reduction in stickleback fish” pinned down the genetic hotspots that facilitated these entirely natural mutations of observed adaptive utility. And then there’s us again. Mary-Claire King & Alan Wilson’s 1975 paper “Evolution at two levels in humans and chimpanzees” posited that deletion (as well as other) mutations in regulatory genes were responsible for our morphological dissimilarities from chimps, since our genes are so incredibly similar (one might be inclined to inquire as to why a designing God decided to make his chosen creatures almost identical genetically to unclean animals).

But losses there have been, and Cory McLean et al.’s 2011 paper “Human-specific loss of regulatory DNA and the evolution of humanspecific traits” explains that some of the traits that make us human resulted from deletion mutations, such as the loss of sensory vibrissae (whiskers) and penile spines (yes, primates, rodents, cats, and many other mammals have these). Check out Alan Dixson’s 1991 paper on “Penile spines affect copulatory behaviour in a primate (Callithrix jacchus),” and then ponder whether you feel more or less designed or adaptive to be without them. Regardless of your reaction, the reasons for that appear to be quite natural and evolutionary. Last, Hodge brings up frameshift mutations. Oddly though, he never actually explains what the “frame” is. In his analogy, each frame is a word, but what is the equivalent of the frame in DNA? Hmm, we feel that would be important to know. As it happens, this harkens back to what codons are. Remember that amino acids are made by the ribosome based on the specific sequences of three nucleotides at a time, codon triplets. The “reading frame” is the codon that the ribosome is interacting with at any given time. If a codon C got added to a set of triplets (the RNA transcribed form here) like UCGCGCGCA, making it CUCGCGCGCA, the serine-arginine-alanine amino acids specified in the original sequence would be frameshifted to make leucine-alanine-arginine instead, likely (though not necessarily) altering the functionality of the protein being made.[32] Hodge may not have been aware that in their aforementioned 2008 paper on beneficial mutations, Kevin Anderson & Georgia Purdom effectively accepted that frameshift mutations do indeed occur, at least regarding the “leaky” lac operon (that allows lactose digestion) recounted in John Cairns & Patricia Foster’s 1991 paper, “Adaptive reversion of a frameshift mutation in Escherichia coli.” That position is a pretty safe bet to take, though, as work on frameshifting hasn’t stopped, for example Samuel Hong et al.’s 2018 paper “Mechanism of tRNA-mediated +1 ribosomal frameshifting.” So, what did we learn? We learned that despite Hodge’s routine, there are examples of point, inversion, insertion, deletion, and frameshift mutations that caused novel functions, adaptations, and

even species. Hodge concluded his account by moving on to what he thinks evolution teaches about mutations, saying this (our bold):  

Pond-scum-to-people evolution teaches that, over time, by natural causes, nonliving chemicals gave rise to a living cell. Then, this single-celled life form gave rise to more advanced life forms. In essence, over millions of years, increases in information caused by mutations plus natural selection developed all the life forms we see on earth today. For molecules-to-man evolution to happen, there needs to be a gain in new information within the organism’s genetic material. For instance, for a single-celled organism, such as an amoeba, to evolve into something like a cow, new information (not random base pairs, but complex and ordered DNA) would need to develop over time that would code for ears, lungs, brain, legs, etc.  

Once more we have to remind that evolution does not teach or mandate that life originated from non-living chemicals because, remember, abiogenesis is not evolution: no alleles, no evolution. Moreover, while most evolutionists (including the authors of this book you’re reading) suspect life did in fact originate naturally, nothing about the observed pattern of evolving life over the billions of years since disappears based on how that first life came about. And can creationists please give that “pond scum” trope a rest. You’ll notice we still have no idea what “information” is supposed to be in a genetic context. But let’s take up Hodge’s rhetorical challenge. Each of the organs Hodge specified has really good evolutionary explanations that are detailed by—wait for it—a combination of mutations and natural selection (as well as other mechanisms). First, ears. All animals have sensory organs for interacting with the environment (see Dave Jacobs et al. 2007 “Evolution of sensory structures in basal metazoa” for a useful review, including how common gene regulatory networks are employed), but what we think of as ears are a strictly vertebrate invention, developing from the chordate pharyngeal arches. Strange how only a specific subset of organisms all more closely related to each other genetically than to anything else has these, right? Starting at the most basal end of things, fish have no head holes through which sound could travel to a sensory membrane; instead,

their sensory membrane is on the outside of their head. This then vibrates and stimulates fluid-filled regions in the head. Next, amphibians have, as expected, developed ears for hearing well both on land and in water, with continuing work including John Bolt & Eric Lombard on “Evolution of the amphibian tympanic ear and the origin of frogs” in 1985, Michael Smotherman & Peter Narins on “Evolution of the Amphibian Ear” in 2004, and Hillary Maddin & Jason Anderson in 2012 on “Evolution of the Amphibian Ear with Implications for Lissamphibian Phylogeny: Insight Gained from the Caecilian Inner Ear.” Then, the amniotes (amniotic egg-making animals) went down their own different paths, which brings the jaw bones into the picture. One route involves the sauropsids (turtles, lizards, snakes, crocodiles, and birds) have one ossicle (bone) in the middle ear that transmits sound from the outer ear to the inner ear—the stapes or columella auris, which is homologous to the hyomandibular bone in fish. We’ll hand the ball off to Scott Gilbert’s 2000 textbook Developmental Biology (6th Edition):  

There is ample evidence that jaws are modified gill supports. First, both these sets of bones are made from neural crest cells. (Most other bones come from mesodermal tissue.) Second, both structures form from upper and lower bars that bend forward and are hinged in the middle. Third, the jaw musculature seems to be homologous to the original gill support musculature. Thus, the vertebrate jaw appears to be homologous to the gill arches of jawless fishes.  

Bodie Hodge is a mammal, though, and we don’t want to leave his ears out. This is where it gets especially fun, with the evidence pointing to evolution in one of the most spectacular ways possible (as coauthor JD knows firsthand, having devoted his Evolution Slam Dunk book to this subject). Though a subject dear to JD’s heart, we’ll give just the highlights here. Synapsids (mammals and their kin), uniquely have two more bones in the middle ear—the malleus and incus—that were originally jaw bones. We don’t have to guess at this, we have the proof from many directions, starting with our own embryology, where back in the 1830s early developmental biologists spotted how we mammals start

out with the jaw layout of the standard vertebrate (with multiple bones in the jaw, and where the articular one functions as the jaw hinge with the quadrate up in the skull). Only during the course of gestation does the arrangement shift into the mammal configuration, where the tooth-bearing dentary bone expands and links up with the squamosal bone in the skull to form our distinctive layout. All of this is tracked in the fossils, commencing with the pre-mammalian therapsids and continuing into the definitely transitional probainognathids and Diarthrognathus (both possessing a unique and predicted dual jaw joint where the old vertebrate one coexisted with the new mammal attachment). Eventually the mammal hinge became the exclusive one, freeing up the old layout to take on new auditory functions as a unit, the spare jaw bones (articular and quadrate) coopted for hearing in the middle ear as the malleus and incus respectively. Paleontologists Alfred Crompton and Zhe-Xi Luo have contributed a wealth of knowledge in this area, buttressed on the biological side by scientists like Neal Anthwal, Charlotte Burford, Brian Hall, Jose Rodriguez-Vázquez, Abigail Tucker, and Daniel Urban—we’ve included papers by them relevant specifically to the jaw to ear aspect in the references. The morphology of organisms can provide many clues on their evolution too, and the mammalian jaw-ear case is a particularly impressive example, as Anthwal & Tucker explained in a 2017 Q&A paper. Though creationists seem mighty reluctant to get up to speed on this. Most recently, NephilimFree (a pompous online apologist familiar to both coauthors) insisted in a January 2019 posting that “The genetic pathway for the ear bones and jaw bones of the creatures involved are not the same!” and in July Matthew Cserhati offered a similar view for CMI, that “Contrary to evolutionary expectations, we now know that these bones actually develop from different parts of the embryo and share different genetic regulation in both reptiles and birds.” Oh, do we now? What a pity decades of working developmental biologists hadn’t got the memo on that, including the scientists whose papers Nephilim and Cserhati had directly cited. Charlotte Burford & Matthew Mason, for example, whose 2016 work on “Early development of the malleus and incus in humans” had been cited in a University of New South Wales embryology review

Nephilim imprudently invoked for a claim that “Scientists admit they do not know the mechanism for these independent development pathways becoming changed by evolution.” That consisted of Nephilim’s copying the abstract the NSW post had quoted from Urban’s 2017 paper on “A new developmental mechanism for the separation of the mammalian middle ear ossicles from the jaw.” Given its contents, we have to wonder whether Nephilim really understood the implications of what he was reading, such as the items we’ve highlighted in bold:  

Multiple mammalian lineages independently evolved a definitive mammalian middle ear (DMME) through breakdown of Meckel's cartilage (MC). However, the cellular and molecular drivers of this evolutionary transition remain unknown for most mammal groups. Here, we identify such drivers in the living marsupial opossum

Monodelphis

domestica,

whose

MC

transformation

during

development anatomically mirrors the evolutionary transformation observed in fossils. Specifically, we link increases in cellular apoptosis and TGF-BR2 signalling to MC breakdown in opossums. We demonstrate that a simple change in TGF-β signalling is sufficient to inhibit MC breakdown during opossum development, indicating that changes in TGF-β signalling might be key during mammalian evolution. Furthermore, the apoptosis that we observe during opossum MC breakdown does not seemingly occur in mouse, consistent with homoplastic DMME evolution in the marsupial and placental lineages.

Urban’s paper was filling in more of those mechanisms, step by step. Meaning Nephilim was like someone kibitzing from the stands, complaining that the evolutionary football team has not yet scored one further goal, while avoiding the hundreds already chalked up—as well as the recurring failure of the creationist team even to show up on the field. Matthew Cserhati, on the other hand, slogged far deeper into the biological recipe book, concocting a soufflé of old creationist misrepresentations mixed in with some fresh ignorance of his own. The old ingredients: Cserhati wondered “how is it possible for parts of the jaw and the skull to get across the eardrum?” This was an even sillier mistake than Davis & Kenyon made in Of Pandas and People, when they had misidentified which bone was which in the skull, and asserted that “one of the bones had to cross the hinge from the lower jaw into the middle ear of the skull.”

Davis & Kenyon in the 1990s and Cserhati in the 21st century were apparently imagining that the bones had to jump inside the ear, when what was actually happening was a shortening of the stapes that pulled the attached quadrate/incus and articular/malleus along with it, as they became increasingly specialized for hearing rather than jaw chomping. Cserhati then asked “why are there no species between reptiles and mammals which have only two ear bones and not three?” That was a repeat of another Golden Oldie mistake, one Duane Gish had made decades before, and spotted by mammal paleontologist James Hopson in 1987 (Hopson’s italics): “intermediates such as he describes never did exist. But his argument is a ‘red herring,’ intended, it would seem, to mislead the uninformed. As we have seen, the four reptilian jaw bones were incorporated into the mammalian middle ear as a unit.” And the new mistakes: citing a 2013 paper by Neal Anthwal, Cserhati proclaimed “The idea that the bones that form the reptile jaw are related to the middle ear bones of mammals was first proposed way back in 1837 by the German anatomist Karl Reichert, long before the field of genetics even came into existence. This theory however, is not consistent with what we now know from genetics and developmental biology.” Specifically, Cserhati contended (our bold) “The formation of the jaw joint is regulated differently between reptiles and mammals at the gene level. In fish, and amphibians, a gene called Bapx1 is responsible for the formation of the jaw joint, whereas in mammals, this gene affects the formation of tissue in the spleen, gut and vertebral column, and not the middle ear.” Sources for this were a 2004 paper by Abigail Tucker, a 2015 work by Sumantra Chatterjee et al., and one from 2018 by Paul Lukas & Lennart Olsson. Even by creationist standards, Cserhati’s source misrepresentation is a classic, starting with the Anthwal paper he’d tossed off on Reichert (1811-1883). Take particular note of what Anthwal had to say about Reichert’s idea and the homeodomain transcription factor Bapx1 (our bold):  

Reichert’s theory has also been backed up by analysis of gene expression. For example, Bapx1 is a jaw joint marker, expressed in the

developing articular-quadrate joint in birds, fish and reptiles (Miller et al. 2003; Wilson & Tucker, 2004). In mammals, however, Bapx1 is found associated with the malleal-incudo joint in the developing middle ear (Tucker et al. 2004). The malleus⁄articular and incus⁄quadrate therefore share a common developmental history, tissue origin, and gene expression pattern.  

That’s right, the same Tucker paper Cserhati had just cited on the history of old Reichert, meaning the creationist had allegedly read two works that directly contradicted his assertion about where Bapx1 wasn’t showing up. Chatterjee’s 2015 paper had specifically studied how Bapx1 acted in certain mouse organs—it was Cserhati who had jumped to the conclusion that the gene was expressed only there. What Cserhati was trying to misunderstand away was how the vertebrate homologue of Drosophila’s bagpipe homeobox gene (keep an eye out for Carla Triboli et al.’s 1997 paper on that below) could come to operate in the formation of the articular-quadrate, and still do so in its derived mammalian malleus/incus offshoot. Which should have been rather obvious for anyone reading Tucker’s paper, since the title was “Bapx1 regulates patterning in the middle ear: altered regulatory role in the transition from the proximal jaw during vertebrate evolution,” and they had stressed in their abstract how “Bapx1 is expressed both within and surrounding the incus and the malleus.” Was Cserhati hoping we weren’t going to read that? Further, that Lukas & Olsson paper had weighed in on this very point, noting how specialized Bapx1 had come to be in mammals (our bold):  

In mice, bapx1 is expressed during embryogenesis in a region which marks the future malleus and incus (Tribioli et al., 1997). In all vertebrates except mammals the homologous structures to these middle ear ossicles form the jaw and are connected through the primary jaw joint. Unlike in fishes, after inactivation of bapx1 in mice, a proper joint formed between malleus and incus. Only the width of the malleus is affected (Tucker, 2004).  

Yep, the Tucker paper showing up yet again in Cserhati’s source list. Sorry, Matthew, third strike and you’re out. Leaving Nephilim and Cserhati to their own inept devices, there’s yet more evolutionary data concerning the ear to set on the table.

The tympanic membrane (eardrum) appears to have independently originated in both the diapsids (all the members of sauropsids minus the ancient anapsids) and synapsids, as documented by Taro Kitazawa et al.’s 2015 paper, “Developmental genetic bases behind the independent origin of the tympanic membrane in mammals and diapsids” and Masaki Takechi et al.’s “Developmental mechanisms of the tympanic membrane in mammals and non-mammalian amniotes” in 2016. Nor is that the end of the data stream. There’s a wealth of fossils tracking the gradual adaptation of whales to underwater hearing, another fascinating evolutionary trail tracked by Sirpa Nummela and colleagues in 2004 and 2007 papers. All that is quite a bit for Hodge and Nephilim and Cserhati to have hand waved away with their blustering about “information” and “mechanisms” and Bapx1 expression—a task much easier for them to do by simply not paying attention to any of that information in the first place. Now, let’s take a good breath, and get on to how lungs fair for Bodie Hodge’s argument. Work on that had been done by Colleen Farmer back in her 1997 paper “Did lungs and the intracardiac shunt evolve to oxygenate the heart in vertebrates?” and a 1999 follow-up, “Evolution of the Vertebrate Cardio-Pulmonary System.” Prior to the split between the modern osteichthyes (bony fish) and their ancient cousins, some bony fish developed outpocketings in the esophagus for oxygen capture, and these eventually branched off from the gut to form their own system supplying oxygen to the heart. That is why the opening to the trachea (windpipe) is right next to the esophagus where food goes in (choking hazard)—talk about intelligent design! On the genetic end, things have progressed a lot since the 1990s, including most recently Jeffrey Steimle et al.‘s 2018 paper, “Evolutionarily conserved Tbx5-Wnt2/2b pathway orchestrates cardiopulmonary development,” pinpointing “that the evolutionary origin of lungs may have involved the recruitment of cardiac TBX5.” In sarcopterygians (lobe-finned fish like lungfish as well as all tetrapods), lungs were widely in play by the Devonian, surveyed in papers by Alice Clement, John Long and colleagues in 2010 and 2016. That primitive lung system eventually gave rise to true lungs in

tetrapods and their various descendants, as reconstructed in 2004 and 2010 papers by Steven Perry with Martin Sander and others. On the other hand, some basal actinopterygians (ray-finned fish) still have lungs—a testament to their shared Silurian ancestry with sarcopterygians. A 2016 paper by Norifumi Tatsumi et al. on polypterid fish found that the most basal modern fish groups, bichirs and reedfish (polypteriformes), have lungs in addition to their gills, allowing them to gulp air in poorly oxygenated water. Following them, the sturgeons and paddlefish (acipenseriformes) lost their lungs; however, even here there is an evolutionary story to what was getting “lost.” Sarah Longo’s 2013 paper “Homology of lungs and gas bladders: Insights from arterial vasculature” describes that the pulmonary artery, which normally carries deoxygenated blood from the heart to the lungs, is vestigial in acipenseriformes, having been coopted for new functions. In paddlefish (Polyodon), the pulmonary artery became a coronary artery (these transport blood into and out of cardiac muscles), while in sturgeons (Acipenser), the pulmonary artery became an esophageal artery (transporting blood to the esophagus). So, acipenseriformes still have “pulmonary arteries,” but these are no longer functioning as they originally did.[33] The last group of non-teleost actinopterygians with lungs is the bowfins and gars (holostei). These are a little strange because bowfins have lungs supplied by a pulmonary artery, while gars do not. Instead, the gar’s gas bladder is supplied blood by lateral branches of the dorsal aorta. It can still breathe, though, via gills and gulping air. Therefore, in actinopterygians, the lungs were lost in acipenseriformes, gars, and finally the teleosts (all remaining actinopterygians). Teleosts modified their lungs into a swim bladder, an organ that aids in maintaining buoyancy, with work here including Christopher Daniels et al.’s 2004 paper on “The Origin and Evolution of the Surfactant System in Fish: Insights into the Evolution of Lungs and Swim Bladders,” and Weiling Zheng et al.’s 2011 paper showing “Comparative Transcriptome Analyses Indicate Molecular Homology of Zebrafish Swimbladder and Mammalian Lung.” Furthermore, clades of teleosts have independently evolved airgulping capabilities, albeit not through lungs. The anabantoidei (Siamese fighting fish and gouramis) and channoidei (snakeheads) are

united by (among other things) their ability to breath air via an organ called the labyrinth, so called because of its folded, maze-like structure, their systematics reviewed in 2004 by Lukas Rüber et al. Because of this organ, some anabantoids can leave the water for periods of time, such as the climbing perch. Understand that this air-breathing ability evolved totally independently of the air-breathing in mudskippers. Fish with the labyrinth organ are grouped within the order anabantiformes, while mudskippers are gobiiformes. In other words, air-breathing in fish has evolved multiple times. Yet more data for Hodge to ignore. But, things inevitably get worse for the creationists, for to them, a number of different “fish kinds” must have been created all with the ability (or at least the remnants of the ability) to breathe air. Did God create all sarcopterygians (including tetrapods) and actinopterygians as two separate holobaramins, free to speciate and “vary” into the myriad forms there are today? Did God create the lungfish baramin separate from the coelacanth baramin (to say nothing of the various fossil eotetrapodiformes—Eusthenopteron, Panderichthys, Tiktaalik, etc.)? Are all the non-teleost actinopterygians grouped into one baramin? Are bichirs, sturgeons and paddlefish, and bowfins and gars three separate baramins? Where do the baraminologists draw the lines? Can they ever draw the lines? So much life for creationists to account for, and so far, so little accounting (or the curiosity to go with it). In 2016 creationist Todd Elder had this to offer on “Fish Classification in Baraminology” at the Baraminology Quest website:  

Fish are defined as aquatic creatures with gills and fins. They are coldblooded, often have scales, and most lay eggs. I am not aware of much work being done with aquatic animals. This is probably due to most Baraminologists focusing on the Ark Kinds (the animal types that would be on the ark). This would not include aquatic animals because they would survive outside of the ark.  

That was it. No list of the fish kinds, just a “definition” so general as to be utterly useless. Can’t they use their brains on this? Speaking of brains, and the nervous system that goes with it, there’s a very detailed evolutionary history on that. In diploblastic animals (ones having two germ layers during development), such as

cnidarians (jellyfish, sea anemones, and corals) and ctenophores (the comb jellies), they have neural nets, which are cobweb-like structures of nervous tissue. Some cubozoan jellyfish even have complex “eyes” called rhopalia, integrated with their nervous system without need of a “brain” as we vertebrates have, described in 2006 by Anders Garm et al., and these box jellyfish have a fossil record going back all the way into the Cambrian, as Jian Han et al. showed in their 2016 paper. Around 570 million years ago (the late Precambrian), the first bilaterally symmetrical animals appeared, meaning that their body plan is approximately mirrored on both sides. The first true brains would have been small, simple organs inside of ancestors that would have been vaguely worm-like. Indeed, the most basal living bilaterians are the acoelomorph flatworms (who are not closely related to the platyhelminthes—flatworms of the protostome variety). As worked out by Katja Seipel & Volker Schmid in their previously noted 2005 paper on jellyfish and triploblasty, their distinctive “striated muscle-based locomotion coevolved with the nervous and digestive systems in a basic metazoan Bauplan from which the ancestors of the Ctenophora (comb jellyfish), Cnidaria (jellyfish and polyps), as well as the Bilateria are derived.” This means that the first brains evolved somewhere between our common ancestor with jellyfish (about 590 million years ago) and our common ancestor with acoelomate flatworms (about 570 million years ago). This is back in the Precambrian, putting those two basal animal phyla many tens of millions of years before the Cambrian Explosion that anti-evolutionists like to bring up. Following the split from acoelomate flatworms, the bilaterians break into protostomes (wherein the mouth develops before the anus embryonically) and deuterostomes (in which the anus develops before the mouth embryonically). Among the protostomes, cephalopods and arthropods independently developed complex brains and nervous systems; however, evolutionary developmental biology work has shown that precisely the same regulatory genes are involved in making brains in humans, sharks, fruit flies, and octopuses (documented by Ann Butler’s 2002 paper “Chordate evolution and the origin of craniates: An old brain in a new head”). A question for baraminologists: Are all protostomes—arrow worms, rotifers, snails, octopuses, priapulid penis worms, roundworms,

tardigrades, velvet worms, and arthropods—one holobaramin? If not, why do they all develop embryonically in the same manner? And, why do we humans develop embryonically in a different way, but in the same manner as chimps, wrens, geckos, frogs, goldfish, and tunicates? Was the Designer just that uncreative, lumping forms together that in so many other ways group contiguously in naturally evolving clades? Tardigrades alone press the boundaries; see the Info Box  . In tunicates, those mostly sessile basal chordates, some members, such as the ascidians, develop neural tissues that are possible precursors for the structures in craniates (chordates with a skull—based on the phylogeny that lampreys and hagfish are sister clades, that includes all modern vertebrates). Within craniates (or vertebrates), the brain is sectioned into three areas: forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain. Following the general evolutionary history, these sections become larger and more complex as our ancestors transitioned over the millions of years from osteichthyes (bony fish) to sarcopterygian fish (lobe-finned fish) to tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrates) to amniotes (amniotic egg-laying animals) to mammals. Please do not take that to mean these other organisms are somehow “lesser” or “inferior”; they are equally as derived evolutionarily as us. Their living representatives all have exactly the same length of time separating one from the other. Also, many nonhuman animals have complex behaviors, as observed in bird mating rituals and chimpanzee social hierarchies, so they are not all simply dull, brutish creatures struggling tooth and claw to survive. They are amazing and worthy of interest in their own right. There are some differences though, such as the neocortex (or isocortex), which is distinctive to mammals. According to Francisco Aboitiz et al.’s 2003 paper “The evolutionary origin of the mammalian isocortex: Towards an integrated developmental and functional approach,” the mammalian neocortex arose from the amniote brain structure known as the pallium, which is much simpler. That means while early synapsids were busy changing their jaw layout, they were simultaneously undergoing changes to their brains. And, natural selection has evidently shaped different parts of the brain, such as the amygdala and hippocampus, with respect to their specific functions,

according to Robert Barton & Paul Harvey’s 2000 paper “Mosaic evolution of brain structure in mammals.” And, within our own hominin lineage, we can observe the enlargement of the brain over time. Remember our chart on Monty White’s hominins from Chapter 3? As it happens, there is a distinct upward trend in brain sizes as time marches on. The early australopithecines, such as Australopithecus afarensis, had cranial capacities in the 400cc range, while later ones, such as A. boisei, had cranial capacities over 500cc. Cranial capacity even differed within species, as later Homo erectus had larger volumes than earlier ones. And, cranial capacity in early Homo sapiens was less than that of modern ones, according to the 2006 paper by Karen Rosenberg et al., “Body size, body proportions, and encephalization in a Middle Pleistocene archaic human from northern China.” An oddly consistent pattern for a designer, wouldn’t you think? Couldn’t get it right the first time? But not at all surprising from an evolutionary point of view. But, brain size alone does not determine intelligence. A rough estimate that quantifies “intelligence” for a species is the brain-tobody size ratio or the encephalization quotient (EQ). After all, blue whales would be considered the most “intelligent” due to the sheer size of their brain,  and Neanderthals had a   ___________________________________________________________________

Tardigrades The wee little “water bears” are a phylum with around 1200 species of very tiny critters, with an understandably sparse fossil record (Kenneth Cooper found the first one in Cretaceous amber in 1964, and a lone Cambrian one had turned up by 2001 when Graham Budd pegged them as “Stem-Group Arthropods”)—along with a truncated genome to match (including a “disintegrated” Hox cluster), explored by Vladimir Gross et al. in 2019. Diane Nelson noted in 2002, “Despite their overall abundance and cosmopolitan distribution, the Tardigrada have been relatively neglected by invertebrate zoologists. Because of difficulties in collecting and culturing the organisms and their apparent lack of

economic importance to humans, our knowledge of tardigrades has lagged that of other groups.” Creationists have lagged still farther behind, though, preferring to highlight only their Gee Whiz hardiness, from Joachim Vetter proclaiming “The ‘little bears’ that evolutionary theory can’t bear!” in 1990, to Creation Ministries tweeting in 2019 they are “far too tough to have evolved!” Actually only a select few tardigrades are very tough, such as Ramazzottius; others like Hypsibius are less stress tolerant, as pointed out by Yuki Yoshida et al.’s 2017 paper on their genomes. CMI spun on a 2018 David Catchpoole article citing Takuma Hashimoto et al.’s 2016 work on Ramazzottius’ radiation resistant MRE11 protein (an ancient one not unique to tardigrades, involved in DNA strand repair—an ongoing topic of study, as by Elda Cannavo et al. in 2019). Catchpoole offered no history or context for that molecule, though, nor quoted Hashimoto’s assessment of it: “the expansion of MRE11 was likely to be due to gene duplication events during evolution to this lineage.” He skipped too the opportunity to present a baraminological counterpoint to the evolutionary work he showed no awareness of, including Lahcen Campbell et al.’s 2011 study, “MicroRNAs and phylogenomics resolve the relationships of Tardigrada and suggest that velvet worms are the sister group of Arthropoda” and Frank Smith et al.’s 2016 paper, “The Compact Body Plan of Tardigrades Evolved by the Loss of a Large Body Region.” cranial capacity larger than our own, indicating a larger brain. Among amniotes, the synapsids have the highest EQ, followed by the birds, and then the traditional reptiles. Interestingly, Archaeopteryx has an EQ larger than that of reptiles but lower than that of modern birds, as James Hopson documented in the 1977 paper “Relative Brain Size and Behavior in Archosaurian Reptiles,” which makes sense given that it is a member of the transitional lineage from non-avian dinosaurs to birds. When scaled allometrically, dinosaurs had brain sizes that were completely normal for reptiles, eradicating any lingering notion that the non-avian ones were all very dumb creatures (some though, like Stegosaurus, did have proportionally tiny brains).[34]

Among synapsids (and likely all animals with brains), EQ is affected by a number of factors. For one thing, as Karin Isler & Carel van Schaik showed in their 2006 paper “Metabolic costs of brain size evolution,” brains are very expensive to maintain, so mammals with low nutritional diets generally have lower EQs. Likewise, carnivores tend to have higher EQs, likely due in part to them having to make effective hunting strategies, as Robert Savage noted in a 1977 paper. However, research also shows that since some mammals with high EQs are herbivores, such as primates and elephants, suggesting sociality is also a factor. Needless to say, there is a lot of evolutionary data for the brain, all of which Hodge and his creationist followers are going to miss, and therefore won’t be accounting for in their Coming Attraction trailer for the creationism “science” movie. Finally, what about limbs? Like the other structures discussed here, limbs were coopted and modified (through mutations that were naturally selected) from existing structures. Just as the mammalian ear required a cooption and modification of jaw bones, lungs required a cooption and modification of the esophagus, and our own brain was coopted and modified from an earlier system in animals. But importantly, what sort of “limb” is Hodge referring to? In protostomes, limb and body development are controlled by Hox genes. In mammals, one of these is called Sonic hedgehog (who said scientists don’t have a sense of humor?). These enormously influential genes control development of organs and patterns the limbs and digits. Interestingly, the same family of Hox genes, the Hedgehog family, controls aspects of development in all other deuterostomes as well as in protostomes, meaning that the Hedgehog family originated prior to the common ancestor of protostomes and deuterostomes (some 560 million years ago). As it happens, the 2011 paper by Philip Ingham et al., “Mechanisms and functions of Hedgehog signalling across the metazoa,” documents that the Hedgehog family has protein domains (protein sequences that can evolve and function entirely independently of the rest of the protein chain) that exist outside even the animals. Think about the implications of that. Hedgehog proteins have two domains (curb your amazement at what they’re called): the Hedge and Hog domains. Thomas Bürglin

tracked their history in two 2008 papers, and it is an interesting story. The Hog domains have been found in non-bilaterian animals, such as cnidarians and sponges; choanoflagellates; dinoflagellates; apicomplexans; red algae; and mosses (but strangely enough not in “higher” plants). On the other hand, the Hedge domain has similarly been found in choanoflagellates, but our common ancestor with them seems to be about the furthest back it goes (though that is still about 900 million years ago). However, the domain bears some striking resemblance to the bacterial (!) Streptomyces albus metalloproteinase (an enzyme that cuts proteins and uses a metal) known as d,dcarboxypeptidase, indicating cooption of a very ancient system. And there are the self-proteolytic protein segments to consider. These cut themselves out of the protein sequence and splice the ends back together where they had just cut themselves out. These Hedgehog domains are called inteins and have been found in all three domains of life (eukaryotes, archaeans, and bacteria). Very deep roots. Their splicing proclivity eventually led to their merger, as the Hedge and Hog domains fused somewhere between 650 and 620 million years ago, forming the Hedgehog family. Fast-forward to the first vertebrates with paired fins (between 525 and 460 million years ago). Researchers had been trying since the 1870s to explain the origin of paired fins but to mostly no avail. One hypothesis by Karl Gegenbaur (1826-1908) held that a gill arch gave rise to the first fins, while another proposed that paired fins developed from lateral folds on the body of the fish. Neither hypothesis was strongly supported in part due to the fact that the modern agnathans, hagfish and lampreys, are not robustly placed on the phylogenetic tree. While non-evolutionist paleontologist Sir Richard Owen (18041892) bumped perilously close to figuring the chordate puzzle back in the 1840’s (see the Info Box  next page), the current consensus holds that they are sister to each other and share a common ancestor with us that lived 525 million years ago (back in the Cambrian). Since agnatha is paraphyletic, including the jawless ancestors of jawed fish, the modern agnatha are grouped into a clade called cyclostomata. Now, that does not mean the data has not moved on since the 1870s. The old models that had tried to work out the evolution had to wait until the development genes for them were discovered. And that

brings us to 2003 when Michael Coates wrote on “The evolution of paired fins,” and could specifically note the homologies between scapulocoracoid (pectoral fin) cartilage and certain branchial (gill arch) cartilage. His abstract ended with this: “No transformation of arch to girdle is necessarily implied, but some signal of developmental relatedness is predicted.” And sure enough, the 2009 paper “Shared developmental mechanisms pattern the vertebrate gill arch and paired fin skeletons” by Andrew Gillis, Randall Dahn, & Neil Shubin, found “the molecular patterning of chondrichthyan branchial rays (gill rays) and reveal profound developmental similarities between gill rays and vertebrate appendages.” This is yet another example of an evolutionary prediction that has been vindicated by experimental evidence. So, regardless of how the first fins arose, we can observe a variety of types in living and extinct forms. Here though, let us focus specifically on the evolution of limbs that allow movement on land, and yes, some fish have such limbs. Among chondrichthyans, the epaulette shark can pull itself along the land from tidepool to tidepool with its fins. Among teleost fish, the climbing gourami, mudskippers, and the waterfall climbing cave fish (Cryptotora thamicola) are just a few examples of fish able to take to the land. Whether they are related to each other in baraminology, and what reason the Designer has for creating fish with the ability to walk is up to creationist interpretation, but the scientists aren’t waiting for them to take a stand on it. In 2014 Emily Standen and colleagues studied the Nile bichir Polypterus, a taxon   ___________________________________________________________________

Owen’s Archetype Owen imagined a “vertebrate archetype” as “the blueprint that God referred to as He guided the history of life,” to quote Carl Zimmer’s account in his 1998 book At the Water’s Edge. Evolutionary paleontologists like Barbara Stahl in 1985 were expecting early chordates to resemble rudimentary lampreys, which is what they turned out to do when they were discovered in the decades since. The very basal Haikouella was like their larvae, while Myllokunmingia looked more like a hagfish, and Metaspriggina

described by Simon Conway Morris in 2008 continued the trend, revealing yet more incipient “vertebrate features” later fish would build on. Interestingly, in 2014 Evolution News showed less imagination than Owen when they tried to pigeonhole Metaspriggina as “a vertebrate fish” (despite having extensively quoted Conway Morris’ actual text, where a vertebrate skeleton was notably not among the critter’s attributes). Will this embolden modern creationists to springboard off Owen to include all vertebrates and their closest ancestors as one holobaramin? Don’t bet on them doing that. whose mixture of primitive and derived traits fascinated biologists ever since pioneering embryologist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (17721844) took note of them in 1802. John Hutchinson described Standen’s findings in his accompanying commentary article in Nature, and it’s worth quoting at length:  

In a bold experiment, Standen and colleagues reared a group of bichirs on land for eight months and compared them with bichirs that had developed in their normal aquatic environment. They then studied how the fish from the two groups moved on land, and how the shape of the skeletal elements of their paired front fin bases differed. They found that, compared with water-raised bichirs, the land-acclimated fish took faster steps, their fins “slipped” across the substrate less frequently, they held their fins closer to their bodies, their noses stayed more aloft and their tails undulated less, with less-variable motions overall. These were behaviours that the authors had predicted should develop to enhance walking abilities on land. Furthermore, the bones of the neck and shoulder region in the land-reared fish had altered in shape to produce a more mobile fin base with greater independence of motion between the fin and the neck, along with improved bracing of the ventral “collarbone” region. These environmentally induced traits probably fostered the locomotor changes observed in the land-reared fish and helped the animals to resist gravity, thereby representing a common biological phenomenon termed developmental plasticity. Surprisingly, the land-reared fish could swim just about as well as the aquatic cohort, so there was no clear trade-off between being a good swimmer and a good walker.  

Trina Du & Emily Standen went on in 2017 to describe the specific muscle fiber details in their experimental Polypterus. In that same year, Julia Molnar et al. identified further connections: “The presence of preand postaxial muscles in both the pectoral and pelvic fins of Polypterus, combined with recent descriptions of similar muscles in the lobe-finned fishes Latimeria and [the Australian lungfish] Neoceratodus, suggests that they were present in the most recent common ancestor of bony fishes.” The story of what fish can do with their limbs gets even stranger for creationists as you walk up the sarcopterygian side (home to that coelacanth Latimeria). First, creationists have to explain why the Designer made their anatomy so congenial to an evolutionary interpretation, like the digit homologues in their fins identified by Zerina Johanson et al.’s 2007 paper. Or making the DNA of coelacanths and lungfish more similar to our own than to the DNA of other fish, as exampled by Naoko Takezaki et al. in 2004. Then, they have to explain why the Designer made a series of progressively more tetrapod-like fish, starting with sarcopterygians like the Devonian Kenichthys. This fish is special because it has, like us, choanae (the opening at the back of the nasal passage that leads to the throat). Which is strange, the Designer being so focused on restricting such innovations that way. Other fish like Eusthenopteron have distinct humerus, ulna, radius, femur, tibia, and fibula. And, Panderichthys has all these characteristics plus an intermediate braincase, as Per Ahlberg et al. laid out in their 1996 paper, “Rapid braincase evolution between Panderichthys and the earliest tetrapods.” And a transitional pelvic girdle, with fins that pointed the way toward vertebrate digits and locomotion, as Catherine Boisvert and colleagues showed in 2005 and 2008 papers. Subsequent work by Nicholas Cole et al. focused on the movement implications for later tetrapods discernible in the “Development and Evolution of the Muscles of the Pelvic Fin” in 2011, in 2018 Heekyung Jung et al. identified “The Ancient Origins of Neural Substrates for Land Walking,” and in 2019 Ahlberg investigated further with “Follow the footprints and mind the gaps: a new look at the origin of tetrapods.”

If designed, it’s starting to look like the Designer is going out of their way to make lots of taxa to inspire evolutionists to confidence that their model of tetrapod origins is correct. Or the Fossil Genie’s on the job. Which brings us to that amazing (and predicted) fossil we mentioned back in Chapter 1: Tiktaalik, which still had fish gills, scales, and fins; but more developed tetrapod ribs, neck and pectoral girdle, and lungs, with intermediate limb joints and ear regions. Just how much more transitional would a fossil need to be to qualify as such by anti-evolutionists? Going by the contorted hairsplitting of creationists Truth in Science in 2006, two postings by David Menton in 2007, Shaun Doyle in 2008, Margaret Helder also in 2008, Answers in Genesis in 2010, and Menton again in a 2013 Answers book chapter (we will get back to that in Volume 2) ... and Casey Luskin grinding them out in 2006, 2008, and 2010 postings ... nothing will ever be enough for them. Nor will they ever be caught describing what manner of fossil they would accept. It’s the same tale of dismissal and evasion. Consider what happened in 2010, when Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki et al. reported in Nature some tetrapod trackways from Poland that predated Tiktaalik by some 18 million years, with commentary by Philippe Janvier & Gaël Clément. Whereupon creationist Tas Walker declared how these “trample the Tiktaalik school of evolution” (gee, do they issue diplomas there?) and Casey Luskin clapped his ID hands in glee over “the havoc wreaked by these footprints.” Whoa—this does not mean Tiktaalik and the other sarcopterygian fish are unimportant? Far from it, as we have noted. All it did mean was some critter capable of paddling in shallow water in what would become a chunk of Poland 397 million years later was doing what Tiktaalik and company would definitely be doing 20 million years after it up in Arctic Canada. There is no rule in the Fossil Genie Manual that only the very earliest representative of a group would be preserved in the scattershot fossil record. Nor that every representative of any diverging form obligingly disappears the moment an earlier one is discovered (in exactly the way your grandparents don’t go poof should you discover they had grandparents too).

It is the characters that organisms have that determine their relatedness to other organisms. The fossil record helps fill in the temporal sequence of things, but always bearing in mind how newer finds can push back the points of origin (but can never push them later). We cannot stress this enough, or shake our heads more strenuously to read anti-evolutionists like Walker and Luskin continuing not to get this really, really basic systematic point. Now, we can move onto Hodge’s final spurt of blatant misunderstandings. For the next two paragraphs, he continues to pontificate on “information” without ever identifying what that is. Then, he switches over to what the Bible teaches and makes a series of unfounded assertions: that plants and animals originally had DNA with no mutations, that God was keeping everything from gaining mutations (we’ll see how that flies in the next chapter), and that a global Flood had occurred (we’ll see how that swims in Chapter 7). Hodge then ends his chapter with a conclusion that merely repeats his lack of understanding of mutations. And that was that. So, what did we learn? We learned that whether one is an actual geneticist, like Georgia Purdom, or a non-specialist, like Bodie Hodge, creationists still utterly fail to account for the data regarding mutations. We saw over and over again that the creationists miss or censor the real genetic information to further their misguided narratives. We have also learned that again and again, creationists have failed to dislodge the evidence for evolution.  

Case Study 4: John Sanford and Genetic Entropy  

However, before we can leave this creationist garden of genetic misinformation, there is one more idea we must investigate since it is heavily tied to the creationist argument on mutations: something called “genetic entropy”. And, what is that, you ask? This was a concept presented by creationists John Sanford (a plant geneticist), John Baumgardner (a geophysicist—impressive but not exactly helpful in the field of genetics) and various others in papers over the last decade, but most directly in Sanford’s 2005 book Genetic Entropy & The Mystery of the Genome (for which Baumgardner penned a laudatory Forward).

Their idea is that the human genome, as well as the genome of every other organism on Earth, is slowly deteriorating over the generations. And not many generations, either, representing (coincidentally?) the time since things really slid downhill for Fallen Man, after the Flood. That’s where their YEC background comes home to roost. In their view these deleterious and slightly deleterious mutations are building up and that the rarer beneficial mutations aren’t up to the task of counteracting them as the generations continue. Cue ominous music. Let’s step back a bit for context on this notion. Decades before Sanford and Baumgardner weighed in with their version, the 1967 Jehovah’s Witness Watch Tower book Did Man Get Here By Evolution Or By Creation? asserted that “There is no favorable trend of mutations, but, instead, there is an unfavorable trend, a downward degenerative trend.” This was just a fundamental religious doctrine dressed up in genetic garb: everything was created in a state of perfection by God but is winding down over time until the Second Coming of Jesus. Watch Tower had offered no technical literature on mutations to support this, merely quote-mining researchers. Modern proponents like Genetic Entropy do cite technical literature, but they must necessarily misrepresent the scientific ideas to do so (although they always have the option of eventually just magically conceding the facts and redrawing their line in the sand to claim they never held the older position in the first place). In this we must give a good nod to someone who spotted the problems in Sanford’s argument before us and documented them beautifully: Scott Buchanan (who describes himself as an “Old Earth or Evolutionary Creationist”) who dissected Genetic Entropy (and Michael Behe’s Edge of Evolution) at the source level in extensive 2010 and 2013 web postings. Our friend Nesslig has also offered some trenchant observations about Sanford’s argument, so a cap tip to him too. Genetic Entropy has been embraced by many a grassroots creationist, of course (both coauthors bump into them online regularly), and surfaced in Dave Nutting’s 2018 lecture recorded by PZ Myers, in which Nutting declared Sanford to be “a whole lot smarter than I am” (which is not, come to think of it, that notable an accomplishment). But

the strength of a scientific hypothesis does not rest on the enthusiasm of its non-science boosters, but on the quality of the evidence adduced for it. So let’s pick up the Genetic Entropy trail. Right off the bat, Sanford misrepresents Motoo Kimura’s wellevidenced neutral theory of molecular evolution, which describes how most genomic variation is caused by genetic drift and mutant alleles that are overwhelmingly neutral (in that they cause no harm or help to an organism). Kimura’s theory allows for most mutations to be slightly harmful (near neutral) and pointed out, “Whether such a small rate of deterioration in fitness constitutes a threat to the survival and welfare of the species (not to the individual) is a moot point, but this will easily be taken care of by adaptive gene substitutions that must occur from time to time (say once every few hundred generations).” Sanford falsely claimed that Kimura had excluded beneficial mutations from a graph in his 1979 paper, supposedly because there were too few to even consider, when the fact was that Kimura’s abstract modeling disregarded beneficial ones to focus on the impact of neutral and deleterious mutations. But Sanford didn’t stop there. He exaggerated the “no selection zone” in his version of Kimura’s graph to make it appear bigger than in the 1979 source, and then offered (without sourcing) a “correct distribution!” figure where he plopped a thin curve of beneficial mutations within a “no selection zone.” With his visual deck thus stacked, Sanford insisted that “Population geneticists know that essentially all mutations are deleterious, and that mutations having positive effects on fitness are so rare as to be excluded from such distribution diagrams.” Really? Beneficial mutations are too small to have much of any effect on a population, and “essentially all mutations are deleterious,” when his own cited work of Kimura had flatly announced the opposite! Namely, that deleterious mutations arising in the larger sea of neutral mutations “will easily be taken care of by adaptive gene substitutions that must occur from time to time (say once every few hundred generations).” Already, we see that Sanford has a major disconnect from reality. Sanford pressed on to document his claim that beneficial mutations were indeed fantastically rare: “The best estimates seem to be one million to one (Gerrish and Lenski, 1998). The actual rate of

beneficial mutations is so extremely low as to thwart any actual measurement (Bataillon, 2000, Elena et al, 1998).” Here he was diving into that Lenski LTEE data field we explored earlier in the chapter, and repeated this argument in his Contested Bones book with Christopher Rupe, though not without a source stumble, citing Lenski’s 2011 “Evolution in Action: a 50,000-Generation Salute to Charles Darwin” for that one in a million rate (a brief general review that had never mentioned explicit mutation rate values at all). But Sanford solo was off to just as bad a start, as the title of Lenski’s paper with Philip Gerrish was “The fate of competing beneficial mutations in an asexual population.” That should have been a dead giveaway that those one in a million beneficial mutations were not only occurring, but did so often enough in a rapidly replicating bacterium to be measured. As it happens, beneficial ones were showing up around once every fifteen generations. But remember their experiment tracked thousands of generations, which meant that 1% of those were getting fixed in their populations. And beyond that? Gerrish & Lenski noted, “Beneficial mutations that become transiently abundant, but which do not go to fixation, may be quite common in asexual populations.” As for the fitness aspect, Buchanan put it this way in his critique (his italics):  

For twelve out of twelve populations in the Lenski study, a significant increase in fitness was observed over the first 10,000 generations. Thus, whatever was the percentage of beneficial mutations, they were numerous and effective enough to drive the evolution of each of the experimental populations to improved fitness. This completely refutes Sanford’s claim that “effectively all beneficial mutations… must be un-selectable.” Sanford had to be aware of the Lenski long-term E. coli study, since it was the basis of Gerrish and Lenski’s estimates of beneficial mutations, yet he withheld that information from his readers and made statements about beneficial mutations that are obviously false.  

Ouch! But it gets worse. Sanford had selected the Santiago Elena paper, in which 226 random insertion events were done in a glucose medium. 80% of them showed a decrease in fitness (3% on average), and we may wonder whether Sanford deliberately picked that study because

of that, but Buchanan noted the follow-up paper by Susanna Remold & Lenski in 2001 (which Sanford didn’t cite) that had discovered something else when the mutants were exposed to a maltose environment. In that case a subset of 26 were tested, and while most of the mutations remained deleterious, three of them (12%) turned out to be beneficial (that’s way above one in a million). None of that should have come as a shock, since much of their work had investigated the antagonistic and pleiotropic effects of mutations, from Elena et al. “Punctuated Evolution Caused by Selection of Rare Beneficial Mutations” in 1996, to Elena & Lenski’s 2003 “Evolution experiments with microorganisms: The dynamics and genetic bases of adaptation.” What is “deleterious” or “beneficial” is not intrinsic to the mutation, but context sensitive. That too flies in the face of Sanford’s primary assumptions about quantifying the overall incidence of beneficial mutations. As for Thomas Bataillon’s paper, Buchanan did not have that available to him, but we did, and all it had done was to define protocols for designing experiments to detect beneficial mutations more effectively (which prior experiments had often not even been set up to do), which meant Sanford was mischaracterizing what the paper was even about. But it’s worse than that, as further work put that detection protocol to the test. In 2004 Sarah Joseph & David Hall had already spotted how beneficial mutations in Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast were quite high, and Buchanan noted Hall et al.’s 2008 follow-up that confirmed that 13% of mutations there were beneficial (while Jellison’s Amazon review of Sanford called attention to the 2008 paper by Joseph Dickinson that detected a much higher 25% incidence in 48 strains studied). Since then the picture has only veered farther from the cartoon version Sanford painted, revealing quite a churning sea of genetic variety going on in that yeasty beastie. Richard Lenski’s 2017 IMSE review called attention to Sasha Levy et al.’s 2015 paper that tracked half a million S. cerevisiae lineages simultaneously, “revealing thousands of beneficial mutations that transiently increased in abundance but were eventually outcompeted by other more beneficial mutations.”

Jellison’s Amazon review offered another paper that reflected the complexity of actual mutations outside of Sanford’s “genetic entropy” box: Stanley Sawyer et al.’s 2007 paper explored how much went on in the “weakly neutral” zone in Drosophila populations, where even common deleterious mutations ended up in polymorphic versions, and the scientists reminded that “The effect of any amino acid replacement therefore depends on its context. What is slightly deleterious in one genetic background may be mildly beneficial in another.” On this matter of what “context” can mean, Buchanan’s critique called attention to two further works with a considerable kick. In 2006 Rees Kassen & Bataillon showed that even the typical low beneficial mutation rate was still enough to generate improved fitness in Pseudomonas flourescens bacteria (a genus we’ve encountered several times already in this chapter), while in 2007 Lilia Perfeito et al. found in small populations of E. coli one of every 150 mutations among them were beneficial, a rate “1000 times as high as previous estimates, and a mean selective advantage of 1%.” In these bacterial cases the advantage was resistance to antibiotics, which had obvious implications for medical procedures (and how if epidemiologists swallowed Sanford’s mythic “genetic entropy” the lives of real people could be affected on account of their seriously underestimating the reality and impact of natural mutations). In a paper Sanford coauthored in 2015 with John Baumgardner et al. “The waiting time problem in a model hominin population” (one which an internet creationist has insisted to both of us authors was a “rock solid” work that could not be refuted, and which Sanford touted in 2016 posts, even at the ostensibly Intelligent Design Discovery Institute) the creationists invoked the flawed Gauger papers on the biotin pathway noted earlier in the chapter as confirmation that “we are in the right ballpark” on their belief that beneficial mutations cannot occur sufficiently to rescue natural evolution. This supposedly irrefutable paper also cited the same suite of papers on mutation rates Sanford had previously misused in his book (Elena et al. 1998, Gerrish and Lenski 1998, and Bataillon 2000), plus a 2014 paper by Bataillon & Susan Bailey (which we’ll get to momentarily), but softened the phrasing a tad with a qualifying adjective (our bold): “It is now generally recognized that beneficial

mutations are rare, and that high-impact beneficial mutations are extremely rare.” And what are these “high-impact” mutations? Other than claiming that J. B. S. Haldane (1892-1964) had “assumed a continuous supply of high-impact beneficial mutations” in a 1957 article, the “rock solid” paper stayed mum on examples. Which was maybe a prudent course, given that Haldane’s old work hadn’t stressed such impacts, high or otherwise, nor even expressly grappled with the rate or nature of beneficial mutations, but was about estimating “the effect of natural selection in depressing the fitness of a species” based on what little was known at the time (DNA as the medium of inheritance was a really new thing). Indeed, Haldane’s own paper cautioned “We do not know at how many loci two ‘good’ but fairly closely related species differ. Their taxonomic characters may depend mainly on as few as twenty gene substitutions. But there is every reason to think that substitutions have occurred at a great many other loci.” Sanford’s bringing up Haldane allowed him to wave “Haldane’s Dilemma” at his readers. Haldane’s calculations suggested there might be a limit to how fast beneficial mutations could occur, and the specific term was coined by Leigh Van Valen in 1963 in a paper offering a solution to it based on how genes tended to interact. But the real resolution to the “dilemma” came a few years later, prompted in 1968 when John Maynard Smith evaluated the math and determined that Haldane’s “conclusion that it will typically take 300 generations per gene substitution is unjustified.” The following year, Peter O’Donald reviewed further work and realized that even Maynard Smith’s caveats had failed to pinpoint the big problem with Haldane’s model, which depended on selection acting on genetic loci separately, rather than on the whole organism where the phenotype is determined by multiple loci—a model that “does not realistically describe how natural selection works.” In 2003 Leonard Nunney drove another nail into the “dilemma” coffin by testing Haldane’s model against how the known variables interacted, and showed how population size, not mutation rate or the incidence of rare beneficial mutations, was the defining factor in how a species could build on those mutations adaptively. When population size was taken into account, the results “differed from Haldane’s

solution.” This had implications for conservation efforts (increasingly a concern in our 21st century), where “we expect small populations to be restricted in their ability to adapt to environmental change.” Understandably, with all that, “Haldane’s Dilemma” faded as a cutting edge genetic problem over the years (it didn’t even get a mention in Adam Eyre-Walker & Peter Keightley’s 2007 review “The distribution of fitness effects of new mutations”), but not so among antievolutionists. Walter ReMine (whose M.Sc. degree was in electrical engineering, not biology or genetics) devoted a whole chapter of his 1993 The Biotic Message book to it, reiterated in a 2005 article. In 2007 web posts he insisted that the dismissal of the “dilemma” was somehow a grave scientific scandal, and was still banging that drum in a 2012 interview with the endlessly credulous creationist  podcaster Bob Enyart  and   ___________________________________________________________________

Cordova under the microscope Coauthor JW got to speak with Salvador Cordova in February 2019, a Young Earth Creationist who circulates in the Intelligent Design apologetic subculture, dribbling YEC talking points in his wake. During the video chat it became rather apparent that while Cordova could talk about the complexity of certain cellular structures (at least insofar as his anti-evolution sources had painted them), his knowledge of the underlying biology was lacking. For instance, he claimed that spliceosomes (proteins that cut introns out of transcribed pre-mRNA) are too complex to have evolved; however, he was unaware of the existence of RNA spliceosomes. In addition, he talked about the alleged difficulties in a prokaryote giving rise to eukaryotes but had also never heard of prokaryotes with eukaryote-like membrane-bound organelles, such as Planctomycetes, explored in a variety of papers over recent years: Rachel Santarella-Mellwig et al. 2010, John Fuerst & Evgeny Sagulenko 2011, Christian Jogler et al. 2012, and Christian Boedeker et al. 2017. All in all, Cordova’s argument was a repetitive sprint to an evermoving goalpost, “How do you explain this? Well, what about this?” On our end, we’re pretty satisfied regarding the “what about” part.

sidekick Fred Williams. Christopher Rupe & John Sanford added to the “clarity” of ReMine’s interpretation in a 2013 creationism conference paper. Not that ReMine, Rupe or Sanford didn’t know about some of the technical criticism of Haldane’s calculations. ReMine had directly cited Van Valen, Maynard Smith and O’Donald’s work in his book, but only in a footnote that made no mention of the latter pair’s explicitly contrary findings and brazenly implied those papers had stood by the very thing the scientists had rejected (the one gene substitution every 300 generations barrier). Rupe & Sanford were just as diaphanous, dismissing Van Valen and Maynard Smith’s analyses as among “highly convoluted and conflicting arguments” (without giving any examples) and bypassed O’Donald and Nunney’s work by the venerable approach of not citing them at all. ReMine’s Biotic Message spin on Haldane’s Dilemma (“Over the long term, a faster rate than this is not plausible—the species cannot plausibly pay the cost”) continues to be favored by niches of creationism and Intelligent Design, as tracked by 1999 and 2007 posts by Ian Musgrave. Here’s our representative sampling of how ReMine’s arguments have circulated, the effect of relying on secondary sources without checking them:  

2005—Don Batten declared with straight face: “Since the publication of ReMine’s book, there has been no serious dispute that Haldane’s analysis (if correct) places a 1,667 limit, a severe limit, on human evolution.” Batten apparently was unaware of the technical criticism literally decades before ReMine’s book, which we know ReMine knew of but neglected to discuss, and which ReMine bypassed completely in the 2005 retread Batten was keen to extol. 2006—Salvador Cordova recommended that 2005 ReMine to the Uncommon Descent ID audience, noting ReMine had been a Fellow at the Discovery Institute, and how “after many rejections was finally forced to publish his paper as a last resort in a (gasp) creationist journal. If one reads his paper, there is not one reference to God, Intelligent Design, or any theological issue, simply pure science.” True enough on all save the last point, but Cordova wasn’t noticing as he thought “his work was not welcome because it hit too close to home for some. But that is my opinion, I will let interested readers decide for themselves.” Well, the interested readers writing our book would submit ReMine’s work failed to gain

traction for the simple reason that it was wrong, and that Cordova showed no sign he’d ever thought to look beyond ReMine’s confident claims to find that out (see the  Info Box for another measure of Cordova’s analytical skills). 2007—At Uncommon Descent Dave Scott fumed that “Wikipedia Suppresses Info On Haldane’s Dilemma”, meaning their refusal to bow to the grandeur of ReMine’s faulty argument. A check of the current Wikipedia confirms their petulant insistence on noting the critical Van Valen, Maynard Smith, O’Donald and Nunney works, and not mentioning the irrelevant ReMine. 2011 & 2016—CreationWiki channels ReMine’s claims on Haldane’s Dilemma without any recognition that there had already been direct refutation of the old Haldane calculation, and reflecting only ReMine’s responses to criticism of his more recent assertions. The creationist evasion game goes on.

  As for the biological examples Haldane mentioned in 1957, one main one was the peppered moth mutation, which turned out to be ever so microevolutionary, even as it posed for a short time as a controversial hobbyhorse to be ridden by anti-evolutionists (see the  Info Box). Stepping back again to the 2015 Sanford paper, what about Bataillon and Bailey’s 2014 paper the creationists added to their set, supposedly showing the absence of beneficial mutations on the scale the creationists wanted? Well, once again it looks like the antievolutionists were racing past the content rather too quickly. Bataillon & Bailey had reminded at the start how their own prior work and a 2010 paper by Allen Orr showed how difficult it was to isolate the incidence and impact of interacting mutations in experimental contexts. So far these involved bacteria, yeast, and viruses, not populations of animals, where the number of variables shoot out the window.   ___________________________________________________________________

Peppered moth Over a century of industrial air pollution in the UK acted as a selection pressure on a species of moth, Biston betularia, which got progressively darker as those presumably survived bird predation better against backgrounds like soot-stained trees. In the 1950’s Bernard Kettlewell (1907-1979) conducted classic field experiments

to test the predation model, which creationists like John Morris in 1994 dismissed as too trivial to be of importance to justify “evolution” generally. Later criticism by Michael Majerus (1954-2009) as to how rigorously they were done (including a lack of independent replication) prompted anti-evolutionists to seize on the episode as a Darwinist fraud, fanned especially by Jonathan Wells in many articles from 1999 to 2016, including his Icons of Evolution book in 2000 (Casey Luskin tagging after in 2002, just as Judith Hooper’s sensationalized Of Moths and Men appeared). That jumpstarted another round of secondary umbrage from creationists who’d already dissed the Kettlewell work, such as  Dave Nutting’s Think & Believe (1991 and 2010), Canadian creationist Richard Peachey (1999 and 2012), joined by the British Truth in Science website in 2005, and David Coppedge in 2011. The fraud angle was played up by some secondary YEC popularizers, such as Emerson McMullen and Warren Krug in 1999. Henry Morris 2003 invoked Hooper’s book; Roger Patterson 2009 cited no one. Straddling the YEC/ID canyon, Paul Nelson sprinted past the bulk of Majerus’ 2007 lecture on the moth affair to complain about a brief mention near the end how gods are of human invention (perhaps catching his eye, coming in the paragraph   right after   Majerus had  double   slapped    Nelson’s  turf  with But by 2014 the field had edged forward enough for them to report how “Direct experimental evidence confirms predictions on the DFE [distribution of fitness effects] of beneficial mutations and favors distributions that are roughly exponential,” in which “the presence of even a few large-effect mutations can have a big impact on how quickly a population moves toward its fitness optimum.” As for the far more numerous deleterious mutations, the most interesting were the weakly deleterious ones, that could (their italics) “determine a population’s expected drift load—the reduction in fitness due to multiple small-effect deleterious mutations that individually are close enough to neutral to occasionally escape selection, but can collectively have important impacts on fitness.” The bulk of the 2015 Sanford paper was aimed at one of the most astonishing attempts at deck stacking that we have ever seen.

Hypothesizing a population of 10,000 hominins (without specifying what that genome consisted of or how it would be determined), they designed “the starting sequence so that it differs from the target sequence at every nucleotide site” (every site,   ___________________________________________________________________

“fundamental creationism and intelligent design are not scientific theories” because they’re untestable, so “have no place in science class”). The episode has been discussed by many science defenders as illustrative of the scientific method and anti-evolutionist haste to seize on controversy: Matt Young in 2004, Nick Matzke in 2007 and 2012, and Jerry Coyne in 2012, but by then a peeved Majerus had entered the fray, undertaking a fresh replication effort that ended up reinstating the peppered moth in 2012 as an icon of evolution (alas posthumously in Majerus’ case, his final work presented by Laurence Cook et al.). On the genetic side, Arjen Van’t Hof and colleagues subsequently explored the biology of the mutation in 2010, 2011 and 2016 papers, tracing it to a specific transposable element. You’d think that would be the end of Peppered Moth bashing, but in 2016 Cornelius Hunter was still manning the barricades in dismissing the latest genetic work on the moths, harrumphing “It doesn’t add up” (to him at least). And Regis Nicoll included the moth canard in a 2017 Salvo magazine rehash of the usual ID talking points (Darwin’s finches, junk DNA, Cambrian Explosion, etc), which 2020 reprint Denyse O’Leary tweet-linked to as supposedly confirming further “Darwinian” weakness. Overall, the anti-evolutionist position on the moths has been “Heads I win, tails you lose,” where they were dismissed before and after the Majerus confirmation or the new genetic work identifying the mechanism of the feature, and their fluffy dissembling may be compared to the measured reaction of the technical people over the same period, such as by Bruce Grant & Lawrence Wiseman, David Rudge, James Mallet, and Daniel Rozen included in our references.

really? could such an organism even be viable?). Their model did not allow selection to kick in until “after the mutation (or mutations) result in a substantial (selectable) improvement in total biological functionality” (even though real selection acts at any time), then ratcheted selection up (which would naturally weed out any deleterious ones more quickly, which they had all but guaranteed to have loads of, having altered all the nucleotides at start). Calling this monstrosity “biologically realistic,” their “numerical simulations revealed that a population of this type required inordinately long waiting times to establish even the shortest nucleotide strings. To establish a string of two nucleotides required on average 84 million years. To establish a string of five nucleotides required on average 2 billion years.” These numbers were so preposterously high that they ought to have wondered how the human populations—reviewed in the very technical work they cited on mutation rates and selection effects (2010 papers by Michael Lynch and Jared Roach et al., and a 2013 one by Catarina Campbell & Evan Eichler)—could have had any fixed mutational variations at all. But they did. In fact, we all do (which is why the scientists were studying them in the first place). Could it be that something was severely wrong with their non-evolutionary model, much as Haldane’s calculations had turned out to be biologically unrealistic? In short, nothing in the ongoing work affirmed the creationist deterioration paradigm, and it may not come as a surprise that nothing of Sanford’s genetic entropy papers were cited by specialists in the field like Orr or Bataillon. We would contend that was because the genetic entropy model was incorrect, and hence not of relevance or utility. Having (in his mind at least) rendered beneficial mutations a losing game, one of the more stunning evasions in Sanford’s original book was how he waffled on the last few decades of genetic research by conceding in a short appendix that “It is certainly true that duplications occur spontaneously within all genetic systems,” yet dug his dogmatic heels in by insisting that this cannot “create new information.” Whatever that is. Which we couldn’t tell from his technical source documentation because he didn’t offer any.

Besides the gene duplication work we’ve already alluded to, coauthor JD assembled a chronological sampler of relevant literature for Evolution Slam Dunk, and we’ve gathered that in an Info Box  on page 268, along with Jeffrey Tomkins’ stab at dealing with gene duplication. Since Sanford was getting his initial assumptions about mutation rates wrong, and avoided including such “information” builders as gene duplications, there remained one big hurdle for Sanford’s idea to clear: does it work? Does the Genetic Entropy hypothesis currently anticipate new findings? Place your bets now. Scott Buchanan noted an obvious test for the Genetic Entropy argument: those rapidly replicating bacteria. “If Sanford’s thesis were correct, we might expect an initial bump up in fitness as the bacteria adapted to some new conditions, followed by a reversion to a secular decline in fitness as the supposedly relentless accumulation of deleterious mutations proceeded. In fact, the Lenski long-term E. coli experiment shows the contrary: an initially rapid increase in fitness, followed by a long plateau of stable or slightly increasing fitness for over 35,000 generations,” citing Zachary Blount et al.’s 2008 paper that we encountered earlier in the chapter. Given that mutation rates vary so much among organisms, including those identified among the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans in 2003 and 2004 papers by Suzanne Estes, Michael Lynch and colleagues, and Lynch et al.’s 2008 ongoing work with yeast, there was a common thread to what affected the outcome, and it wasn’t “genetic entropy.” It was whether natural selection was in play. As Buchanan put it (his italics and underlined emphasis): “when natural selection is not operating, the population genome deteriorates, and when natural selection is operating, the average genome of the population does not deteriorate.” And he rightly asked “How can Sanford possibly claim what he claims, when decades of experimental studies clearly show the exact opposite? As a genetics researcher, he was certainly familiar with MA [mutation accumulation] studies and their implications. This is another example of deceit in Genetic Entropy, and it is a whopper.” Sanford devoted a whole chapter of his book to misrepresenting the contents of James Crow’s 1997 paper “The high spontaneous mutation rate: Is it a health risk?” saying that the viability of the human

population decreases from mutation accumulation at a rate of 1% to 2% per generation, which sounds like major support for his genetic entropy idea; however, the opposite is true. As with the Lynch work above, the paper is saying this decrease is only occurring due to an absence of natural selection (and specifically among people living in industrialized nations with lower birth rates and higher survival rates due to improvements in medical treatments). But Sanford’s genetic entropy actually relies on natural selection occurring, the sort that would have prevailed through our pre-modern history, not what can happen in a modern environment where relaxed selection has come into play. Buchanan’s criticism noted this as well, adding that when asked directly about the implications of his work, Crow stressed that his paper offered “no support for the Genesis account” and “are entirely consistent with the neo-Darwinian theory.” Yet another derailment of Sanford’s logic train at the station—and by extension, Jeffrey Tomkins, who in a 2015 defense of Sanford’s claims (“Genetic Clocks Verify Recent Creation”) was citing Crow’s paper as if it showed “the inability of natural selection to remove” deleterious mutation accumulations. Meanwhile, the science express kept chugging along. In the same year Sanford was drawing his Genetic Entropy line in the sand, a paper by Peter Keightley et al. found “Evidence for Widespread Degradation of Gene Control Regions in Hominid Genomes” that had prevailed all through our long lineage, though how that translated into the impact of deleterious mutations at any given point in time depended both on the degree and manner of selection and the activity of other genes. ___________________________________________________________________

Gene duplication Predating John Sanford’s book are Sarah Teichmann et al. 1998, John Jelesko et al. 1999, Robert Friedman & Austin Hughes 2001 & 2003, Michael Lynch 2002, François Mazet & Sebastian Shimeld 2002, Senda Minguillón et al. 2003, Lukasz Huminiecki & Kenneth Wolfe 2004, Peter Stadler et al. 2004, and Michele Morgante et al. 2005. The field is so large that many researchers specialize in particular features, such as Dietmar Lang et al. 2000 and Markus

Hartmann et al. 2003 on the β-α barrel roll, whose diverse functions include mitochondrial pore openings. Post Genetic Entropy would include Jörn Petersen et al. 2006, Roderick Finn & Børge Kristoffersen 2007, Chris Hittinger & Sean Carroll 2007, Xiang Gao & Michael Lynch 2009, Margrethe Serres et al. 2009, Baocheng Guo et al. 2012, Elisabeth Kaltenegger et al. 2013, Adam Hargreaves et al. 2014, Wenfeng Qian & Jianzhi Zhang 2014, Dan Andersson et al. 2015, and Ferdinand Marlétaz et al. 2015. We highlighted that Hargreaves paper in bold because of a pair of 2015 Acts & Facts articles by Jeffrey Tomkins (“Snake Venom, Genetic Entropy, and Adam’s Curse” in May, and “Moonlighting Proteins Befuddle Evolution” in September) that claimed the paper that had determined the snake venom system originated by gene duplication of salivary protein genes had denied gene duplication! Tomkins thought to pull off this trick by selectively quoting how they had not found the duplications were “of genes encoding body proteins” specifically. He then compounded the misrepresentation by citing further work that didn’t help his case, starting with Vanda Boshnjaku et al.’s 2012 paper that had discovered a transcription factor role for folate receptors. Tomkins decided this showed there was “no wiggle room for any random ‘evolutionary tinkering’”   with the   “Creator’s  handiwork.”   Except  this   Our species has a trade-off going, in would appear, with Michael Lynch noting (in the 2010 paper cited by Sanford et al. above) that “Although the human per-generation mutation rate is exceptionally high, on a per-cell division basis, the human germline mutation rate is lower than that recorded for any other species.”And just in case you may think that Sanford’s creationist views of genetics have remained hermetically sealed in the YEC crypt, in a 2010 Uncommon Descent post, Salvador Cordova incredibly contended that Lynch’s paper buttressed Sanford’s notions (“read it and weep, literally”). In 2013 more of Sanford’s notions filtered into the Intelligent Design orbit, from Cordova’s posts to multiple articles Sanford coauthored with John Baumgardner, Wesley Brewer, Paul Gibson,

George Montañez and Chase Nelson appearing in the 2013 Biological Information: New Perspectives coedited by Robert Marks,   Michael Behe,  William Dembski, Bruce Gordon (a Canadian ___________________________________________________________________

“precisely regulated” receptor plays a role in fueling cancerous cells, as covered by Vineet Mohanty et al. in 2017. If Tomkins wants his designer yin, he must accept the diseased yang. But Tomkins wasn’t done flipping off the science, condescendingly describing one 2015 paper (Adriana EspinosaCantú et al. on “Gene duplication and the evolution of moonlighting proteins”) as one where they “fancifully claim” gene duplication as “some magical process,” and selectively invoking another work (Jacobo Reyes-Velasco et al. on python tissues) for the point that “the genes that encode venom proteins are not specific to venom glands but are actually expressed in many different tissues throughout the snake’s body,” as if that ruled out their origination from those salivary genes. Tomkins made no mention of the thrust of Reyes-Velasco’s paper, that it investigated the genetic “biases in which genes were recruited for snake venom systems.” Perhaps Tomkins might pay less attention in future to “Adam’s Curse,” and heed more the admonition against bearing false witness. Undeterred by the cavils of Tomkins and company, Carolina Minguillón et al. 2009 and Ajna Rivera et al. 2010 have worked on the role of gene duplication in the formation of vertebrate appendages and animal eyes. Paleogenomics has pressed ahead to reconstruct some of the ancient enzymes generated along the gene duplication trail, such as Karin Voordeckers et al. 2012, and in 2018 Ferdinand Marlétaz et al. culling further clues from the amphioxus genome. Loren Haarsma et al. 2016 have progressed to defining the generalized dynamics of diverging duplicated genes (a Fun Fact aside: Haarsma is coauthor with his wife Deborah of the 2007 book Origins: A Reformed Look at Creation, Design, and Evolution). The upshot: there is a lot of genomic data to account for, and the avoidance of it is another measure of the overall uselessness of

Sanford’s Genetic application of it.

Entropy

or

Jeffrey

Tomkins’

befuddling

  philosopher) and Sanford. Lynch bumped into Sanford more directly in 2018 when he and Joe Felsenstein penned posts and responses by William Basener and Sanford concerning their paper “The fundamental theorem of natural selection with mutations.” Lovers of genetic minutia may explore all this at their leisure. Deterioration of another sort occurred in April 2019 when Denyse O’Leary tweeted “An essential prediction of Darwinian theory of common descent, for example, is that functional genetic information increases through a process of mutations, insertions, and deletions. Experimental science, however, consistently falsifies this prediction.” Her source consisted of a quote-mined paragraph in Uncommon Descent from an Evolution News posting by “biophysicist” Kirk Durston —that ultimately fired only two source citations for the notion “that the genomes of life are slowly degrading.”[35] Both were older works that had been circulating in the antievolution quote circuit: Alex Mira et al.’s 2001 paper “Deletional bias and the evolution of bacterial genomes” had claimed no such thing (only that bacterial genomes tend to remain small and “degraded” pseudogenes get weeded out quite regularly), while Dmitri Petrov & Daniel Hartl’s 1998 paper “High Rate of DNA Loss in the Drosophila melanogaster and Drosophila virilis Species Groups”(which Durston’s linked to twice, once for “fruit fly” and again mistakenly for “human beings”) likewise related to their dearth of “DNA junk” and pseudogenes, not to some “degrading” of the organisms’ function or the DNA coding for them. As for Genetic Entropy closer to home, in 2012 Keightley determined that human mutation rates overall were lower than had been previously estimated, and laid out “A Resolution of the Mutation Load Paradox in Humans” in a paper with Yann Lesecque. All this was further confirmation of how our species managed to avoid imploding on Sanford’s purported genetic degeneration slide, based as it was on only that one 1997 Crow paper. Incidentally, none of that relevant Keightley work surfaced in that paper Sanford coauthored in 2015 with John Baumgardner et al., purporting explicitly to be about mutations “in a model hominin population.”

In that Crow-eating chapter Sanford offered this jab at another concept: “To the extent we can attribute any meaning to the term synergistic epistasis, it means that mutations interact such that several mutations cause more damage collectively than would be predicted by their individual effects. At least one paper provides experimental evidence that the concept is not valid (Elena and Lenski, 1997).” Actually that paper (“Test of synergistic interactions among deleterious mutations in bacteria”) had not done that, because it wasn’t about testing that concept at all, but rather seeing by artificial insertion mutations whether their E. coli studies supported a particular model of how sexual reproduction originated and was maintained, reporting that “the mutational deterministic hypothesis seems to fail not because interactions between deleterious mutations are very rare, but rather because synergistic and antagonistic interactions are both common.” Scott Buchanan noted how selective Sanford was to have relied only on that one paper, and on bacteria at that, calling attention to further work that bore on the subject, including Rafael Sanjuán & Elena’s 2006 paper, “Epistasis correlates to genomic complexity,” tracking the dynamics in a variety of taxa, from viruses to prokaryotic bacteria and eukaryotic animals. As it happens, Sanford cited that work in a 2013 paper with John Baumgardner et al., but only peripherally as if it didn’t impact their underlying assumptions. Perhaps at this point he was simply too befuddled to notice. And just to put some still more recent frosting on the epistasis cake, Darin Rokyta et al.’s 2011 “Epistasis between Beneficial Mutations and the Phenotype-to-Fitness Map for a ssDNA Virus” (which an online creationist thought to offer coauthor JD as somehow confounding evolution) found almost a third of the double mutations they examined conferred improved fitness experimentally, while a 2017 paper by Mashaal Sohail et al. found “Negative selection in human and fruit flies involves synergistic epistasis,” further confirmation of “why sex and recombination are advantageous.” And while we’re on the topic of sex, in 1964 Hermann Muller (1890-1967) proposed that one reason why sexual reproduction got favored in evolution was because it worked against deleterious genes (Joe Felsenstein dubbed the process “Muller’s ratchet” in a 1974 paper, “The Evolutionary Advantage of Recombination”). The genetics of such exchanges can be quite complicated, though, as Sidhartha

Goyal et al. suggested in their 2012 paper, “Dynamic MutationSelection Balance as an Evolutionary Attractor,” where deleterious mutations can dominate in an “overadapted” population, while beneficial ones can nudge poorly adapted ones to greater fitness. The presence of endosymbiotic bacteria can play a role too, insulating asexual organisms from the impact of parasites, as in the aphids studied by Mark Asplen et al. in 2014. In 2019 Alexander Brandt et al. reported “No signal of deleterious mutation accumulation in conserved gene sequences of extant asexual hexapods” (all of which having apparently taken up the practice in a recent geological sense). So no “mutational meltdown” for them, either. So far, all the underpinnings of Sanford’s argument were misfired, and this kept up as Sanford ramped up for his dash for the finish line: that genomes have been visibly deteriorating in the short time since Creation and/or the Flood, springing the biblical angle only in his final chapter, where he alluded to the longevity of the patriarchs and the reduction of that after the Flood. That this would have required quite a lot of solid evidence to support it was obvious, but that Sanford did not do. Scott Buchanan summed up his chagrin thus:  

For all Sanford’s hand-wringing over the inescapable declines in genomes everywhere, his lack of concrete examples shows that the scientific facts are not on his side. Microbes have existed for untold millions of generations, and even small mammals like mice and rabbits which reproduce one or more times a year have existed with humans for thousands of generations in historic times, and many more thousands of generations in prehistoric times. If genomes of these rodents were declining by say 0.1% per year, then in 3000 years since 1000 BC, they should be down to 5% of their original fitness (0.999 raised to 3000 power = 0.05) So where is the evidence of super-rabbits in 1000 BC or even 1000 AD?  

Sanford had alluded to a study by fellow creationist Philip Holladay on a supposed decay in longevity of patriarchs as recorded in the Bible, and Holladay has kept up this refrain all the way to a 2016 Answers Research Journal paper on “An Exponential Decay Curve in Old Testament Genealogies.” On this matter of Old Testament decay, Jeffrey Tomkins weighed in with a 2015 paper claiming “Empirical genetic clocks give biblical

timelines,” in which he dangled Wengqing Fu et al.’s 2013 paper showing that 73% of single nucleotide variant mutations in proteincoding among human beings (and 86% of the deleterious ones) had originated in the last 5,000-10,000 years. This was hardly unexpected, given the swirl of human population mixing in that time, and how the more deleterious ones would have been selected out the longer they’d been in the population (really serious ones running the risk of causing the holder to drop dead, and consequently removing those from the gene pool). Since the 5,000-10,000 year figure overlaps with the 6,000 Eden creation target (never mind that the paper still had a quarter of those SNV’s older than 10,000 years), some creationists have waxed positively giddy over this, as both coauthors of this book know firsthand in debates, when they have thrown the Fu paper at us.[36] But Tomkins further pressed his luck in his 2015 piece in bypassing over a decade of science work by citing Thomas Parsons et al.’s 1997 paper “A high observed substitution rate in the human mitochondrial DNA control region,” and Ann Gibbons’ 1998 Science commentary on it, that had found some unusually fast mitochondrial mutation rates (one every 80 years, instead of one every 12,000) that if taken all on their own could pull the mitochondrial Eve forward to 6,000 years. Bingo! The Bible right after all. This paper too has been grist for the creationist wish fulfillment mill, starting with David Plaisted in 1998. But not so fast. Even at the time, Gibbons had noted how many factors could have produced these results (from statistical artifacts due to small samples, to mutational hotspots in a subpopulation), which means Tomkins could hardly claim to be unaware of them too. And now comes the over a decade part, as subsequent work pinned down more of the mitigating factors that affected which parts of mitochondrial DNA were more susceptible to mutation, allowing scientists from Sigrún Sigurðardóttir et al. in 2000 to Pedro Soares et al. and Eva-Liis Loogväli et al. in 2009 to steadily improve their measurements. And something else: by the time Tomkins was writing in 2015, we have genomes from a variety of now-extinct organisms dating some tens of thousands of years ago—including mammoths, mastodons, gomphotheres, glyptodonts (giant armadillo relatives), saber-toothed cats, giant sloths, stilt-legged horses ... and Neanderthals and  Denisovans. None of these show any more or less genomic

degradation than their modern relatives, and with the actual ancient human DNA available we can directly test the mitochondrial calibration rates against these real world examples, starting with the Neanderthals in 1997 and 1999 papers by Matthias Krings et al., and the Denisovans Matthias Meyer et al.‘s 2012 work. With hundreds of samples stretching back nearly 40,000 years, 2013 and 2014 papers by Qiaomei Fu et al., and Adrien Rieux et al. in 2014 were seeing the actual rates over time. Yet more work appeared in 2016 by Cosimo Posth et al., but the papers that could have been available to Tompkins showed fairly steady rates for the whole chromosome clustering around 2.14 to 2.74 x 10-8 substitutions per site per year. Did Tomkins fail to mention any of this because it would snag his desire to allow a unique originating Adam and Eve to be living only 6,000 years ago? Interestingly, in 2018 Erik Trinkaus identified “An abundance of developmental anomalies and abnormalities in Pleistocene people.” While around the same time Trinkaus was spotting how actual ancient humans did not appear to be more perfect that their modern counterparts, Sanford et al. tinkered with models of “designed allelic variation” to let their literal Adam and Eve in on the field, while acknowledging (with considerable understatement) their difficulty in reconciling them with “the actually observed human allele frequency.” One may also note Sanford presented no Adamic or patriarchal inferences in any of his 2013 Biological Information papers. Nor did Jeffrey Tomkins offer specifics in September 2014 when opining that “Adam and Eve were created with perfect, error-free genomes—no mutations present.” None? No Alu retrotransposons present? Or is it that Adam and Eve possessed all the million-plus ones observed in human populations currently? You’ll pardon us for being a bit unclear on what Sanford or Tomkins’ positions are here. The latest entry in the Noachian Genetic Dating Game relates to the human Y chromosome. Much work has been done on this, such as Jacques Chiaroni et al.’s 2009 work on “Y chromosome diversity, human expansion, drift, and cultural evolution” as humans expanded around the world, and Diego Cortez et al.’s 2014 paper for the “Origins and functional evolution of Y chromosomes across mammals,” both of

which challenge the creationist story, demographically and phylogenetically. That the data wasn’t going to be easily disposed of could be seen in a 2010 Panda’s Thumb posting on “Creationists and Y Chromosomes” by Skip Evans, who noted creationist Todd Wood’s outlier caution in drawing anti-evolutionary implications from the Y, which continued in 2011 when Wood took issue with how Jeffrey Tomkins stressed the importance of that more divergent chromosome in distancing the two groups. To that point, Wood cited Steve Rozen et al.’s 2003 paper on “Abundant gene conversion between arms of palindromes in human and ape Y chromosomes,” which Tomkins floated past in his response, offering vaguely “While a number of large non-coding structural features (for example, palindromes) were already identified as being quite different, as Wood noted (Rozen et al. 2003), the more detailed features were still largely undefined.” That seemed odd, given that Tomkins was also aware of Jennifer Hughes et al.’s 2010 paper, “Chimpanzee and human Y chromosomes are remarkably divergent in structure and gene content” that seemed rather far from “undefined,” specifying the possible causes for those variations, including “the highly disproportionate role” of male-specific Y chromosome genes and the “opportunity for a single advantageous mutation to dictate the evolutionary fate” of them through “genetic hitchhiking.” But remember creationists envisage that everyone on the planet is descended directly from Noah’s family only 4,500 years ago, so some creationists simply can’t let the Y go. In 2018 marine biologist and creationist Robert Carter coauthored a paper with Stephen Lee & John Sanford, trying to cram the Y and mitochondrial data into their much more compressed 6,000-year Adam & Eve framework. And in 2019, Nathaniel Jeanson and Ashley Holland offered a pair of papers trying to springboard off their contention that mitochondrial DNA mutation rates were “consistent with the YEC model” (which they weren’t) to resolve the problem they’d encountered with the human Y-chromosome data in Yali Xue et al.’s 2009 paper and the 2015 study by Agnar Helgason et al., where the “rates would seem to be consistent with the evolutionary model.” Their efforts are worth a closer methodological look.

Obviously Jeanson & Holland had to get rid of any populations prior to 6,000 years, or at least the genetic signs of them reached by Monica Karmin et al. in 2015, who had dated “the Y-chromosomal most recent common ancestor (MRCA) in Africa at 254 (95% CI 192– 307) kya,” with another “cluster of major non-African founder haplogroups in a narrow time interval at 47–52 kya” as humans spread into “Eurasia and Oceania after the out-of-Africa bottleneck,” and a “second strong bottleneck in Y-chromosome lineages dating to the last 10 ky.” Only that last flirted with the dating needs of the Big Slosh, of course, meaning the others had to go. While the Karmin paper hypothesized that the most recent “bottleneck is caused by cultural changes affecting variance of reproductive success among males,” Jeanson & Holland preferred to attribute this to the post-Flood dispersal, requiring them to start with a population of only eight people, a modeling parameter understandably inconsistent with anything proposed in the Xue and Helgason papers. So they skipped that part, instead trying to end-run the data by finding segments of the population where mutation rates might be fast enough to get from Noah and the kids to our present genetic distribution. To that end they had to step over yet another set of papers, starting with 2013 ones by Paolo Francalacci et al. and David Poznik et al. reconstructing European Y-chromosome phylogeny and reconciling the mitochondrial and chromosomal measurements Jeanson & Holland were insisting were in conflict. Followed by a 2016 study by Poznik et al. on “Punctuated bursts in human male demography inferred from 1,244 worldwide Y-chromosome sequences” which found “Present-day geographical distributions provide strong support for the correspondences we proposed for the initial peopling of most of Eurasia by fully modern humans ~50–55 kya and for the first colonization of the Americas ~15 kya.” None of which was getting Jeanson & Holland any closer to the biblical timeframe they assured their readers were supported by the genetic data (once they trimmed off anything that didn’t fit, of course). But the data they needed to massage (or ignore) now included Neanderthals, because another 2016 study Poznik was involved in (but which Jeanson & Holland took no note of) was Fernando Mendez et al.’s “The Divergence of Neandertal and Modern Human Y Chromosomes.”

That paper pegged the last common ancestor or humans and Neanderthals at a quite precise 588,000 years ago, refuting (our bold) “alternative scenarios of a relatively recent or super-archaic origin of Neandertal Y  chromosomes. The fact that the Neandertal Y we describe has never been observed in modern humans suggests that the lineage is most likely extinct.” No more extinct perhaps than the creationist arguments for a unique Big Slosh bottleneck 4,500 years ago. You can see the problem. If those Neanderthals are humans (as so many current creationists insist they were), they were as much sons of Adam and Eve as Noah’s family a few (very long) generations afterward. Since no new DNA “information” is deemed to have originated by natural evolutionary means, Adam must have possessed their ancestral genetic sequences (Eve’s being derived from Adam’s, at least if you go by the ribectomy version of Genesis). But if those Neanderthal Y chromosomes are now extinct, then none of Noah’s family could have had those genes, otherwise some of their living descendants would possess them still. With populations so compact as envisaged in the creationist model, how could Noah’s family not have any trace of genes their ancestor Adam must have had? The failure of the data to match up to the creationist necessity isn’t even slightly surprising. It was inevitable, because the model’s wrong. So, is genetic entropy even slightly useful for anything? In 2012 Sanford had coauthored a paper with Robert Carter on a very specific topic, “A new look at an old virus: patterns of mutation accumulation in the human H1N1 influenza virus since 1918.” This sought to argue how the genome of the human H1N1 influenza virus has been degrading over time—clearly an indication of genetic entropy! And thereby hangs a tale. Sanford and Carter were starting off with a skewed view of pathogenicity. As Nesslig reminded us, it’s wrong to think viruses exist only to harm or even kill its host organism—in fact, the opposite’s true. A virus too effective at felling its host soon goes bye-bye for want of hosts. Really successful viruses tend not to be lethal, and if they can do their business without making the host sick at all, all the better. The selection pressure favors viruses that can evolve into a tolerable level

of annoyance for their hosts. Which means epidemic outbreaks are more likely to happen when circumstances combine to bring viruses into novel environments. That’s what happened with AIDS in the 1980s (spread especially, though not exclusively, by sexual practices that facilitated infection by the blood-borne HIV virus). And it’s what happened with the 1918 influenza pandemic, where a virus that could spread among birds and pigs was just the thing to run amuck among soldiers and civilians crammed together and breathing on each other, though exactly where and when it started is still a matter of legitimate uncertainty, reflected in analyses by John Barry in 2004, John Oxford et al. in 2005, and Jeffrey Taubenberger in 2006. The creationist urge to cherry-pick went viral regarding that virus’ repeat appearances. Carter & Sanford drew on a graph from Lone Simonsen et al.’s 1998 “Pandemic versus Epidemic Influenza Mortality,” which the creationists asserted showed “a continuous exponential decline in influenza-related mortality over time, and this is true for all three major serotypes.” Only the graph wasn’t about the virus’ fitness nor its pathogenicity among humans, but something else altogether: the declining number of flu victims under 65 over time. People exposed to the virus can generate antibodies to it. The incidence of antibodies in more recent outbreaks was a factor the Simonsen paper noted, but seeing that “influenza A (H1N1) viruses were relatively avirulent after their reemergence,” they suggested “that younger persons may retain longlasting immunity better than older persons after exposure to a new influenza virus subtype.” Failing to spot that distinction, Sanford apparently revised Genetic Entropy to include this discovery, as Jellison’s Amazon review noted a chart in the 2014 4th edition claimed this matched the creationist’s “Mendel’s Accountant” algorithm predicting just such a decline in virulence. But no again. Nature is more complicated than that. Fast-forward to 2016 and the paper by Anna Otte et al. “Evolution of 2009 H1N1 influenza viruses during the pandemic correlates with increased viral pathogenicity and transmissibility in the ferret model” documented quite the opposite (our bold):  

Here, we show that distinct mutations in the 2009 pandemic H1N1 virus genome have occurred with increased frequency after pandemic declaration. Among those, a mutation in the viral hemagglutinin was identified that increases 2009 pandemic H1N1 virus binding to human-like α2,6-linked sialic acids. Moreover, these mutations conferred increased viral replication in the respiratory tract and elevated respiratory droplet transmission between ferrets. Thus, our data show that 2009 H1N1 influenza viruses have evolved after pandemic onset giving rise to novel virus variants that enhance viral replicative fitness and respiratory droplet transmission in a mammalian animal model.  

In other words, selectively beneficial mutations (to the virus at least) have been occurring in the H1N1 strain despite Sanford’s pronouncement that their genomes are simply deteriorating. Nor has Sanford’s Genetic Entropy model held up for organisms bigger than bacteria. Numerous paleogenomic and paleoproteomic studies have been done on a variety of extinct critters: saber-toothed cats and the American cheetah by Ross Barnett et al. in 2005, mammoths by Hendrik Poinar et al. in 2006, mastodons added by Nadin Rohland et al. in 2007 and 2010 papers, in 2015 the collagen of giant sloths like Megatherium by Michael Buckley et al., and the notoungulate Toxodon and the llama-like ungulate Macrauchenia by Frido Welker et al., glyptodonts in 2016 by Frédéric Delsuc et al., stiltlegged horses by Peter Heintzman et al. in 2017, as well as the aforementioned Neanderthals, Denisovans and archaic humans, and yet, there is no sign of increasing genomic degradation between them and their extant cousins. We call this a pattern of evidence, one which plainly sinks Genetic Entropy. In getting his core data field seriously askew and then extrapolating way beyond that to make empirically questionable conclusions, Sanford was only doing what Michael Behe tried to do in his Edge of Evolution book over on the ID side, inflating the incidence of bacterial resistance to medicines to rule out a natural mutation underpinning for (of all things) the reptile-mammal transition macroevolution case documented in the fossil record (coauthor JD investigated that Behe matter in Evolution Slam Dunk). Whether by creationists or ID advocates, this is not a grand landmark of explanatory success in disease prevention, and as neither

Behe’s Edge of Evolution or Sanford’s Genetic Entropy argument are supported by any data and in fact are a complete misrepresentation of the actual data we do have, in the practical world of real life (where lives may depend on it), they are worse than absolutely useless— they’re potentially dangerous. As apparent as this pattern of obvious misrepresentations and misunderstandings is, we’re not done yet. In the next chapter, we will combine the “brains” of Purdom and Hodge to see if they can demonstrate what a “kind” is. If White’s mess was any indication, neither coauthors are disposed to hold their breath.



5. Depending on the Strangeness of Kinds What is a kind? This short question has enraptured the minds of numerous creationists, and yet they have nothing approaching a system for delineating kinds or baramins. Part of the reason for this is that creationists avoid genetics like the plague when it comes to baraminology. Why? The reason is that genetics shows all organisms being related to each other, from humans to sponges to algae to bacteria, and creationists certainly cannot have that. Despite the fact that biologists can make predictions about common ancestry (see Timothy White et al.’s 2013 paper “Beyond Reasonable Doubt: Evolution from DNA Sequences”) and that biologists understand that traits are inherited and modified over generations, creationists try to arbitrarily group organisms into distinct and unrelated groups, and usually dwell on critters already familiar to them (like dogs and cats, cows and bears), a practice going back at least as far as George McCready Price a century ago, continuing through the initial heyday of Young Earth creationism (which Tony Thulborn reviewed in 2001), and persisting up to the present. Instead of relying on genetics when they deal with modern organisms, though, creationists try to group things together based mostly on similar morphology—what things look like. They also employ other methods, including just public opinion, and we will look at these as they are referenced. The last chapter saw Georgia Purdom and Bodie Hodge attempt to provide evidence that mutations were not evidence of evolution … and they failed miserably. Here, we are going to look at what Hodge and Purdom produce when they work together, The New Answers Book 3’s chapter four “What Are ‘Kinds’ in Genesis?” Remember that we saw A. J. Monty White stumble and fall flat on the issue of what a “kind” is, so let us see if the duo do any better in 2013. We’ll also compare their efforts with a few other creationist studies on the same topic: the 2012 article “Mammalian Ark Kinds” (henceforth called the Lightner mammal paper), which was authored

by “independent scholar” Jean Lightner (who holds a degree in veterinary medicine, not paleontology nor genetics), and a 2011 paper Purdom and Hodge coauthored with Lightner and Tom Hennigan titled “Determining the Ark Kinds.” Hodge and Purdom enter with this:  

The first thing that needs to be addressed is: “What is a kind?” Often, people are confused into thinking that a “species” is a “kind.” But this isn’t necessarily so. A species is a man-made term used in the modern classification system. And frankly, the word species is difficult to define, whether one is a creationist or not!  

We agree that there is a measure of confusion here, but it’s less about the difficulties of defining species in the wild as it is the trouble creationists have trying to shoehorn those within the “kind” concept. It is commonplace for grassroots creationists to declare that speciation doesn’t happen, even as Don Batten functionally accepted speciation in Creation Ministry International’s 2014 Evolution’s Achilles Heel anthology, as did Christopher Rupe & John Sanford’s Contested Bones book allowing speciation “on rare occasions” (like “dogs came from wolves”). That’s because, unless species are kinds, speciation must have been happening, a lot of it. But if kinds exist above the species level (the family is the traditional unit), then so much for our human species, as we fall into the primate kind. It is that contradiction that lies at the heart of contemporary creationist equivocation on what is a kind.[37] As Ronald Numbers (the preeminent historian of creationist lore) observed in a 2004 essay, “Ironic Heresy: How Young-Earth Creationists Came to Embrace Rapid Microevolution by Means of Natural Selection,” by the 1940s the theoreticians of creationism had completely given up on the fixity of species, especially Frank Lewis Marsh, the founder of baraminology, and by the time Marsh wrote on the “Variation and Fixity Among Living Things” in 1978 he functionally allowed speciation within the otherwise fixed kinds. But that concession didn’t filter down easily to the apologetic defense floor, as Joel Duff found in 2019 regarding a popular 1986 creationist textbook that was channeling a 1959 anti-evolution pamphlet implicitly nixing speciation. That meant a generation of creationists were coming up through their in-house educational system

not really knowing what it was their side actually thought about species. In 1991 Wilbert Rusch (1913-1994) went so far as to advise his fellow creationists (his italics) “to avoid the word entirely when referring to the concept of created kinds.” With that degree of vagueness in play, it was understandably more difficult for them to figure out how to keep that leaky speciation boundary from spilling over into the dreaded macroevolution. Although creationists seldom expressly use the word species to define a kind, they often (unknowingly) fall into that very thing when they use a variation of the biological species concept to define a kind as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding with each other. Remember how White applied this to the favorite creationist critter: domestic dogs, including wolves, dingoes, coyotes, and the various jackals. In a 2019 video talk on the Flood, Georgia Purdom repeated this trope, claiming that the members of most animal families can interbreed, and specifically that all in the canid family could do so. Which we know isn’t true, as we explored back in Chapter 3 regarding jackals. In the real world, biological isolation is not the simplistic “Interbreeding: yes or no?” thing creationists would prefer. Real species are populations of organisms, within which many isolation mechanisms come into play. You also have species aggregates or complexes, where different closely related species are so similar to each other that telling them apart becomes difficult. One example is the Ensatina salamander ring species complex in California we discussed regarding White back in Chapter 2. Another would be the treefrog Hypsiboas calcaratusfasciatus complex as documented by Marcel Caminer & Santiago Ron’s 2014 paper “Systematics of treefrogs of the Hypsiboas calcaratus and Hypsiboas fasciatus species complex (Anura, Hylidae) with the description of four new species.” Members of species complexes are often able to interbreed with each other, even as barriers to interbreeding can become established, as in ring species. Hodge and Purdom were accurate to report that classification systems are entirely man-made; nature does not care what we call a pine tree or an elephant or what we decide is a species. Species, genus, family, etc. are descriptive terms that help researchers categorize organisms to make studying them easier. The terms

inevitably lead to inferences on relatedness, which is demonstrable through genetic and physiological studies, as even the creationists acknowledge in their stabs at systematics. The genetics of living organisms, though, are a lot squishier than our rigid nomenclature. The reproductive isolation that can lead to speciation can develop gradually, not necessarily like swinging a gate shut all at once. If two animals can hybridize to produce fertile offspring, then they might very well do so even though we consider them different species. And really, this is a grand indication of the constant flow of evolution: the allele frequencies of populations are constantly shifting in different directions as the environment changes (including the selective pressures of what they eat or what might eat them) and as new alleles are introduced to the population by natural mutation. In Pacific Northwest chipmunks, for example, the mitochondrial DNA can play as big a role in governing hybridization zones (the seed corn of many a speciation shift) as the main genomic DNA, as John Demboski, Jeffrey Good, Sarah Hird, Noah Reid, and Jack Sullivan have shown in ongoing collaborative research from 2001 to 2012. Genes and the environment are in continual interaction with each other, producing “endless forms most beautiful” (as Darwin put it in his memorable phrase). Another problem with a one-size-fits all definition of species is that not all organisms reproduce sexually, so they cannot interbreed with anything. Bdelloid rotifers, archaeans, and bacteria (among others) are all asexual, so the species concept as defined by the ability to interbreed becomes null here. Instead, biologists look at the degrees of genetic similarities among asexual species to determine their relatedness. Though when the genetics of a species are known, it’s possible to fill in pieces of the lineage trail predictively. For example, in the 1989 article “A Lizard Foretold,” herpetologist Charles Cole and colleagues recounted their discovery of an all-female species of lizard in South America, Gymnophthalmus underwoodi. Asexual reproduction being what it is, they deduced it must have come about by hybridization from antecedent sexually reproducing species, and a check of its genes identified the likely male side of things, G. speciosus, which allowed them in turn to predict the genome of the hypothesized female end and

even anticipate its physical characteristics. In another indication of how practically effective evolutionary thinking is, in 1993 they found the missing G. cryptus in the wild, and a 1999 review by David Kizirian & Cole inferred what they could about its biographical history and origins. Fossil species, on the other hand, certainly do not mate once they become a fossil, so their degrees of relatedness must be determined by similarities in their structures to living analogs or descendants that do the mating thing. In some cases, determining new species or genera can be rather easy, but other times it can be difficult, especially when the fossils are reflecting closely allied species. That was the case most famously during the so-called “Bone Wars” when Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-1899) named a new sauropod he found Apatosaurus in 1877. Then in 1879, Marsh spotted another very similar beast, a fairly complete one (except for missing a skull) that he named Brontosaurus, eventually plunking a head on it from another sauropod altogether, Camarasaurus (a taxon more like the massive brachiosaurs than the lither diplodocids), resulting in the classic large-mouthed herbivorous critter that incongruously ended up munching on the adventurers in the original King Kong. Coauthor JD grew up with “Brontosaurus,” but a century after Marsh did his naming game, the similarities between the two led to the view that they were both really species of Apatosaurus. Since in zoological nomenclature the earlier name takes precedence, by the 1980s “Brontosaurus” was out and the lesser-known Apatosaurus was in. Fast forward to 2015 though, and the massive “A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda)” by Emanuel Tschopp and colleagues took a closer look and found enough disparity at the anatomical level to warrant seeing Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus as distinct genera again. This saga is also recorded in the 2017 AiG article “Brontosaurus: The Only Dino to Go Extinct Twice” by Laura Allnutt where, after asking if “bad science” was involved, she correctly says,  

No, it isn’t, and we can still trust the scientific process. Scientists are always evaluating and reevaluating and researching, and new discoveries often lead to new understandings of past discoveries. Scientists are gatherers of knowledge who then share their learning with the world.

 

Unless, of course, the creationists don’t like what they share (like all the meticulous evolutionary systematics the creationists have not in fact contributed to), in which case they disparage it all as so much “Fake News”. Similarly, Allosaurus was named in 1877 by Marsh, and a number of other theropods from the late Jurassic of North America that have been ascribed to it may or may not be the same genus, such as Saurophaganax and Epanterias. Likewise, Nanotyrannus may be its own genus or (rather more likely) a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex. Finally, another tyrannosaurid named Raptorex may or may not be a juvenile Tarbosaurus. In this instance the fossils were discovered by what are essentially fossil poachers, so the exact date and location of it are subject to intense controversy. But just because there is no hard and fast definition of a species, that does not mean a species is entirely arbitrary either. In reality, organisms are divided into species based on a combination of genetics, morphology (or fossils), embryology, reproductive abilities, ecology, and sometimes behavior. So, as reproduction does certainly play a factor; organisms that cannot consistently produce fertile offspring are considered to be of two different species. And, remember that both creationists and evolutionists use the word species, so saying that a species is hard to define is equally true whether one thinks the Earth is 6,000 years old or not. Intelligent Design advocates also need to wrestle with this notion, and some, like Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig in a 2005 article “Mutation breeding, evolution, and the law of recurrent variation” functionally reject that speciation can happen at all (which would in principle relegate all species to the Created Kind category). Meanwhile, it is solely strict creationists who have to know what organisms are definitely not related to each other. That’s the whole point of kinds. Which is why Hodge and Purdom then explain the Noah’s ark story and conclude with this:  

A plain reading of the text infers that plants and animals were created to reproduce within the boundaries of their kind. Evidence to support this concept is clearly seen (or rather not seen) in our world today, as there are no reports of dats (dog + cat) or hows (horse + cow)! So a good rule of thumb is that if two things can

breed together, then they are of the same created kind. It is a bit more complicated than this, but for the time being, this is a quick measure of a “kind.”  

Oh, it is way more complicated than “a bit” when the creationists invoke forms that are not regarded as close enough phylogenetically to interbreed directly today (canids and felids, equines and bovines) as if that resolved the problem of how to determine the boundaries for all the almost canids or nearly equines that existed in the fossil record. What if we can show through multiple methods that organisms who cannot interbreed now are nonetheless related to each other in so many other ways, then should we not follow that evidence? For instance, numerous genetic studies of cetaceans (whales and dolphins) have concluded that they are nested within the clade of even-hooved mammals called artiodactyla, from John Gatesy et al.’s “A phylogenetic blueprint for a modern whale” in 2012, to Georgia Tsagkogeorga et al.’s 2015 paper “A phylogenomic analysis of the role and timing of molecular adaptation in the aquatic transition of cetartiodactyl mammals.” There are of course other lines of genetic evidence that point to whales and hippos being closely related, data which have been known for some time, such as Gatesy’s 1997 paper “More DNA support for a Cetacea/Hippopotamidae clade: the blood-clotting protein gene gamma-fibrinogen” and Björn Ursing & Ulfur Arnason’s “Analyses of mitochondrial genomes strongly support a hippopotamus-whale clade” in 1998. Strange that the creationist’s Designer would take such pains to give hippos and whales similar DNA sequences in specialized proteins and cellular organelles despite them not being related at all. Pardon the scientists then, for so misunderstanding that evidence, if contrived by a Designer apparently dedicated to fulfilling the expectations of 21st century evolutionary systematics (rather than the nebulous theological imperatives of creationists). Fossil evidence reinforces this even more glaringly, where early cetaceans, such as Pakicetus and Ambulocetus, have the inner ear structure unique to cetaceans, along with the astragalus (an ankle bone) shape unique to artiodactyls (documented by Philip Gingerich et al.’s 2017 paper “Astragali of Pakicetidae and other early-to-middle Eocene archaeocetes (Mammalia, Cetacea) of Pakistan: locomotion

and habitat in the initial stages of whale evolution”). And this continues far down into the genetic substrate, as Tukushi Kishida et al. found in their 2015 paper on “Aquatic adaptation and the evolution of smell and taste in whales.” Thus, we have multiple independent lines of evidence confirming that whales are indeed related to other artiodactyls—hippos, giraffes, deer, cows, camels, pigs, etc.—even though whales are not able to interbreed with other artiodactyls today, tens of millions of years after their common ancestors parted company. Neither Answers in Genesis nor Creation.com (Creation Ministries International) nor the Discovery Institute nor Evolution News have put out any papers substantively disputing that hippos are genetically closely related to whales. Both coauthors find that very telling. The closest one can come is a daisy chain of evasion. Hank Hanegraaff’s “Did Hippos Evolve into Whales?” was excerpted from his 2012 book. Although his Christian Research Institute favors Young Earth creationism, on this point Hanegraaff decided to copy a brief argument from the rival Intelligent Design camp, from William Dembski & Jonathan Wells’ inept 2008 The Design of Life book (and threw in for good measure Michael Behe’s Edge of Evolution, that hadn’t discussed the evidence on whale evolution at all). Dembski & Wells tried to dispute the data not by accounting for it themselves, but by lobbing dueling authority quotes and concluding with the obsolete red herring about how closely whales and hippos were to pigs phylogenetically. That hasn’t been a serious issue in the scientific community since the 1990s, so it was a clear measure of the three authors’ collective ignorance (or laziness) that Hanegraaff’s 2012 gloss showed no familiarity with data that had been available for over a decade.[38] And even worse, remember that Kurt Wise has fielded the possibility that walking whales were on the ark. That means only about 450 years prior to baleen whales attaining gigantism, they were dogsized amphibious carnivores. 3 million years is fast in geologic terms, but 450 years is a breakneck speed indeed for that amount of morphological change to have occurred. But what about the examples our resolute creationist duo provided: a cross between a cat and a dog or between a horse and a

cow. Embarrassingly, this is no different than Comfort and Cameron’s crocoduck (mentioned in the White chapter) because Purdom and Hodge are saying that the only test of common ancestry would be a chimeric cross between two distantly related organisms (as coauthor JD correctly notes, there are no reports of dog-snapdragon crosses either). The explanation for why we do not see cat-dog or horse-cow crosses is the same: these animals merely share a common ancestor sufficiently distant that such hybridization ain’t gonna happen now. Worse, both Tommy Mitchell and Ken Ham have explained in an analogous case why we don’t see things like this. Their example, however, involved humans and modern apes. Both are answering the question “If humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes?” Ken Ham says in a 2018 AiG posting, “Why are Apes Still Here,”  

Evolutionists don’t believe we evolved from [modern] apes. They believe we evolved from an “ape-like” ancestor. Apes are supposedly our evolutionary cousins, and somewhere in the distant past we both split off from a common ancestor to go our own separate ways.  

Strangely, both coauthors can agree with Ham on this particular point (because the creationist has tumbled onto the truth for a change). JW feels the need for a stiff drink at this point, and JD trends likewise. But on with the tale. Tommy Mitchell was even more explicit on this ape matter in 2010: “This argument shows a misunderstanding of what evolutionists actually believe about human evolution. The evolutionary concept of the origin of humans is not based on humans descending from modern apes but, rather, argues that humans and modern apes share a common ancestor.” Ironically, Mitchell took this opportunity to actively advise the faithful not to use the “why are there still apes” argument—a recommendation which all too many creationists fail to heed, as both coauthors bump into examples constantly (many thanks to the humorous Twitter account named Take That Darwin, suggesting perhaps how few popular creationists have kept up with their Answers in Genesis). Which puts Purdom (a trained geneticist) and Hodge on the spot. If even Tommy Mitchell and Ken Ham acknowledge within the same

AiG they purportedly defend that evolutionists do not think humans are descended from modern apes or chimeric crosses of the two, then why would Hodge and Purdom not apply that same standard to cats and dogs, cows and horses?  

Dogs and cats, really living together  

Since they brought them up, though, what about the common ancestors between cats and dogs and horses and cows? For starters, we have to wonder what cats compose the “cat kind”. Based on genetic and morphological similarities, is the house cat related to the lion, tiger, and cheetah, and are all members of felidae related to each other? Todd Wood’s 2008 baraminology book would suggest they are, as did a 2011 paper by Barnabas Pendragon & Niko Winkler (who did not cite Wood’s book), but what about the outliers? Are all felids related to hyenas? Are felids and hyenas related to mongooses, civets, binturongs, and genets? At this level Wood and Pendragon/Winkler were not willing to lump things together, treating felids and civets as separate kinds, but at that systematic level there’s a new data field to account for: the fossils. Nathaniel Jeanson didn’t even get that far. He manifested his “Limit to Biological Change” in 2010 by recapitulating decades of creationist incapacity to pin down what a kind might be, suggesting that morphology might be the key, only to let the cat out of the bag a few months later by admitting the presuppositional nature of the whole enterprise. As for cats, while Jeanson wondered in 2013 whether there were lions in the Garden of Eden, that’s as close as he’s got to working out whether all feliformes are related to each other and to fossil groups like nimravids (false saber-toothed cats) and miacids. The Pendragon paper at least mentioned the nimravids, but implied they weren’t among the felid kind. But what are the miacids, you ask? They are a group of basal carnivorans (the dog and cat-like carnivores) that include a large number of very primitive members— including Dormaalocyon, Vulpavus, Gracilocyon, and Uintacyon. The miacids have characteristics in common with both cats and dogs, so should they be considered in either kind or their own? You won’t learn much on miacids from the creationist perspective. Neither Wood nor Pendragon/Winkler mentioned them. A 2012 piece

by Brian Thomas appeared to let some primordial felids out of the bag: “Because these within-kind changes happen so fast, there is no scientific reason to doubt that cats produced very different-looking varieties very soon after the Flood.” But that didn’t lead to any mention of miacids, nor in his 2019 installment asking “Have Lions Always Been Lions?” Nathaniel Jeanson left fossils out altogether in his “Mitochondrial DNA Clocks Imply Linear Speciation Rates Within ‘Kinds’” in 2015, and likewise for his series of articles at AiG repeating his arguments in 2016. It would be difficult to infer things from fossil forms when you don’t mention any, and yet Jeanson nonetheless proceeded as if all the extant carnivora species originated over only a few thousand years after the Flood. The ease with which Jeanson thought he could make his case visually without filling in the supporting data was particularly amazing when it came to the Cervidae. Jeanson’s 2015 paper had a graph claiming not only that all of the three dozen extant deer species originated since the Flood, but that over half of those differentiated just over the thousand years from the time of classical Greece to the Fall Rome! Besides that occurring within historic times, Jeanson functionally sped the rate up 3000 times faster than the evolutionary model, since Clément Gilbert et al.’s 2006 phylogeny has most of those deer genera appearing over three million years (from 5 to 2 Ma). And that’s not including extinct species (where a comparable number are known), such as the Eurasian ones studied in 2005 by Marzia Breda & Marco Marchetti. As to exactly how he identified when and where those particular speciation events were supposed to have taken place, Jeanson spared his readers the joy of that detail by not identifying any of the dots on the graph, or offering any technical documentation to justify his representation. But by then Jeanson should have been wary about trying to find accelerated mutation rates in the past, as in 2012 he’d proposed that very thing and then discovered the genetic data he examined from a range of mammals (alas, not including deer, but lions were on hand) showed no such acceleration. Jeanson waded even deeper into the wrong end of the gene pool when he suggested that the microscopic water flea Daphnia pulex had

too few mutations in its mitochondria had it been around “7,600,000 years” according to evolution. The creationist didn’t clarify there or in his 2016 summary whether Noah had tucked away these transparent arthropods aboard the Ark, but the paper he cited on their fairly high mutation rate, Sen Xu et al. from 2012, made no claims about their time of origin. The water fleas in general have tightly packed genomes lacking a lot of intron clutter, and they are known in both sexual and asexual models (details which Jeanson neither mentioned nor apparently took account of in his analysis). Work Jeanson didn’t cite would appear relevant: a 2012 paper by Teresa Crease et al. identified an expansion of the ecological range of the D. pulex lineage 8,800-22,000 years ago, and a 2013 paper by Abraham Tucker et al. suggested this particular Daphnia had gone asexual only around a thousand years ago, so where Jeanson was scrounging that “7,600,000 years” is anybody’s guess. But back to the carnivores. In that same year of 2015, excreationist David MacMillan illustrated the generalized ancestral forms required for the various carnivore kinds proposed by the Ark Encounter, asking “if creationists were presented with only the eight ‘ancestral’ species depicted above, they would likely group most or all of them into a single baramin based on their obvious similarities,” and let the reader spot how similar those were to the miacids, that “genus of small, arboreal placental carnivores which appear in the right strata and region to have been the ancestor of all modern carnivores.” We invite our readers to compare all that with the science facts on these basal carnivora, and their relationships, offered in Floréal Solé’s 2014 “Dental and tarsal anatomy of ‘Miacis’ latouri and a phylogenetic analysis of the earliest carnivoraforms (Mammalia, Carnivoramorpha).” A 2016 post by Jeanson took issue with MacMillan while asking “Why Don’t More People Accept the Young-Earth View of Speciation?” Maybe because it’s wrong, we might suggest. But Jeanson wasn’t addressing the MacMillan post above, but a 2016 one where MacMillan commented on Jeanson’s failure to “point to observed speciation events matching” his model. Which Jeanson clearly hadn’t. The creationist countered that he’d made “abundant testable predictions,” (like the differential mutation rate prediction Jeanson himself admitted was disconfirmed?) and so considered

MacMillan “intellectually dishonest” for failing presumably “to wade through all 29,000 words of my technical paper.” Jeanson also objected when Joel Duff recommended MacMillan’s piece among critiques of creationist hyper-speciation notions, with Jeanson dismissing blog posts as representing “one of the worst sources of scientific information.” Not compared to Answers in Genesis and Acts & Facts, in our opinion, corrupted as we are though by a perverse inclination to making sense of things. Incidentally, Elizabeth Mitchell is the only antievolutionist (so far) that we’ve spotted riffing off the Solé paper, in 2014 with “Extinct Carnivore Ancestor of Lions and Tigers and Bears? (Oh My!}.” Mitchell trotted out the customary objections on dating and systematics, declaring along the way: “Today, as we try to determine just what the original kinds of animals were like, biologists look at their characteristics as well as what sorts of animals are able to breed with each other. Answers in Genesis in conjunction with several outside scientists has been conducting research and review of the biological literature in order to determine this information,” which consisted of a link to (drum roll) Lightner’s 2012 “Mammalian Ark Kinds,” as if that resolved the creationist systematics regarding those oh-so-ancestral fossils like the miacids that Lightner’s living form only paper had not discussed. The challenge of carnivore systematics continues on the dog side. Based on genetic and morphological similarities, are dogs related to all other canids (including the ones they cannot interbreed with), beardogs (amphicyonidae), dog-bears (hemicyonidae), true bears (ursidae), seals (pinnipedia), and raccoons and weasels (musteloidea)? Are they also related to the miacids? According to Lightner’s papers on canids and mammal kinds, all members of canidae are related to each other, even though we have already seen that not all canids can interbreed with each other. So, do reproductive abilities really matter in determining kinds? Is consistency ever going to rear its contentious head? Not when it comes to Jeffrey Tomkins, that’s for sure. His 2014 article “New Dog Genome Research Nixes Evolutionary Paradigm” avoids taking a stand on the baraminology of canids, in favor of setting up a faux fistfight between scientists concerning the circumstances under which dogs were domesticated.

“Evolutionists are desperate to find genomic evidence proving Darwinian ideas about natural selection and evolution,” Tomkins opined, which was a slippery slope to plant himself on, since creationists are not of one mind whether they accept natural selection or not within their non-Darwinian paradigm (as you’ll see in Chapter 7). But Tomkins’ target concerned something well below that origins level, the evidence Erik Axelsson et al. offered in 2013 that domesticated dogs had more copies of the amylases needed to digest starches than their wolf cousins, which they hypothesized was an adaptive response to their starchy diet offered by humans in the process of domesticating them. Axelsson’s paper studied “3.8 million genetic variants used to identify 36 genomic regions that probably represent targets for selection during dog domestication” that included 19 areas with “genes important in brain function, eight of which belong to nervous system development pathways,” and additionally spotted signs of selection in “Ten genes with key roles in starch digestion and fat metabolism.” It was that aspect that prompted them to hypothesize “that novel adaptations allowing the early ancestors of modern dogs to thrive on a diet rich in starch, relative to the carnivorous diet of wolves, constituted a crucial step in the early domestication of dogs.” Tomkins mentioned none of the details (especially not those nervous system genes, nor even the genetic information discussed in another paper he cited, Guo-dong Wang et al.’s 2013 paper on Chinese dogs) as he set up his fisticuffs match: “However, this initial study was soon debunked by” Adam Freedman et al.‘s 2014 paper that according to Tomkins showed only “that the copy number of amylase genes was actually not fixed or stable across diverse dog, wolf, and wild dog genomes.” He then authority quoted Greger Larson & Daniel Bradley’s commentary on the Freedman work, who described this as a more “complex pattern,” which phrase Tomkins poopooed as but “evolutionary lingo” for no evidence for selection. That the history of the widely dispersed domestic dog was indeed a complex one is no secret in the systematics literature, as a 2012 analysis by Larson et al. attested, but Tomkins addressed none of the specifics even Larson & Bradley brought up in their commentary, such as how the wolf species directly ancestral to domesticated dogs having likely gone extinct had “muddied efforts to pinpoint the time and place

of dog domestication.” All Tomkins chose to take from the Freedman paper was “that no evolutionary trends could be detected in these genes.” Pity that Freedman et al. weren’t up on what it was their work supposedly hadn’t found, since they had reported quite a few trends, genetic and otherwise. Citing a range of papers that Tomkins didn’t, they summarized the paleontological and biogeographical findings known so far as humans interacted with gray wolves. It’s a discussion that tramples beyond the limited YEC fenceposts (our bold):  

Archaeological evidence provides partial clues about dog origins. For example, dog-like canids first appear in the fossil record as early as 33,000 years ago in Siberia [Ovodov et al. 2011]. However, it is not clear if these proto-dog fossils are ancestral to living dogs or instead represent failed domestication attempts or simply morphologically distinct wolves [Ovodov again]. Similarly, the geographic origin of dogs is uncertain, with distinct lines of evidence supporting Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Europe as potential domestication centers, and ruling out Africa, Australia, and North America [Germonpré et al. 2009 & 2012, Larson et al. 2012, Pang et al. 2009, Pionnier-Capitan et al. 2011, Savolainen et al. 2002, and vonHoldt et al. 2010]. Nonetheless, several recent studies have begun to illuminate the genetic basis of traits that changed during dog domestication and breed formation, advancing the general understanding of how genetic mechanisms shape phenotypic trait diversity [Boyko et al. 2010, Cadieu et al. 2009, Karlsson et al. 2007, and Yan Li et al. 2013 (on canine brain gene expression specifically)]. For example, a recent study found an increase in copy number of the amylase gene (AMY2B) during dog domestication suggesting adaptation to starch-rich diets [the Axelsson paper].  

Far from having “debunked” the amylase connection, the Freedman paper went into some detail on which dog and wolf breeds showed amylase variation, and what that suggested about the part human activity played, given that widespread dog domestication around 15,000 years ago predated agriculture (our bold):  

In a survey of sequence data from 12 additional domestic dog breeds, we find that the Siberian Husky, a breed historically associated with nomadic hunter gatherers of the Arctic, has only three to four copies of AMY2B, whereas the Saluki, which was historically bred in the Fertile Crescent where agriculture

originated, has 29 copies. In order to validate the results, we used real-time quantitative PCR (qPCR) to explore the variation in AMY2B copies across additional breed dogs (n = 52), additional dingoes (n = 6) and a worldwide distribution of wolves (n = 40). The qPCR results show modern dog breeds on average have a high copy number of AMY2B and that wolves and Dingoes do not. However, the qPCR results also shows that the AMY2B expansion is polymorphic in wolves (16 of 40 wolves with >2 copies) and thus is not restricted to dogs.  

So, nothing in the Freedman study “debunked” a connection of high amylase content to the subsequent rise of starchy agricultural diets, or that the dogs got them from ancestral wolves, only that adaptation to starchy diets wasn’t likely to be “the driving force in dog domestication.” That is a notable distinction Tomkins of course left out of his Act & Facts article, an omission especially unjustified since the Freedman paper presented ample data to support the idea that a modest variation in the prior wolf population was indeed magnified in dog-using cultures that grow crops, but not so among nomadic peoples. And to throw one more bone on the pile of data Tomkins’ creationism has so far preferred not to account for, canid interactions remain “complex” and ongoing, as a 2016 paper by Bridgett vonHoldt et al. established that “two endemic species of North American wolf are admixtures of the coyote and gray wolf.” Pressing on past grey wolves to all those potential doggy cousins, what do creationists make of such critters as the dog-bears? In August 2018 Brian Thomas grumped about Susumu Tomiya & Jack Tseng’s 2016 cladistic analysis of two small amphicyonids that placed the group as basal caniforms, close to the later canids. In a manner like that of Duane Gish, who never recoiled from a contrived rationalization (such as deciding early amphibians were too fishlike to have descended from fish), Thomas objected to the canid relationship based on a bone-enclosed space in their ears that was too like that of dogs, asking “shouldn’t early ancestors have less dog-like characteristics?” The screeching sound you’re hearing is Thomas’ desperate but clumsy attempt at goalpost moving, for the idea that some amphicyonids developing a more canine-like auditory embayment

would hardly seem a stumbling block for their status as an ancestral form for canines. But Thomas’ argument was especially lame since he’d peripherally cited Robert Hunt’s 2001 paper on the amphicyonid Paradaphoenus, who had reported that its embayment was only partially enclosed. Transitional example, Brian. Thomas pompously wrote that “I needed no fossil expertise to determine that beardogs show no real evolution.” And we need “no fossil expertise” to spot how Thomas doesn’t read his own sources all that well. For a capper to this tale of baraminological vacuity we submit the equids. Horses are perissodactyls, odd-hooved mammals just like rhinos and tapirs. Do genetic and morphological similarities unite horses, rhinos, and tapirs in the creationist mind? Already, we have seen that some creationists have united all horses from the dog-sized Hyracotherium to the modern Equus, so why not just keep going? When you look at the fossils, such as chronicled by Luke Holbrook et al. in 2004, and by him with Joshua Lapergola in 2011, it takes no strain to spot the great similarity that early horses, such as Hyracotherium, show with early tapiromorphs, such as Homogalax (described in work by Leonard Radinsky in the 1960s). As George Gaylord Simpson (1902-1984) put it in 1960, Homogalax and Hyracotherium represent “not only the common parent of horse and tapir but also the common ancestor of two major divisions (suborders) of mammals.” That’s why these critters look so similar to early brontotheres (rhino-like mammals closely related to horses), such as Palaeosyops. And early rhinos too, such as Hyrachyus. Which brings us to the other early perissodactyls, such as Isectolophus, and mammals closely related to the perissodactyls, such as Radinskya. The accumulating taxonomical thicket creationists need to account for is more than amply illustrated by comparing the systematic work of Donald Prothero & Robert Schoch in 1989 with that of Samantha Price & Olaf BinindaEmonds in 2009. And then ask, if one wanted to get all baraminological, couldn’t this perhaps indicate a really big kind? Creationists had been having trouble clarifying their kinds from the start, which critic of creationism James Monroe specifically noted regarding the perissodactyls back in 1985, and the situation hasn’t

improved since. In 2003 Todd Wood et al.’s “A Refined Baramin Concept” coyly alluded to Monroe’s article when they acknowledged how “creationists still struggle with defining and justifying baraminology methodology. It won’t come as a surprise to learn that, a decade and a half farther on, even the refined baramin concept hasn’t provided enough buoyancy for them to dive into the extensive fossil perrisodactyl pool. Or even read their own side’s work all that closely. Apparently unaware of Wood & David Cavanaugh’s 2003 horse work (where all the fossil horse series was accepted as a “monobaraminic” lineage, their buzzword for groups that had evolved within the alleged kind), Lightner’s 2012 paper still blithely treated horses, tapirs and rhinos as separate kinds, without realizing how unlikely it was such a distinction could survive if Wood and Cavanaugh’s own Hyracotherium to Equus standard were applied to the fossils long known in the paleontology literature that they tended so to avoid taking note of. Finally, the familiar barnyard cows are members of artiodactyla. That unique ankle astragalus structure of artiodactyls exists in cows along with all the other even-hooved mammals mentioned previously, so are they all related? They seem to be, especially when genetics comes in to say that all artiodactyls, including whales, are more closely related to each other than to any other mammals. Now, from the intro to baraminology you have thus far received, can you already see how difficult it is to chop organisms into distinct and unrelated kinds? And see the temptation creationists have to simplify the problem by junking most of the data, fossil and genetic. With this as preface, let us move onto Hodge & Purdom’s next paragraph:  

As an example, dogs can easily breed with one another, whether wolves, dingoes, coyotes, or domestic dogs. When dogs breed together, you get dogs; so there is a dog kind. It works the same with chickens. There are several breeds of chickens, but chickens breed with each other and you still get chickens. So there is a chicken kind. The concept is fairly easy to understand.  

Is this concept “easy to understand”, though? First, there is confusion on the part of the creationists: they are equating parental

clades with kinds. For instance, the duo say that breeding dogs will always produce dogs, and it absolutely will … in the same way that it will also always produce a member of caniformes, carnivora, laurasiatheria, mammalia, synapsida, amniota, tetrapoda, vertebrata, bilateria, etc. You cannot escape your parental clades even if you lose characteristics diagnostic of the group, such as snakes being limbless despite being tetrapods (they have limbed ancestors from the Cretaceous like Pachyrhachis, per Michael Caldwell & Michael Lee’s 1997 paper). If this is how the creationists intend to define a “kind”, then all of life is going to end up one gigantic holobaramin. We looked at the dog example, so what about chickens? Breeds of chickens are all members of Gallus gallus domesticus, which is a subspecies of the red junglefowl Gallus gallus. There are then three other species of living Gallus including G. lafayettii, G. sonneratii, and G. varius. But, are all these Gallus related to bamboo-partridges? Are they related to peafowl, pheasants, and quail? Are all galliformes related to each other? Are galliformes related to ducks, geese, swans, and screamers (a small family of South American birds uniquely lacking the uncinate process in their ribs, bony extensions otherwise found in birds, reptiles, and in tetrapods all the way back to Ichthyostega)? Are all fowl (galloanserae) related to each other or not? To what extent are fowl related to hummingbirds, nightjars, flamingos, petrels, pigeons, passerines, and birds of prey? Are all or any living birds (the neognaths} related to each other, including the flightless ostriches, rheas, emus, and cassowaries? So, if creationists want to make baraminology a reality, then they have to work the data into their claimed history, which includes two major genetic bottlenecks: the Creation and Flood. The duo even point this out: “From a biblical perspective, though, land animals like wolves, zebras, sheep, lions, and so on have at least two ancestors that lived on Noah’s ark, only about 4,300 years ago.” Yes, they have to explain the huge genetic diversity of modern organisms as originating over the past 4,300 years (actually less, since so many of those animals were observed to exist long before the present) from only two representatives of each “unclean” kind (or

seven for the “clean” ones). The only question is what a kind actually is! To reduce the amount of evolution—sorry, variation—that has occurred over the past 4,300 years, creationists would have to include more kinds on the Ark; however, things start becoming difficult when you try to figure out spacing arrangements. To make sure there is enough room to accommodate all the kinds on a vessel of limited capacity, creationists are forced into reducing their number. But resolving that temporary booking problem only compounds the difficulty post-Flood: the fewer kinds to start, the more evolution required afterwards to end up with the species distribution we see today. A reminder of the scale of the problem. When creationists think of “animals” they tend not to include insects (cue the crickets). Or the vast menagerie of wee invertebrates swimming and wriggling around beneath the notice of Adam naming them all in Eden. Plants or fungi or protists tend not to make the grade at all—a wise approach perhaps given how easily Ken Ham could be lured into confusion regarding plant fossils. In 2019 he boldly blogged, “Surprise: ‘Oldest’ Fossil Lily Looks Just Like a Lily.” Only it didn’t and wasn’t. Ham had mistakenly riffed off a ScienceDaily secondary gloss on a paper by Clément Coiffard. It was ScienceDaily who had dubbed it a “lily” in the headline, though more accurately explaining in the text how they meant “the oldest known monocotyledonous plants. These include orchids, sweet grasses, lilies and lilies of the valley.” Ham clearly hadn’t waded into the text, and Joel Duff commented how   there is a great irony in his falling for this “lily” fossil. If he had read the original research he would have discovered that this fossil represents a great transition fossil. It has characteristics that span a variety of modern groups of monocots. It exists at a time when the lily, orchid, and other lily-like families had not yet distinguished themselves as identifiable families. The presence of a plant just like the one found here is what evolutionary biology would expect. Plants like this would have been the ancestors that gave rise to the particular families that we recognize today.

 

Of course Ham might just bite the botanical seed husk and conclude all the 60,000-odd monocotyledons are just variations on the lily kind. Or not. Best stick with the terrestrial vertebrates. During his debate with Bill Nye in 2014, Ham claimed that there were about 7,000 pairs of animals on the ark, for a total of 14,000 forms. Three years later, Ham’s Ark Encounter downsized that number to just 1,400 kinds, which according to a 2019 lecture by Georgia Purdom involved around 6700 total animals—just half of his original number, and a fifth of the number of kinds. As we’ll see shortly, there isn’t really a method for determining what a kind is, but let’s take their numbers at face-value regardless. So how many animal species are there on Earth currently? Estimates have ranged from 3 million to 100 million. In the debate, Nye estimated about 16 million extant animal species. Camilo Mora et al.’s 2011 paper “How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean?” estimates that there are currently 8.75 million species on the Earth today, 7.7 million of which are terrestrial animals (lots of insects among them). We have discovered only about 1.2 million species thus far, of which 950,000 are terrestrial animals. So assuming that 7.7 million species figure is roughly correct (totally discounting all the nowextinct populations that must have existed, indicated by the fossil record), we can perform the same sort of calculation that Nye did. 4,300 years have supposedly passed since the animals trundled off the Ark, though because of historical records any post-Flood diversification would had to have kicked in before people described critters like elephants or giraffes. At any rate, the hypothesized 1,400 animal kinds aboard the Ark somehow became 7.7 million species. You can subtract 1,400 from 7.7 million to get 7,698,600 new species, but that starting value is too few to matter. Functionally the creationist is still faced with accounting for millions of species. Divide that by 4,000 x 365 to find the speciation rate, and that brings us to five new species per day! That’s lower than Nye’s eleven per day, but still much more than a reasonable expectation. How do the creationists deal with this? In 2016 AiG’s David Boyd took Susan Lightner’s 2013 stab at identifying the bird kinds (196 in her reckoning) to suggest that initial species could have generated the 9,000 or so known ones by just

doubling every 750 years. When put that way, it seems like a reasonable claim, right? Not if you pay attention to the known data on speciation rates. For birds and mammals, speciation isn’t measured in terms of the past few thousand years but hundreds of thousands to millions of years. As even Boyd must have known, since he cited Santiago Claramunt & Joel Cracraft’s 2015 paper on “A new time tree reveals Earth history’s imprint on the evolution of modern birds,” that graphed bird differentiation across a timeframe of 95 million years. Back in 1977, Guy Bush et al. estimated the rates of speciation for mammals: “rapidly” evolving lineages produced 1.6-2.8 new species per million years, whereas “slowly” evolving ones generated only 0.3 species in that time. Reptile and amphibian speciation rates are also measured in millions of years, and various papers have documented how temperature affects the mutation rates that underpin how fast speciation can take place, such as Andrew Allen et al. on foraminifera in 2006, and Soo Hyung Eo & Andrew DeWoody with birds and mammals in 2010. Temperatures fluctuate by latitude, of course, and a 2007 paper by Jason Weir & Dolph Schluter identified latitudinal gradients affecting speciation and extinction rates in birds and mammals: “Near the equator, the ages of sister-species pairs spanned the past 10 million years, with a mean age of 3.4 million years ago. As distance from the equator increased, the upper limit and mean ages of sister species declined significantly. At the highest latitudes, all of the sister species diverged less than 1.0 Ma.” A mean of 3.4 million years is significantly more than 750 for anyone counting. In short, no genomic studies indicate speciation events occurring in thousands of years, let alone hundreds. Therefore, Boyd’s notion of doubling species every several hundred years is out. Nathaniel Jeanson, however, chopped down the amount of time needed by saying there was an explosive burst of speciation events immediately following the flood. According to his aforementioned 2015 article “Mitochondrial DNA Clocks Imply Linear Speciation Rates Within ‘Kinds’,” in lineages with only a few known members, new species were produced just every 200 years—a giddy rate way too slow to account for the known examples, but even there not supported by any genetic data (especially what he supplied in his paper).

All this implies a post-Flood hyper-speciation binge requiring “too rapid a change to have been produced by any traditional microevolutionary mechanisms,” as Kurt Wise admitted with considerable understatement back in 1994 (regarding the quandary posed by such hominid fossils as Australopithecus ramidus). And unless such processes had been occurring in the past but magically stopped for some unknown reason at just the point scientists came to be in a position to measure them, the fallback position was to suppose what Wise had to: “an enormous amount of latent genetic information (perhaps even pre-programmed species morphotypes) in each organism represented on the Ark.” For which he offered not a shred of evidence either, one might add. Decades later, the situation hasn’t improved. Nathaniel Jeanson was still thrashing over baraminology basics with biologist Stefan Frello in a set of 2018 exchanges in the Answers Research Journal, with Frello noting of dogs that the DNA variation among them and their wild kin didn’t buttress the creationist hyper-speciation needs. Hodge & Purdom’s chapter tried to account for the even larger glut of genetic diversity presently known to science with nothing more than a reworded version of Wise’s option: “God placed variety within the original kinds, and other variation has occurred since the Fall due to genetic alterations.” What does “God placed variety” even mean? Does that mean God magically created the original kinds with all the genes and alleles that would come to be expressed in their modern descendants—a “created heterozygosity”, as creationist apologist Standing For Truth is fond of intoning in his many online debates. If so, then why is there no evidence for it? Why are there no genetic fossils, such as broken genes (non-functional pseudogenes), in modern elephants, cats, dogs, or anything else that indicate having descended from an ancestor who had all the functional versions? Are we expected to believe that the Ark kinds (perhaps “ark-etypes”) had all the genes and alleles of their descendants but somehow managed to develop germline cells that only had some of those genes and alleles, i.e. some sperm and eggs had all the genes to make mammoths while others only those to generate African elephants? How would that even work?

A similar situation holds for the current Ark Encounter lumping of okapis in with giraffes, an astonishing turnaround Joel Duff noted in a 2019 posting. Generations of creationists had been insisting the long neck of the giraffe was designed, not an adaptive shift from some earlier shortnecked forms. That would include Lynn Hofland from 1996 whom Duff quoted, Jerry Bergman insisting in 2002 that okapi were separate kinds unrelated to giraffes, down to Tim Clarey “Sticking Your Neck” out in 2013 with the mantra that giraffes had been made “fully formed” on the sixth day of the Creation Week. One of Duff’s online commenters further noted the 2000 kids’ education piece by Stacia McKeever included (along with a horse, mammoth, kangaroo, bat and T. rex) the standard giraffe among their Ark animals. That was back in the day when AiG was thinking of the Ark as a big floating box. But come the Ark Encounter, visitors to their supertanker-styled boat could read how “the Ark giraffids were probably more okapi-like in appearance than the giraffe.” Oh, Consistency, thy name is not Creationism! Duff further noted how the mitochondrial genetic difference between okapi and giraffes is wider than that between chimps and humans (forms not deemed as within the same kind), and this is a range comparable to that of antelopes and giraffes. More of the genes involved in the giraffe’s evolution are now known too, from Morris Agaba et al.’s 2016 paper, noting particularly “the HOX, NOTCH and FGF signaling pathways, which regulate both skeletal and cardiovascular development, suggesting that giraffe’s stature and cardiovascular adaptations evolved in parallel through changes in a small number of genes.” With that okapi to giraffe genetic barn door thrown open, why not then go whole hog (or ruminant), and allow God to have “created a ‘ruminant kind’ which was on the Ark and then became giraffes, elk, deer, pronghorn and several other types of animals”? All this backs creationists into a corner entirely of their own making, regardless of whether they argue that the original kinds had all the genes and alleles found in all of their descendants or not. If the original kinds did, then we expect to find genetic evidence of this in the modern descendants; however, none exists.

Lots of work has been done identifying genetic bottlenecks in organisms, from Marilyn Menotti-Raymond & Stephen O’Brien on cheetahs in 1993, and Philip Miller & Philip Hedrick on Drosophila fruit flies in 2001, to David Hyten et al. on soybeans in 2006. Pick your organism: an Ark-load of bottlenecked ones would be ubiquitous, unmistakable genetically. And whatever genetic kit the original kinds did not possess (and is that even possible in the creationist paradigm?), then we should expect to find evidence of rapid mutation rates in the not-distant past that formed the variety of genes, alleles, organs and structures in today’s organisms. However, we do not. The genetic evidence of a universal population bottleneck caused by the Flood is absent.  

A Baramin by any other name would not a Clade make  

Hodge and Purdom moved on from this waiting quicksand in an attempt to explain just what a kind is. At last! Here it goes: “Baramin is commonly believed to be at the level of family and possibly order for some plants/animals (according to the common classification scheme of kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species). On rare occasions, a kind may be equivalent to the genus or species levels.” Well, that narrows it down. Nathan Lents’ 2019 Skeptic article found a comparable fluidity to Michael Behe’s Darwin Devolves regarding the adaptive radiation of lemurs on Madagascar over many millions of years  

Lemurs have accomplished this impressive adaptive radiation because they were free to inhabit the ecological niches normally occupied by other animals. With no rodents on Madagascar (initially), the mouse lemurs emerged. With no true sloths, we have the sloth lemur. There is a mongoose lemur, a Koala lemur, monkey lemurs, and the aye-aye is sometimes called the woodpecker lemur! Behe begrudgingly acknowledges that the diversification of lemurs has reached the taxonomic level of family, something he claims that unguided evolution can’t do, but he declares that it “may be an artifact of classification.” Is Behe suggesting that a mouse lemur and a crowned sifaka belong in the same family? Behe also boldly asserts that, “[lemurs] have no distinctive traits that aren’t shared with other primates.” When I shared that quote with [Ian] Tattersall, he nearly choked on his

empanada. Of course, Behe also allows for the possibility that all of this adaptive potential was provided by “intrinsic, intelligently provided information carried by the ancestor of lemurs.” He fails to explain how that hypothesis might be tested.  

Behe, Hodge and Purdom as methodological triplets, separated at birth. Whether explicitly creationist or vaguely Intelligent Design, the kind concept is like a balloon: it can be small or inflate hugely as needed. And we know the reason why this elasticity is on hand. The rationale for some kinds being a single species is just a priori assertion to justify a theological conviction. Most all creationists believe that since humans were created in the image of God, there could only ever been one human species (and thus one human kind). That’s when those “rare occasions” kick in. Move over to non-human organisms, though, and things get murkier. Take the sunflower family (Asteraceae), tackled in 2001 and 2002 papers by Todd Wood and David Cavanaugh. With 32,000 species in 1,900 genera, they admitted the obvious: “While it is certainly possible that the Asteraceae could be a single created kind, its species diversity would be without parallel among the vertebrates.” Indeed, it would (especially if the idea is to keep our species of vertebrate a kind of its own). But that would be no more unparalleled than how Wood and Cavanaugh sought to wriggle under the baraminological limbo bar without bumping their heads on the variety of their photosynthesis systems (our bold):  

The evidence also implies that the originally created ancestor used C3 photosynthesis, and that the C4 photosynthesis present in some species emerged since the creation. The characteristics of the intermediate species and the genetics of C4 species support the hypothesis that latent genetic information may have been present in the ancestor, and activated during post-Flood diversification of the group, possibly through a mechanism called Altruistic Genetic Elements.  

Given what we noted about the “Fun Facts on carbon fixation” in the Info Box from Chapter 2, we can sympathize with Cavanaugh & Wood’s quandary, but not their strained solution, attributing it to “simply the unexpressed abundance of a benevolent Creator” who somehow

included the genes for the C4 system in the created baramin, and yet not having those show up in the genomes of all the group. In the end, they punted on whether the sunflowers comprised a baramin, willing only to tag a quarter of them (5,730 species in the Heliantheae and Eupatorieae groups) as a monobaramin. But monobaramins are but subsets of larger presumed baramins, which makes us curious about what exactly is the greater group in which the sunflowers are the derived branch, and by this stage does “monobaramin” mean much of anything? Not really. Especially when we know the muddle they’re in at the other end of their Noachian teeter-totter, our species, which must be its own holobaramin, no ifs, ands, or buts. If only there weren’t so many hominids…. How they rationalize the available data depends on their enthusiasm or willingness to be glibly dismissive. Many are like Michael Behe, and don’t really think much about the problem, while some follow the Kent Hovind path and declare all other species of Homo to be fake. As seen in the chart back in Chapter 3, others are willing to adopt members of our genus as just weird modern humans, from Rupe & Sanford in Contested Bones to Todd Wood, allowing habilis, rudolfensis, erectus, etc. into the human holobaramin. In either case, inconvenient facts—like us being more closely similar genetically to chimps than gorillas, and having brain systems biologically like those in the primate family—are just ignored. Seriously! Creationist John Upchurch head-scratched this very point in his 2016 “Surprising Similarities Between Creation & Evolution” where, after noting the genetic and morphological similarities between humans and chimps, asked, “Why are the apes so similar to us? That’s a great question. Do you remember how I said we don’t have all the answers? Well, here’s a prime example. We have some ideas, but we don’t really know for certain all His purposes for the similarities.” Really now, perhaps the reason for the similarities is that we share common ancestors with other organisms who also had these traits, traits inherited and modified through lineages. And the reason you can’t figure this out is that your tragically incorrect model is clouding your judgment. Just a thought. But, back to the Purdom/Hodge show (our bold):  

Baraminology is a field of study that attempts to classify fossil and living organisms into baramins. This is done based on many criteria, such as physical characteristics and DNA sequences. For living organisms, hybridization is a key criterion. If two animals can produce a hybrid, then they are considered to be of the same kind. However, the inability to produce offspring does not necessarily rule out that the animals are of the same kind, since this may be the result of mutations (since the Fall).  

First, when do creationists ever talk about grouping organisms by DNA sequences? This is the first Purdom & Hodge have specifically alluded to it (they usually only refer to it in a roundabout way: those who can interbreed are a kind, which indicates a degree of similarity in DNA sequences), and Lightner shot her foot off about genetics in the Mammal Paper saying, “Often similarity based on morphology doesn’t correlate with genetic similarity, causing some rather surprising associations (Nishihara, Hasagawa, and Okada 2006).” What does that mean? Was Lightner claiming the obvious, that convergent features in distantly related organisms need not be specified by exactly the same genetic sequences? If you look up the cited paper, Hidenori Nishihara et al.’s 2006 “Pegasoferae, an unexpected mammalian clade revealed by tracking ancient retroposon insertions,” then you find it was arguing for the pegasoferae hypothesis, which proposed that perissodactyls (odd-toed ungulates), pangolins, carnivorans, and bats form a monophyletic clade (thus excluding the artiodactyls or even-toed ungulates). Lightner’s invocation of the paper implied that since artiodactyls and perissodactyls are similar in morphology, but not closely related, that must mean morphology does not necessarily correlate with genetics. However, this is utter hogwash. Let us first just assume the paper is correct in its assessment. What does that mean? Just that hooves independently evolved in two different quadrupedal lineages. That’s it. Should that be all that surprising? Other mammals that had hooves lost them, such as the perissodactyl chalicotheres who later gained claws on their front legs, while hooves have originated even outside Mammalia, as in the Eocene crocodilian Boverisuchus (a critter previously known as Pristichampsus, per a 2013 review of the fossils by Christopher Brochu).

Also, the common ancestors among the different pegasoferae groups lived either in the late Cretaceous or early Cenozoic. OneZoom (a phylogeny website) places the common ancestor between perissodactyls and carnivorans 70 million years ago. Tyrannosaurus rex’s cousin Tarbosaurus was still munching on hadrosaurs like Saurolophus at that time! Most mammals were the size of shrews and were millions of years from their great post-Mesozoic radiation. When you place these animals in their proper evolutionary and temporal context (that Map of Time thing again), their relationships make more sense. Just dropping a paper and an inflammatory statement, as Purdom and Hodge tried to do, is entirely unhelpful. But, is the particular conclusion reached by the paper generally supported? While the main groupings were not in dispute (nor the overall chronology), as Nishihara affirmed in a 2009 follow-up paper, the troublesome bunch for the Pegasoferae hypothesis were the bats. A competing model (the Scrotifera hypothesis) posited that bats branched off first, leaving the remainder to become the fereuungulata, comprised of two branches: ferae (the armored pangolins and carnivorans) and euungulata (the artiodactyls and perissodactyls). Peter Waddell et al. offered support for this competing hypothesis in 1999, which has been borne out by further genetic data (remember, the “DNA sequences” Purdom/Hodge assured us they attended to?), such as Xuming Zhou et al.’s 2012 paper “Phylogenomic Analysis Resolves the Interordinal Relationships and Rapid Diversification of the Laurasiatherian Mammals,” as well as ecological studies on how these animals operated in their environment. That would be the state of the systematics in 2013, when Purdom & Hodge weren’t paying attention to it. What’s transpired since? According to the 2018 paper “Arms race of temporal partitioning between carnivorous and herbivorous mammals” by Yonghua Wu et al., the carnivorous ferae clade group together in part due to their shared nocturnality, while diurnality took hold among the herbivorous euungulata shifting to daylight activity to avoid predators. Regardless of which hypothesis turns out to be true, though, the main mammalian relationships covered in these papers hadn’t disappeared, nor was there evidence that morphological similarities did not correlate with the genetic similarities that produced them.

Now let’s take a closer second look at the creationist criteria regarding hybridization. Remember that dogs and foxes are both canids and, therefore, considered by Lightner to be the same kind; however, the two cannot mate due to their vast genetic differences. There is a footnote in the afore-quoted section that says infertile offspring do not matter when considering relatedness among organisms in a kind, but we can ignore this escape hatch because it is more or less irrelevant to their bigger point, how mutations “since the Fall.” could come into play. Todd Wood et al. pointed out in the 2003 “Refined Baramin Concept” that the pioneer of baraminology Frank Marsh made a similar statement: “When discussing reproductive isolation in Drosophila, Marsh stated that two species that were morphologically indistinguishable were probably members of the same baramin even though they could not cross (pp. 172-173). We might summarize Marsh’s view as follows: Morphological similarity can imply baraminic relationship, but morphological difference does not necessarily indicate different baramins.” And with that wide-open barn door, baraminology is dead. With this brief admission, we can now group together organisms who may or may not be able to interbreed with each other. Now, dogs and foxes, rhinos and deer, elephants and manatees, human and chimps, and every other organism can be classified based on genetics and morphology. We can include the ability to interbreed (as biologists do), but now this is just one of a number of methods that we can utilize to determine relatedness. And, what we find is that all organisms group together in nested hierarchies (as is expected under evolution), all being ultimately related to each other. Hodge & Purdom battered down yet another barn door when they sought to apply their standards to fossils, specifically one bunch of dinosaurs. “For example, even though many different dinosaurs have been identified, creation scientists think there are only about 50 ‘kinds’ of dinosaurs. Even though breeding studies are impossible with dinosaurs, by studying fossils one can ascertain that there was likely one Ceratopsian kind with variation in that kind and so on.” By 2019, Purdom was talking in terms of sixty to eighty dino kinds (while insisting “dinosaurs are not a problem” for the Flood model), though still without documentation. She did say there was a

“stegosaurus” kind and a “sauropod” one (the sound you hear at this point is the baraminology box creaking as very disparate taxa from even those three examples get scrunched into their cramped baramin crate). Right, remember that we can only identify fossil species and genera by their morphological characteristics, and this method has evidently led creationists to group all ceratopsians into one kind. Now, why is this important? There is considerable variation among ceratopsians for starters, which even Hodge & Purdom recognized in their chapter (including the protoceratopsid Montanoceratops, for example, when the venerable Duane Gish had been adamantly rejecting seeing them as ancestral ceratopsids in his 1995 antievolution book, Evolution: The Fossils STILL Say No!). By the time Hodge and Purdom were writing, there were a lot of taxa to keep track of. The earliest ceratopsians appeared in the late Jurassic in Asia, such as Yinlong some 165 million years ago, small bipedal critters like the Early Cretaceous Psittacosaurus. Unlike later ceratopsians, they had no large horns or frills, but did feature the distinctive predentary bone that developed into the classic ceratopsian parrot-like beak. As the Cretaceous wore on, the ceratopsians became progressively more quadrupedal and their frills grew, as seen in Leptoceratops and Protoceratops. Spreading across a new land bridge into North America, their lineage eventually produced the famous large horned and frilled ceratopsians like Triceratops and Torosaurus (separate genera!) in the late Cretaceous. Overall, this is a huge amount of evolution that lasted nearly 100 million years. Creationists, on the other hand, have to cram all of this (known only by the fossils supposedly laid down in the Flood) into the time between the creation of their kind and that slosh. That’s 1600 years or less, a more sweeping spurt of hyper-speciation than even what they require to generate all the living species in the 4,300 years since the Flood. Creationists are piling up quite a set of proclamations for which there exists no evidence. And we’re far from done. Consider the closest relatives of the ceratopsians, the pachycephalosaurs, the most basal of which are extremely similar to the earliest ceratopsians—just look at Wannanosaurus versus Yinlong. Why stop with the comparisons

there? Why not note all the morphological similarities among cerapodans (adding on the iguanodontians, hadrosaurids, Hypsilophodon, and others)? Bring on the neornithischians too (adding on a few basal members such as Agilisaurus). Include all the beaked genasaurians while we’re at it (adding on ankylosaurs and stegosaurs). And can we honestly exclude ornithischians generally (adding on the heterodontosaurids)? What about the similarities among all dinosaurs? All diapsids? All amniotes? All tetrapods? Taking the little monobaramin steps the creationists themselves allow, how can they avoid connecting all those dots step by microincremental step? By not taking many of the steps, that’s how. Hodge & Purdom exemplify what’s really on their mind in all this baramin talk when they complained about the popular confusion of species and kinds in early systematics, and how (their italics) “Christians were teaching fixity of species (kinds), but the definition of species changed out from under them.” The problem was the whole notion of “fixity,” whether it was at the species level or somewhere farther on. But for Hodge & Purdom the true import lay somewhere else: “The results of this were devastating to the Church. And people began doubting the Word of God as a result, walking away from Christianity, and embracing an evolutionary philosophy.” And as evidence of this invidious consequence, they quoted the letter botanist George Bentham (1800-1884) wrote to Darwin’s son Francis in 1882 (where you may notice that the subject of religious faith hadn’t come up at all):  

I have been throughout one of his most sincere admirers, and fully adopted his theories and conclusions, notwithstanding the severe pain and disappointment they at first occasioned me. On the day that his celebrated paper was read at the Linnean Society, July 1st, 1858, a long paper of mine had been set down for reading, in which, in commenting on the British Flora, I had collected a number of observations and facts illustrating what I then believed to be a fixity in species, however difficult it might be to assign their limits, and showing a tendency of abnormal forms produced by cultivation or otherwise, to withdraw within those original limits when left to themselves. Most fortunately my paper had to give way to Mr. Darwin’s and when once that was read, I felt bound to defer mine for reconsideration; I began to entertain doubts on the subject, and on the

appearance of the ‘Origin of Species,’ I was forced, however reluctantly, to give up my long-cherished convictions, the results of much labour and study, and I cancelled all that part of my paper which urged original fixity, and published only portions of the remainder in another form, chiefly in the ‘Natural History Review.’  

This is one bum rap. Belief or disbelief in any science position should be based solely on the evidence, and that was the problem facing the creationist insistence on there being a fixity of kinds. Just as botanist Bentham did on plants in the 19th century, evolutionists today (Christian or otherwise) reject the notion of fixed baramins not because of (or in spite of) their religious convictions, nor merely because one species of finch split into two daughter species, but because there is no reason to believe immutable kinds exist either today or in the fossil record. And, we can demonstrate this by looking at both genetics and the fossil record, which we have seen the baraminologists have a consistent aversion to doing. It is relevant that the Lightner Mammal Paper does not look at any fossil species and so offers no substantive judgment on how baraminology would be applied in fossil contexts. They even implicitly conflicted with Kurt Wise (who was willing to allow terrestrial cetacean ancestors on the Ark) when they begged off dealing with them: “Since cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises) and sirenians (dugong and manatees) spend their entire lives in the water, these two orders of mammals are not considered.” Not that creationists do any better when they do attempt to evaluate fossil data. Jean-Renaud Boisserie et al.’s 2005 paper on “The position of Hippopotamidae within Cetartiodactyla” had studied a wide range of closely related taxa (largely represented by fossils): ruminants, the archaeocetes (including Pakicetus), the anthracotheres and their hippo cousins, and the suids (pigs) and tayassuids (peccaries). In relying on Boisserie’s dataset, Todd Wood’s 2008 book had to be aware of the taxa, but decided only the very closest cluster of hippos and their kin were their own kind, but none of the rest (and begging the question how any of the observed fossil variety could have originated from single created forms less than 1500 years earlier). That may be compared with Boisserie, whose several 2005 analyses were already extensive, but has continued the work in the years since, including detailed collaborative systematic papers with

Maeva Orliac and Fabrice Lihoreau in 2010 on “Early Miocene hippopotamids (Cetartiodactyla) constrain the phylogenetic and spatiotemporal settings of hippopotamid origin,” another in 2015 showing how “Hippos stem from the longest sequence of terrestrial cetartiodactyl evolution in Africa,” and a 2017 paper on “A new species of hippopotamus (Cerartiodactyla, Hippopotamidae) from the late Miocene Baynunah Formation, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates,” revealing yet more of the “Hippopotamus Event” around 8 million years ago when hippos as we know them made their big appearance on the scene. At the opposite extreme, M. Aaron (an “independent researcher” identified only by that initial in the two papers they’ve done so far) tried to determine if the caseids (an early group of pelycosaur synapsids) formed a kind in the 2014 paper “Baraminological Analysis of the Caseidae (Synapsida: Pelycosauria).” The caseids are a minor sidebranch family early in the synapsid lineage that forms the reptilemammal transition, meaning Aaron was selecting as limited a target as possible to avoid the sort of macroevolutionary implications Wood was jumping headlong into with those “hippos”. However, to do this, Aaron evaluated a grand total of … four caseid taxa: Cotylorhynchus, Casea broilii, Euromycter, and Ennatosaurus, leaving out other caseids like Trichasaurus, Oromycter, and Angelosaurus. Aaron justified this because the fossils had some pieces missing, thus ignoring the evidence that wasn’t missing regarding those taxa. Regarding two, Aaron said “When conducting the baraminological analyses, I removed the taxa Angelosaurus and Oromycter because they did not meet the taxic relevance cutoff of 0.60.” Yes, they removed two caseids because they were not relevant enough to a discussion on caseids. And yet, Aaron retained Eothyris, the eupelycosaurs Varanops and Mycterosaurus, and the reptiliomorphs Limnoscelis and Diadectes—all non-caseids. What did Aaron make of those? There are numerous skeletal similarities among them. For example, Eothyris is united by its morphological similarities with the caseids into a clade called caseasauria. The eupelycosaurs are likewise united by theirs, and the reptiliomorphs by theirs. Aaron waffled that “This baraminological analysis does not confirm or deny

this close relationship” between caseasauria and eupelycosauria, while simultaneously insisting that “caseasauria” does not exist because caseids are not related to Eothyris. Why use terminology that implies relatedness to describe taxa that are not related to each other? If you’re confused, it’s because what Aaron tried to do is confusing. Perhaps not coincidentally, the caseids are one of the few synapsids on display at Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter, where visitors are told “they are known only from rock layers deposited by the Flood.” In her 2019 lecture, Georgia Purdom sprinted past the lot of them by alluding ever so briefly to the synapsids (implying there might have been only a few kinds, all extinct), while the Encounter itself listed around eighty there (as many as the high end for the dinosaur kinds in Purdom’s talk). In any case, all these “kinds” (including the still more mammalian cynognathid therapsids) were described by the park and Purdom evasively as “non-mammalian synapsids”—as opposed to the “mammalian synapsids” perhaps? AKA mammals. And that’s not even the bottom of the heap when it comes to misreading the synapsid paleontology. In 2008, Charles Creager at CreationWiki similarly tried to argue that the evolution of mammals from earlier synapsids did not happen. To do this though, he didn’t undertake his own research (how exhausting that would be). Instead he merely offered lame comments on Kathleen Hunt’s extensive 1997 online survey of mammal evolution. Since all the information in her piece was literally under Creager’s nose, he ended up offering some hilariously bad assessments, such as this one: “Eozostrodon, Morganucodon, and Haldanodon seem to be the same kind of animal, possibly varieties of mouse.” That is so fractally disconnected from reality. None of these genera have the dentition diagnostic of rodents (incisors, diastema, and molars)—check out Zhe-Xi Luo & Thomas Martin’s 2007 paper for particulars on their definitely not yet stock mammalian teeth. But the crash-and-burn moment for Creager’s argument concerned how distinct their skulls are from modern mammals. That is, they have a double jointed jaw where the large dentary bone (now our only jaw bone) is connected to the squamosal bone (the bone of the head minus the jaw) but where the articular bone is still connected to

the quadrate. Both the articular and quadrate were the original joint bones present in the jaws of early synapsids, but much later these moved upwards to form our middle ear bones (as was pointed out in the last chapter). This made it preposterous to claim these animals might have been just “varieties of mouse.” Creager makes the same mistake when he says, “Note that even Talk.Origins doesn't think that Oligokyphus and Kayentatherium are mammal ancestors. These are clearly 100 percent mammals with no evidence of reptilian traits.” Again, as Hunt’s original source (from which Creager was copying) had explicitly noted, their skulls still have the double joints, which is not seen in any modern mammal. This is a clear relict of shared common ancestry with other amniotes. Creager displays other fundamental misunderstandings of paleontology by proclaiming that fossils are only arranged to fit the evolutionary model. In reality, fossils are arranged by their morphological characteristics, and the time period in which they appear is generally less important than what specific characters they have due to the scattershot nature of the fossil record. Now, we could go on about this and enumerate all of Creager’s failures, but coauthor JD has this covered all this in far greater detail in Evolution Slam Dunk. And the science marches on. As this book was being written, several new papers appeared by Katrina Jones and colleagues continuing their study of the evolutionary history of the mammalian backbone (including those perissodactyls), and the earlier synapsid stage of that specifically (“Fossils reveal the complex evolutionary history of the mammalian regionalized spine”). Basal synapsids, like pelycosaurs, only had two specialized regions of the spine, the cervical and dorsal, which display little differences in vertebrae shapes and underwent differentiation in their pectoral vertebrae before the origin of the therapsids. Early therapsids gradually increased the differences in the shape of the vertebrae, and differentiation in lumbar vertebrae occurred prior to the origin of true mammals. If it isn’t an evolutionary process, it’s doing a darned good imitation of one. And then there’s the genetics: the Hox genes involved in the process have also been worked out, connecting the ancient fossils to the modern genes. Meanwhile, anti-evolutionists have not made any

comparable strides in assessing the fossils or the relevant genes. They all seem to be stuck in Creager mode. So, what do the baraminologists do to not work things out? One method creationists use to figure out what organisms comprise a kind is called multidimensional scaling (MDS). Evolutionists use it too, since they invented it (and quite a while ago, with examples like Joseph Kruskal’s paper from 1964). To see what organisms and clades are more closely related to one another, the MDS tool groups them by similarities, where longer distances among taxa indicate more dissimilarities. In addition to MDS, creationists use “baraminic distance correlation” to (hopefully) chop groups of organisms into distinct kinds. This method is similar to MDS, but creationists add onto it arbitrary limits that help draw the clear separations they need for reducing clades of organisms to distinct kinds. Even this deck-stacking doesn’t always work in the creationists’ favor, though, as revealed by Todd Wood in his 2005 article “Visualizing Baraminic Distances Using Classical Multidimensional Scaling” (our bold):  

For example, Robinson and Cavanaugh (1998b) found significant, positive baraminic distance correlation between humans and primates when using molecular data. This violated their proposal that significant positive correlation indicated taxic continuity. Wood (2002) found a

similar

phenomenon when analyzing morphological and molecular datasets of the grasses. Significant negative correlation could be detected only with the morphological dataset but not with the molecular dataset of the same taxa. Wood interpreted his results and those of Robinson and Cavanaugh to indicate that discontinuity and continuity should be detected holistically, without an overrepresentation of a single type of characters (e.g., molecular).  

Translated into English, the data that did not fit with the creationist model (where humans cannot be related to primates, or too many grasses in one baraminological barrel) must be “interpreted” and molded until it does fit. Systematics by massage. Sometimes the massaging runs the other direction, lumping taxa together to keep the number of created kinds down to an Arkmanageable minimum. Consider M. Aaron’s paper at AiG titled

“Discerning Tyrants from Usurpers: A Statistical Baraminological Analysis of Tyrannosauroidea Yielding the First Dinosaur Holobaramin.” He concluded “that the group including Tyrannosauridae, Bistahieversor, Appalachiosaurus, Dryptosaurus, Raptorex, Xiongguanlong, and Eotyrannus is a holobaramin.” Whoa! Let’s check the Map of Time here. Eotyrannus lived 130 million years ago (the early Cretaceous), while Tyrannosaurus lived 68-66 million years ago (the late Cretaceous). As we were writing this chapter, a new tyrannosaurid species was reported by Andrew McDonald and colleagues. Hailing from San Juan County, New Mexico, and dated at just over 78 million years old, tossing Dynamoterror dynastes into the mix would whittle the time from Eotyrannus down to a mere 52 million years. To put all that in perspective, our common ancestor with chimps lived about 6 million years ago. That means roughly ten times more than the length of time from today to our common ancestor with chimps occurred between the origin of the familiar tyrannosaurids and its common ancestor with Eotyrannus. It is extraordinarily unlikely that these two were more closely related genetically than we are to chimps —just look at their morphological differences. Yet without pausing for breath, creationists try to group these two tyrannosauroids together, but not two significantly less disparate hominids. Here we’re seeing the tip of the incoherent iceberg that is baraminology. Remember that by their standards, a kind is about the level of family … well, unless it needs to be much larger to accommodate larger clades or much smaller so as to only include humans (unless one acknowledges that there is more than one species of Homo as Todd Wood does). Think a very flexible accordion here, rather than a stiff and precise measuring stick (the sort you need to do rigorous science). A look at other articles on theropods by creationists fall in that “less conclusive” box. Some, like Answers in Genesis 1999, Emil Silvestru 2006, Shaun Doyle 2007, Elizabeth Mitchell 2011, Jonathan Sarfati and Tas Walker in 2012, and CreationWiki 2012 and 2015, classify feathered non-avian dinosaurs as, well, dinosaurs—including Beipiaosaurus, Ornithomimus, Oviraptor, Sinornithosaurus, Sinosauropteryx, Troodon and Velociraptor—but do so because they’re denying that they’re actually feathered.

As Brian Thomas put it in a 2018 article with Sarfati, conceding how “divided” their side’s researchers were on this, they acknowledged that “A genuine dinosaur (reptile kind) with bona-fide feathers that today characterize various bird kinds might not directly affront Scripture’s within-kind demand, but it would fuel evolutionary bias by blurring between-kind lines.” Now wouldn’t that be a shame. But it does account for why those same creationists (and a few more besides), when they see definite feathers on an obviously dinosaurian anatomy, act like Alan Feduccia and reflexively go the safe route to plop them as birds. The list includes Creation Ministries International in 1998, Andrew McIntosh and Jonathan Sarfati in 2009, Elizabeth Mitchell in 2013, 2014 and 2015, and CreationWiki in 2015—regarding Anchiornis, Caudipteryx, Changyuraptor, Eosinopteryx, Epidexipteryx, Protarcheopteryx, Zhenyuanlong, and Microraptor (though CreationWiki hedged their bets there by wrongly dismissing that as a putative fake). Check these critters out for yourself, though, and see whether you can make such tidy distinctions. Of the creationist pigeonholing of Caudipteryx as “bird”, Jonathan Kane reminded that its forward jutting pelvis was typical for saurischian dinosaurs:  

It is particularly ironic for Creation Ministries International to argue that Caudipteryx is a flightless bird, because in another article [Daniel Anderson 2006] they have argued that birds are not related to saurischian dinosaurs because of this difference between their pelvic structures. If having a forwards-pointing pubis means that an animal cannot be related to birds, then Caudipteryx not only cannot be a bird; according to CMI’s argument it cannot be related to birds at all!  

Epidexipteryx landed Michael Denton in a similar quandary over on the Intelligent Design side, which coauthor JD noted in Evolution Slam Dunk. In his 2016 book, Denton punted the “controversy about whether there are ‘reptiles’ with pennaceous feathers” over to a single source, a 2008 Evolution News posting by Casey Luskin that claimed: “Unreported in the media is the fact that the paper contains language directly hinting that Epidexipteryx hui could also be ‘interpreted as secondarily flightless.’”

Arguably the reason why “the media” had not reported that factoid was that Fucheng Zhang et al.’s paper had made no such claim. Having noted its very dinosaurian anatomy, the issue concerned the dinosaur’s prominent “ribbon-like” tail feathers but no arm plumage. Since flightless birds don’t lack feathers on their wings, Zhang reasonably concluded, “Unless Epidexipteryx is interpreted as secondarily flightless, the absence of pennaceous limb feathers in this taxon suggests that display feathers appeared before airfoil feathers and flight ability in basal avialan evolution.” In his haste to banish that feathered dinosaur to the birdcage, Luskin excised all that context, an oversight compounded by Denton’s breezy reliance on him. Evolution News has continued the rationalizing refrain on feathered dinosaurs, of course, such as a 2013 posting on “The Origin of Avian Flight: Comparing Explanations from Darwinism and Intelligent Design” that neglected to actually present an ID explanation for any of the little data they alluded to, in what amounted to a clog of authority quotes. But that only throws into relief how creationism has claimed a much higher standard, seeking (but failing) to present their working baraminological alternative. But back to baraminology. That there are no good, consistent criteria for the creationist delineation of dinosaurs from birds was up front in David Cavanaugh’s 2011 article “An ANOPA Study of Coelurosaurian Theropods.” His creationist toolkit found only clusters of overlapping taxa, not the distinct isolated blobs required by the baraminology paradigm. Which left Cavanaugh proposing (we’re not kidding) that “it seems at least reasonable for creationists to consider the possibility that the Jurassic ‘bird’ Archaeopteryx really is related to theropod dinosaurs, not as descendant but instead as their ancestor.”   ___________________________________________________________________

Alan Feduccia and bird origins Feduccia objected to the idea of feathered dinosaurs in a 1985 paper (before their actual discovery!), a view continued in his 1999 book The Origin and Evolution of Birds, and holding to that “if it’s

got feathers, it’s a bird” line in Riddle of the Feathered Dragons in 2012. Of that latter work, anti-evolutionists like Jay Wile found it a congenial authority to recommend (despite Feduccia’s objections to creationism, he was still their best shot at undermining the dino-bird evolution scenario). Uncommon Descent riffed off a David Coppedge posting in 2012 on him, while Evolution News was giddy that Jonathan Wells was somehow vindicated because Feduccia had briefly mentioned him (regarding his part in the “Archaeoraptor” kerfuffle, which we’ll discuss next chapter). Reviews in scientific venues were more divided, based on which camp they belonged to. Nicholas Geist (who had coauthored a 2000 paper with Feduccia, and others with the ornithologists circling the dino-bird skeptic camp) recommended it, but wondering why there was so much rancor, given that “both sides agree that birds and dinosaurs are closely related.” Critical Luis Chiappe (solidly in the dino-bird paleontologist bunch) highlighted a core gap in Feduccia’s position (one notably downplayed by the favorable reviewers): Feduccia was “clearly more interested in disproving the theropod hypothesis than in providing support for an alternative,” a point echoed by the generally favorable Egbert Leigh in 2014, commenting how Feduccia had been “too busy refuting his opponents to tell the story of his birds properly.” That lack of a comparably detailed alternative has plagued Feduccia’s argument from the start, compounded by a dearth of Triassic or later archosaur fossil evidence for any hypothesized bird ancestor (apparent by the time Lawrence Witmer surveyed the topic in 2002), and his persistent dismissal of cladistic analysis as a guiding phylogenetic tool to make sense of what is on the fossil field. Thomas Carr was blunt on that in his 2013 review: “those without training in systematic biology will be seriously misled by the misrepresentation of cladistics” in Feduccia’s book. Darren Naish’s 2019 blog mention of Feduccia’s books as “unreliable and misleading” sums up the stance of many in the scientific field. Geist and Walter Bock (in his 2015 review) were particularly impressed Say what?

And the situation hasn’t improved for them since. Without citing Cavanaugh’s bit, in 2013 Paul Garner, Todd Wood and Marcus Ross tackled the baraminic status of a sampling of the Jurassic and Cretaceous avialae and found Archaeopteryx kept poking its head up among the dromaeosaurid dinosaurs. Cavanaugh and Garner’s papers are just more misshapen bricks in what ought to be a solid baraminological wall, trying in vain to keep up with an ever   ___________________________________________________________________

with Feduccia’s raising the bird digit homology issue. In several papers starting in 1997, Ann Burke, Julie Nowicki & Feduccia argued that the three-fingered avian hand involved digits 2-3-4, whereas theropod dinosaur hands apparently had digits 1-2-3, a position he defended in a chapter of his 2012 Riddle of the Feathered Dragons. Günter Wagner & Jacques Gauthier countered that a genetic frameshift may have accounted for both of those facts (the budlike anlagen in vertebrate limbs not being dedicated to their fates initially). Such things were known to have occurred in skinks, per Michael Shapiro et al. 2003 on the two-toed Hemiergis from Australia, and subsequent experimental work over the years 2005 to 2011 by Wagner & Gauthier with colleagues Alexander Vargas, Zhe Wang, and Rebecca Young support that frame shifting having happened for birds too (the papers pro & con are included in our references). Paleontology also played a part, as the digit issue came up regarding the Early Cretaceous Eoalulavis noted back in Chapter 3, the earliest found with an alula steering feather—only it was attached to the theropod digit I. Protopteryx was found to have them also. For further fun, a Jurassic ceratosaur turned up that was losing that first dinosaur digit, described by Xing Xu et al. in 2009, and further explored in a 2013 paper “Tracing the Evolution of Avian Wing Digits” he wrote with Susan Mackem. ICR’s Brian Thomas whistled past that 2009 finding with the mantra that “dinosaurs and birds were made purposively and distinctly as separate creatures.” Sure. The take home here is how varied digit modification (and the integuments attached to them) can get in the real world of evolving

life, and beyond just what was happening with the birds (such as the salamanders Cornelius Hunter tripped over back in Chapter 4). Aditya Saxena’s 2017 paper on “The origins, scaling and loss of tetrapod digits” pulls together the current data on all that, including the many genes and regulators that have been found involved in the process (such as the ubiquitous Shh). Interestingly, sonic hedgehog also figures in the evolution of molar cusp changes in the African wild dog Lycaon pictus around 1.7 Ma, concomitant with their loss of one of their forefeet digits, all explored by Daniel Chavez et al. in a 2019 paper. expanding menagerie of fossil theropods that wantonly insisted on trampling all over their fluctuating baraminological corrals, as ex-Young Earth Creationist Jonathan Kane surveyed in a perceptive 2016 Pandas Thumb post. Certainly creationists were long past defending Bodie Hodge’s favorite line nicked from Allen Feduccia (the scientist who had landed on the wrong side of the bird digit issue, see the  Info Box on the previous pages). Originating from Virginia Morell’s Science commentary way back in 1993, Feduccia was quoted: “Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur. But it’s not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of ‘paleobabble’ is going to change that.” But things didn’t stay in 1993, and by 2012 an Answers Magazine posting “Archaeopteryx Has Flown the Coop” opted for vague hand waving, implying that the new Xiaotingia feathered avialian fossil belonged to its own kind, but without clearly stating whether that included either Archaeopteryx or any dinosaur. We’ll have more to say in Chapter 6 on these taxa and the ever-widening challenge they pose for creationism. To return to the Purdom/Hodge argument, they finish out their subchapter following the quote by George Bentham as lamenting that modern churches have since compromised Genesis for evolution. Their final subchapter merely looks with hopeful eyes to a future where baraminology has been more thoroughly investigated. We, however, do not think baraminology is ever going to enter into any great period of expansion, since creationists ignore both the data and each other. Instead, the actual paleontologists and biologists will

continue onward and upward with their work, tirelessly teasing out the relationships among organisms. A few, like “armchair paleontologist” Kane, may even turn around now and then to wave back at the creationists, stuck far down the fact hill, bumping into one another as they try to lure a few of the critters into their imaginary baramin pens, while hoping critics don’t notice how closely they match the evolutionary framework the creationists so want not to be true.  

Determining the Ark Kinds  

Now with that done, we will move onto our second act: looking at Jean Lightner et al.’s “Determining the Ark Kinds.” This paper intends to do exactly what the title proclaims: to use different methods to group organisms into kinds. Their methods of choice are hybridization tests, the fancy-sounding cognitum, and statistical baraminology. In the abstract, the team makes an interesting note: “If the grouping seems excessively high taxonomically, the family level may be used as the default level to avoid underestimating the number of kinds on the Ark.” What exactly is “excessively high” in baraminology? Understand that a “family” is just a useful construct made by humans. The organisms display relatedness in their genetics and morphology, but a “family” is just a group of organisms more closely related to each other than members of another family. And, families can vary greatly in their numbers of members. Some families are monotypic, where there is only one species in a family—such as the small, non-parasitic placozoan Trichoplax. Lacking a fossil record, placozoans are so isolated as an early diverging form that they qualify as a monotypic phylum (which makes them rather interesting biologically, as genetic work over many years by Stephen Dellaporte, Thorsten Hadrys, Mansi Srivastava, Caroline Smith and colleagues have shown many novel cell types there, and even a protoPax gene, relevant to basal tissue and organ formation). Other families have hundreds or even thousands of species. For example, the rove beetle family staphylinidae contains some 63,000 species. That’s more than all mammals, reptiles and birds combined. Such is the variety of families in the natural world.

Being considered part of a family is often determined by a combination of evolutionary, paleontological, and genetic data. One thing that makes terms like “family” useful is that larger taxonomic categories are often more “stable” than smaller ones, which is beneficial for assessing organismal relationships, although this is not always the case. The kingdom protista turned out to be a taxonomic nightmare, for example, containing dozens of groups not closely related to each other: the protistan choanoflagellates are more closely related to animals (not an easy thing to tease out, witness the 2008 and 2017 work by Martin Carr et al.), nucleariids are more closely related to fungi (as David López-Escardó et al. covered in their 2018 paper), and euglenids are more closely related to plants (following Bożena Zakryś et al.’s 2017 analysis). And for fun, compare that with Monique Turmel et al.’s 2008 review of the euglenid’s chloroplast plastids, themselves cyanobacterial endosymbionts—biology as nested Russian Doll. But despite the considerable taxonomic reconfigurations that had to be undertaken to sort such protistans out, no research ever uncovered signs that the groups did not share common ancestry. So, there is no single metric for a group of organisms being a family. Families can vary hugely in size; thus, saying a kind is a family is virtually meaningless. Creationists must show that some group of organisms is only related to each other, not to any other kinds. That is the basis of baraminology and special creation after all. However, these underlying beliefs that creationists hold have not been borne out by the data at all. Anyway, after describing the Noachian story and some “Biblical Evidence” on the creation week, the Lightner paper offered this tautological fluff: “Since life was created ‘according to their kinds’ and told to reproduce, it is often assumed that life reproduces according to its kind. While Scripture does not emphatically state that life reproduces only after its own kind, there is a very strong inference given both the biblical text and observations made in the world today.” This is very odd. How could an organism ever leave its kind? No matter how many genetic and morphological changes the descendants of modern wolves might undergo, those descendants will still be members of the “dog kind.” They can never leave their kind because

they will always bear some evidence of having been part of that kind, no matter how much they may have varied. One way to put it (as our friend and YouTuber Peter DeTukker has): how many generations do you have to go before your ancestors are no longer your ancestors? Never, it’s impossible. Descendants of the original members of the “dog kind” could never fail to be members of the “dog kind” themselves in the same way that our descendants can never depart the systematic category of primates, mammals, amniotes, tetrapods, vertebrates, chordates, etc. You cannot escape your ancestry. Nor apparently the limitations of taking ancient religious statements as if they were valid scientifically. The Lightner team quotes the Bible in an attempt to reinforce their argument:  

And of every living thing of all flesh you shall bring two of every sort into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the birds after their kind, of animals after their kind, and of every creeping thing of the earth after its kind, two of every kind will come to you to keep them alive. (Genesis 6:19–20).  

But, what was “every creeping thing” to an ancient Middle Easterner? Certainly not koalas, tapirs, penguins, polar bears, or American bison, let alone therapsids and sauropods. Horses, cattle, pigs, and dogs comprised the majority of creeping things that the biblical authors came into contact with—familiar barnyard animals humans had domesticated, and that creationists dwell on to this day when they offer examples of kinds. The extent of extant and fossil biodiversity was not even realized by authors in the 1800’s—let alone 100 AD. And yet the Lightner team was committed to treating this bucolic biblical breeding paradigm as relevant to the whole range of living organisms. Having reinforced their idea that a kind is a reproductive unit (even if Purdom & Hodge have admitted it might not necessarily be) they dove into hybridization. We have seen that this is the main argument for baramins among extant organisms. After laying out how the method works (as we’ve already discussed), they pressed their technical argument just a bit too far:  

So how much development is necessary for hybridization to be considered successful? Is fertilization enough? The answer to the latter question is clearly no, as human sperm can fertilize hamster eggs in the laboratory. Even the first few divisions are under maternal control. For this reason Scherer (1993) stated that embryogenesis must continue until there is coordinated expression of both maternal and paternal morphogenetic genes. Lightner (2007) suggested that the advanced blastocyst stage may be sufficient. This was partially based on a study by Patil and Totey (2003) which showed failure of embryos around the 8 cell stage was associated with a lack of mRNA transcripts. Thus it seemed significant coordinated expression was necessary to advance past this stage, through the morula stage, to a late blastocyst.[39]  

Why is fertilization not enough to denote a kind? The team does not explicitly explain why the answer is “clearly no”; they merely drop their answer and keep moving. There is nothing scientific about delineating kinds based on whether or not a zygote gets to the blastocyst stage (as opposed to pegging it to the zygote or still later morula phase). Blastulas do vary in the number of cells across the animal kingdom, but such a classification scheme obviously doesn’t work for protists, plants or prokaryotes. Which means it was an entirely ad hoc justification contrived to defend splitting clades of organisms into kinds even if numerous lines of data point in the opposite direction. And as we shall shortly see, the team freely admits they would abandon this arbitrary dividing line if it does not support what they want to be true. Creationists further ignore just how interchangeable the binding components of vertebrates are. According to Michael Bedford’s 1977 paper “Sperm/egg interaction: The specificity of human spermatozoa,” human sperm can adhere to the zona pellucida (the glycoprotein wall around the egg cell) of a gibbon’s egg. In fact, the sperm of rabbits, mice, and hamsters can all adhere to the zona pellucida of humans. The 2015 paper “Cross-species fertilization: the hamster egg receptor, Juno, binds the human sperm ligand, Izumo1” by Enrica Bianchi & Gavin Wright even found that an indicator of sperm quality was the ability of zona pellucida-free Syrian golden hamster eggs to fuse with human sperm. One of the older methods of testing relatedness is called DNADNA hybridization where strands of DNA from two different organisms

are mixed, and the more heat required to break their bond indicates the closeness of their relationship. Using this method, it has been shown that human, chimp, and gorilla DNA hybridize, meaning they are all extremely closely related genetically. Why would that specific group do that if they were created separately? But it gets even neater: they are so close genetically that DNADNA hybridization alone could not determine their current phylogeny, as Jon Marks et al. noted in 1988 of Charles Sibley & Jon Ahlquist’s pioneering 1984 work (the Sibley team refining their analysis in 1990 in response). As time has gone on, though, researchers developed methods for sequencing strands of DNA with millions of nucleotides, showing that our genetic similarities with chimps are indeed around 95% (recall the information presented back in Chapter 4, but see also Roy Britten’s 2002 paper, “Divergence between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA sequences is 5%, counting indels” or Kay Prüfer et al.’s 2012 “The bonobo genome compared with the chimpanzee and human genomes”). With that the creationist position is in deep trouble, since we know they cannot tolerate humans being in the same kind as anything else. Any method that points to humans being related to other non-Homo organisms is wrong a priori, as we saw when Wood ignored the molecular evidence linking humans and non-human primates. So, those biological goalposts have to move. Now consider hybridization of another sort: if two organisms can breed, then aren’t they the same species? It didn’t take long for the creationists to encounter the limitations of the hybridization method for their argument. One problem is that there is not good data for a lot of hybrids. This is true—like who is going to mate everything with everything to find out? This is why genetic tests exist, to compensate for that. But those only work up to an arbitrary and unspecified point. Moving on, hybridization attempts may be successful or not, because prezygotic and postzygotic isolation doesn’t take place in an all-or-nothing mode. Barriers may occur more in one direction, for example, where males of one population are able to mate with the females of another, when it won’t work so easily the other way around. Francisco Ayala described how that applied to fruit flies in a 1978 piece for Scientific American (technical papers on the process in

Drosophila include Daniel Hartl et al. 1994 and Daven Presgraves et al. 2002). Comparable work exists for other insects, like moths and butterflies (Presgraves 2002 and Vladimir Lukhtanov et al. 2005), fish and birds among vertebrates (Andrew Hendry et al. on some rapid hybridization in sockeye salmon in 2000, and Trevor Price & Michelle Bouvier on birds in 2002), as well as plants (Noland Martin & John Willis 2010). Purdom & Hodge already acknowledged that two organisms may not be able to interbreed while still being part of the same kind, so we can mark that as a conceded point on their part, and press on to their ultimate escape hatch, the obvious fact that fossils long dead cannot hybridize. Neat, they have an outlet available whenever they want to downplay fossil data regarding how the speciation process played out in the geological past (Kent Hovind invokes it repeatedly in his lectures and debates). But the data they need to account for still keeps accumulating. Molecular studies have supported humans and all other primates (euarchonta) being sister clades to the rodents and lagomorphs (glira), treeshrews and colugos, forming the super-order euarchontoglira— genetic work coming to the rescue here, since there are very few clear morphological characters uniting so seemingly disparate a bunch as euarchonta and glira. It’s by the genes that such diversity can be sorted out, in studies such as Heather Amrine-Madsen et al.’s 2003 “A new phylogenetic marker, apolipoprotein B, provides compelling evidence for eutherian relationships” (those apolipoproteins we’ve already met in the Milano cholesterol case), David Lynn & Daniel Bradley’s 2007 paper “Discovery of α-defensins in basal mammals,” Sen Song et al.’s 2012 “Resolving conflict in eutherian mammal phylogeny using phylogenomics and the multispecies coalescent model,” and Vikas Kumar et al.’s “Coalescent-Based Genome Analyses Resolve the Early Branches of the Euarchontoglires” in 2013. Let’s just focus in on the rodents for a bit. In 2012 Frank Sherwin went ratting with “Big or Small—Rodents Have Always Been Rodents,” in which he played in the venerable Duane Gish tradition of offering selected authorities to cast doubt on various aspects of rodent evolution and origins, but without actually saying much (or even enough) about them (our bold):

 

Some of the latest evolutionary candidates for rodent ancestors are the Eurymylidae, from the early Tertiary of Asia. Recently, evolutionists suggested that a creature called Heomys may be the possible ancestor of rodents, although it is too advanced and its appearance is too late to be an ancestor. Other eurymylids such as Matutinia, Rhombomylus, and Eurymylus are a side branch and not directly ancestral to rodents.  

Leaving aside when and where that “Tertiary of Asia” was supposed to be in Sherwin’s unspecified pre-Flood, Flood, and postFlood schema, as landmasses shuttled about in the Big Slosh cataclysm, at no point did he mention what was it about Heomys that was “too advanced” to qualify as an ancestor for even Sherwin would accept, or how less advanced it would need to be for Sherwin to give it the thumbs up. Or how much earlier it would need to have lived to be ok with him —and what did earlier even mean in the creationist’s timeframe, when everything in the Big Slosh tumult is taking place in less time than the lifespan of a geriatric tortoise or average sequoia. For that paragraph Sherwin cited one source, Jin Meng et al.’s 2003 study of the Rhombomylus fossil and its implications for the origin of the Glires clade, which comprises all rodents and lagomorphs (rabbits, hares and pikas). The Meng paper put little Heomys as the earliest known side branch on the rodent side occurring in the early Eocene, contemporary to another critter, Mimotona which is in the bunch leading off to the lagomorphs (work on the mimotonids include Alexander Averianov in 1994, Brian Kraatz et al. in 2009, and Łucja Fostowicz-Frelik et al. in 2015). At this stage of the game the taxa are so similar (but not identical) a larger category has had to be constructed to deal with them (the Simplicidentata, embracing the rodents and their closest extinct relations), with some getting a generic tag like “gliriform”, such as Sinomylus described by Malcolm McKenna & Meng in 2001. All those other taxa Sherwin name-dropped belong to a now extinct group of early Asian rodents known as the Eurymylidae, which were apparently doing that speciation thing like everything else. Take Matutinia, a fossil similar enough to Rhombomylus that it was initially taken for it, until a new study by Suyin Ting et al. in 2002 suggested it

warranted its own genus in the Simplicidentata. And a 2004 paper by Xueshi Huang et al. located Heomys “at the root of the clade that includes Rhombomylus and Matutinia.” Neither of those papers were among Sherwin’s sparse citations. Nor did they appear when Jerry Bergman cribbed Sherwin’s article wholesale in 2014 (“Rodents: An Evolutionary Success Story that Evolution Cannot Explain”), including crowing that some later jumbo rodents that lived in the Miocene and Pleistocene (described in papers by Marcelo Sánchez-Villagra et al. in 2003, and Andrés Rinderknecht & Ernesto Blanco in 2008) represented pre-Flood giantism. But the origins of rodents were the point at issue, and apart from merely noting the conventional position, Bergman shied away from filling in the details. Thus he cited Jin Meng et al.’s 1994 paper not to discuss the new Mongolian fossil rodent they’d found, Tribosphenomys , but only to note  that rodents appeared to have originated in Asia. And he dangled Pierre-Olivier Antoine et al.’s 2012 paper solely regarding the appearance of rodents in South America 34 million years ago—a date which Bergman’s mythology requires to be wrong, no matter what the facts, which accounts for his not even trying to dispute any of the contents of the Antoine study, which was on “Middle Eocene rodents from Peruvian Amazonia reveal the pattern and timing of caviomorph origins and biogeography.” Bergman brought up Gennady Churakov et al.’s 2010 review on the relevant genetic diagnostics for “very conflicting results among both proposed lines of descent and with the fossil record,” none of whose specifics Bergman attempted to discuss. And going by its title, “Variance of Molecular Datings, Evolution of Rodents and the Phylogenetic Affinities between Ctenodactylidae and Hystricognathi,” we suspect Dorothée Huchon et al.’s 2000 paper was slated for that doubt-sowing task too. Only Bergman must have lost track of what he was doing while compiling his two pages (bedazzled perhaps by his rapid-fire deck stacking), since he never got around to mentioning it. For those just itching to know, the two systematic classifications Huchon alluded to were both problem groups to categorize, though for opposite reasons. Hystricognathi is a broad rodent infraorder that includes animals as wide-ranging as chinchillas and porcupines, and we must wonder whether Bergman was keen on including them in any single baramin.

The Ctenodactylidae (AKA gundis or comb rats) are a family of pudgy rats from South Africa. Known by only five living species in four genera, and with a few fossils dating from the Pleistocene, they posed a challenge to resolve phylogenetically. But some resolution emerged in 2007 when Huchon et al. took a look at what turned out to be their rare living cousin, Laonastes, a “Lazarus” (living fossil!) hanging on from the diatomyid family, whose genetic data suggested the ctenodactylids diverged from them 44 million years ago. That would make them an early branching group, since the other extant rodent families appear to have emerged “no more than 38 (±2.5) Mya.” No wonder they’d been so hard to pin down. Speaking of Huchon’s work, Bergman managed to miss another of their more recent efforts: their 2002 rodent phylogeny that managed to reconcile a lot of the older conflicts between the DNA and paleontological data sets, and firmly placed the rodent radiation “at the transition between Paleocene and Eocene”—a chronology completely consistent with the supposedly “conflicting” Churakov work. Sherwin and the rats returned (and not as a Seattle grunge band) in 2016 with “The Rodent Record.” He replayed that trope on how molecular studies of organisms often conflict with the paleontological record, in this case Emmanuel Douzery et al.’s 2003 study whose title was as tailormade for quote mining as the unused Huchon: “Local Molecular Clocks in Three Nuclear Genes: Divergence Times for Rodents and Other Mammals and Incompatibility Among Fossil Calibrations.” But it is one of those “duh!” things that any phylogenies that draw on molecular data are all but guaranteed to yield divergence times older than the fossils, given that (1) genetic changes tend to go their variation route long before manifesting as overtly different morphology, and (2) the fossil record will be unlikely to deliver up the very earliest example of any such notable change. What the molecular data never shows are divergence times younger than the known fossils, nor do they show the patterns of appearance and distribution that match up in any way with the dictates of the Big Slosh. But Sherwin was no more disposed to wade into that treacherous water than Bergman was, preferring instead to trawl the chapters of a 2015 book on rodent evolution. Not all the chapters,

mind, just ones that could supply snippets that when sufficiently trimmed would suit his apologetic needs. Along the way he mentioned a few more fossil taxa. “In the past, evolutionists suggest a creature called Progonomys was the ancestor of mice,” whereupon Sherwin quoted from the chapter by Pierre-Henri Fabre et al. to seemingly dismiss that (our bold): “Currently there is no evidence that supports Progonomys as the most recent common ancestral stock of extant Murinae (Phloemyini included).” This was a most gymnastic Duane Gish class parse, requiring him to describe as little as possible of the context, or his own creationist non-model. As the 2015 paper by Yuri Kimura et al. noted (a resource Sherwin did not cite), the Phloemyini are an outlier group among the Old World rats and mice. It’s only if those basal cousins are included that Progonomys (living around 12 Ma) is ruled out as the common ancestor for them all. But is it not still a dandy ancestral form for the rest of the taxa in the Murinae when the Phlormyini are not included? That’s how the Kimura paper classified them, and that Progonomys is still regarded as a phylogenetically informative basal form is affirmed by another work Sherwin didn’t reference, Vincent Lazzari et al.’s 2010 paper on their “micro-macroevolution connection.” And more recently in the 2019 paper by Raquel López-Antoñanzas et al. on another newly characterized species of the genus: “Progonomys is probably one of the most important taxa in the history of murine rodents, not only because it was the earliest taxon to acquire the derived dental characters of the crown murines, but also because it was the first modern representative of the group to spread out of southern Asia.” Sherwin played a similarly tight game with the other rodent he mentioned: “Evolutionists thought a creature called Karnimata was ancestor of rats, but secular zoologists suggest that ‘Karnimata includes specimens from different species or genera’,” citing the book chapter by Christiane Denys & Alisa Winkler. The issue Sherwin skipped was whether the morphology of those fossils (which he did not allude to) planted them at the base of particular rodent lineages (which they do, as again confirmed by the Kimura study). But Sherwin went full Duane Gish with his next quote, extracted with surgical precision from Lionel Hautier & Philip Cox’s chapter.

We’ve put the single sentence Sherwin nicked in bold, to let you the reader assess whether it’s been taken out of context:  

Most of these autapomorphic features have been defined on the skull probably because this is where the most distinctive characters of the order are concentrated. This association of morphological characters is so distinctive that, in comparison to other placentals, the first representatives of the clade were easily recognisable in the Paleogene fossil record. Indeed, from a quick look at the fossil record, it is easy to get the impression that rodents have always been rodents. Paradoxically, the apparent simplicity of this ordinal classification masks a number of serious challenges. First. The early acquisition of diprotodonty and associated rodent-like features during the evolutionary history of rodents has made it difficult to recognise the potential ancestral condition for the group. Second, strong functional constraints linked to the acquisition of a diprotodont skull may have limited the number of possible evolutionary pathways and promoted convergent evolution, which in return has hampered attempts to establish an intraordinal classification.  

The authors went on to remind their readers how “More than in any other mammalian order, cases of convergent and parallel evolution have repeatedly been reported in Rodentia, especially in relation to their cranial morphology,” which made it all the more necessary for Sherwin to have recognized and dealt with that context. Which, of course, he didn’t. So what is all this diprotodonty stuff? That’s having two prominent protruding incisor teeth in the lower jaw, which was a common feature of many early mammals. Going on what Philip Morris et al. presented in their 2019 paper on the “Mechanical significance of morphological variation in diprotodont incisors,” though such tooth forms are known also “in lagomorphs, hyraxes, the aye-are and common wombat,” there’s a commonality to their shape, which varied “in a way predictable from ecology and mechanics, in order to resist bending.” Which means a great deal of why rodents look the way they do will track back to their particular dietary and behavioral traits, which in turn relates to the shifting ecological conditions in which they lived. Another element was explored by Mark Swanson et al. in 2019: the evolution of the masseter muscles in rodents, whose skull attachment “has moved forward [from the zygomatic arch] onto the

rostrum at least seven times (with one reversal) during the approximately 70 Myr history of rodents.” Those shifts also correlate to specific lineages as identified in evolutionary systematics, which coincidence creationists favoring “common design” would need to account for. Not that Sherwin was keen to address those factors. “Creationists don’t have to confront the entanglement and confusion of evolutionary trees,” he wrote. But it’s not because “they believe Genesis as it is written” as Sherwin does, but because the creationists are just as prone as he is to engage in quick hunts for quote-mine fodder, not opportunities to show off the utility of their design model by actually using it. The scale of the problem facing them was indicated in one of the book chapters Sherwin didn’t draw on for authority quoting. Reviewing the rodent fossil record, Mary Dawson reminded how most of them came down to us as individual teeth only (they’re the most readily preserve bits of a vertebrate’s body). Jerry Bergman’s piece must have known this too, though claiming only that rodents “have an excellent fossil record” when citing Churakov’s paper, but not mentioning that they were largely teeth. It is true that the cusps and indentations in mammal teeth are so particular in a species that they are diagnostic in a way much of the post-cranial anatomy isn’t, especially in the rodents, where so many of them are small critters with the same bones shaped pretty much the same way. But it is only with the full anatomy to look at that some of the finer distinctions regarding phylogeny can be resolved, and in the case of extinct forms at the base of the Glires clade seventy million years ago, the Fossil Genie is not always obliging. But lest the creationists gear up to heave a satisfied sigh of “just rats, after all,” they’ve got quite a systematic hurdle to overcome first. In fact, around 2,200 of them, for 40% of all mammal species are rodents (Sherwin gave a smaller number of 1,700 species in his 2012 article, which may have come from him thinking only of the subset of muroid rodents, the superfamily that covers mice, rats, gerbils, hamsters and voles). Dawson noted that the range of them had expanded from 349 extant and 275 extinct genera known in George Gaylord Simpson’s day seventy years ago, to 474 extant and 743 extinct ones known today. That’s notably more genera than are

presently identified for all the dinosaurs. Sherwin can take a whack at their baraminology any time he likes too. Once again it is what we don’t read in these creationist articles that is so revealing. Are the taxa they brought up (Eurymylus, Heomys, Karnimata Matutinia, Rhombomylus, Progonomys, and the Phloemmyini) members of whatever “rat kind” their dogma would allow, or not? Only if they’re not can they even dare to wave technical literature on how closely they are deemed to be related on evolutionary grounds, so that readers might compare the “Darwinian” phylogeny with their own baraminological one to decide the merits of either on the basis of the evidence. Only it sounds like Sherwin and Bergman accept that they are in the same kind, since even those giant rodents were deemed to be still just rats, by their own admission. Which means the creationists are confronted with exactly the same issue of “evolutionary trees” Sherwin sneered at, requiring that every one of them did in fact derive from the created exemplar visible to Adam and Eve in Eden, and subsequently tucked away in their Ark box, only to scamper out in the Delugeravaged landscape to proliferate into those 2,200 monobaraminic species by the same natural speciation Darwin and Wallace suggested. And end up in particular places, too—a 2013 study by John Schenk et al. suggests the the muroid rodents alone underwent several dozen colonization episodes (up to ten in Eurasia, seven in Africa, five in North America, four in Southeast Asia, two in South America, and one to Madagascar). All of this speciation and globetrotting must have been going on really, really fast—not over some tens of millions of years, but in mere centuries, if not less. And that includes their diverse tooth layouts (diprotodont incisors and otherwise) and masseter muscle shifts. All within a kind and so quickly? Present the genetics and paleobiogeography of that, misters Sherwin and Bergman.  

The Cognitum  

If the creationists are so confident in their position, why then do they ignore or distort so much data the evolutionists are so keen to

address? Their silence speaks volumes. Unless of course they’ve just grown dizzy from the rhetorical spin they’ve had to resort to, trying in vain to extricate their mythology from the baraminological quagmire. And it’s about to get worse. Ladies and gentlemen, we present Purdom & Hodge and the cognitum method. This one’s a corker:  

A cognitum is a group of organisms that are naturally grouped together through human cognitive senses. A cognitum can be above the level of the baramin (for example, mammals), below the level of the baramin (for example, foxes), or at the level of the baramin. This perception-based concept was proposed by Sanders and Wise (2003) as a separate tool in baraminology. Though not originally proposed as a means to identify baramins, the basic concept could prove useful for our purposes here. Use of this method assumes that created kinds have retained their distinctiveness even as they have diversified.  

The Lightner team had similarly written, “Human cognitive senses influence where animals are placed taxonomically.” This is only true in the sense that humans use their mental faculties (cognition) to categorize organisms. Organisms are not simply lumped in taxonomic groups because they superficially look similar; they are placed in taxonomic groups because data—whether molecular or morphological or both—indicates that grouping. Compared to contemporary cladistics, the gut feeling “it looks kinda like” cognitum approach qualifies as stepping back, not forward. What is the usefulness of this method? We’d agree that it certainly does not identify kinds, and as Roger Sanders & Kurt Wise displayed in their 2003 paper, the cognitum concept meekly mirrored the conventional systematics of nested hierarchies, locating felids within carnivores within mammals within vertebrates within metazoans within eukaryotes (skipping that chordate phyletic step entirely, by the way). But remember, mammalia is not a kind, and while Sanders & Wise might imply only a “fuzzy boundary” between mammals and vertebrates, we know the transitional therapsids were the opposite of fuzzy—although their later members were definitely furred, as a group they’re an annoying reality creationists try at every opportunity to avoid.

Call it cognitum (fuzzy or not), to creationists, it is ultimately only the coincidence of “common design” that a large set of organisms have the same anatomical structures and developmental plan. But does this convey much meaning when applied to the full range of life on Earth? The Carboniferous reptiles Westlothiana and Hylonomus, the extinct synapsid Archaeothyris, the later Permian reptile Paliguana, and a modern gecko all look outwardly pretty similar in that they have a basic “lizard body plan.” However, creationists would likely (if they ever got around to it) end up classifyng them as different kinds based on what we know from conventional paleontology (yes, the creationists just crib the paleontological work, while downplaying that’s what they’re compelled to do on account of their lack of labor in that field themselves). So how about an actual example. The team continues,  

Lightner (2006) used it when proposing that all members of the genera Ovis and Capra belonged to the same baramin. Hybrid data had connected most members across these genera, and the members who had no hybrid data naturally fit in the group based on their physical appearance. They also happened to fit in the same group taxonomically.  

Oh! We saw how tyrannosaurids, allosaurids, megalosaurids, and abelisaurids must all naturally fall into one kind due to their hundreds of morphological similarities then. Is that right? After all, they do fit into the same group, theropoda, taxonomically. But now, even though Ovis (sheep) and Capra (goats and ibexes) are grouped within the family bovidae, the Lightner team would not bring them all into one kind. Instead, we get a menagerie, from the barnyard domesticated cattle (bovinae) and sheep (caprinae) to the impala (aepycerotinae) and antelopes (antilopinae), along with a parade of their still more exotic relatives—hartebeest (alcelaphinae), duiker (cephalophinae), sable antelope (hippotraginae), and reedbucks (reduncinae). Why do they classify them this way? It’s the cognitum at work. Lightner says (our bold), “Most people would tend to think of sheep and goats as distinct from cattle. For these reasons it was decided to split the family and consider the subfamily the level of the kind.”

Wow, both coauthors are so relieved to hear that the “science” of baraminology is willing at the drop of a hat to bow to the opinion of the majority; systematics by popularity contest, as if taxonomy were a category at the People’s Choice Awards. The Lightner team continued on with more bull:  

The cognitum has played a role in determining what is accepted as true hybridization. As discussed previously, fertilization is clearly insufficient evidence of hybridization. When Lightner (2007) found documented evidence that domestic cattle (Bos taurus) had been crossed in vitro with water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) and a few fertilized eggs survived to the well-developed blastocyst stage, it seemed sufficient coordinated expression of genes had been demonstrated. The fact that water buffalo naturally group with cattle based on anatomy, physiology, and the husbandry practices used with them was an important part of why it was accepted. If a blastocyst could be formed between domestic cattle and a skunk, this criterion would no doubt be reconsidered.  

What exactly is “true hybridization” and how does that differ from “false hybridization”? Remember, according to the team, a “true hybridization” event is one in which the developing offspring makes it to the blastocyst stage. Why? Because humans cannot be related to other organisms even at that level, as we saw in the case of hamsters and humans. And, why would the criterion need to be reconsidered if a blastocyst formed between a domestic cattle and a skunk? Well, the probable reason for that is most people would tend to think of cattle as distinct from skunks. Never mind all the genetic evidence linking skunks to other members of musteloidea (a carnivore superfamily that includes weasels, raccoons and such), as reviewed in Jun Sato and colleagues’ 2006 paper “Evidence from Nuclear DNA Sequences Sheds Light on the Phylogenetic Relationships of Pinnipedia: Single Origin with Affinity to Musteloidea” and their 2012 “Evolutionary and biogeographic history of weasel-like carnivorans (Musteloidea).” Or the genetic evidence linking musteloidea to all other carnivorans, such as John Flynn et al.’s 2005 paper “Molecular Phylogeny of the Carnivora (Mammalia): Assessing the Impact of Increased Sampling on Resolving Enigmatic Relationships.” And genetic evidence linking carnivorans to all other

laurasiatherians (including cattle), such as the 2009 paper by Zhuocheng Hou et al., “Phylogeny of the Ferungulata (Mammalia: Laurasiatheria) as determined from phylogenomic data” and Jingyang Hu et al.’s “Summary of Laurasiatheria (Mammalia) Phylogeny” from 2012.[40] Were we to look at the data “holistically”, as Todd Wood recommended, would we not then find that skunks and cattle are related in one giant holobaramin that ultimately includes all life? That’s one slippy-slide the creationists are not willing to allow, but that doesn’t mean they’re not equipped with a few more short ones of their own. Perhaps unaware that Todd Wood had clumped pigs and peccaries in a box that suggested they were a single putative kind, the cognitum tugged the Lightner team in the opposite direction (again, our bold):  

From previous work in baraminology, researchers have suggested that the level of the baramin tends to fall at or near the taxonomic level of family (Wood 2006). There is often a strong cognitum at the family level. This suggests that the family is a good initial approximation of the level of the baramin. In some instances a strong cognitum may be above or below this level. For example, pigs (Suidae) and peccaries (Tayassuidae) form a strong cognitum even though they are in separate families. From looking at these animals or pictures of them, they are easily grouped together by human cognitive senses. Their division into separate families is based on more subtle details, and most people would not naturally split them into these groupings unless they were familiar with the taxonomy of these animals. So in this case the baramin appears to be at the level of the superfamily (Suoidea).  

How curious. Bovinae and caprinae (two subfamilies) are marked as separate kinds because people tend to think they are not closely related based on what they look like, while suidae and tayassuidae (two families, and thus systematically more disparate) are grouped together because people tend to think they are closely related based on what they look like. Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter followed this tack by having them as a single kind, and Lightner’s mammal paper gave the game away on the arbitrary nature of this approach with this gem: “It is doubtful that an average biology student with some familiarity with pigs would divide

this group in a way consistent with current family divisions. Therefore, it seems natural to place the level of the kind here.” So, now classification schemes are influenced by the thoughts of average biology students? She might as well just say she prayed on it or consulted her personal Ouija board. And, what are those subtle differences between pigs and peccaries that prevent their getting merged as one baramin? Well, for one thing, peccaries have different-shaped tusks: pig tusks are long and curved, while peccary tusks are short and straight. But maybe the snag for the creationists is their long biogeographic history, dating back to the late Eocene (some 35 million years ago), according to the 2009 paper “The early evolution of the North American peccaries (Artiodactyla: ___________________________________________________________________

The Great American Biotic Interchange First remarked upon by naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, codiscoverer of natural selection, the Great American Biotic Interchange was an extensive event that started around 4 million years ago where large numbers of species from North and South America immigrated to their respective opposite continents. Mammals, for instance, had already been going from one continent to another: the sloth Megalonyx went up into North America as far back as 9 million years ago, the carnivore Cyonasua (a sort of super raccoon) crossed into South America around 7 million years ago, and sigmodontine rodents (New World mice and rats) entered South America around a million years later. As tempted as we are to explore the Interchange in detail— discussing the evolution of South America’s giant predatory flightless “terror birds”, the xenarthrans (sloths, anteaters, and armadillos), marsupials, and notoungulates (a group of enigmatic mammals that have recently turned out to be sister to the perissodactyls according to paleoproteomic evidence, as indicated by Frido Welker et al.’s 2015 paper “Ancient proteins resolve the evolutionary history of Darwin’s South American ungulates”)—the creationists moved on, so we shall also. But not before leaving you with these three papers for some overviews: Michael Woodburne’s 2010 “The Great American Biotic

Interchange: Dispersals, Tectonics, Climate, Sea Level and Holding Pens,” the 2016 “Quaternary glaciation and the Great American Biotic Interchange” by Christine Bacon et al., and Luciano Varela et al. “Phylogeny, Macroevolutionary Trends and Historical Biogeography of Sloths: Insights From a Bayesian Morphological Clock Analysis” in 2019.   Tayassuidae)” authored by Donald Prothero (who is an interview acquaintance of both coauthors) and the 2016 paper by Rodrigo Dutra et al. “Phylogenetic Systematics of Peccaries (Tayassuidae: Artiodactyla) and a Classification of South American Tayassuids.” Peccaries were present in Eurasia and share a common ancestor with pigs that lived about 37 million years ago. Shortly thereafter, peccaries immigrated to North America and diversified (the Late Eocene saw temperatures dropping, ice sheets expanding, with corresponding drops in sea level, opening up land access to the Americas). Peccaries subsequently becoming extinct in Eurasia during the Miocene possibly due to competition with the pigs. Meanwhile, the North American peccaries diversified. One such Miocene genus was Skinnerhyus who has enormous wing-like cheekbones, described by Prothero & Audrianna Pollen’s 2013 paper “New Late Miocene Fossil Peccaries From California And Nebraska.” And the biogeographical story took another step about 3.7 million years ago when they then crossed into South America during the Great American Biotic Interchange when the Isthmus of Panama formed (see the  Info Box for more). All of this natural variety in the peccary family stretching over tens of millions of years is, of course, ignored by the creationists as they get lumped ever so effortlessly as just some manner of “pig” that lived somewhere or other (don’t bother us with details) following their trundling down Noah’s gangplank only 4,300 years ago. The creationists get to their third and final method for determining ark kinds: statistical baraminology.  

Although developed separately, statistical baraminology has similarities to the cognitum in some ways. It takes a collection of characteristics (character traits) and using several statistical tests attempts to discern significant holistic continuity (similarity) or discontinuity between species (Wood et al. 2003). Like the cognitum,

it assumes that baramins retain their distinctiveness today. However, in contrast to the cognitum, it assumes that the baramin is the level where statistical tests will consistently point when a set of character traits are analyzed.

  What sorts of character traits? At what point are character traits ineffective for showing relationships? Why is it that pigs and pig-like mammals form a kind, but not all animals that develop their anus before their mouth embryonically? Or on a smaller scale, why are all mammals who develop a marsupium not one kind? Or a placenta? Or elbows, for that matter. Remember that when evolutionists divide organisms into genera, families, orders, etc., they remain related to each other even if they are classed differently. Everything is still a cousin to everything else. But when creationists divide organisms, those who do not fall into a kind are necessarily not related to that or any other kind but their own. Therefore, creationists must invent a method that reliably distinguishes related organisms from unrelated ones. Evolutionists have to do no such thing—merely group organisms as more or less closely related to each other. That distinction is a source of informative systematics for evolution—it’s cladistics in a nutshell, where the blurry lines between closely related species or the mosaic transitionals linking broader categories act as markers for the changing lineages tracking through time. But for creationists, those “almost this” or “nearly that” forms present annoying potholes for the baraminological express train, especially when they try to massage the data with statistical baraminology. The Lightner team then explains the concept of a holobaramin, which “can be thought of as all members of a specific created kind; in other words, the whole baramin.” Not quite—borrowing the holotype notion from traditional systematics (where it signifies the representative fossil that defines the group), the holobaramin relates to the physically preserved examples of the baramin, the fossils trapped by the Flood. But if the creationists aren’t usually the ones digging up the fossils, this means that defining holobaramins requires culling the working data from somebody else’s bench. Which is why we found what they wrote next particularly amusing: “A suitable matrix of characters is often available together with published cladistic analyses

of taxonomic groups. Since someone else has done the work of compiling the data, the baraminologist can enter it into a spreadsheet and run it through the software package available at the Center for Origins Research (CORE) website.” Yes, and who is that “someone else” who has done all the work? The evolutionist biologists and paleontologists, the ones who actually studied the specimens or dug them up (hard work, that). Having had negligible impact on both of these fields for more decades than the combined age of we coauthors, along come the creationists to visibly ignore most of that data. And what happens if they don’t? Now we get to something we find rather interesting (our bold):  

These methods have not been without their critics. The strongest reactions seem to be when the conclusions are at odds with how other creationists feel creatures naturally group. A dramatic example was when an analysis of craniodental characters placed Australopithecus sediba in the human holobaramin (Wood 2010). This led to numerous articles expressing disagreement about these specific results and the techniques in general (Line 2010; Lubenow 2010; Menton, Habermehl, and DeWitt 2010; Wilson 2010). Important points in the discussion included the significance of specific anatomic features, the inclusion of inference in certain character states of the dataset, and the possibility that statistical analysis may not consistently point to the level of the holobaramin.  

Righto, as we saw in the chapter “Evolution and Evidence,” Wood grouped Australopithecus sediba, Homo habilis, and Homo rudolfensis into the human kind. As would be expected among the upper echelon creationists (because your average creationist is not all that likely to read Answers in Genesis thoroughly, and certainly not long baraminological papers), they got into a fight over it. This, after all, crosses a longstanding line that humans are not related to australopithecines. They just aren’t. So, let us turn to the papers. Peter Line’s 2010 entry “Gautengensis vs sediba: A battle for supremacy amongst ‘apeman’ contenders, but neither descended from Adam” harrumphed that Wood “comes up with the farcical statement that ‘the dispersal of the human population from Babel would presumably have been led by H. habilis and H. rudolfensis, specimens

of which appear stratigraphically lower than any other human species.’ Moreover, his comment about ‘the significance of human-like australopiths and the ape-like humans’ appears almost to concede the issue to the evolutionists.” Almost? Wood had gone way beyond deviating from the biblical timeline; he had proposed that the “humans” muttering in confusion post-Babel (supposedly a mere few hundred years after the Flood) consisted of taxa that fell about as far removed from H. sapiens as you could get without slipping clear over into the australopithecines! What a thing to have happened to Noah’s kids in so little time. It is not until the end of Line’s article that he addresses some actual data regarding Wood’s astonishing conclusion, saying,  

In some ways the result of Wood’s analysis is so wrong it can be refuted by simple observation. Consider the similarities of the Australopithecus sediba cranium to that of the Australopithecus africanus cranium Sts 71 from Sterkfontein. Then ask yourself, is a technique to be trusted that finds more similarities between the Australopithecus sediba skull and a modern human skull, than between the Australopithecus sediba skull and the Australopithecus africanus skull, to the point where Australopithecus sediba is classified as human and Australopithecus africanus is classified as an extinct australopith-type ape?  

Line bases his conclusion of dissimilarity on cranial morphology alone and ignores postcranial anatomy (the Case of the Disembodied Hominids). But, that is not all; the reason that A. sediba is more like us in some respects than other australopithecines is that those hominids constitute a grade. Another of those “almost this” and “nearly that” bunch. In other words, australopithecines are united by their morphological similarity, but some species within the genus are going to be more closely related to their descendants, such as A. sediba to Homo, than to other australopithecines, such as A. sediba to A. africanus. The fact that some australopithecines share characteristics with humans is precisely what we would expect under common ancestry. Now, how do the other creationists do the comparing thing? The next article that disagrees with Wood is Marvin Lubenow’s “The Problem with Australopithecus sediba.” Like Line, Lubenow dwells on the skull morphology alone: “My own cast of an

Australopithecus africanus skull confirms its likeness to Australopithecus sediba, and pictures of such skulls confirm the same. And Australopithecus africanus also closely resembles a modern chimpanzee.” Another “look at the skulls” argument, but why does no one ever look past the skull? Why are comprehensive evaluations of postcranial anatomy so rare in creationist considerations—or carved up piecemeal in the case of Rupe & Sanford’s Contested Bones book? Coauthor JW certainly did not hold back in his video on the subject of human evolution titled “Hominin Evolution”, nor do any researchers who study australopithecines.[41] When showing relationships among living and fossil creatures, science must take into account all their features, for that gives the best chance of an accurate placement. Regarding the human lineage, an illustrative example would be Mana Dembo et al.’s extensive “Bayesian analysis of a morphological supermatrix sheds light on controversial fossil hominin relationships” in 2015. But in creationism land, the game is which pieces to extract to make their (not quite articulated) model seem justified for their already believing readers. David Menton, Anne Habermehl & David DeWitt’s criticism of Wood at least mentioned the postcranial anatomy, but showed how unwilling they were to see anything about the australopithecines as other than ape:  

The postcranial skeleton of Australopithecus sediba is also very ape-like. It has a small body with ape-like large-jointed upper and lower limbs. The arms and hands of Australopithecus sediba extend down to the knees, typical of long-armed knuckle walkers. The up-tilted glenoid fossa (shoulder joint) of Australopithecus sediba together with its long curved fingers are typical of the suspensory adapted upper limbs of tree dwelling apes. The feet are described as primitive and similar to other Australopiths. But are these striking differences between Australopithecus sediba and humans outweighed by the similarities?  

Now compare this with Lee Berger et al.’s 2010 paper “Australopithecus sediba: A New Species of Homo-Like Australopith from South Africa.” They acknowledged these very elements, which is why they placed A. sediba in the Australopithecus genus. However, they didn’t stop there:

 

Postcranially, Au. sediba is similar to other australopiths in its small body size, its relatively long upper limbs with large joint surfaces, and the retention of apparently primitive characteristics in the upper and lower limbs (table S2). Au. sediba differs from other australopiths, but shares with Homo a number of derived features of the os coxa [hip bone], including increased buttressing of the ilium and expansion of its posterior portion, relative reduction in the distance between the sacroiliac and hip joints, and reduction of distance from the acetabulum to the ischial tuberosity. These synapomorphies [characteristics shared with its descendents] with Homo anticipate the reorganization of the pelvis and lower limb in H. erectus and possibly the emergence of more energetically efficient walking and running in that taxon. As with the associated cranial remains, the postcranium of Au. sediba is defined not by the presence of autapomorphic  features [features distinct to it] but by a unique combination of primitive and derived traits.  

Berger and the baraminologists stand in sublime contrast, where all the data are brought into play by the evolutionists, while the creationists play Zeno Slicing to smudge up the picture. And what applies in our one species is only magnified when we step back to look at more of the living world, current and fossil. That leaves us with the final Wood critic, Gordon Wilson’s 2010 “Classic Multidimensional Scaling Isn’t the Sine Qua Non of Baraminology” grousing how paleontologist Phil Senter had the cheek in “Using creation science to demonstrate evolution: Application of a creationist method for visualizing gaps in the fossil record to a phylogenetic study of coelurosaurian dinosaurs” to turn the baraminologists’ own tool of multidimensional analysis on the coelurosaurs, demonstrating that by their own measures birds are descended from theropod dinosaurs. Senter repeated the show in 2011 with “Using creation science to demonstrate evolution 2: morphological continuity within Dinosauria.” Interestingly, Wood’s 2011 responses to Senter’s usage of baraminology included one published in the same journal that Senter had appeared in, Journal of Evolutionary Biology, prompting Wood to ponder (his ellipsis) how his “experience with this paper make me question the common wisdom that creationists can't get their responses published simply because they're creationists. Perhaps there's more to this... dare I ask—could it be a quality problem?”

The short answer would be yes. But we can sympathize with his plight. How grim is it when the creationists can’t even rely on their own methods to keep the evolutionary monster at bay? Which brings us back to Lightner’s Ark Kind paper, where they stumbled over more of why natural evolution works and creationism doesn’t:  

At the opposite end of the spectrum, there are times where the statistical tests have shown discontinuity between animals connected by hybrid data (Brophy and Kramer 2007; Wood 2008, pp. 57–60). In one case (McConnachie and Brophy 2008) a dataset of 102 mostly osteologic characters was used to evaluate landfowl. Three of the putative holobaramins were connected by hybrid data. Hybrid data is considered more conclusive than the statistical tests because it requires considerable continuity at the genetic, metabolic, developmental, and immunologic levels. This discrepancy between the hybrid data and statistical results is a concern because datasets involving fossils are generally limited to osteologic characters.  

This is intriguing. What is this “discontinuity” matter? Hybridization comes into play closer to the speciation process than would morphology, which can change adaptably far more gradually over time, long after any initial speciation event that spawned the new lineage. So from an evolutionary point of view, speciation should connect taxa in close nesting clades, while the bigger morphological field would nest in far higher systematic categories, including families. But the creationists are committed to the existence of firm baraminological boundaries distinguishing the kinds; any murkiness at the boundaries are signals that they haven’t identified a creature that exclusively reproduces “after its kind.” As we saw with Wood and Cavanaugh’s horses, though, monobaramins would just be evolution by another name, so there is a pitfall of their method identifying only that a group comprise a monobaramin. But beyond that, they have the nagging problems of how to account for diversification within the baramins in the constrained time between Creation and the Flood (to cover the fossil record preserved in that proposed event) and in the time since the Flood (to handle the present glut of species). Involving around 1,500year timeframes--or less.

In responding to a creationist commenting on a 2016 post by Joel Duff on “The Great Genetic Bottleneck that Contradicts Ken Ham’s Radical Accelerated Diversification,” Christine Janis reminded that “Genesis 12.16 claims that Abraham already had oxen and sheep (not to mention camels and asses), so the entire diversity of modern ruminants (plus extinct forms) must have been accomplished in around a thousand years. That’s mouse deer (shown by genetics to be the basal form today), to ox, giraffe, moose, etc. in 200-300 generations.” So what did Lightner’s ammo say? The 2007 paper by Timothy Brophy (harkening from the creationist-friendly Liberty University) and “independent scholar” P. A. Kramer is titled “Preliminary Results from a Baraminological Analysis of the Mole Salamanders (Caudata: Ambystomatidae).” Available online only as an extended abstract, it concludes that there are multiple kinds of mole salamanders; therefore, there are multiple kinds within a family in this case. Now there’s a slippery slope systematically, given how many taxa there are and how limited is the booking space available on the Ark. The matter is only compounded with Michelle McConnachie & Brophy’s 2008 paper “A Baraminological Analysis of the Landfowl (Aves: Galliformes)” which tried to filter the cladistic data field culled from Gareth Dyke et al.’s 2003 paper on the galliform birds into the baraminological box. While the Dyke paper resolved the lineages very precisely, McConnachie and Brophy ran into trouble, finding that (our bold) “Both baraminic distance correlation analysis and multidimensional scaling suggest the possibility of four holobaramins within the landfowl order: Megapodiidae, Cracidae, Numididae, and the remaining Phasianoidea.” But looking at it from the hybridization side, the creationists discovered something different, forcing them to pull back and “conclude that the landfowl are composed of two monobaramins,” the Megapodiidae and the “most surprising result” where the Cracidae are included in the phasioanoid monobaramin.” A big “gosh!” here, as the creationist jumped back from the broader holobaramin (the term for a truly separate created kind) to the more open subset of monobaramin (naturally evolved lineages within some larger putative baramin). But the irony is that none of these findings should come as a surprise to the evolutionary cladist, as the Dyke paper placed those

megapodes out on the far wing of the Galliformes, while the cracids landed at the node where the Galliformes split into them and the other phasianoids. And the guineafowl (Numididae)? Those are positioned as a side branch at the base of the phasianoids. For all their twiddling of the physical data (none of which emanated from the sweat of the creationist brow) all they ended up doing was reiterating the findings of the standard systematics, just muddied up in terminology that meant way less than it needed, inconsistent even on their own terms. Over on the evolution side, similar things have admittedly occurred now and then. For instance, the pangolin was grouped with anteaters, sloths, and armadillos into the clade edentata because they all shared certain morphological characters, such as toothlessness (despite all having the genes for teeth and enamel—who knew?). However, genetic data later showed that pangolins (order pholidota) are sister to the carnivorans. Genetic data always has the final say. Oh, if only creationists had something like that in their world. In fact the Lightner team finally directly addresses such genetic similarities in the concluding section of their paper, but look how it figures in their hierarchy (our bold):  

Other data, including results of statistical baraminology analyses as well as protein and DNA sequence data, will be evaluated where it seems appropriate. However, none of these will be given as high a priority as hybrid data or the cognitum. This may seem counterintuitive to some. Sequence data is considered hard, objective data. The cognitum seems so subjective. Certainly, it would seem that it is more scientific to use hard data than the subjective cognitum. Besides, these other methods use such interesting mathematical analyses that they must be better, right? In reality, the really good math masks the fact that conclusions based on these other data have a highly subjective component. Statistical baraminology analyses are based on certain selected character traits, and character selection is not an unbiased process. Brophy (2008) [a PowerPoint lecture version of the aforementioned McConnachie and Brophy paper], in explaining why hybrid data and statistical baraminology results were in conflict, proposed that purpose for which the dataset was gathered could bias the results. In the case of landfowl (Galliformes), the dataset was intended to divide the birds up for

taxonomic purposes. This seems a reasonable explanation for why the statistical tests based on that dataset divided birds that were connected by hybrid data.  

What exactly is that “highly subjective component” of DNA sequence and protein data, you ask? Well, here it is (our bold):  

To some, using sequence data may seem more objective. Certainly identifying sequences is objective. It is the interpretation that is not. How does one distinguish between sequences that are the same because two creatures are from the same kind and sequences that are the same because God created them the same in two different kinds? Why do differences exist? Are they simply variability God placed in one created kind at Creation? Are they differences that have arisen within a kind since Creation? Are they created differences between different kinds? Are they differences that have arisen between two different created kinds that originally had identical or very similar sequences in a particular region? The bottom line is that we don’t have enough understanding of genetics to understand the significance of most sequence data.  

So, even though it is an observable fact that genes are inherited and modified through descending lineages, logically extending this process backwards through time is just a subjective interpretation? Note that not one of these questions have been tested by creationists. Why? Because they have no data even hinting at the idea that God placed sufficient genetic variation in organisms only some 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, or ones filtered through the Flood event only 4,500 years ago, to account for what is observed in their putative descendants today. They have to ignore the vast majority of data and radically reinterpret what little data they do evaluate. This has been seen over and over again. The last thing we will quote from the Lightner paper is this, a theoretical shoe drop if ever there was one (our bold):  

Once the modern descendants of the Ark kinds are determined, we need to use this information to infer what the actual pair on the Ark may have looked like. One thing that is evident when looking at animals in the world today, many have specialized to live in specific niches. There are hares that live in the arctic, others that live in the desert, and others in intermediate climates. There are cattle (for example, the yak) that can withstand high altitudes and cold climates; there are

other cattle (for example, zebu) that are adapted to live in hot, arid climates. We also see specialization in domestic animals, where some cattle have been bred for milk production and others have been bred for beef production. Given these trends, the Ark kinds would be relatively unspecialized animals that fit nicely into the cognitum of the created kind.  

Neither coauthor holds his breath for the day that creationists figure out what the Ark kind archetypes looked like, or reconstruct their genetics in the way evolutionary paleogenomics have already commenced. This is because they cannot even seem to determine who is related to who, as they ignore the genetics that signals that very thing. And there’s something else that they must always leave out. It’s not just the what and when of things, but the where.  

Some Bats in the Baraminological Belfry  

Consider Todd Wood’s 2008 book, which we’ve already encountered regarding felids, whales and peccaries. What the other analysts did on a piecemeal scale, Wood pumped up into a more comprehensive contortion of others’ scientific data. Or at least segments of it, for just like Aaron, Wood was often cavalier about data removal. Regarding the Erinaceidae (hedgehogs), for example, of the 47 taxa available for study, he tossed out 22 of them! But when Wood tackled just two of those many bat families, the spectacled bats (Mormoopidae) and leaf-nosed bats (Phyllostormidae), placing them as separate baramins, he inadvertently highlighted how argumentative and unproductive the creationist model has become. Some background. As has been noted, bats have a checkered taxonomical record, and for a darned good reason. There are lots of living ones (1200 species, comprising 20% of mammals on their own), but precious few as fossils—something that shouldn’t be at all surprising, since most bats aren’t especially large. Indeed, some are the smallest animals on earth. Being tiny with fragile bones that can easily erode away raises the odds against ending up getting to be a fossil display in a modern museum, and the earliest known bats found, like Icaronycteris from 52

million years ago found in Wyoming (described in 1966 by Glenn Jepson), were very small indeed (their bodies about palm-sized), and already belonged to three now extinct families, as Gerard Case illustrated in his 1982 A Pictorial Guide to Fossils. The books by John Hill & James Smith in 1984, and Brock Fenton’s in 1992, found only seven of the eighteen living bat families had fossil examples adequate for identification (an eighth was problematic), meaning around half of the families had no fossil record at all to assist in clarifying the trajectory of their evolution. Nor has the situation improved spectacularly since. In 2009 Thomas Eiting & Gregg Gunnell found “At the genus level, the bat fossil record is estimated to be 12% complete,” and Thierry Smith et al.’s 2012 review found at that genus level, while 26 had some fossil examples, these were usually just teeth and bits of jaws, with only half a dozen of the much rarer full body fossils that could tell scientists more than that some of their genus was flapping around at that time. So you’ve got little tiny animals with a sparse fossil record sprinkled over 50 million years, where the genetic information in living forms suggest their deep roots could go all the way back into the Cretaceous, but their earliest fossil examples date only some 10 million years later, by which time (duh) they were visibly echolocating fliers like the bats we’re familiar with. This was perfect fodder for creationists to play what coauthor JD calls the Bermuda Triangle Defense: highlighting the absence of fossil transitions without examining the geological reasons for them, exactly as believers in the Bermuda Triangle do when they point to “mysterious” ship and plane disappearances without checking what the weather might have been (such as severe hurricanes occurring when the crafts “mysteriously” disappeared). In 1993 Duane Gish discussed none of their fossil forensics when he dismissed on principle the identification of fossil bat teeth that Laurie Godfrey’s “Creationism and Gaps in the Fossil Record” indicated by their shape and structure that they would have evolved from insectivores (a view consistent with subsequent work, where Gregg Gunnell & Nancy Simmons’ 2005 review was even more explicit: “Proto-bats were most likely arboreal, small, insectivorous, and nocturnal”).

Two years later, Gish pushed the Bermuda Triangle Defense even farther when he insisted “The paucity of the fossil record of bats cannot be used as an excuse by evolutionists, since we do have many fossils of bats. The fossils of bats recovered at Messel were the most numerous of fossil creatures discovered at that site.” That was a dissembling evasion, as his source for that (a 1992 Scientific American article by Gerhard Storch) had actually said (our bold) “fossil bats are normally rare, but at Messel they outnumber other mammals, probably because they were often caught above the Messel lake when it released gases.” This referred to something Gish didn’t explain—that fifty million years ago in that spot in Germany, Messel functioned like the deadly African volcanic lake in Cameroon that killed thousands of villagers in the 20th century through natural releases of carbon dioxide. Gish at least tried to overtly misrepresent the data. Other antievolutionists aren’t even aware of how much of the data field had been misrep___________________________________________________________________

How to make a bat wing There are several factors to consider in working out how bat wings evolved (quite apart from whether the Fossil Genie will swoop in and supply us with the early stages). There’s the presence of webbed digits, the elongation of the forelimb, and the reduction of overall bone thickness (handy to keep body weight down to get more flap for the muscular burn). While creationists were not pondering how a non-flying bat ancestor could have come to have such modified limbs by natural processes, those armed with an evolutionary perspective were not so limited. Bone thickness involves the Hoxd13 gene, as Chih-Hsin Chen et al. found in 2005. Bmp plays a role, with Scott Weatherbee et al. showing in 2006 how repression of it by fibroblast growth factor Fgf8 contributes to the retention of the interdigital skin as membrane. On the elongation issue, in 2006 Karen Sears et al. identified experimentally Bmp2 as “potentially a key mechanism in their evolutionary elongation.” In 2008 Kimberly Cooper & Clifford Tabin further pinpointed the Prx1 homeodomain transcription factor as at

least one regulator of Bmp2 in digit extension. And in 2014 Mengyao Dai et al. further isolated the role of the Meis2 and Mab21/2 homeobox genes, along with the T-box Tbx gene. None of these were new genes, requiring a unique origin, meaning the basement genetic architecture to form the specialized bat wings were available for natural selection to work on. Should you be surprised?   resented for them, as coauthor JD learned while attending the 1998 Whitworth University “Creation Week” organized by Stephen Meyer. In the course of extoling the virtues of Intelligent Design, geologist John Wiester brought up bats as an example of a problem for evolution. When JD asked what he knew of their fossil record, though, this turned out to be only the basic examples featured in the creationist literature —an interesting circularity, given that Wiester was among the critical reviewers of the revised edition of Davis and Kenyon’s Of Pandas and People (which included Michael Behe and Meyer, but also theologian J. P. Moreland and the more overtly creationist Norman Geisler and Kurt Wise). It was another decade before the Fossil Genie got in the act. By 2008 another bat turned up from the same deposit as Icaronycteris, covered in Simmons et al.’s “Primitive Early Eocene bat from Wyoming and the evolution of flight and echolocation.” Though still possibly millions of years removed from the origins of bats as fliers, there were relevant clues nonetheless of what changes had occurred in the meantime, as Onychonycteris finneyi retained claws on all five digits, unlike later bats (see also the  Info Box). The fossil had some squashed parts in the areas that would have verified that it could echolocate, though in 2010 Nina Veselka et al. found possible signs of that “A ___________________________________________________________________

And for comic relief, a brief pseudoscience break: interestingly, the Sears paper came up in a 2016 Acts & Facts article by Frank Sherwin, “The Evidence Rats Out Bat Evolution,” but only for an authority quote that bats possessed elongated digits. When Sherwin went on to describe the genetics of bat fingers, he did not

note who it was who had worked that out (perhaps wanting to leave the impression that the creationist side had some hand in it). Instead, the thrust of his article was another Bermuda Triangle Defense play, hyperbolically so in his case, as he wondered how “untold billions of intermediate creatures (not a rodent but certainly not yet a bat) survived for millions of years while waiting for such well-constructed wings and prey-catching abilities.” He even complained that (our bold) “an early bat fossil dated at ’50 million years’ revealed no noteworthy increase in digit proportion,” when no one was demanding that a form already flying for millions of years should exhibit that characteristic. But then Sherwin was running rather far ahead of the data anyway, including his own. Such as claiming: “Of the 1240 living mammal species, almost 25 percent are the amazingly designed bats.” Sherwin apparently had confused how many bat species there were with the total mammal count (currently upward of 5500), compounded the mistake by citing as his only source his own brief 2003 “Bat-tastic Bats” that had given no such information. He also asserted that “over 1,000 fossil bats have been unearthed.” Sherwin offered no source at all for that.   bony connection signals laryngeal echolocation in bats.” The reaction of creationists in 2008 was predictable. Answers in Genesis objected to its being called “primitive” but relied only on a BBC secondary account. The prolific David Coppedge at least cited the Simmons paper directly, but didn’t discuss the features (like those retained claws, and its resemblance to the other known early bats) that supported such an adjective. Quoting the commentary by John Speakman in Nature on how the costly energetic character of echolocation was directly offset by flight, Coppedge disparaged the idea that this accounted for the absence of that capacity in terrestrial vertebrates, but without acknowledging any of the papers Speakman had referenced on that (Roderick Suthers et al. 1972, Speakman et al. 1989 and Speakman & Paul Racey in 1991). And for good measure in the evasion parade, Coppedge even waved Duane Gish’s 1995 argument, thus fielding more Bermuda Triangle Defense by proxy.[42]

But enough of the flunkies. How did Todd Wood (one of the founding professionals in the baraminology endeavor) address those two families of bats, spectacled and leaf-nosed? Conventional taxonomy has consistently put those two families right together as immediate sister clades, variously reviewed in works from Simmons & Jonathan Geisler back in 1998 (“Phylogenetic relationships of Icaronycteris, Archaeonycteris, Hassianycteris, and Palaeochriopteryx to extant bat lineages, with comments on the evolution of echolocation and foraging strategies in Microchiroptera”) to Emma Teeling’s “Phylogenies, fossils and functional genes: the evolution of echolocation in bats” in 2012. Likewise for the 2016 phylogeny by Danny Rojas (suggesting neotropical bat diversity was spurred by an earlier speciation pulse around eighteen million years ago) and the 2019 one by John Hawkins (challenging the traditional microbat/macrobat morphological distinction as not so informative phylogenetically). Yet in pegging each as clearly separate holobaramins, Wood indulged in some fancy footwork on how much data he’d survey. There are only two genera of mormoopid bats, involving a mere ten species, two of which happen to be extinct fossil ones: Mormoops magna and Pteronotus pristinus. Now Wood relied on one source for his data, a 2001 paper by Simmons & Tenley Conway. Those authors excluded M. magna from their study because it was “known only from fossil humeri,” and yet it was the P. pristinus (with a fairly complete skull) that Wood omitted “due to extremely low taxic relevance”— criteria for which he did not explain. We might conjecture whether lopping off half of that family’s fossil record in this particular way might have been done precisely to distance them from any potential relatives, like those leaf-nosed bats, that might be compared on the basis of their skulls. But with or without the fossils, that bat was still out of the bag, as the Simmons & Conway paper Wood had relied on had definitively concluded “The phyllostomid and mormoopid taxa in our study together formed a clade.” Wood’s data-flushing grew bolder with the phyllostomid bats, a family with an order of magnitude more living species to look at, morphologically and genetically. They’re among the largest bat families endemic to the Americas, with 140 species in 49 genera, and

naturalists were drawn early on to study their relationships on account of their strikingly diverse feeding habits, including “sanguivory (bloodfeeding), insectivory, carnivory, omnivory, nectarivory, palynivory (pollen-feeding), and frugivory,” as Andrea Wetterer et al.’s 2000 paper put it (by the way, most bats fall into the insectivore category). Wood drew on Wetterer’s extensive phylogeny and review as his source, a paper explicitly coalescing “Data from Diverse Morphological Systems, Sex Chromosomes, and Restriction Sites.” And yet the creationist elected to exclude “all molecular characters” and a whopping 83 of the 140 taxa to deduce their proposed baraminic status. Systematic whittling with a chainsaw. Not that Wood didn’t recommend further research on these bats, but it’s revealing to read what he had in mind (our bold): “Creationists ought to continue studying this family of bats, since the amazing variety of feeding habits in the Phyllostomidae would make an excellent model system to study the origin of carnivory as a part of post-Fall natural evil.” And have any creationists done that in the decade since? To our knowledge, no. There has been a ladling of praiseworthy declarations now and then, though, as in December 2017 when James Johnson praised bat pollination of cactus in Acts & Facts: “as you exchange gifts with loved ones this Christmas, many of God’s creatures and plants will be exchanging gifts, too.” Which pious fluff may be compared to what the evolutionary scientists were up to in the hard work department during that same time. Just as Wood was hacking the leaf-nosed bats down to baraminological size, and in stark contrast to his “natural evil” medievalism, in 2008 Theodore Fleming & Nathan Muchhaka were working out the ecological dynamics of how nectarivory arose not just in bats, but also in birds. When the diversity of the plants are taken into account, along with their individual phylogenies (that constrain how either can adapt with modified forms) there turned out to be a pattern to the regional groups: large non-hovering generalist birds and bats dominate Southeast Asia and Australasia, large hovering specialist birds (but generalist bats) are found in Africa, while small hovering specialized birds and bats (including the phyllostomids) are seen in the Americas.

Regarding the leaf-nosed bats, in 2010 Thomas Datzmann et al. constrained their origination time frame to a ten million-year period (29-20 Mya), and the “type and structure of papillae and muscular innervation” in their specialized tongues “revealed levels of difference in line with an independent evolution of nectarivory in these bats.” Moreover, the circumstances of their evolution has brought up some conservation concerns: in 2017, Stephanie Ortega-García et al. deduced that the earliest of these Neotropical nectar feeders lived in a cooler climate, and the legacy of their inherited metabolism regarding their comfortable thermal niches suggested that just a modest 1°C rise in temperature could threaten the survival of even the nocturnal ones. Evolutionary biology figures things out, you see, rather than growing exhausted trying to limit the range of what they must explain away. Over on the genetic side, Liliana Dávalos et al.’s 2012 paper, “Understanding phylogenetic incongruence: lessons from phyllostomid bats,” were also not trying to delineate the role of “natural evil” in their origin, but instead, the impact of natural mutations as contributors to their specialized form and behavior. In particular, the nectar-feeders among them “have extremely high metabolic rates” which involves “almost exclusive use of dietary carbohydrates in respiration, instead of fat reserves.” Armed with that data, they suggested variations in the bats’ cytochrome b proteins (“essential for correct assembly of the entire respiratory complex”) had played a part, where specific amino acid substitutions “may be the result of a short burst of positive selection” that in turn had led to previous uncertainty in sorting out some of their lineages where similar replacements had occurred convergently.[43] Now you may recall how the bat families Wood chose to cover all live in the Americas. Indeed, there’s quite a biographical consistency about them, as already noted for those leaf-nosed ones, and likewise for the spectacled bats, just part of a long-standing ecological network among the mammals there, outlined in 2004 and 2006 papers by Liliana Dávalos. Which highlights something missing from Wood’s treatment of these critters: why is it that these forms (including their fossils) are found only in the Americas? Their two kinds were hypothetically created in Eden (where presumably Adam named them), and yet the

only fossils found (presumably drowned in the Flood) only show up clear across the planet. As for their Ark-bound representatives, though, they evidently made a post-Flood beeline (sorry, bat-line) all the way across ten thousand miles or so of land and ocean (supposedly undergoing tumultuous revision in the fun house post-Flood period) without leaving a trace of their existence along the way, to arrive in a nice neat cluster of ecological interaction with the nectar-dispensing plants obliterated in the Flood but that subsequently got to be there ... how? Such as the giant elephant cacti (Pachycereus pringlei) of the Sonoran Desert. Who’da thunk cacti could be so frisky in their migratory habits, and so dedicated to keeping pace with the flying bats that end up as their pollinators. And we do mean bats, plural. One is the lesser long-nosed bat Leptonycteris yerbabuenae, a phyllostomid which swoops in to hover and lap the nectar with their long adaptive tongue, as covered by M. A. Horner et al. in 1998. These are a migratory offshoot of the southern long-nosed bats (L. curasoae), splitting off over the last few hundred thousand years, per Gerald Wilkinson & Theodore Fleming’s 1996 study. As usual, such details did not clutter the baraminological analysis of Todd Wood. Only the lesser long-nosed bats have some new competition, from an entirely different family of bats, the Vespertilionidae (some 240 species that cover most of North America), described systematically by Zachary Roehrs et al. in 2010. That family is insectivorous, but in 2013 Winifred Frick et al. reported how one of them (Antrozous pallidus) has found that bug chasing on the big night-blooming flowers of the cactus offers a handy desert dessert. Because they land directly on the plant and can nuzzle down more easily into the flower than the specialized energy-intensive hovering L. yerbabuenae, its competition turns out to be better at pollinating the cactus than they are. What the scientists are seeing is the adaptive shift to a new ecological niche literally on the fly, as A. pallidus is the first of its family known to be getting into the nectar slurping business. In the race between the creationists working out the role of “natural evil” versus evolutionists plowing away on the natural

selection front, which side do you think has been commanding more of the data field? Certainly not Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis, where Joel Duff reported on an October 2019 lecture by Karina Altman (a marine biologist, and resident zookeeper for AiG’s mini-menagerie of pettables) hadn’t advanced beyond recycling their generalized tropes against natural selection and speciation, without addressing how that creationism had to rely on those very things to sustain the need for way fewer created kinds than species (fossil or living). And how many fewer, you may ask? Take a visit to Ham’s Ark Encounter, where the model of created kinds had to be made flesh (or at least physically dimensional surrogates). Duff noted their confusion in 2016 (“Ark Encounter Common Ancestors”) regarding the bats, quoting their website explanation:  

It is quite possible that every bat is a member of the same kind, in which case only fourteen would have boarded the Ark. But without solid data to show that the various bat families can interbreed, we have split them into 22 kinds, representing living and extinct families. Since the Ark had to house 14 of each kind of bat, then using the worst case scenario, there would have been 308 bats living on board.  

Going by a blurry photo at their website listing the kinds aboard, coauthor JD spotted 7 extinct bat kinds aboard, and 19 living ones listed, for 26 total (not 22), so future researchers may be able to work out more clearly which ones the Ark Encounter creationists listed and which were actually general headings (the Ark Encounter has not simply posted the list to allow such clarification, let alone justify its content). In any case, it looks like they’re presuming to draw the baramin line at the family level, but whether 22 or 26, the creationists face a problem. Duff asked:  

How could the incredible array of diverse characters that are found among the bats be contained in just a few ancestors just 4000 years ago? Bats are so diverse that scientists classify them as an order with suborders and then families within those suborder.  Genetically and morphologically bats are at least as diverse as the orders of rodents, carnivores and ungulates. Each of these orders of mammals contain many families which the Ark Encounter believes are separate kinds.  

At the very least there remain an awful lot of bats flitting around in Noah’s Ark without proper systematic grounding. All in all, we have seen time and again that creationists are so far behind the data curve, they do not even realize there is one. We have seen that creationists cannot consistently draw dividing lines between kinds, and they cannot explain why organisms which are shown to be related genetically, morphologically, and embryologically are actually not related. And, they have no way to explain why there are certain similarities and differences among entirely unrelated groups of organisms, other than to mutter “common design” while getting out the hatchet to chop off more data. In 2006 Alan Gishlick summarized the problems facing the fledgling baraminology: “Despite its use of computer software and flashy statistical graphics, the practice of baraminology amounts to little more than a parroting of scientific investigations into phylogenetics. A critical analysis of the results from the one ‘objective’ software program employed by baraminologists suggests that the method does not actually work.” From our vantage in 2019 we can see that the method still doesn’t work. But it is the best they have, and we’ve seen venues like the Ark Encounter clumsily expanding their conception of “kinds” as they try to incorporate the latest goalpost moving by the baraminologists. In the end, the entirety of organismal systematics is one big mystery to creationists, and likely to remain so.



6. More Evidence for Evolution Back in Chapter 3, we talked about evidence for evolution. We discussed comparative anatomy, fossils, and genetics, and we have talked a lot about genetics in the past two chapters. Here though we’ll start with how genetics comes into play in speciation. In that “Evolution and Evidence” chapter we explained that genetic differences build up in populations of organisms that eventually stop allowing some to consistently interbreed. This is a well-documented and well-understood phenomenon among biologists and has been observed in modern organisms, such as cichlid fish, as well as the fossil record, from diatoms and other microfossils to our own genus Homo. As we saw with kinds and baraminology in the previous chapter, at the higher theoretical end creationists today accept that speciation occurs. Even the godfather of Flood Geology, George McCready Price, came to permit speciation within created kinds by the 1940s, calling them “‘natural species’ when he was being careful,” as Kurt Wise tactfully put it in a 2018 homage to Price. Yet both coauthors are still confronted from time to time with antievolutionists who think this does not happen. Never mind how this shunts them back centuries, to the mindset prevailing when Carolus Linnaeus started the modern systematic ball rolling. In those days species were seen in “essentialist” terms, as static entities (though scholars from James Larson in 1968, to Mary Winsor in 2003 and David Stamos in 2005 have thrashed over how much of that perspective Linnaeus embraced). But it’s not the 18th century, and everyone who seeks to account for the observed diversity of life has to come to grips with the same body of evidence that compelled a recognition of Darwinian common descent in the 19th century (in which species were still very much real taxonomical units, but no longer convincingly seen as fixed and immutable), a conceptualization which has only been strengthened by the avalanche of discoveries in the years since. For the chapter “Is Speciation Evidence for Creation or Evolution?” from The New Answers Book 4, Gary Parker was the

author. At first glance, he’d seem a qualified person for the job. He has a bachelor’s in biology/chemistry, a master’s in biology/physiology, and a doctorate of education in biology/geology. Parker has even contributed actual technical work, a 1967 paper “The Influence of Temperature and Thyroxine on Oxygen Consumption in Rana pipiens Tadpoles” that came out of his Master’s thesis. So, like Georgia Purdom and Andrew Snelling, Parker has indeed added to the sum of scientific knowledge. What is he doing now, you ask? Not following up on frog biology (or R. pipiens’ systematics, for that matter, the northern leopard frog being not only a commonly used lab animal, but a species with an interesting evolutionary history, including a post-glacial dispersal bump in North America, chronicled by Eric Hoffman & Michael Blouin in 2004, without Mr. Parker’s input on whether any of that correlated with the Flood). According to Lawrence Ford’s Institute for Creation Research’s 2006 article “Evolution Teacher Returns as Creationist,” Parker and his wife were currently operating the Creation Adventures Museum, a house-housed facility in Arcadia, Florida. Yes, instead of continuing to contribute to the technical literature, he has opted to superintend a modest establishment that conducts creationist seminars on such minutia as identifying shark teeth and shells, conducting field trips to the Grand Canyon, and presentations objecting to human evolution. Most predictable. Amid the biographical details, Ford also bemoaned modern church-state separation:  

In 1963, the same year Parker was hired to teach at Desoto, Madalyn Murray O'Hair pushed her atheist mandate through the Supreme Court in a case that ended school prayer for millions of children across the United States. In the four decades since this ruling, Americans have seen other liberties squashed by the Court: displays of the Ten Commandments, Bible reading in schools, Christmas nativity scenes in town squares, prayers by students at school events, and many more.  

This was an allusion to the Abington School District v. Schempp court ruling, but the ICR article neglected to mention that placing the Ten Commandments and Christmas nativity scenes on federal land is

unconstitutional not because it offended the likes of atheist O’Hair (who was not the only party to the suit), but because it violates the First Amendment, and that forcing students to pray in public schools is similarly unconstitutional (as well as being rudely presumptuous for children or their parents who do not share the faith represented by those mandated prayers). These same creationists proudly proclaim that our Constitution and America as a whole are founded on Christian principles (see the Info Box  on David Barton). An ironic stance, compounded by its being historically questionable, as variously explored in Brooke Allen’s Moral Minority, Forrest Church’s So Help Me God or Steven Waldman’s Founding Faith, and Andrew Seidel’s The Founding Myth. Preamble aside, let us dive into what Parker has to say about speciation. He begins the chapter with a story:  

In a debate at a major Texas university, the creationist was challenged with this claim: Hawaiian fruit flies that could once all interbreed had changed into numerous reproductively isolated species, and that, said the challenger to considerable applause, “proved evolution.” The creationist responded (also to considerable applause) that such a change would be the opposite of evolution. Losing the ability to interbreed, each “new species” would have less genetic variability, less ability to meet changes in its existing environment, and less ability to explore new environments—all suggesting demise and decline rather than the expansion of genetic potential required for what Darwin called “the production of higher animals.”

Now, this is a lot to unpack. First, remember that we pointed out in the White chapter that evolution occurs via the production of genetic variations (through recombination and/or mutations), those differences are selected for or against (genetic drift and gene flow occur also), and new species are formed over generations as a result. And, remember that creationists accept all of this, more or less, kinda sorta. The previous chapters saw that creationists also cannot determine how many species can form before reaching that unspecified genetic barrier. Which leaves Parker’s bold presumption: do new species have less genetic variability than their parent species? Well … no… and Parker’s failure to cite supporting technical information for that rather

gave away the trick (forgetting even to use the handkerchief over the hat before not pulling the rabbit out of it). We’re left scratching our heads, wondering how to go about determining   ___________________________________________________________________

David Barton wall building The court “historian” for the Christian America mythos is David Barton, who buys into anti-evolutionism and climate science denialism. He was even called as a witness by Senate conservatives in 2007 for a hearing on global warming, a subject for which he had even less expertise than history (he falsely claimed to have a doctorate in education, while holding only a BA from Oral Roberts University). The homophobic Barton reflects the dogmas of Christian Reconstructionism (AKA Dominionism) that seeks to restore America to godly governance; see “America Wake Up!” Rousas John Rushdoony (1916-2001) penned in 1983, and Chris Smith’s sobering 2012 review of that movement. Barton’s Wallbuilders movement inspires wide-eyed enthusiasm, such as former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (the YEC politician father of one of Donald Trump’s revolving door press secretaries, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who departed the Administration during our writing). In 2011 Gov. Huckabee advised Americans they should be made to watch Barton’s videos at gunpoint—never mind all the criticism leveled at Barton’s sloppy methods, including even by creationist Jay Wile! In 2012 Glenn Beck burbled on Barton’s new book about Thomas Jefferson: “If you've never read a David Barton book, you've not read a history book,” and “David is one of the best, if not the best historians in America”—just as the publisher pulled the tome after a scathing factual analysis from evangelicals Michael Coulter and Warren Throckmorton. Our references include postings by Robert Boston, Frederick Clarkson, Paul Harvey, Julie Ingersoll, Lauri Lebo, Kyle Mantyla, and Sarah Posner tracking Barton’s highly politicized Wallbuilders activities, with connections from former Speaker of the House Paul

Ryan to Christian nationalism and the recent “Project Blitz” campaign. the potential genetic variability of a population? All the nucleotide substitutions as a blob? Every conceivable duplicated gene? Every imaginable regulatory gene mutation? Well there’s a lot of tasks on the plate. Of course, Parker never got to the point of recognizing the scale of the claim he was dangling, let alone document it. Nor does he cite evidence for the claim that any new species has less ability to meet changes in its existing environment or explore its new environment. And what does that even mean? A reduced capacity to move around? Or a quivering disinclination to do so? We believe Parker means the species is less able to adapt to its environment, but then, he could have said that more clearly. And then move on to offering evidence for that—which is just what he didn’t do. Therefore, Parker’s paragraph is just a series of unsubstantiated assertions, and badly written at that. Despite Parker having written an entire chapter on speciation, this aforementioned quote is the only novel part of it; the rest consists of routine creationist tropes: God created kinds, mutations do not create new genes (but they do, according to Parker, produce new alleles—a foggy dividing line), and there is only variation within kinds (we’ve seen how viable that argument went regarding the baraminologists). Six pages later, Parker gets back to his assertion about species losing genetic variability, and again, he cites exactly zero sources. Did he think we’d not notice that the second time around? Thus, Parker really has no argument here.  

Riddle Me This: How does genetic information involve Satan?  

The next chapter of interest comes from The New Answers Book 2: “Information: Evidence for a Creator?” by Mike Riddle (the same fellow whose lack of curiosity on the reading of his own sources we have noted previously). Interestingly, the web version of this chapter has an opening line that the book does not: “What if it could be shown through empirical science that the universe consists of more than just mass and energy?”

Well, by definition, that is not possible. Empiricism refers to the philosophy that all knowledge is derived from sensory experience. Since empiricism requires matter (which Einstein showed is energy), it is not possible to learn about something that is not matter or energy or produced by these, such as thoughts, or floating magical pixies. We had to include this to beat presuppositionalists to the punch. You see, they seek to end-run the absence of physical evidence by inquiring that “If the universe is just matter and energy, then how can we know about logic, emotions, and such?” These things are all produced by matter—the brain, hormones, etc. But no one has ever produced evidence that thoughts and emotions can originate outside of a physical body. So, regardless of whether or not anything does actually exist outside “mass and energy” (we think Riddle means matter because mass is a measurement; put a different way, does it make sense to say “temperature and matter”?), we would not be able to determine that empirically. Theoretically, one could show that the Earth is young (6,000 to 10,000 years old) empirically, but one would be unable to show who created the Earth unless that being were to make him/her/itself known to us through sensory experience. And now that we have those philosophical niceties out of the way, on to the actual meat of Riddle’s chapter. Prepare for mythic melodrama:  

The battle of the ages began when Satan deceived himself into thinking he could overthrow the sovereign rule of God. Since then, Satan has opposed God and has become known as the adversary or great deceiver. Two opposing kingdoms are in conflict. The kingdom of Satan attacked the kingdom of God with the goal of destroying it. Both God and Satan have a purpose for history; but since God is God, and Satan is His created creature, God’s purpose is the ultimate one.  

What an entirely unnecessary opening, unless your only audience is intended to be people who take the Satan concept as being relevant to information theory and genetics. It certainly does paint the picture of “You’re either with us or against us” where the “us” includes God Himself. Therefore, if you disagree with us, you are working directly for the sum of all evil in the universe. A bit dramatic, no? If Riddle wanted

to come off as an objective interlocutor, this one paragraph dashes that hope. Still worse, because this acknowledges a bit of the theodicy issue, which is why evil exists in the world. While one could spend an entire book explaining theodicy (and people have), we will be brief on this issue. In this case, God knew when he created Satan that Satan would be able to lead people astray, dooming them to eternal torture. What is the point of that? Does God need people to suffer? If not, then why create a world in which he knew in advance that a large number of people would indeed suffer eternally? Was it really a good idea for Riddle to go out of his way to bring that up? Anyway, Riddle spends another paragraph explaining how Satan has been trying for years to get people to join his cause. However, Riddle makes a major historical mistake along the way (his emphasis):  

With the birth of the Church, Satan had a new enemy to contend with. The Church’s preaching of the gospel poses a serious threat to his kingdom. Every time the gospel is preached to nonbelievers, Satan is in danger of them believing it and leaving his kingdom. Thus, in order to prevent losing members in his kingdom, Satan must attack the Church and its message. Throughout the history of the Church, Satan has used various tactics from physical persecution to deceiving the Church into believing the wrong ideas and compromising God’s Word. Satan has launched these attacks from both outside and inside the Church. People have burned the Bible, banned it, changed it, or considered it irrelevant, especially in this modern scientific age. One of Satan’s major strategies against the church has been and is the philosophy of materialism.  

If you’re thinking that the salient mistake here is Riddle supposing that the Christian Church preceded the philosophy of materialism (when it dates back to at least the ancient Greeks—such as Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus) that’s true enough, but it’s something deeper even than that. In the creationist worldview old Satan predates human history, and in that dogmatic view has been doing his conniving best since before the Fall of Man. But the dangerous historical revisionism here is the implication that all the doctrinal tumult churning in the development of Christianity over the centuries was not on account of the texts

themselves being contradictory or unclear, but solely due to the machinations of the Evil One. With this one paragraph, Riddle tries to let human agents and their fallible and contentious reasoning off the hook for assembling divergent theological positions in the first place, then heretic hunting and burning of the rival denominations’ chapels and texts (along with the people too) when the contenders vied for political power. In this inversion of the historical record, only the Young Earth creationist positions of Answers in Genesis (which were not formalized until the 20th century) are valid scriptural interpretation—all else is literally of Satan.[44] Nothing troublesome could come from that attitude, now could it? Of course, that has no bearing on whether or not “materialism” is actually true; instead, the point here is that Riddle has his history backwards and inside-out. If Riddle wants his argument to have merit, then he needs to have an accurate understanding of the past. He’s not getting off to a good start. Riddle goes on, “Materialism is the assumption that all that exists is mass and energy (matter); there are no supernatural forces, nothing exists that is nonmaterial, and no God. Materialism is the foundational presupposition for atheism, humanism, and evolutionism.” The second sentence is entirely false. Atheism is defined as a belief in the nonexistence of any gods, humanism is a philosophy that emphasizes the value of humans, and evolution is a theory of biodiversity. Riddle (or rather the ideology he defends) has muddled a lot together here. First, something that may buck the assumed view: atheism does not necessarily include materialism, since atheism is solely a rejection of supernatural god claims, not a guide book on how the universe is put together. After all, what is meant by “nonmaterial”? Are space-time, physical forces, and dark matter not in a very fundamental sense nonmaterial, and are atheists not allowed to acknowledge the existence of such things? If we look to atheist physicists such as Lawrence Krauss and Sean Carroll (or devoutly religious ones, for that matter, such as Freeman Dyson or John Polkinghorne), then we see that they do most certainly allow these things (as well they should, given how quantum theory is chockablock with weirdness like “virtual

particles” that fizz in and out of existence as “vacuum fluctuations” like the smile on Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat). Are these atheists among them then materialists or not? But, this is part of the issue: what is meant by material? There is a huge scholarly debate in philosophy as to what material means, one which would carry us too far afield for the purposes of this book. So to summarize, materialism is not a necessary and foundational presupposition of atheism, even if a lot of atheists are “materialists” by practical inclination and attention to reason. Second, that humanism tag. The plain fact is there are Christian humanists and evolutionists (if we define evolutionism as the acceptance of the theory of evolution). Going way back, Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), more commonly known as Petrarch, is considered one of the first humanists and a well-known Christian. Spoiler alert: the humanists of the Renaissance were Christians! And, in Chapter 1, we pointed out a number of Christian evolutionists— Francis Collins, Mary Schweitzer, Robert Bakker, etc. The creationist dogma may not like these things, but the splendid variety of people’s beliefs are not obliged to follow their superficial prejudices. In the next paragraph, Riddle summarizes his argument and asks again the question of whether empirical science could do what is definitionally impossible: demonstrate the existence of things outside of sensory experience. We must wonder why Riddle is bothering with philosophy so much. If he wants to overturn evolution, which is a scientific theory, then he needs to do it with science and evidence, not philosophy. This ramble on history and philosophy is a totally useless preamble, unless it was intended to poison the well, to set up a trap door to permit the removal of evolution based on its philosophical presupposition of the dreaded “materialism”. It may be argued that preemptive well-poisoning is at the core of the form of conservative religious apologetics employed by people who end up as anti-evolutionists. In 2019 unrepentant materialist Matt Herron reviewed a set of Evolution News and Uncommon Descent posts on that subject from or about Barry Arrington, Michael Egnor, Ann Gauger, David Klinghoffer, Eric Metaxis, William Murray, Denyse O’Leary and Wesley Smith. It was a catalogue of dire things materialists like Herron were supposed to believe, prompting his summary:

 

I am really awful according to these folks: stupid, racist, unethical and immoral, “depraved”, an advocate of violence and a Holocaust apologist. Not to mention ignorant, deeply ignorant! I believe all kinds of absurd things, such as that life and minds don’t exist and that humans are coal. I deny reality and spread my impoverished superstition like the intellectual darkness that it is. I can understand if you don’t want to be friends with me. I never knew how horrible I am; I don’t even want to be friends with me anymore! For the record, I don’t believe any of those things. I don’t espouse violence. I don’t think the Holocaust was okay, or that children are equivalent to isopods, or that humans are nothing but carbon. I believe in life, love, minds, rational thought, and intellectual freedom. Why, then, do intelligent design advocates say all of these things about me? Why do they want you to believe that I’m a stupid, ignorant, evil person?  

Why, indeed? Herron did not venture an answer, but he need look no further than the creationist world view Mike Riddle represents to see from which philosophical well all were dipping. Now let’s move on to see how that perspective translated into seeming substance when Riddle finally got to his argument:  

For Darwinian (molecules-to-man) evolution to actually work, new genetic information is required each step of the way. In order for a fish to grow legs, new information must be encoded into the DNA. For a reptile to grow feathers, new information must be encoded into the DNA. For an apelike creature to evolve into a human, new information must be encoded into the DNA. This new information must add to or replace old information with new instructions to grow legs, or feathers, or human characteristics. But what is information and where does it come from?  

This is nothing we have not already seen before. Remember back in Chapter 4 how Bodie Hodge never defined information for us. Riddle similarly does not venture a clear conceptualization of the term. And like Hodge, we are presented with a laundry list of things for which there are vast amounts of data that the creationist simply hand-waved away. Riddle’s likely readership may think he’s made a case, but let’s go through them to see whether that holds up.

In the case of “fish growing legs,” we saw in Chapter 4 that the genes for patterning development in vertebrates were coopted from earlier genes. Fins formed from either the gill arches or lateral folds on the animal, and fish developed the ability to move around on land numerous times. There is so much literature on these transitions, and yet, all we get from Riddle is “new information must be encoded into the DNA” with no attempt to say what exactly that “new” DNA was supposed to be. There was certainly no mention of all the genetic and paleontological work that has gone into this field over the past several decades. And as Riddle never returned to legs or feathers or apes, what was even the point of mentioning these features? But there’s nothing to stop us from looking, is there.  

Flying the Creationist Coop: “Information” and the origin of feathers  

Though anti-Darwinist Joachim Andreas Wagner (1797-1861) was fine dumping Archaeopteryx (which he preferred to call “Gryphosaurus”) among the dinosaurs in a posthumously printed 1862 paper, and the creationist textbook Of Pandas and People implied in the 1990s it might have been just a peculiar feathered reptile and not a real bird, the presence of feathers has been the line in the sand for most everyone in the bird origins debate. Jonathan Kane’s 2016 book chapter on “Created Kinds and the Origin of Birds” took note of the intransigence of creationists Daniel Anderson 2006, David Menton 2008, and Michael Oard 2011 on bird evolution. While Anderson channeled a variety of largely dated or irrelevant sources (like Michael Denton), and Oard shoveled swathes of Alan Feduccia, Menton shot off the field entirely in making a claim so bizarre it could have come from Kent Hovind:  

The theropod type of dinosaur that is believed to have evolved into flying birds is, to say the least, poorly designed for flight. These dinosaurs have small forelimbs that typically can’t even reach their mouths. It is not clear what theropods, such as the well-known T. rex, did with their tiny front limbs. It is obvious that they didn’t walk, feed, or grasp prey with them, and they surely didn’t fly with them!

 

Poor Menton had obvious confused just one group (large tyrannosaurids) with the theropods most closely related to birds, like the much smaller bird sized Sinornithosaurus Kane alluded to, whose longer arms were not necessarily needed to stuff food in their mouths at all. Has Menton never watched a raptor or vulture feed, we wonder? But their arms are virtually indistinguishable from those of birds where it counts: the range of their motion and hence their capacity to glide or fly. All they needed were the feathers, and those indeed they had in abundance. There is a glut of data for feathers, dinosaur style. Huge piles of non-avian dinosaur fossils are known presently, including scads out of China, suggesting that many (if not most or all) theropods had feathery integuments in some way. One of the first feathered theropods found was reported by Pei-ji Chen et al. in 1998: Sinosauropteryx, which sparked some dispute for a while, when Theagarten Lingham-Soliar, Alan Feduccia and colleagues objected in a 2007 paper that the feather impressions in that fossil were actually collagen filaments. And Lingham-Soliar jousted with Aaron Van der Reest et al. over the feathers on Ornithomimus in 2016. But by then there was more to the story than just collagen. Jonathan Kane noted the implications of Fuchang Zhang et al. finding in 2010 “traces of pigment-bearing organelles called melanosomes, the same organelles that give the feathers of modern birds their colors. Collagen does not contain pigment, and the feathers of fossil birds contain melanosomes that are preserved in exactly the same way as those of Sinosauropteryx.” Lingham-Soliar and Feduccia have stuck to their No Dino Feathers position in the years since, even following Fiann Smithwick’s review of the accumulating evidence in 2017, by which time the list of feathered dinosaurs had expanded too far to be dismissed as isolated collagen misreads. Except, of course, by the resistant creationist Tortucan mindset. In spite of being aware of the Smithwick analysis, Brian Thomas & Jonathan Sarfati were still waving the Lingham-Soliar collagen flag in 2018, and likewise for Jerry Bergman following along in 2019. Here’s the thirty-five genera of feathered theropods we’re aware of, grouped chronologically by some of their clades. The Chinese

feathered dinosaurs noted in gray are nicely illustrated and discussed at length in Jonathan Kane’s book chapter. Juvenile specimens are marked here with a (J). Notice that the earliest taxa are living some fifteen million years prior to Archaeopteryx:   165-162

Serikornis 164

Pedopenna 161 Anchiornis

Anchiornithidae

Lefèvre et

Anchiornithidae

Xu & Zhang

(aka “Aurornis”?)

Anchiornithidae

al. 2017 2005 Hu

2009,

Foth

2013,

Godefroit & Cau

2013,

Xu & Zhao et al. 2009 160

Xiaotingia

Anchiornithidae

160

Eosinopteryx

Xing Xu et al. 2011 Godefroit &

Anchiornithidae (or early bird?)

Demuynck et al. 2013 (or

Lefèvre

et al. 2014) 122

Yixianosaurus   163

Ambopteryx

Anchiornithidae

Norell & Xu 2005

Scansoripterygid

160

Yi qi

Wang et al. 2019 Xing Xu

Scansoriopterygid

et al. 2015

Scansoriopterygid Scansoriopteryx (or bird?)

F. Zhang

(J)

2002

155

et

al.

(or Czerkas &

Feduccia 2014) 155

Tiny Scansoriopterygid

Epidexipteryx

F. Zhang et al. 2008

 

It’s looking like the Fossil Genie’s beginning to fill in more of the uncertainty regarding the earliest paravians. Which only makes the breadth of feathered theropods living after Archaeopteryx all the more impressive:   150

Rauhut

Sciurumimus

(J)

et

Basal megalosaurid or coelurosaur

al.

2012 Godefroit et

al.

2013 151

Göhlich

Juravenator

& Chiappe

Coelurosaur or compsognathid

2006 Chiappe & Göhlich 2010

125-122

Pei-ju

Sinosauropteryx Compsognathid

Chen et al. 1998

125

Jumbo Sinocalliopteryx compsognathid

Shu’an Ji et al. 2007

  126

Changyuraptor 125-122

Sinornithosaurus

Microraptorid

Han et al.

Microraptorid

Xing Xu (&

2014 Wu) et al. 1999, 2001

& 2003, Xu & Wu 2001 120

Zhou et al.

Microraptor

2002,

Microraptorid

Hwang 2002 Hone et al. 2010

  126

Jianchangosaurus Therizinosaur (J)

Pu et al. 2013

125

Xing Xu

Beipiaosaurus

(& Tang) et al.

Therizinosaur

1999

Xing Xu (& Zheng) et al. 2009

  Miniature Dilong tyrannosaurid 125 Large Yutyrannus tyrannosaurid   125

Xing Xu et al. 2004 Xing Xu et al. 2012 Bell et al. 2017

125

Basal Protarchaeopteryx oviraptorosaur

Qiang Ji

125

Qiang Ji

Caudipteryx

et

Oviraptorosaur

et al. 1998 al.

1998 Zhou

&

Wang 2000 125

Oviraptorosaur

Qiang Ji

Ningyuansaurus

et al. 2012

88-70

Funston

Avimimus

Oviraptorosaur

et al. 2016

72-66

Barsbold

Nomingia

et al.

Oviraptorosaur

2000 papers

124-120

He et al.

Similicaudipteryx

2008

Oviraptorosaur

(J)

Xing Xu et

al.

2010

  124

Jianianhualong 122

Troodontid

Xing Xu et al.

Troodontid

Qiang Ji et al.

Jinfengopteryx   122-120 Theropod Jeholornis avialan (or early bird?)  

2017 2005

Zhou & Zhang 2003, D. Li 2010 O’Connor

2012

&

2013

120

Lü &

Zhenyuanlong Dromaeosaurid

Brusatte 2015

75-71

Dromaeosaurid

Velociraptor   75

Shuvuuia  

Alverezsaurid

75-65

Ornithomimus

Turner et al. 2007

Schweitzer et al. 1999

Ornithomimosaur

Zelenitsky et al. 2012

Van

der

Reest

et

al. 2016 70

Deinocheirus

Yuong-

Ornithomimosaur

Nam Lee et al. 2014

  And the creationist reaction to all these specific feathered theropod taxa? Predictable. In 2016 Tim Clarey was one of the few instances of a creationist mentioning one of them, dubbing Zhenyuanlong a bird, without laying out his diagnostic criteria whereby he’d be able to distinguish that critter from other dromeosaurids—or would he go whole hog (or whole flock) and try to designate all dromeosaurids as birds? While Clarey makes up his mind, let’s step back and review what we’ve found so far. Juravenator and Epidexipteryx (mentioned last chapter regarding Michael Denton and Casey Luskin) date around the same time as the Jurassic’s definitely feathered Archaeopteryx. At this early stage, though, Juravenator is still sufficiently generalized that there has been argument over whether it is a coelurosaur or one of the similar appearing compsognathids, and it is of relevance that its covering fell in the protofeather filamentous category laid out quite specifically in the work of Richard Prum & Alan Brush in the early 2000s (whom we alluded to briefly in an Info Box back in Chapter 2). Prum & Brush rightly reasoned that any evolutionary scenario for the origin of feathers had to be consistent with how feathers were constructed developmentally, and they worked out a series of protofeather stages to fulfill those criteria. Right around that time the first signs of exactly such protofeathers were showing up in the new fossils, like Sinornithosaurus, so when Ryan McKellar et al. reported in 2011 finding various protofeathers exquisitely preserved in Cretaceous amber, this evidence just added to the growing pile of data.[45] It was unknowable whether the protofeathers belonged to feathered theropods or basal avians, but in 2014 Frank Sherwin was sure that he didn’t want McKellar’s fuzz to be from either, and invoked a critical letter to Science by Carla Dove & Lorian Straker questioning whether they might have been plant filaments or mammal hair.

“Clearly, the ‘dinofuzz’ buzz was pretty bad science,” Sherwin crowed. But what was “pretty bad science” was that Sherwin did not mention the response by McKellar’s team countering Dove & Straker’s claims. Such deck-stacking is par for the Acts & Facts course. In the presumptive prediction failure department, in 2006 creationist Eric Silvestru chortled over the lack of feathers in the first Juravenator specimen, and doubled down on it in a 2007 response to Robert Clark (a creationist defending the reality of the feathered dinosaurs). The 2010 finding of the feathered example suggests the Fossil Genie apparently preferred the evolutionary paleontologists more, which made Jerry Bergman still ignoring protofeathers in his 2019 “Did Dinosaurs Come with or without Feathers” even more anachronistically behind the data curve. Every bit of what you’re about to read was potentially knowable by him. The juvenile forms that were found, like Sciurumimus, Similicaudipteryx and Jianchangosaurus, offer further growth-stage glimpses into how feathers were figuring into the developing organism, and Ashley Heers, Kenneth Dial, Stephen Gatesy and colleagues have come at the matter from the other direction, drawing insights on the evolution of flight by studying what juvenile birds do today and working out the kinematics of flight. Adding to the analytical field: a 2019 robotic model of “the most basal non-volant winged dinosaur” Caudipteryx built by Yaser Talori et al. demonstrated how “forced vibrations induced by legs’ motions during running trained the Caudipteryx and the other feathered dinosaurs to flap their wings.” And what if you have more than two wings? The four-winged Microraptor and Changyuraptor revealed how varied early dino flyers could be (flight feathers on arms and legs), as well as figuring as the more interesting half of the briefly controversial chimeric “Archaeoraptor” fossil forgery, shown in Christopher Sloan’s 1999 National Geographic article, which drew gloating fury from an antievolutionary flock. Creationists include Steve Austin, Brad Harrub & Bert Thompson, Dave Nutting, Nancy Pearcey, Jonathan Sarfati, and Randy Guliuzza (still banging on it in 2016). Jonathan Wells’ Icons of Evolution dubbed it the “Piltdown Bird,” and there was even a sideswipe from political ideologue Chuck Colson orbiting the Intelligent Design camp.

National Geographic commissioned a post mortem by Lewis Simons in 2000, while Timothy Rowe et al. did likewise at Nature in 2001. So while “Archaeoraptor” never got off the ground, the very real Microraptor definitely did. A note is warranted on the flight capability of these early birds. Contemporary ones can zip off the ground in one go, no need to run or leap from a rock. But the anatomy of the basal birds (lacking a developed sternum for stronger flight muscles) was not quite at that level. In 1988, Gregory Paul considered the flying ability of Archaeopteryx “was still on the crude side,” and 1993 and 1994 papers by John Speakman and S. C. Thomson likewise supported more of a glider mode. Walter Bock added to that chorus in 2000, and in 2006 Philip Senter concluded that the layout of the bones and muscles in Archaeopteryx, Confuciusornis and Jeholornis didn’t permit the level of powered flight seen in later birds. A 2013 paper by Bock concurred, leaving us with the droll assessment of Henry Gee in 1999 still holding pretty much true today, namely that “Archaeopteryx could have flown far more efficiently than a sack of potatoes, but may not have had the endurance or maneuverability of a modern bird.” Now back to what was going on in those evolving flocks, like little Avimimus, a group of which feathered dinosaurs were caught in a local flash flood 70 Mya. And given how many oviraptorosaurs have been found with feathers, it’s also reasonable to presume others of their group from less detailed deposits had them too, such as the Mongolian brood-nesting Citipati, Conchoraptor and Nemegtomaia, examined in papers from James Clark et al. in 1999 and 2001, Martin Kundrát and Jiří Janáček in 2007, and Federico Fanti et al. in 2012. Likewise, the sub-adult microraptorid Tianyuraptor described by Xiaoting Zheng et al. in 2010 was not found with feathers, but it’s not implausible to think it had them. And, as reminder of how blurry the dividing line is now from dinosaurs to birds, there is some dispute still as to whether the fragmentary Jurassic Scansoriopteryx and Eosinopteryx and the Early Cretaceous Jinfengopteryx were theropods or very basal birds. Likewise for the enigmatic Balaur bondoc evaluated by Andrea Cau et al. in a 2015 paper. Bear in mind that is only on the theropod side. Among Ornithischians, in 2014 Pascal Godefroit et al. found the basal

Neornithischian Kulindadromeus had feather-like structures (though not without some objection from the feather-skeptical Theagarten Lingham-Soliar). That fossil dates from the Jurassic, and feathery bristles show up a bit later on in the heterodontosaurid Tianyulong that Xiaoting Zheng et al. had described in 2009. In 2002 and 2016 papers, Gerald Mayr and colleagues revealed similar features on Psittacosaurus, the small bipedal ancestor of the ceratopsids living early in the Cretaceous. All this puts the sauropods as the outliers, as so far no integumentary structures akin to proto-feathers have been found on them. Still farther afield, some researchers suggest the hair-like pycnofibers of pterosaurs are homologous to theropod proto-feathers, recently reviewed by Zixiao Yang et al.’s 2019 paper, “Pterosaur integumentary structures with complex feather-like branching.” Progress on working out the evolution of feathers involved a splendid combination of these fossil finds, and the genetics, such as Matthew Harris et al.’s “Shh-Bmp2 Signaling Module and the Evolutionary Origin and Diversification of Feathers” in 2002, and their 2005 follow-up on “Molecular evidence for an activator-inhibitor mechanism in development of embryonic feather branching.” There was also the recognition that any adaptive evolutionary model had to be consistent with how feathers are actually formed developmentally. Richard Prum’s 1999 paper “Development and evolutionary origin of feathers” helped start that ball rolling, and his 2002 collaboration with Alan Brush, “The Evolutionary Origin And Diversification Of Feathers,” led the way to Xing Xu’s 2006 “Feathered dinosaurs from China and the evolution of major avian characters” and Xu et al.’s “Exceptional dinosaur fossils show ontogenetic development of early feathers” in 2010. Together these papers document the development of feathers from simple filamentous integuments to the modern feather, and the various stages of this evolution are physically corroborated in theropods. The earliest proto-feather was just a tubular structure called a collar. Later, the collar differentiated, producing barb ridges that grew unbranched keratin filaments. The filaments then fused at their base to a central one. This was followed by that central base developing filaments along it.

The fine filaments on modern feathers are called barbs. In a maniraptoran dinosaur, a number of these barbs then fused on the anterior midline of the follicle to form the rachis (that structure that goes down the middle on a feather). Originally, the barbs would have been single branches, but over time, they developed their own branches, called barbules. One stage of feather evolution predicted in Prum’s model had a simple broad filament, and exactly that was found in Beipiaosaurus, as documented by Xing Xu et al.’s 2009 paper “A new feather type in a nonavian theropod and the early evolution of feathers.” Still more evidence comes from seven feathers found in Cretaceous amber, described by Vincent Perrichot et al. in 2008:   the first fossil evidence of the intermediate stage between the very distinct stages II and IIIa defined by Prum (1999) in his theory of evolutionary diversification of feathers. Stage II is characterized by non-ramified barbs attached at their base to the calamus, without barbules. Stage IIIa corresponds to the appearance of a central shaft formed by the fusion of non-ramified barbs and the appearance of the planar form.

  Interestingly, this intermediate structure eliminated the need for a further IIIb stage proposed by Prum—nature showing that there are often even smoother paths to adaptive change than those worked out with such care by scientists a hundred and fifty million years later. Note that all the stages of this evolution have been expressed directly in fossils, so they cannot be hand-waved away with vague notions of “information”. Though the creationists have avoided even the hand waving stage in this case by usually not discussing these transitional feather fossils at all. One who ventured where feathered angels feared to tread was the ever-confident David Coppedge in 2009, who didn’t dispute any of Prum’s model or claim Beipiaosaurus’ filaments didn’t match them (let alone offer any explicit creationist substitute), but instead performed some sidestepping: the filaments might not really have been feathers, he grumped, and besides, they “had nothing to do with flight.” Which, of course, missed the whole point: that flying was not the only thing feathers needed to do.

The range of variation in just the theropod family Scansoriopterygidae is revealing, where Epidexipteryx had a short tail with four ribbon-like feathers on each arm. Yi qi had membranous wings like a bat, and the latest find, Ambopteryx described in 2019, had long tail filaments and the bat-like wings. One ponders whether the baraminologists could tolerate these being in the same “kind” or not. David Menton was certainly not disposed to take a stand on such things in a 2018 AiG posting, “Did Dinosaurs Evolve into Birds?” that summarily dumped everything with feathers (including Microraptor and Changyuraptor) in the “bird” category. But Jerry Bergman went positively off the rails in 2019, thrown into a tizzy regarding Wang’s paper on Ambopteryx, ranting at Coppedge’s Creation Evolution Headlines website about science writers enthralled in “a Darwinian trance,” and declaring (our bold) that this “find may be actually have been the precursor of modern bats as this paper has concluded, and not a dinosaur evolving into a bird as other authors imply.” Only that was not the conclusion of that (or any other) paper, causing much head-scratching between creationism critic Bill Ludlow and paleontology student Alex Reubenstahl discussing Ambopteryx and Bergman on YouTube, marveling at the creationist’s complete obliviousness to even the basics of systematics, whereby Ambopteryx was dinosaur through and through. Meanwhile, in the world of actual science investigation, on the molecular level, Jakob Vinther et al. in 2008, Fucheng Zhang et al. in 2010, Quanguo Li et al. in 2010 and 2014 (with coauthor Julia Clarke, see the  Info Box), and 2016   ___________________________________________________________________

Julia Clarke and Antarctic songbirds Coauthor JW had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Julia Clarke at Louisiana State University where she discussed the origin of avian flight and feathers, as well as her role in the discovery of the Late Cretaceous bird Vegavis from Antarctica (a more birdfriendly habitat back in the Mesozoic). What makes this bird special is that it has a syrinx, which is a series of “vocal folds or membranes attached to modified mineralized rings vibrate to

produce sound.” It is the oldest bird discovered with a syrinx and begs the question of how many other dinosaurs had syrinxes that were simply not preserved in the fossil record, and whether any of them may have chirped, crowed or sang. We’ve included Clarke et al.’s 2016 paper on Vegavis in our references. On the topic of Antarctic birds, in 2015 James Johnson waved the specter of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) regarding the ill-fated Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole by Robert Scott (18681912). Part of their ambitious science study included finding penguin eggs they hoped would illuminate Haeckel’s recapitulation theories (more on that later in this chapter), and Johnson used that as a dated crowbar to dislodge “the ‘dinosaur-to-birds’ fairy tale.” Although Scott reached the Pole, the rival expedition by Roald Amundsen (1872-1928) had beaten him there by a month, and all of Scott’s team perished with him on the way back to their base camp. Amundsen would himself die on a rescue mission for the airship Italia that had crashed while exploring the Arctic. Johnson ventured nothing about the pre-Flood environment of that continent, however, or its flora and fauna, about which a lot had been discovered, showing a familiar succession of biomes: ● Cambrian trilobites (Jago & Cooper 2005) and an assortment of other comparably marine arthropods (Rode et al. 2003, Wrona 2004 & 2009). ● Permian peat biota (Slater et al. 2015), fully marine no longer. and 2019 papers by Yanhong Pan et al., have recovered keratins (from which feathers are made) and those melanosomes from not only Cretaceous birds, but also from a number of their contemporary theropods—including Anchiornis, Microraptor, and Sinornithosaurus. Scratching his head over the new review by Xiaoli Wang et al. in 2017 of the 229 Anchiornis specimens currently known, including feathered ones, Brian Thomas wondered “Perhaps some factor other than anatomy plays a role in calling these extinct creatures ‘dinosaurs’.” Sorry, Brian, but it is precisely because of their anatomy that they’re classified as dinosaurs. Perhaps Thomas needs a catchup on his systematics. Meanwhile, thanks to the improving analytical techniques, these ancient beasts are putting on a colorful show. In the case of

Microraptor, it evidently   ___________________________________________________________________

● Definitely still not a marine environment, as we find Mesozoic dinos (Smith & Pol 2007), loons (Acosta Hospitaleche & Gelfo 2015), leeches (Bomfleur et al. 2012) and freshwater decapod crustaceans (Babcock et al. 1998), along with pollen traces (Osborn & Taylor 1993), ferns (Axsmith et al. 2000), trees (Decombeix et al. 2014), and sunflowers (Barreda et al. 2015)— baraminologists Wood & Cavanaugh take note! ● Mammals showed up too by the Eocene, with marsupials (Goin et al. 1999 & 2007) and ungulates (Marenssi et al. 2004), while ancient basilosaurid and early baleen whales (Mitchell 1989 & Buono et al. 2016) inhabited the sea thereabouts. By then, though, as Australia continued to press farther away from its old Pangaea neighbors near the pole, the ocean currents began to reconfigure into a cooling circumpolar one. In the Eocene, Antarctica’s mountains were starting to glacier up, with woodlands and tundra dominating into the Oligocene, until ice crowded even that out in the Miocene (John Anderson et al. 2011, Galeotti et al. 2016 and Tremblin et al. 2016). So many extinct forms of life, making ever so much sense biogeographically in the standard framework, but a conundrum that creationists steer clear of accounting for themselves. For instance, in 2017 Stephanie Pappas reported on a Permian fossil forest buried in a Yellowstone-style volcanic eruption. But all David Coppedge could see was a reference in that secondary account to amino acids (of some sort) having been found, which he reflexively translated as must be young. Tim Clarey, meanwhile, blithely declared “This discovery should be no surprise to those who take Genesis as literal history. The Bible clearly describes a global Flood that affected all land masses—why should Antarctica be an exception?” But this was ash, Tim, not water. The inability of creationists to tell those two apart will be discussed further next chapter. had dark, iridescent feathers, while Sinornithosaurus seems to have had chestnut reddish-brown stripes adorning its tail. These colors

might have been for camouflage or signaling to other members of the same species, but either way, feathers clearly did not evolve originally for flight. Bergman, Coppedge, Menton, Sherwin, and Thomas notwithstanding, feathery integuments would have been useful in these functions, as well as insulation, and coopted for flight only later on. And there’s more. It had been known back in 2000, in a paper by Randall Widelitz et al., that avian foot scales could be converted into feather buds with a modified  -catenin molecule, hinting at an underlying process connecting scales with feathers. Pushing still further into the biology, in many papers from 2000 through 2014, Lorenzo Alibardi, Matthew Greenwold, Roger Sawyer and colleagues have looked at the specific genetics underpinning epidermal appendages in archosaurs, and how birds and their feathers fit into the picture. For example, a 2006 paper by Alibardi identified “Beta-keratin localization in developing alligator scales and feathers in relation to the development and evolution of feathers”, and Greenwold’s 2010 work summarized where all this was heading:  

Our results suggest the following scenario for the evolution of the β-keratin gene family. The genome of early archosaurians contained a cluster of β-keratin genes, closely related to the scale β-keratin genes seen in today's crocodilians and birds. Duplication and diversification lead to the subfamily known as claw, which provided additional building blocks for the evolution of archosaurian appendages; i. e., claws, beaks, spurs, etc. In fact, members of both the scale and claw subfamilies of β-keratin are present in developing claws, beaks, scales, and even feathers of birds. As the development and morphogenesis of the epidermal appendages diversified further, recombination in the β-keratin gene cluster provided the raw material for the evolution of new β-keratin genes, such as feather and feather-like, which would eventually provide the structural proteins for appendages with novel functions, such as the feather. In fact, our molecular phylogenies demonstrate that the avian claw genes evolved from the scale genes, and form a basal group to the feather-like and feather genes.  

Just this one paragraph cited extensive technical research (included in our references): Dale Smoak & Sawyer’s 1983 paper on bird scale keratins, a pair of 1989 works on avian keratin genes by

Richard Presland et al., Rose Shames et al.’s 1991 paper on chick beak keratins, Alibardi & Mattia Toni’s 2008 work on feathers and the cornification process, Luisa Dalla Valle et al.’s 2009 examination of crocodile keratins and the determination of their homology with avian keratins by Changjiang Ye et al. in 2010. And at every stage there were the fossil data to include. Which were addressed by many a paper: Xing Xu & Gou Yu’s “The Origin and Early Evolution of Feathers: Insights from Recent Paleontological and Neontological Data” in 2009, Christian Foth’s “On the identification of feather structures in stem-line representatives of birds: evidence from fossils and actuopalaeontology” in 2012, Evan Saitta et al.’s “Additional information on the primitive contour and wing feathering of paravian dinosaurs” in 2018, and Yanhong Pan et al.’s “The molecular evolution of feathers with direct evidence from fossils” in 2019. The beat goes on. And would not all that sound like “new information” to Riddle? Because it does to both coauthors.  

Oh not again … DNA as “Information”  

Feathers are one thing, but Riddle mentions an ape turning into a human. Isn’t that a big transition? We, with our splendid brains, capable of articulate speech, like to think so, but what “information” changes are really required at the biological level to account for that (especially pulled out over five or ten million years)? We lost hair, became bipedal and gracile, and increased brain capacity among other things. None of these required the many millions of years that limbs and feathers needed to evolve. For one thing, we are pretty sure Riddle would count the reduction in hair as a loss of information. Second, facultative bipedality was in our hominoid branch of the apes long before the human species was around. Ardipithecus ramidus shows evidence of partial bipedality some 5.6 million years ago, whereas the human species did not appear until about 300,000 years ago (we will return to this topic in a later chapter in Volume 2). Third, we mentioned the increase in brain capacity among hominids in the last chapter. That subject alone brings up the shared brain anatomy of primates, the genes associated with them, and whether any features of our human brains can truly be deemed either unique or inaccessible by the avenues of natural evolution (see the

Info Box  on the next page for more). Needless to say, Riddle is flushing a lot of data down the drain with his vague pronouncements. But, he goes on. And on. For the next two paragraphs, Riddle describes a scenario in which someone contacts another person by Morse code (again with the Morse!). That second person calls the first person’s brother, and the brother sends an email to his mother. Riddle then concludes, “Nothing material actually transferred from you to your mother, but information did, which shows that everything isn’t material.” Let us unpack this. What did transfer from the first person to the second to the third to the fourth entail? The first person contacted the second person by Morse code in the form of smoke signals. In other words, arbitrary value has been assigned to pulses of combustion products by humans, and where did those arbitrary values originate? In our brains. Thus, the value is the result of neurochemistry, so the “information” conveyed in the smoke signals is ultimately the result of the matter in our brains. The second person called the brother. Phones work via electricity and radio waves; the former is an effect of protons and electrons, while the latter is a type of electromagnetic radiation, which in turn is caused by photon particles. The same is true of the email the brother sent the mother; emails are just code in computers, which run on electricity. Would Riddle consider protons, electrons, and photons as material? If they are not, would he acknowledge that ___________________________________________________________________

Brains and Homo floresiensis Many researchers have been working out the details of our brains and their evolution. We’ve included a sampling of such work in our references, on the genetic and developmental side from Robert Barton, Jane Bradbury, Megan Dennis, Robert Hill & Christopher Walsh, Melanie McCollum, Katherine Pollard, Todd Preuss, Mehmet Somel, and Eric Vallender. Primate and hominid brain endocasts have illuminated some of the process from the fossil end, in papers by Douglas Broadfield (H.erectus), Kristian Carlson (A. sediba), Dean Falk (forensic measures like skull suture evidence), Ralph Holloway (H.erectus &

H. naledi), Mary Silcox (primates), Phillip Tobias (H. habilis), and Xiu-Jie Wu (H.erectus). A case study on how challenging the forensics can be concerns Homo floresiensis, a diminutive hominid nicknamed “Hobbit” found on an island near Java, with considerable (and often contentious) discussion of whether it was likely a microcephalic human (the pigeonhole preferred by creationists like Rupe & Sanford’s Contested Bones) or whether it represented a genuinely new species, maybe even a dwarf remnant erectus. Favoring the microcephalic human: papers by Robert Eckhardt, Maciej Henneberg, Israel Hershkovitz, Robert Martin, Charles Oxnard, Robert Vannucci, and Jochen Weber. On the new species side: Leslie Aiello, Debbie Argue, Karen Baab, Peter Brown, Adam Brumm, Robin Dennell, José Diniz-Filho, Dean Falk, Adam Gordon, William Jungers, Yousuke Kaifu, Daisuke Kubo, Susan Larson, Stephen Montgomery, Mike Morley, Richard Roberts, Thomas Sutikna, Matthew Tocheri, Gerrit Van den Bergh, Michael Westaway, Eleanor Weston & Adrian Lister. Dive in and decide for yourself.   atheists do not necessarily have to be materialists? If they are, how would Riddle define material in the first place? But, Riddle does not stop to think about any of this because he plows ahead to conclude instead:  

This is the good news! Why is this good news? Because the foundation for materialism (atheism, humanism, evolution) is that the universe consists of only two entities: mass and energy. Therefore, if a third entity can be shown to exist, then materialism and all philosophies based on it must also be false. Information is this third fundamental entity.  

He places a footnote on the word entity that reads, “Entity: The state of having existence; something with distinct and independent existence.” We would hope that anyone coming to this discussion would already know what the word entity means. Curious that he would feel the need to define it for us. Unless, of course, he wants to seed the game with a term that has baggage.

We don’t normally conceive of radio waves or electrons or smoke puffs as “entities” in the same sense as we do organic “entities” like animals or us, and that ambiguity may be what he was aiming at. Regardless, Riddle again asserts that materialism, atheism, humanism, and evolution are the same or at the very least inextricable. We have, however, already shown how false this is. So, what exactly is Riddle considering to be non-material? Well, according to him, the concept “Happy Birthday” is non-material but can be transferred from once person to another. But again, this is exactly like the Morse code smoke signals: “Happy Birthday” only has value because we have assigned it value; it doesn’t mean anything sans humans. And, that placement of value again comes from our brains, so it is again the result of the neurochemistry that our brains do (and without which, there will be no ideas, and hence no value). Ideas are the result of matter and energy, so there is absolutely no contradiction with materialism (even if you are not a materialist). Riddle continues (his italics),  

There are several definitions of information currently in use; however, each of these definitions are generally too broad. For example, one definition of information includes symbols with or without meaning, and another includes everything in its definition of information. Imagine sending random symbols as smoke signals to your friend—would Happy Birthday ever get sent to your mother on her birthday? Imagine sending a bunch of smoke signal dots in the air to your friend—would Happy Birthday ever get sent to your mother?  

Precisely! Words and symbols have meaning because we give them meaning, but where does that meaning come from? Riddle cannot seem to work to that part. Though he did spare his readers any reference on the “several definitions of information” that he dismissed for them. Such as the influential one of Claude Shannon & Warren Weaver’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication back in 1949. Let’s look at how that got applied in the workaday world of science. In 1979 Jeffrey Wicken’s “The generation of complexity in evolution: A thermodynamic and information-theoretical discussion,” applied such principles as Shannon Information and found that “Natural selection converts the sequence entropy generated in these processes into molecular information.” Moreover, he concluded that “In

an energy-rich physico-chemical milieu, the randomization of matter and energy will favor the growth of molecular size and complexity in prebiotic polymers and in the primitive genome as well.” Curiously, a 2011 anti-evolution posting by “A.O.” at The Religion of Islam website proclaiming “Thermodynamics Falsified Evolution” wantonly cited Wicken’s paper, apparently unaware that it had said exactly the opposite. Hmm. Let’s press on. In 2000, John Maynard Smith’s “The Concept of Information in Biology” was agreeable to seeing the genome as a genetic program of sorts, but cautioned that “the effect of a gene depends on the cell's translating machinery ribosomes, tRNAs, and assignment enzymes. For these reasons, I want to say that genes and regulatory proteins carry information, but enzymes do not.” Several commentaries poked around Maynard Smith’s assumptions. Peter Godfrey-Smith wondered whether even the coding process would qualify as an “information” carrier if the codon assignments for the amino acids weren’t arbitrary ones as Maynard Smith supposed (in which case the ultimate activity of strings of amino acids couldn’t be separated from the codons that specified them, check out Appendix 3 for more on that). John Winnie reminded how the degree of organization had to play a role, and Kim Sterelny similarly suggested the coding and reader molecules of life were not really distinct at all, but blurred as an interconnected system. Regarding an example Maynard Smith presented, that of arthropod eye formation, Sahotra Sarkar cautioned, “as Sterelny notes in his commentary, it is equally plausible to think that the unmutated allele receives information from other alleles to make a compound eye.” Step on ahead a few years, and Robert Hazen’s 2007 “Functional information and the emergence of biocomplexity” included Shannon Information in their tool kit to help in modeling the extensive sequence spaces presented by natural evolutionary systems (such as RNA aptamers “that bind target ligands” and ribozymes “that catalyze specific reactions”). And toddle on down to 2016, and we find Sergey Semenov building on those tools to construct “Autocatalytic, bistable, oscillatory networks of biologically relevant organic reactions” from simple organic molecules “relevant to metabolism and similar to those that might have existed on the early Earth.”

So information theory is not something evolutionary science has shied away from. To the contrary, they’ve been productively using it for decades. What do our creationists have to contribute from their side? A lot of buzzword usage (see the Info Box  ), but what we want is substance. We coauthors were extremely excited to finally see a creationist define information once and for all. Riddle offered this: “In July 2006, a team of scientists representing various scientific disciplines met to evaluate a definition of information proposed by information scientist Dr. Werner Gitt, which is precise and corresponds very well to human languages and machine languages.” O…k…? Why does information in human and machine language matter? We thought the point of this was to explain “information” in the context of genetics. DNA is not a language; it is a molecule that does molecule things. The evolutionists we noted above repeatedly brought up exact biological examples. Oh well, at least a group researchers from various scientific disciplines met to tackle this issue. We do not have to wonder who those researchers were because Riddle conveniently lists them. The first is Werner Gitt, the creationist we met when we tackled Bodie Hodge. Riddle’s chapter listed him as “PhD, engineering/information.” Whereas Thomas Schneider, a biologist with the National Cancer Institute, who had explicitly applied Shannon Information to biology in a 2000 paper (continuing to show it’s not a problem for evolution), deemed Gitt a writer who had completely misunderstood the concepts, ending up “completely scrambled and confused.” But that’s ok. Maybe the others can make up for that. Who is next? Jason Lisle the astrophysicist. Another creationist, whose comparably scrambled cosmological notions will be explored in Volume 2. Then there’s geneticists John Sanford and Georgia Purdom, microbiologist Kevin Anderson, and chemist Royal Truman, creationists whose labors of evasion we’ve previously encountered. This lineup is not looking good. Add a string of creationist contributors whose relevant expertise we have reason to question: veterinarian Bob Compton, linguist John Oller (will he adjective genetics into submission?), and still farther from biology or genetics, Andy McIntosh (PhD in “combustion

theory/thermodynamics”) and Dave Mateer (BS in “mathematics and computer science”). Oh yes, and Mike Riddle himself, whose BS in mathematics and MA in education apparently did not equip him  with the skill or gumption to read   ___________________________________________________________________

Information as buzzword The term shows up a lot in anti-evolution apologetics (often in the context of Origins or Bust arguments concerning abiogenesis or the Cambrian Explosion), though with no more specificity on the genetic front in the cases we’re examining in this chapter. We’ve included a sampling in our references beyond what we’ve directly discussed in the text. On the YEC side, there’s Gitt 1996, Truman 1999 and 2001, Answers in Genesis 2000, Walter Brown 2001, A. Williams 2005, Don Batten and CreationWiki in 2007, Carter 2011, Bartlett 2012, Sanford 2013, and Spetner 2016. The ID camp’s using of the term is just as extensive, a repeated refrain of Dembski in 1998 and 2002, Steve Meyer in 2003, 2004, 2013 and 2015, the venerable Walter Bradley in 2004, Luskin in 2007, 2010, 2011 and 2013, Dembski & Marks in 2009 and 2010, Montañez and Zeiger in 2010, Marks on his own in 2010, 2013 and 2014, the collaborative Ewert in 2012, 2013 and 2015, Dembski, Ewert solo, Gibson and Chase Nelson & Sanford in 2013, Durston and Evolution News in 2015, and Egnor, Ewert & Marks and Brian Miller in 2017. There are of course critics of the anti-evolution stance on “information” and whether natural processes can and do generate it, along with religious scientists uncomfortable with ditching the findings of evolutionary biology: Roche 2001, David Wolpert (coauthor of the “No Free Lunch” algorithm Dembski misrepresented) and Tellgren in 2002, Elsberry & Shallit 2003 and 2011, Richard Dawkins 2007, Le Page and PvM in 2008, Shallit 2009, Elsberry 2010, Freeland, Isaac, Venema and Watts in 2011, Stuart Kauffman and Charles Marshall in 2013, and David Levin 2015.

technical papers he’d cited (even after a decade, as noted back in Chapter 2). Somehow we feel that the definition this team has cooked up for biological information is going to be just as useless as Riddle’s solo pronouncements on materialism or radiocarbon in diamonds. Here are Riddle’s criteria for being considered “information”:  

Code (syntax): Information within all communications systems contains a code. A code contains a set of symbols and rules for using letters, words, phrases, or symbols to represent something else. One reason for coding is to enable communication. Examples of codes would be the English alphabet, words, and syntax; hieroglyphics; or codes used in computers (for example, C, Fortran, or Cobol). Meaning (semantics): Meaning enables communication by representing real objects or concepts with specific symbols, words, or phrases. For example, the word chair is not the physical chair but represents it. Likewise, the name “Bob” is not the physical person but represents the real person. When words are associated with real objects or concepts, it gives the word meaning. For example, aichr and Bbo do not have meaning because they do not represent any real object or concept. However, if in the future one of these character strings were to represent a real object or concept, it would have meaning. Prior to the computer Internet age, the word blog had no meaning; today it is associated with a web page that serves as a personal log (derived from web log) of thoughts or activities. It can also mean a discussion community about personal issues. Another new word with meaning is simplistic. New words are continually being designated with meaning. Expected Action (pragmatics): Expected action conveys an implicit or explicit request or command to perform a given task. For example, in the statement, “Go to the grocery store and buy some chocolate chips,” the expected action is that someone will go to the store. This does not mean the action will actually happen, but it is expected to happen. Intended Purpose (apobetics): Intended purpose is the anticipated goal that can be achieved by the performance of the expected action(s). For example, in the statement, “Go to the grocery store and buy some chocolate chips,” the intended purpose might be to bake and eat chocolate chip cookies.  

In case we needed more guidance, Riddle provides a list of things that contain information: the Bible, newspaper, hieroglyphics, sheet music, and mathematical formulas. You may have spotted how none of

these involve genetics. You know, the thing “biological information” is supposed to be encoded in. The snag for Riddle’s cartoon version of “information” is how, at their core, biological systems are not instructing or motivating some other organism to embark upon behavior to suit that organism’s convenience. Though some can evolve to do that, like the parasitical apicomplexan Toxoplasma gondii, which infects rats as a way to get into cats (their primary host, in which they sexually reproduce). Toxoplasma does this by manipulating the rat’s brain to overcome its aversion to cats, sweetening the stimulus further by causing the rat to become sexually aroused by the cat, worked out by Manuel Berdoy et al. in 2001, Ajai Vyas et al. in 2007, and Patrick House et al. in 2011. That’s creepy enough as it is without adding in the creationist idea that the parasite might be persuading the host to consciously act in such a manner. Or, to put it in Riddle-ese: “Go to the dangerous felid and get randy until it eats you.” Oh, by the way, partly because of our agriculture practices, from 30-50% of the human population is infected with forms of Toxoplasma gondii, with an impact on its virulence and effects, per work by Jaroslav Flegr et al. in 2014 and Keats Shwab et al. in 2018. Given the organism’s ability to reduce rat inhibition about cats, though, there is a suspicion their effects on dopamine and testosterone might in certain circumstances influence human inpulsivity, investigated by Anna Skallová et al. in 2005, Flegr in 2007, and Joanne Webster et al. in 2013. Ain’t nature wonderful? Given all that, do creationists really want Toxoplasma gondii’s “information” (and its effects) included in the bin of intentional design? However, by any realistic definition, DNA does not contain any information at all. We could say that DNA contains code (those codons we mentioned in the last chapter), but it does not have meaning, expected action, or intended purpose. DNA is, after all, a molecule; molecules do not mean anything, they do not have any implicit or explicit commands to perform any tasks, and they have no purpose. To explain using a different analogy, sodium hydroxide does not mean to result in an exothermic reaction when combined with hydrochloric acid; the reaction is simply a result of the properties of both molecules. So it is with DNA: DNA does not consciously mean to

do anything, but its actions (especially when collected in intricate networks over the course of billions of years of evolution through natural and sexual selection) are the result of biochemical stimuli. We can skip down quite a ways in Riddle’s chapter because he says almost nothing of interest. He certainly does not cite technical literature in his argument (which doubtless eased the strain on his tendency not to have read what he did cite). He does quote physicist and information theorist Hubert Yockey, though, who is a bit of an odd duck and worth a few comments. Yockey is known primarily for his work on the Manhattan Project, but he also authored a number of books and papers on molecular biology (included in our references) and is somewhat Michael Beheesque (or Alfred Wallace-esque, for that matter) in that he believes evolution can explain life over the billions of years, but that natural processes cannot explain the origin of life. To this purpose, in his 1977 paper “A calculation of the probability of spontaneous biogenesis by information theory” and 1981 “Self organization origin of life scenarios and information theory,” Yockey calculated that cytochrome c (about a hundred amino acids long) was unlikely to have been produced by randomly bumping amino acids together. Although that might seem to put the lid on abiogenesis, you should take note of that random stipulation in his argument (as opposed to components coming together less casually), and the presumption that odds of a specific molecule being produced meant even random assemblies couldn’t have prebiotic utility at all (the odds of being dealt a King-high flush in poker is unlikely, for example, but that doesn’t mean you won’t get useful pairs quite frequently). Such issues were noted by critics William Thwaites in 1985 and Richard Carrier in 2004. Moreover, 1994 papers by Matti Saraste and Jose Castresana suggested cytochrome oxidases had originated from denitrification enzymes, meaning they needn’t have been present in the very first biology, and in 2002 Oliver Daltrop et al. even found that “contrary to opinion of 30 years standing, that a c-type cytochrome can form from heme and apoprotein in vitro under mild conditions and in the absence of any biosynthesis apparatus.” All that notwithstanding, Yockey devoted more time to the same cytochrome argument in his 2005 book

Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life, though with no mention of Thwaites, Carrier or denitrification enzymes. Subsequent work hasn’t helped Yockey’s case. The evolution of the nitric oxide reductases, cytochrome oxidases, and their varied membrane protein interfaces has been explored by Jong-Hoon Lee et al. in 2007 (“Evolutionary origins of members of a superfamily of integral membrane cytochrome c biogenesis proteins”), Simonetta Gribaldo et al. in 2009 (“Evolution of the haem copper oxidases superfamily: a rooting tale”) and Yushi Matsumoto et al. in 2012 (Crystal structure of quinol-dependent nitric oxide reductase from Geobacillus stearothermophilus). Enough of Yockey, we have Riddle on the griddle, and his attempt at shoehorning DNA into his information definition:  

Code: The decoded portion of DNA contains 4 letters (ATCG) that make up three-letter words (codon). These codons are arranged linearly in a various sequence (syntax). Meaning: Each three-letter word represents 1 of the 20 specific amino acids used in life. The sequence (syntax) of the DNA words designates the specific sequence of the amino acids in protein formation. Expected Action: Cellular proteins are biomachines essential for construction, function, maintenance, and reproduction of the entire organism. Intended Purpose: Existence of life.  

Again, we can agree that DNA does contain code, but the other three (Meaning, Expected Action, and Intended Purpose) are entirely incorrect. Per his definition, DNA could only be said to have Meaning if it “enables communication by representing real objects or concepts with specific symbols, words, or phrases.” DNA doesn’t do that. Amino acids (which are molecules) are specified by codons (more molecules) that are transcribed from DNA to RNA (yet more molecules). No symbols, words, or phrases are involved in this process, so DNA cannot meet the necessary criteria for having meaning. Next, Expected Action entails conveying an implicit or explicit request or command, which implies consciousness. We saw how weird that sounds with Toxoplasma, commanding rats to go suicidal, and the situation doesn’t get any better by burrowing down to the DNA level.

DNA could only be said to have this if we personified it, but that is again not how DNA actually works. DNA, as a molecule, does not command or request anything—implicitly or explicitly. DNA undergoes a series of biochemical reactions—including transcription, translation, and replication—but all of these are merely actions unconsciously performed by DNA under specific circumstances. Again, does sodium hydroxide implicitly or explicitly command an exothermic reaction to occur when combined with hydrochloric acid? Is there any Intended Purpose to all this? No, none at all, just the physical dictates of chemistry. Nor was Riddle’s version of the creationist position rendered any clearer when Werner Gitt et al further refined their argument in 2013 to claim that “Universal Information” (“A symbolically encoded, abstractly represented message conveying the expected action and the intended purpose”) and “Mental Imaging Information” (information in which there is meaning, action and purpose but no abstract code, syntax or abstract meaning”) definitely “play a key role in life.” They did not illustrate this with actual DNA, but did skate perilously close to a biological example in this (our bold):  

For example, a “spoon and fork’ on a highway sign directly (i.e., not abstractly) represents “food” or “eating place” since it resembles the entity that it represents. Another example is the pheromones emitted by certain insects for, say, mating purposes. These pheromones have an inherent physicochemical relationship with the entity they represent. When received, these pheromones convey meaning, expected action and purpose directly (i.e., not abstractly) instead of through some intermediate substitute possessing “abstract meaning” expressed via an abstract code with an associated syntax. In other words, the pheromone molecule is not an abstract substitute for the entity, it is the entity itself.  

Remember, this is Gitt and company in their more technical mode! We’re reminded of Rene Magritte’s surrealist painting of a pipe with the caption Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“This is not a pipe”). Images of spoons and forks would be symbolic of diners only because human minds decided to render them so. They could just have easily been deemed to herald the presence of cutlery shops, or even (among those for whom puns are both the highest and lowest form of humor)

the availability of budget motels wherein one may spoon and/or fork in discrete circumstances. The “meaning” of the symbols are truly arbitrary, in exactly the way DNA isn’t. The action of a string of code has a biological effect independent of whether any brain-localized mind is there to appreciate it—such as the hapless rats marching via the dictates of Toxoplasma’s DNA to their amorous doom in the mouths of hungry cats. And what of pheromones, “the entity itself”? There, too, evolution is on display, had Gitt and company only bothered to look. Pheromones don’t only show up in insects, of course. Protozoan ciliates living in the Arctic and Antarctic oceans employ them in mating, as do nematodes (found terrestrially in such cheery places as compost piles, rotting fruit and dead animals), see the 2011 papers by Graziano Di Giuseppe et al. and Patrick McGrath et al.—and in 2015 a new species of yeast was even triggered in the lab by Taisuke Seike et al. tinkering with their pheromones. We mammals have them too, from pandas (a 2017 paper by Jiao Zhu et al.) to people, or at least the disconnected remnants of the system, described in Jianzhi Zhang & David Webb’s 2003 “Evolutionary deterioration of the vomeronasal pheromone transduction pathway in catarrhine primates,” Charles Wysocki & George Preti’s “Facts, Fallacies, Fears, and Frustrations With Human Pheromones” in 2004, Wendy Grus et al.’s 2005 “Dramatic variation of the vomeronasal pheromone receptor gene repertoire  among five  orders of   ___________________________________________________________________

James Kohl on pheromones and light In 2013 Kohl contended he’d worked out the secrets of those pheromones. The following year, Andrew Jones penned a short but caustic comment on Kohl’s claims in the same journal, noting “Kohl demonstrates a blatant disregard for established nomenclature” and “shows significant comprehension issues within his own paper and in external discussions of references he believes support his model.” Jones concluded “It was a mistake to let such a sloppy review through to be published.”

Based on our disconcertingly frequent and singularly unproductive online interactions with Kohl, we can only concur. Kohl’s predilection for citing technical papers that he somehow thinks support his specially parsed creationist position (but which don’t), was out in force in a series of posts assailing theistic evolution. Kohl has this thing about light (like citing Natalia Achkar et al. 2018 on light deprivation), and in 2017 regarding a 2015 abiogenesis paper by Bhavesh Patel et al., he contended: “They showed that a single set of light-activated reactions gave rise to most of life’s buildings blocks simultaneously. Simply put, that fact refutes every aspect of neo-Darwinian nonsense. It also eliminates consideration of any theories proposed by ‘big bang’ cosmologies.” That’s right, Kohl thinks a paper showing how a host of organic components are generated naturally refutes an evolutionary model that welcomes exactly that happening. Kohl explained nothing further on how he performed that gymnastic conclusion jump, nor how any of Patel’s findings undermined “big bang” cosmology. In a January 2020 Tweet spurt, just as we were finishing up this book, Kohl invoked Mart Krupovic et al. 2019 “Integrated mobile genetic elements in Thaumarchaeota” as evidence that Eugene Koonin (a coauthor of the paper) had “totally reversed his position on neo-Darwinian evolution to meet Darwin’s ‘conditions of life’.” Which Koonin clearly had not, in that or any other paper. placental and marsupial mammals,” and Didier Trotier’s 2011 “Vomeronasal organ and human pheromones.” It shouldn’t be a surprise that Enrique Lanuza et al. reported in 2008 on “Sexual pheromones and the evolution of the reward system of the brain: The chemosensory function of the amygdala” (an ancient vertebrate brain module that we specialized mammals rely on for a host of emotional reactions). And derivatives of testosterone and steroids may be functioning as pheromones in human sexual preferences, explored in 2005 and 2006 papers by Hans Berglund, Ivanka Savic & Per Lindstöm. But let’s just focus on the insects that Gitt’s bunch mentioned but did not investigate. In his commentary on Wendell Roelof et al.’s “stunning” 2002 paper on moth sex pheromones, Thomas Baker wrote how they’d shown that a  

saltational event occurred in an ancestral Ostrinia moth population and gave rise to a new pheromone and new species, the Asian corn borer, Ostrinia furnicalis. A pseudogene that had been unexpressed for millions of years in the genome of Ostrinia and that controlled desaturation of pheromone molecules, suddenly became expressed. As a result, the position of the double bond shifted in the pheromone of females expressing the gene.  

Desaturases are enzymes that remove two hydrogen atoms from fatty acids, generating carbon-carbon bonds, but the discovery of their role in the moth’s sex pheromones opened the door “for us to contemplate the intriguing possibility that the evolutionary mechanism they described to explain a major blend shift may also have been responsible for creating all of the many more minor pheromone component blend-ratio differences that abound in moth pheromone systems.” That is, for those who realized there was a door to be opened, unlike the creationists in their sealed designer bunker, looking at the 180,000 species of moths and their pheromones only at a very long distance. But the science moves on. Further work by Wendell Roelofs & Alejandro Rooney in 2003 was followed by Bingye Xue et al. in 2007, Takeshi Fujii et al. in 2011, Greg Leary et al. in 2012, and Zsolt Kárpáti et al. in 2013, exploring the interacting factors that generate distinct pheromones and their effects in that corn borer genus, including retroposon fusion, and how single mutations can flip populations into a new mating mix. The graduated plasticity of seemingly specific molecules was seen in wasps as well, as a 2013 paper by Oliver Niehuis et al. suggested “that new pheromone compounds can persist in a sender’s population, without being selected against by the receiver and without the receiver having a pre-existing preference for the new pheromone phenotype, by initially remaining unperceived.” And in 2015 Aleš Buček et al. found that a single amino acid substitution in a duplicated fatty acid desaturase gene had generated a novel sex pheromone in another common garden and crop pest, the tobacco hornworm Manduca sexta. It’s relevant to note these desaturases were evidently not involved in sex pheromones in Manduca’s immediate relatives.

Abstract “entity” or not, then, the creationists ought to have explained more about whether they think any of these observed incremental processes were other than natural ones, and whether this called into question the whole paradigm of designed genetic “information.” We devote an  Info Box to James Kohl’s special obtuseness on this subject. Someone else with surface technical credentials who can’t resist going the Kohl high dive route on the allegedly designer parts lurking in natural genomes is Peter Borger (AKA Pieter or Peer Terborg), who coauthor JD ran into in the course of a lengthy back and forth concerning Joel Duff’s 2019 post, “Snakes Preserved in Dinosaur Nests—Another Problem for Creationist’ Flood Geology.” Identified initially as peer, only in the course of the discussion did it become clear who “peer” was, by which time he had taken to danging his own published work (but not his various explicitly creationist papers, including ones with Royal Truman, which we’ve included in our references) as if it were independent corroboration of his creationist view of front-loaded genetics undergoing post-Flood deterioration. Only his 2019 collaborative paper with Daniil Nikitin on retroelements in human evolution in no sense supported his stance, especially so in the case of their citing Gustavo Caetano-Anollés et al.’s detailed and informative 2009 paper on “The origin and evolution of modern metabolism.” On his own, Borger’s 2017 opinion piece claiming “Natural Knockouts: Natural Selection Knocked Out” had invoked Richard Clark et al.’s 2007 paper on genetic polymorphisms in Arabidopsis to support the claim that “almost every tenth gene was so defective that it could not fulfill its normal function anymore.” The Clark paper had made no such assertion. Despite the strained waving of Riddle and Gitt (let alone the still more obtuse Kohl and Borger/Terborg, who ought to have known better), DNA has no discernible intended purpose. Indeed, the only way we can ascribe “purpose” to DNA is if we personify it, and as before, that is not how DNA actually works. DNA does not consciously intend to continue the existence of life on Earth. DNA is merely reacting in a way such that this occurs. And give certain collections of DNA with especially evolved brains the compulsion to try and work out the “meaning” of it all, whether there’s any there or not.

Mike Riddle ultimately has no argument on “genetic information” because his sources have no argument. His definition is only applicable in the case of language, which is fine. However, it has absolutely no bearing when it comes to genetics. And with a definition inapplicable to genetics, Riddle is in no position to make any claims about the informational aspects of DNA. We were tempted to take Riddle’s chapter “Does Evolution Have a…Chance?” in The New Answers Book 3 to task too, but that is just as lackluster as the previous one. Riddle cites almost nothing in it, and his arguments are based entirely on overly simplistic probability scenarios (such as comparing evolution to flipping a coin). Riddle was making the same mistake as Mats Molén had regarding Julian Huxley (noted back in Chapter 3), forgetting to put selection and inheritance into the mix—the twin pillars of Darwinian evolution. Obviously, coins do not experience selective pressures or inherit compounding genetic variations, so how could Riddle regard coin flipping as anything at all like evolution? Why waste several more pages critiquing that in-depth when we can relate and dismantle his whole argument in a few sentences. So on that note, we shall spare you that ordeal, and move onto the next Answers chapter.  

Vestigial Organs  

Before jumping into David Menton’s chapter on “Vestigial Organs —Evidence for Evolution?” in The New Answers Book 3, we ought to ask what exactly are vestigial organs, and why would he be making such a big deal of them? Phil Senter & Jared Mackey reviewed decades of Creation Science (CS) apologetics in 2017 and found the vestigial structures issue was connected to their notion of allowed degeneration of organisms, something that could be let into their conceptual frame in a way genuinely vestigial elements couldn’t. Senter & Mackey concluded:  

Perplexingly, through half a century, CS authors have maintained a general consensus that all “created kinds” of organisms have undergone degenerative changes, and they have simultaneously maintained a general consensus that vestigial biological structures do not exist. Because the claim for biological

degeneration implies the existence of vestigial structures, CS authors’ denial of their existence is incongruous.  

That same incongruity pervades Menton’s approach to the matter. He did an ok job of explaining the concept: “The argument goes like this: living organisms, including man, contain organs that were once functional in our evolutionary past, but that are now useless or have reduced function.” That’s similar to Senter & John Moch’s description in their 2015 paper “A critical survey of vestigial structures in the postcranial skeletons of extant mammals”:  

1. The first criterion for vestigiality is that in comparison to its state in the sister groups the structure exhibits extreme reduction. 2. The second criterion is that the structure has lost the specialized morphology that it exhibits in the sister groups. 3. The third criterion is that the structure has lost a salient ancestral function. Although it may not be completely functionless, biologists consider it vestigial only if it has lost a major function.  

But notice how Senter & Moch didn’t include uselessness as a major element. Keep that in mind in the rest of our discussion. As for what it all can mean, developmental biologist Gerd Müller summarized the evolutionary implications of vestigial features in 2002:  

The significance of vestigial structures, these echoes of the past, today lies mostly in the illustration of non-adaptive origins of certain features of organismal construction. They are also of taxonomic interest, and a number of morphological phenomena can be understood only if the processes of vestigialization are known. This is the case with atavisms, which are often based on embryonic vestigia, such as the occasional extra toes in horses. Another case is the morphological innovation, which take its origin from retained rudiments of reduced structures. Experimental enhancements of embryonic vestigia can also uncover suppressed developmental interactions. Finally, certain vestigia in humans are of medical significance, as exemplified by paraovarian cysts, branchial fistulae, or appendicitis. In general, vestigial structures and the processes of their formation shed light on the relationship between development and evolution.  

Shedding light is not what we’re going to get with Menton, however, either with the history or what the term vestigial is held to mean. Darwin back in the 1800s was the first to highlight vestigial

organs as being evidence for evolution, since the function of certain structures and organs has definitively changed over generations, and it was the obligation of the naturalist to make sense of such things. Menton summarized that adequately enough (our bold):  

Charles Darwin was perhaps the first to claim vestigial organs as evidence for evolution. In chapter 13 of his Origin of Species, Darwin discussed what he called “rudimentary, atrophied and aborted organs.” He described these organs as “bearing the plain stamp of inutility [uselessness]” and said that they are “extremely common or even general throughout nature.” Darwin speculated that these rudimentary organs once served a function necessary for survival, but over time that function became either diminished or nonexistent. In Darwin’s book The Descent of Man, he claimed about a dozen of man’s anatomical features to be useless including the muscles of the ear, wisdom teeth, the appendix, the coccyx (tailbone), body hair, and the semilunar fold in the corner of the eye. To Darwin, this was strong evidence that man had evolved from primitive ancestors.  

But later Menton brought up what he presumably considered a heavy gun, culled from old Chuck directly (our bold):  

Darwin himself pointed out a flaw in the vestigial organ argument. He wondered how once an organ is rendered useless, it can continue to be further reduced in size until the merest vestige is left. In chapter 14 of Origin of Species he declared, “It is scarcely possible that disuse can go on producing any further effect after the organ has once been rendered functionless. Some additional explanation is here requisite which I cannot give.” Why, indeed, would useless organs continue to exist for millions of years after they ceased to have any selective advantage?  

You’ll notice the big goalpost shift here, to strictly “useless organs.” This was a common creationist mantra by the time Menton was writing, going back to Henry Morris in the 1970s and well in play by the time Kent Hovind’s pocket oracle came on the scene, Walt Brown’s In the Beginning, and continuing through AiG apologetics like David DeWitt’s “Setting the Record Straight on Vestigial Organs” in 2008 and Jerry Bergman asking “Do ‘Useless’ Organs Prove Humans Evolved?” for Acts & Facts.

Some of the troping metastasizes: Don Batten including it in a 2014 CMI post asking “Is evolution true?” that quickly sprinted through the apologetic food chain to an effusive post by homophobic climate science-denying hyper-conservative Michael Bresciani at Renew America, extoling in turn Robert Carter’s Evolution’s Achilles Heel book. Such are the daisy-chain dynamics of the creationist subculture. [46]

On a more technical side, in 2000 Jerry Bergman had even complained that the modern practice of looking beyond the initial uselessness notion when it came to studying vestigial organs was a “problematic” revisionism on their part. Bergman cherry-picked several older general science works to suit his purpose, such as the brief glossary definition of vestigial organs in Linda Gamlin & Gail Vines’ 1986 The Evolution of Life (“One which has lost its function in the course of evolution, and is usually much reduced in size”). Would he have been so quick to cite it had they worded it as “earlier function”? Coauthor JD was struck by how Bergman described their work as “authoritative,” a cheeky thing to do given that he showed no inclination to accept its hundreds of pages of evolution evidence as equally authoritative. But then Bergman had higher fields to rhapsodize on, ending with a gymnastic change of subject: “Evolutionists never have explained how and why so many structures could exist in humans (like the complex structures that enable music, song, and dance) that confirm no survival advantage yet delight millions.” Really, the vestigial features we’re about to explore in detail (and which neither Bergman nor Menton managed with comparable specificity) cease to have those features on account of our capacity to sing and dance? But Menton was all about song and dance. Because he explicitly knew the vestigiality criterion did not involve organs being necessarily useless, switching to that context (as he did repeatedly in his chapter) was a pattern of tactical tango way too frequent to count as anything other than misrepresentation. Starting with this:  

How Can We Be Certain an Organ Is Useless? The problem with declaring any organ to be without function is discriminating between truly functionless organs and those that have functions that are simply

unknown. Indeed, over the years nearly all of the organs once thought to be useless have been found to be functional. When we have no evidence for the function of an organ, it is well to bear in mind that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  

And this section (more of our bold):  

The Definition of Vestigial Organs Has Been Changed As the list of “functionless” organs has grown smaller and smaller with advancing knowledge, the definition of vestigial organs has been modified to include those whose functions are claimed to have “changed” to serve different functions. But such a definition removes the burden of proof that vestigial organs are a vestige of evolution. Thus, the evolutionist might concede that the human coccyx (“tail bone”) does indeed serve an important function in anchoring the pelvic diaphragm—but still insist, without evidence, that it was once used by our ancestors as a tail.  

Actually, we can show that our ancestors used our tails as more than just “pelvic diaphragm anchors” because we can show our relatedness to other organisms genetically and morphologically. Both of these methods indicate that we are most closely related to chimps, then gorillas, orangutans, gibbons, then Old World monkeys (Cercopithecoidea), New World monkeys (Platyrrhini), etc. In fossils, we can see that simians appear in the Paleocene; stemcatarrhines appear in the Oligocene, such as Aegyptopithecus; apes and cercopithecoids split from a common ancestor about 25 million years ago; and apes underwent their own radiation where they lost their external tails (Proconsul and Ekembo by 18 and 17 million years ago, respectively)—for recent systematics on them, see Kieran McNulty et al. in 2015 and Tab Rasmussen et al. in 2019. This shouldn’t be especially surprising, since even the cercopithecoids do not have prehensile tails, and some, such as the Barbary macaque, do not have tails at all. Menton will have to remind us, then, who is refraining from relying on data, especially regarding the distribution of tails in primates, and the genetics underlying such morphological variety. We’ll get back to that, but right now we must put our foot down on the chronology of Darwin and the vestigial issue.

In the original 1859 Origin of Species, Darwin ventured that all vestigial—rudimentary—organs were functionless. In the years after, he became familiar with other work, particularly that of naturalist Giovanni Canestrini (1835-1900), an early supporter of Darwin’s evolutionary position, appearing in the 1867 Annuario della Società dei Naturalisti di Modena (yes, the journal is in Italian). By 1871 Darwin had amended his definition of vestigial for The Descent of Man: “Rudimentary organs are eminently variable; and this is partly intelligible, as they are useless or nearly useless, and consequently are no longer subjected to natural selection.” A whopping total of twelve years on the shelf life of that earlier “useless” definition, reflecting the diligent Darwin’s continuing study of the subject. And, as we saw with Gerd Müller’s comments and the Senter & Moch definition, the concept has come to be still more precise and technically informative as time has gone on. Is it supposed then to be a blemish on science, that it improves as it acquires more information? Not a problem in our view. Now, let us look more closely at that Darwin quote Menton waved at us. Coauthor JW was intrigued to find the context of it, so he opened up his copy of Origin of Species. Only to find that the quote did not exist in that version (the original 1859 one). It turns out this quote was added into the 1872 edition of Origin of Species, and even more interestingly, the quote is followed with this:  

If, for instance, it could be proved that every part of the organisation tends to vary in a greater degree towards diminution than toward augmentation of size, then we should be able to understand how an organ which has become useless would be rendered, independently of the effects of disuse, rudimentary and would at last be wholly suppressed; for the variations towards diminished size would no longer be checked by natural selection. The principle of the economy of growth, explained in a former chapter, by which the materials forming any part, if not useful to the possessor, are saved as far as is possible, will perhaps come into play in rendering a useless part rudimentary. But this principle will almost necessarily be confined to the earlier stages of the process of reduction; for we cannot suppose that a minute papilla, for instance, representing in a male flower the pistil of the female flower, and formed merely of cellular tissue, could be further reduced or absorbed for the sake of economising nutriment.  

How curious that Menton would selectively choose to omit the aforementioned part of the very paragraph from which his quote comes. Was he merely repeating something culled from a quote mine? Given the parasitical nature of so much of anti-evolutionary apologetics, that’s not implausible, but if Menton was doing his own direct research with the Darwin quote, and was therefore aware of the next paragraph, then this gets marked down as one count of data suppression. That Darwin’s Descent of Man speculations might be fodder for misinterpretation was noted in a 2009 post by PZ Myers, concerned that his lone statement on vestigial organs was getting blown out of proportion and dismissed too glibly by some 21st century science commentary. And a closer look at Darwin’s original reveals more to the story. The economy of growth bit is the idea that organisms will lose structures over their evolution that are not useful to them. At the same time though, Darwin was reminding his 1872 readers that organisms will not necessarily completely remove such structures simply for the purpose of spending their tissue budget slightly more economically. The process is not that fine-tuned or finicky. This sentiment is echoed by paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall in his 1995 book: “The fact is that we carry a lot of evolutionary baggage around with us... Natural selection is not hovering there all of the time to get rid of things we absolutely don't need.” Just how complex the interactive forces can be to slow the process of weeding out vestigial systems (including the impact of pleiotropic genes involved in multiple traits) is seen in blind cave fish, explored in a 2008 article by Monika & Luis Espinasa, “Losing Sight of Regressive Evolution” (where Menton’s Darwin Origins snippet also came up along the way). Reviewing the genetics of eye loss, the Espinasas wrote “It appears that the degeneration of eyes is due less to the accumulation of many mutations than to mutations in a few, very specific, high-impact regulatory genes.” At this point Menton is skirting around the important distinction that he never wants his readers to know about. For not all vestigial organs are useless, and even ones that are can remain in the biological loop for millions of years precisely because evolution has no foresight to remove them. If these structures do not hamper in any way

the growth or survival of an organism, then why get rid of them? There is no Law of Evolution that states even absolutely useless organs must be removed, like some opened jar of spaghetti sauce that has overstayed its Use By date. Let’s start with one of the classical examples of vestigial structures, the hind limbs of whales, which are imbedded within the body of living ones. These limbs are remnants of the weight-bearing limbs of ancient cetaceans, such as Pakicetus, and they even come out briefly during embryonic development (as well as occasionally popping up in modern cetaceans atavistically, as by Teizo Ogawa & Toshiro Kamiya in 1957, and in 1965 by Seiji Ohsumi), but they have clearly lost their usage in walking. Thus, they have receded into the whale, but this doesn’t mean they don’t still have function, anchoring muscles associated with the reproductive system, or that evolutionary processes haven’t been shaping that, as James Dines et al.’s “Sexual Selection Targets Cetacean Pelvic Bones” explored in 2014. Diving right past the developmental biology in the Dines paper he’d cited, at ICR Brian Thomas harrumphed with this contortion in 2014: “Why, if whales originated from other tetrapods, should whales use bones that are perfectly suited for controlling their sexual organs instead of showing any vestige of usefulness for life on land? These results show that male whales use pelvis bones that were well crafted for anchoring reproductive organs—not for anchoring limbs. Whale hips are not vestigial.” Randy Guliuzza offered similar rationalizations (but at more length) in 2016 with “Major Evolutionary Blunders: Are Whales and Evolution Joined at the Hip?” Pretty much, yes, Randy. Get used to it. Another example noted by Senter & Moch’s paper was how “the vestigial second and fourth metacarpals and metatarsals of horses no longer function as struts between a digit and the carpus or tarsus but still function as guides for suspensory ligaments and as muscle attachment sites, as well as supports for carpal and tarsal bones.” Two related papers on primates referenced in their study were authored by Robert Tague (JW’s anthropology professor): the 1997 “Variability of a Vestigial Structure: First Metacarpal in Colobus guereza and Ateles geoffroyi” and the 2002 “Variability of metapodials in primates with

rudimentary digits: Ateles geoffroyi, Colobus guereza, and Perodicticus potto.” And, there are numerous documented cases of vestigial structures in other groups of organisms, such as emus whose wings do not have enough musculature to even move. Cataloguing as they did dozens of vestigial structures throughout the whole class of mammals, clearly the existence of vestigial structures is widely recognized by biologists. With that in mind, are any of Darwin’s structures mentioned by Menton vestigial? Absolutely. Look to those ear muscles, which Menton only alluded to in passing, but declined to discuss further in his text. A dip into the science literature may suggest why. The pinna is the outer portion of the ear and contains a number of muscles. In other mammals, the pinna can be oriented towards sources of sound, but not in apes. Apes cannot move their ears to express emotion either, and a few years after Menton wasn’t thinking about the subject, a 2015 phylogenetic analysis of vestigial pinna muscles in apes conducted by Steven Hackley, “Evidence for a vestigial pinna‐orienting system in humans,” concluded that these muscles have indeed been vestigial for some 25 million years. The ear muscles attempt to orient towards sounds (called the postauricular reflex) but are far too weak to be able to accomplish this, as can be seen by observing the neural circuits that are still firing, studied in Hackley’s 2017 follow-up paper, “Prepulse inhibition and facilitation of the postauricular reflex, a vestigial remnant of pinna startle.” Second, the semilunar fold of the eye, also known as the nictitating membrane or plica semilunaris, is a small fold in the corner of the eye that was first described by Richard Owen in 1866. That’s another one Menton skipped investigating. By 2013, though, there was more contemporary science than the 19th century’s Darwin to draw on, including Tatsuyoshi Arao & Edwin Perkins’s 1968 paper on “The nictitating membranes of primates” along with Gunna Arends & Uda Schramm more specifically on “The structure of the human semilunar plica at different stages of its development—a morphological and morphometric study” from 2004.

Research has, of course, moved on since then. In rabbits, for example, Jeremy Chae et al.’s 2018 paper “Nictitating membrane fixation improves stability of the contact lens on the animal corneal surface,” showed how it “contributes to a healthy animal eye by producing and distributing tears, removing ocular debris, secreting immune proteins, and acting as a mechanical barrier.” In humans though, its function is utterly insignificant. So again, yes, for us it is a vestigial structure in exactly the way it isn’t for rabbits wearing contact lenses. We will get back to the wisdom teeth, appendix, coccyx, and hair shortly, because Menton explicitly disputes their vestigiality. We should wonder though, as Menton never brought up the ear muscles or semilunar fold again, whether we should assume by his silence that he thinks the case for these being vestigial is valid? Hmm. Contrary to Menton’s fervent implication, though, the number of vestigial organs and structures has actually increased as more and more species have been studied in detail. Senter & Moch’s paper covered a wide range of mammalian examples, and a 2010 paper by Senter noted such features in dinosaurs, such as the nubbin of a fifth toe that shows up in Archaeopteryx but in no living bird. And then there are the snakes. Many ancient ones with vestigial limbs have been discovered in recent years—such as the midCretaceous Haasiophis, and Eupodophis and Pachyrhachis from the Late Cretaceous. Their features, systematics and paleoecocology have been covered in many papers by Michael Caldwell, Alexandra Houssaye, Alessandro Palci, Olivier Rieppel, and John Wiens & Jamie Slingluff (included in our references). One squamate very close to the true snakes is the aquatic Adriosaurus, and Palci & Caldwell described its vestigial structures in their 2007 paper “Vestigial forelimbs and axial elongation in a 95 million-year-old non-snake squamate.”[47] In addition, we know that toothless baleen whales, along with aardvarks, and xenarthrans (armadillos, anteaters, and sloths) all have the genes for producing enamelin (the largest protein in the enamel matrix), even though none of them have teeth. And Camila Cupello et al.’s 2015 paper “Allometric growth in the extant coelacanth lung during ontogenetic development” demonstrated “the presence of a potentially functional, well-developed lung in the earliest known

coelacanth embryo, and its arrested growth at later ontogenetic stages, when the lung is clearly vestigial.”  

Menton down History Lane: Wiedersheim’s The Structure of Man  

Here we can’t resist taking a close look at an item that Menton tossed off to buttress his functionality trope (our bold):  

In 1893 the German anatomist Robert Wiedersheim expanded Darwin’s list of “useless organs” to 86. Listed among Wiedersheim’s “vestigial” organs were such organs as the parathyroid, pineal and pituitary glands, as well as the thymus, tonsils, adenoids, appendix, third molars, and valves in veins. All of these organs have been subsequently shown to have useful functions and indeed some have functions essential for life.  

Those nine examples are a long way from eighty-six, and curiously Menton offered nothing in the way of documentation on any of them. Before beating up on old Wiedersheim (1848-1923) too much, though, it should be noted how he’d tagged his vestigial examples: “Organs having become wholly or in part functionless”—not absolutely functionless, as Menton implied. Source Methods Alert: are we catching the scent here of a possibly unwarranted argument? The pineal gland is part of the endocrine system that participates in producing hormones to moderate sleep and circadian cycles. Based on its appearance in reptiles and other vertebrates, Wiedersheim wrote that the pineal gland “can with certainty be regarded as originally a sense organ” and duly included the “Glandula pinealis” on his human vestigial list. The sensory aspect of the pineal system in vertebrates has been explored by many researchers since Wiedersheim’s 1890s, such as Chao Zhang et al.’s “Pineal-specific agouti protein regulates teleost background adaptation” in 2010, Seiji Wada et al.’s 2012 “Expression of UV-Sensitive Parapinopsin in the Iguana Parietal Eyes and Its Implication in UV-Sensitivity in Vertebrate Pineal-Related Organs,” Julien Benoit et al.’s “The sixth sense in mammalian forerunners:

Variability of the parietal foramen and the evolution of the pineal eye in South African Permo-Triassic eutheriodont therapsids” in 2016, and for good measure, Krister Smith et al.’s 2018 “The Only Known Jawed Vertebrate with Four Eyes and the Bauplan of the Pineal Complex.” Would Menton or any anti-evolutionist wish to challenge the observation that in no sense do humans draw on our remnant pineal gland in anything like the way fish and reptiles do? In other words, it’s vestigial in the sense Wiedersheim defined it. Things get worse for Menton’s including the parathyroid gland, also part of the endocrine system that helps regulate the body’s levels of calcium and phosphate, and adenoids operating as a component of the immune system. Because they tend to atrophy in adults, somebody may have considered adenoids to be vestigial, but it wasn’t Wiedersheim, who mentioned neither them nor the parathyroid in his book nor put them on any of his lists. Oops! The reason for his 1893 omission regarding the parathyroid gets clearer when you take account of the history and how slowly science findings disseminated back before the Internet. Reviewing the matter in 1953, Alexander Cave noted how Richard Owen was the first to spot that tiny gland, in a rhinoceros in 1852, but also that it was not common knowledge. It was only in 1880 that Swedish medical student Viktor Sandström (1852-1899) found it in cats, dogs, horses, oxen, rabbits and humans. But, like the plant breeding experiments Gregor Mendel (18221884) reported in the 1860s, Garabed Eknoyan’s 1995 review of parathyroid research reminded how Sandström’s pioneering work was “barely noticed for several years.” In 1891 Eugène Gley (1857-1930) commenced finding out more of what the newly-identified gland did (and how its removal could provoke seizures), while the “parathyroid” term itself wasn’t introduced until 1896, and most of the medical study of it only occurred in the 20th century. Regarding the thymus and tonsils, the history is likewise relevant. Today we know them as organs that function in the immune system, producing T lymphocytes that help protect the body. Tonsils are a curious case. After all, in 2002 according to UW Medicine, some 800,000 Americans had their tonsils removed, most of them due to repeated infections or airway blockage. How’s that for “intelligent” design?

But what was known about them back in 1893? “Concerning the thymus,” Wiedersheim wrote that it was known among “the lower Fishes, in which it attains its greatest development,” which work had “led to the brilliant suggestion that it may be in them primarily protective of the branchial organs of respiration, by a process of phagocytosis, in a manner akin to that in which the tonsils and associated cytogenous tissues are protective of the main respiratory passages of the pulmonary organs of the terrestrial Vertebrata.” That doesn’t sound much like Wiedersheim thought the thymus or tonsils lacked a function, does it? But hadn’t he classified them as “vestigial”, as Menton assured us? Actually, no, he hadn’t. Wiedersheim put the thymus under another category: “Modified under Change of Function, though this cannot in all cases be proved.” As for tonsils, they weren’t included on any of his lists. A similar problem arises for Menton including the pituitary on his hit list, an organ which we know today releases a variety of hormones that participate in different body systems. Wiedersheim was aware of two components of that gland in his time, putting the “Anterior lobe of the hypophysis cerebri (pituitary body)” on that “Modified under Change of Function” with tonsils, but leaving the rest (the part other than the lobe) among his vestigial 86, though recalling that this didn’t mean Wiedersheim had decreed the organ to be without function. Finally, vein valves help prevent blood from flowing backwards, which would seem a rather useful feature. But while Menton addressed none of the details, Wiedersheim had been quite specific on what he had in mind (our bold):  

The structure of the heart, originally very simple, soon becomes complicated, but even then certain peculiarities of the right auricle point back to the condition found in the Amphibia. These are, for example, the inconsistent vestiges of valves at the opening of the left vena cava superior (Thebesian valve), and the almost constant remains of the valves of the sinus at that of the vena cava inferior (Eustachian valve). The same applies to the traces of the incorporation of the sinus venosus and of the pulmonary veins into the opposite divisions of the atrium (auricles). In short, Comparative Anatomy furnishes not only interesting parallels with, but an explanation of the various stages in the Ontogeny of the heart of the higher Vertebrata. There are, however, some conditions which occur in the Mammalian heart, especially during the early periods in its development, which

cannot be explained by inheritance, but which have arisen secondarily through adaptation; among the chief of these are the secondary perforation of the septum atriorum and the formation of the annulus ovalis or isthmus of Vieussens.  

Wiedersheim was right on the mark on those “inconsistent vestiges” of the semicircular Thesbesian valve at the opening of the coronary sinus along the right atrium. Varying widely in size and often having holes in them, around a quarter of people don’t have the valve at all, as covered by Patrick Felle & John Bannigan in 1994 and Gary Mak et al. in 2009. Of that latter work, and its implications for how the valve could get in the way of modern coronary sinus operations that required getting past that obstruction, Josef Kautzner remarked that it wasn’t established that this “caudal remnant of the embryonic sinoatrial valves” had “any role in normal physiology.” Vestigial is also not a bad description of the Eustachian valve, whose embryonic function (helping to spread oxygen-rich blood coming from the placenta) ceases after birth. The valve shrinks to a crescent remnant in most people, disappearing entirely in some, while in others it remains in place, where it can occasionally become infected, circumstances which can be mistaken for other coronary glitches, as noted by Jamelle Bowers et al. in a 2001 paper. And likewise for the chordate sinus venosus, which in fish definitely performs a function in collecting venous blood, but by the time you get down to the derived mammals the paired features are barely present embryonically, with one bit, the sinoatrial node (which was only first observed by science in 1907) turning out to be doing something very different in the adult, functioning as a pacemaker, as reviewed by Oliver Monfredi et al. in 2010. Finally, during embryonic development, pulmonary veins are absorbed to become openings in the finished heart—though just how many you end up with turns out to vary. The usual pattern is two to a side, but a 2014 study by L. C. Prasanna et al. found almost a third of people had more or fewer than that (14% with 2 left & 1 right, 12% with 2 left & 3 right; 4% with 1 left & 2 right, and 2% with 1 left & 4 right). In any case, the diagnostic tools for spotting heart problems (serious things, like “Pulmonary Arteriovenous Malformation”) depend on doctors knowing how the plumbing is laid out inside, and in this case nature has not been so obliging.

Or was it just the loose attention to the specs on the part of the hypothetical creationist designer? Where are those biological OSHA regs? Now it wouldn’t have shocked us in 2019 to have found that an 1893 book on biology might have slipped up now and then, but what’s striking is how well old Wiedersheim’s tome had held up over the intervening century. Which is more than can be said about David Menton, whose 21st century approach was not to give a lesson in the history of anatomical studies but to cast doubt on the existence of vestigial structures in principle, in effect crying “Hey, here are some structures scientists once considered vestigial and useless but no longer do; therefore, is anything actually vestigial?” With the data creationism needed to account for piling up, it’s revealing how far from that field Menton was willing to lurch. Consider this Origins or Bust bit:  

The Loss of Useful Organs Doesn’t Explain Their Origin A problem for using vestigial organs as evidence for “amoeba to man” evolution is that the chief burden of the macro evolutionary explanation is to account for the spontaneous origin of new functional organs—not the loss of functional organs. While evolution might require the loss of functional organs, it is the acquisition of fundamentally new organs that remains unexplained by random mutations and natural selection.  

Sorry, David, but this evasion won’t work, though it’s useful to unpack all the baggage Menton was trying to slip in by it. Saying “amoeba to man” is pure strawman. No one is using the existence of vestigial organs to argue that amoebae and humans had a common ancestor—there are other perfectly fine avenues to that destination, as genetic and cellular morphological studies of metazoans (animals including us) and amoebozoans put our common ancestor some 1.4 billion years ago. The upshot of that is the realization that humans did not evolve from amoebae, as the latter are in their own derived side clade, the amoebozoa. Nor are vestigial organs used to argue about the origin of new ones. How new organs and organ systems arise has been studied indepth in a number of cases (remember, we discussed the respiratory and nervous systems in Chapter 4). Menton has to ignore all the data

we have surveyed (in principle available to him too). Worse, no one who understands evolution thinks they appeared spontaneously, poof in one go. The respiratory system has a history dating back at least 430 million years, and the nervous system tracks back still further, at least 600 million years ago. For Menton to append that “spontaneous” tag says way more about his own truncated YEC Map of Time and saltational imperatives than it does about the biological processes forming new organs in basal metazoans. The issue Menton was supposed to be addressing is why vestigial organs are used as evidence for evolution in the first place. They are structures that appear in a wide range of organisms but also have lineage-specific traits. There is no reason why these structures would exist if not the result of common ancestry. Moreover, these features do not make sense under any other theories. And Menton is proving that point by not being able to make sense of them himself, failing to apply his creationist conception to the facts. We have to understand that Darwin was not the first person to take note of these structures. Aristotle did way back in the 4th century BCE; certainly he was not using them to argue for evolution. While neither evolution nor creationism necessarily require the existence of vestigial structures, they do fit within the evolutionary model quite nicely. For example, organisms closely related genetically to each other often share the same vestigial structures, as mentioned in the case of the pinna muscles in apes. The creationist explanation for that would either be that non-human apes and humans were separately created with the same deficient muscles, or that the muscles broke independently in both non-human apes and humans. Both of these assertions come off as painfully ad hoc—and, lacking a Time Machine, presently untestable and therefore unscientific. Under creationism, though, there is no reason why any species that are supposed to be totally unrelated to each other should have the same leftover parts, unless God is extremely uncreative. In fact, the best way to show that all life was created would have been to separate organisms into discrete categories—may we call them … kinds? Great evidence of kinds would be that each has some genetic material completely different from any other kind, that every kind

develops differently, that each kind has totally different anatomies and physiologies, or something along that line. Instead, we find increasingly inclusive groups of organisms that share specific diagnostic characteristics. There is no reason that humans and chimps—entirely unrelated to each other in the creationist model—should both have all the features diagnostic of an anthropoid primate, and also of an euarchontoglire, placentalian, mammal, amniote, tetrapod, sarcopterygian, vertebrate, chordate, deuterostome, metazoan, opisthokont, and eukaryote among others, unless they are descended from ancestors who also had these characteristics on account of their natural lineage. We can apply simple observations of descent with inherent genetic modifications into the distant past, and that knowledge has allowed evolutionists to make a number of verifiable predictions and lead to deeper understanding of the biological data. Which is exactly what Menton was so reluctant to do. But not averse to hand waving, like this:  

Circular Reasoning The most conspicuous logical flaw in the use of vestigial organs as evidence for evolution is circular reasoning. Evolutionists first declare vestigial organs to be a result of evolution, and then they turn around and argue that their existence is evidence for evolution. This kind of argument would hardly stand up in a court of law.  

This ironically is exactly what Mention sought to do, except by stealth, since in his creationist frame vestigial features cannot occur on account of natural evolution, no matter what the evidence. With that guiding (and non-negotiable) presupposition underlying his apologetics, Menton’s selective veering onto the data field is a wonderment to behold.  

Evasion Exhibit No. 1: Embryology  

Since Menton brings up courts of law, though, permit us to submit this as our first exhibit:  

Vestiges of Embryology

Evolutionists insist on explaining vestigial organs only in terms of evolution, but other explanations are more plausible and even provable. For example, the human body does have many organs and structures that are clearly vestiges of our embryological development. While it is quite easy to prove that an organ or structure is a vestige of embryology, there can be no empirical evidence to support the speculation that an organ is a vestige of evolution. There are several structures that function during the development of the embryo and fetus that appear to be no longer used after birth. Remnants of these once-functional structures persist throughout life. Such structures perfectly fit the definition of a vestige, but they are not vestiges of evolution. The following are a few examples of embryological vestiges. Ligamentum arteriosum—obliterated remnant of the ductus arteriosus, an artery that shunted blood from the pulmonary trunk to the descending aorta, thus bypassing the lung during fetal development. In certain cases of congenital heart defects, the ductus arteriosus actually continues to function ___________________________________________________________________

Recurrent laryngeal nerve One of the foibles of our evolutionary history is how we get stuck with the consequences of things that occurred millions of years ago. The recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) is one of them. Vertebrates have nerve connections to their breathing systems: a central vagus nerve, attached to which is a laryngeal nerve that in basal models (and fish today) ran down past the heart to the gills. As tetrapods developed, though, with air intakes at the mouth but hearts located increasingly farther away in the body, derived terrestrial forms breathing air from the mouth ended up with that laryngeal nerve looping down and around an aortic arch before linking to the vagus nerve. It’s a relatively minor detour for humans, but a rather extended one of fifteen feet in the case of the long-necked animals like giraffes (and even worse presumably for the giant sauropods, as explained in a 2012 paper by Mathew Wedel). Critics of creationism have naturally offered this as an example of pointlessly sloppy design, including Donald Prothero in his 2007 book, and Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins in their 2009 volumes. Unwilling to allow anything in our biology to be inept (it’s by the Perfect Designer, after all), anti-evolutionists have tried to

rationalize away the problem. First, by not thinking at all about the way the nerves are laid out in animals other than us (and so avoiding that perilous comparison thing), and second, by scavenging around for any practical reason for such an unusual arrangement. Especially superficial examples would be a 2005 piece by Frank Sherwin, and a 2010 one from Jonathan Sarfati. But Jerry Bergman’s several articles on the topic (2002, 2010 and 2011) Intelligent Design advocate Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig in 2010 (duly parroted by Casey Luskin), and Randy Guliuzza in 2016, have tried for more detail. Lönnig also dislikes the idea of giraffe evolution as much as any creationist, so dwelt on the giraffe example in particular. Sarfati and Lönnig highlighted the problems that can arise should the RLN not develop normally, implying thereby that the looped attachment   for some time after birth to keep the baby alive. Ligamentum teres hepatis—obliterated remnant of the umbilical vein that shunted much of the oxygenated blood away from the liver to the inferior vena cava during fetal development. Median umbilical ligament—an obliterated vestige of the allantois, a pouch extending off of the embryonic cloaca. The allantois disappears very early in gestation after functioning as a scaffolding to help construct the umbilical cord; this remnant is seen as a ligament extending from the bladder to the umbilicus (bellybutton).  

The first two are comparable to the pulmonary vein example mentioned ___________________________________________________________________

(however superficially peculiar) must have ended up the way it has for the best of reasons. While rare, RLNs running in unexpected ways have proven particularly vexing for surgeons trying to do thyroidectomies, though, as noted in clinical reports like Thierry Defechereux et al. 2000 (among the papers Lönnig cited), Mehmet Uludag et al. 2009, and Diogio Casal et al. and Antonio Toniato et al. in 2010. The

recurrent and non-recurrent nerves can even occur together, as in the case noted by Y. S. Yang et al. 2009 (also fielded by Lönnig), further complicating the task of surgeons to spot the nerve’s eccentric deployments. So it was a bit bold for Sarfati to insist in 2011 that “No evidence exists that the design causes any disadvantage.” Guliuzza added a 1983 paper by Michael Leonard et al. that suggested the developing human embryo drew on the RLN as a temporary scaffolding while the heart muscles formed. Which would qualify as a Gouldian spandrel (a novel function coming about as an unintended side effect), but that doesn’t make the issues of the odd overall arrangement go away. If the designer wanted to have a temporary support scaffold, why do so by that nerve system and not by a more direct transitory method? Lönnig (with Luskin tagging along behind) tried to upend the “Darwinism” argument by wondering what would have prevented the supposedly infinitely powerful Natural Selection from producing a better less contrived system. Luskin wrote (our bold) “It seems quite likely that there are mutational pathways to a more efficient route for the RLN. Under neo-Darwinian thinking, this implies this pathway should have evolved,” and that “The fact that the pathway remains—under evolutionary logic—that there’s some benefit to the current design, which implies that the current design isn’t so imperfect after all.” All of which shows how little Luskin understands evolutionary principles. There is no “should” to Natural selection. It has no foresight. The RLN works just fine, it’s just arranged in a way that reflects its evolutionary history.   by Wiedsersheim, and likewise can have medical downsides. The ligamentum arteriosum is also in the neighborhood of another odd feature of vertebrate“design”, the recurrent laryngeal nerve (see the  Info Box). The median umbilical ligament is not to be confused with the medial umbilical ligament, a remnant of the umbilical arteries; both are functionless in adults, but the median one definitely can get in the way of surgeons poking around in that vicinity in their operations. Similarly,

the embryonic “round ligament of the liver” vein can act up in adult hypertension, or go inconveniently gangrene now and then, as reviewed by Wissem Triki et al. in 2018. Rather than dwelling on such potential design defects of a biology that seems sporadically untidy in cleaning up after itself, Menton pressed still further down this path by explaining how both sexes have vestiges of the opposite sex and concludes with:  

Almost every organ of the female reproductive system can be found in a different or vestigial form in the male reproductive system (and vice versa). For example, in the male, the prostatic utricle (an out pouching of the prostatic urethra having no known function) is a remnant of the paramesonephric duct that develops into the uterus and oviducts of the female. Clearly, the vestigial organs of reproduction are not a result of evolution but rather embryological development.  

Really? Menton thinks creationism explains this better than evolution? To creationists, the male was made first, and then the female was made after. So, why would the male have remnant characters of the female at all? In reality, sexually dimorphic features (parts of the body that are specific to each sex) are explained quite well by evolution, not by creationism. Understand that sexual selection is a pretty well understood mechanism of evolution. In this, mates choose each other based on certain characteristics—bright feathers, large antlers, prettiest song, etc.—and what characters mates choose can definitely influence the “normal” phenotype of the population over generations. For instance, we looked at the peacock’s train in Chapter 3 and how that was likely caused by mate choice. Here, humans generally are monogamous, so sexual dimorphism between the sexes is often rather low. But because offspring inherit a set of genes from both parents, males are going to receive the genetic instructions for making, say, breasts just like females. The only difference is that in males the Y-chromosome eventually kicks in and (usually) short-circuits the development of breasts. So, reduced sexually dimorphic characters are not vestigial because they are not reduced in size and function across clades (it may be noted that the Senter & Moch paper on vestigial features in

mammals does not even mention sexually dimorphic characters). Menton is again forgetting what definition of vestigial he provided.  

Evasion Exhibit No. 2: Homology  

Menton moved onto homology, which we covered back in Chapter 3. Creationists (including Menton) accept homology to a very limited extent, and vestigial features are just another type of homologous structure. Remember that the creationists were utterly unable to delineate kinds in the previous chapter; that is, they could not explain why some structures are ok to be homologous in certain species (such as the arm bones in chimps and gorillas), but not in others (such as the arm bones in chimps and humans). Menton trips over this issue in our next evasion exhibit:  

Homology Many vestigial organs are examples of homology but not necessarily of evolution. Homology is an underlying similarity between different kinds of animals recognized by both evolutionists and creationists. All terrestrial vertebrates, for example, share a widespread similarity (homology) of body parts. Evolutionists insist that this similarity is the result of evolution from a common ancestor. Creationists, on the other hand, argue that this similarity reflects the theme of a common Creator and the need to meet similar biological requirements. For example, all vertebrates with true limbs (amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals) have the same basic limb structure at least during their embryological development. This standard vertebrate limb consists of an upper limb comprising one bone, a lower limb comprising two bones, and a hand or foot bearing five digits (fingers and toes). Thus, the limbs of all limbed vertebrates share fundamental similarities, with each being specialized to meet the needs of each species.  

Remember that we can indeed test common ancestry among organisms, for example showing that DNA sequences for homologous proteins converge the further we go back in time. We can also make predictions about what we should find in the fossil record if common ancestry is correct, which evolution has. But how would we test a

design event? Are those happening in either nature or the lab? Menton is not thinking about that. Even more interesting, we can make predictions about not just the similarities among organisms but also the differences. For instance, biologist Stephen Schaffner’s 2017 BioLogos post “Testing Common Ancestry: It’s All About the Mutations” shows how the distribution of certain mutations (some types are more common than others) that cause within-species differences matches that same trend among species. This only makes sense if those natural mutations are the reason for differences among organisms. Not only did Schaffner test this between humans and chimps, included baboons, orangutans, and macaques, yielding the same trend. Creationists are utterly unable to make these sorts of predictions, or apparently even pay attention to the data on which those analyses were based.[48] In short, if creationists want evolutionists to believe that similarities among organisms are the result of a common designer, then the creationists need to start putting up testable predictions about that hypothesis. Neither coauthor holds his breath for that. Especially given how disposed Menton is to offering evasions like this (our bold):  

Horses have five digits while developing as an embryo, but generally all but one (the third digit) is absorbed before birth. Vestiges of the second and third metacarpal (and metatarsal) bones are visible in the modern horse as the splint bones. Some fossil horses, however, had three toes, but both three-toed and onetoed horses have been found together in the fossil record. In National Geographic magazine, for example, there is a picture of the feet of both a three-toed horse (Pliohippus) and a one-toed horse (Equus) that were found at the same volcanic site in Nebraska.  

This is strange. Is the implication that since some three and onetoed horses have been found together, one-toed horses could not have evolved from three-toed horses? Was Menton alive while his parents were alive? How about his grandparents? Were his parents alive while their parents were alive? Anyway, this sort of argument has been debunked by both evolutionists and even Menton’s fellow creationists. Remember that baraminologists Wood, Wise, and Cavanaugh all agree that horses,

from the small five-toed Hyracotherium down to the one-toed Equus, are part of a monobaramin. That means modern one-toed horses did indeed evolve from three and five-toed horses, even within the creationist paradigm. But how does this invalidate the vestigial character of those toes? Menton seems on the brink of a Freudian admission that vestigial organs do exist. Why else would he say “vestiges” of these bones? Should we assume his argument is then: vestigial organs do not exist, unless they do, but they still do not prove anything because they represent a loss of function? Menton was intent on pressing this flimsy argument to the limit, as he included hair as “an example of a homologous structure declared to be vestigial by evolutionists” (that he declined to name), concluding “To declare the unique hairs of one mammal to be vestigial to those of another is biological nonsense.” What? Because some mammals have adapted their hair for specific functions (Menton mentioned rhinos and porcupines), our human hair is not vestigial as seen within our primate family? Also, is the hair of those rhinos, porcupines, and humans acceptably homologous to Menton now, as in derived from a common ancestor? We coauthors would be inclined to agree with Menton on that point. Eventually Menton got around to addressing the erector pili muscles (also known as arrector pili) and our comparatively sparse body hair. Yet again, Menton plays his “It has a function; therefore, it can’t be vestigial” song and dance:  

Evolutionists argue that human body hairs are vestigial (useless) because there are so few long terminal hairs compared to tiny vellus hairs. Hair serves as thermal insulation in most mammals, which is important because most animals are incapable of regulating their body temperature by sweating. Man, on the other hand, is a profuse sweater and can maintain body temperature over a much wider range of ambient temperature than nearly all other mammals. Long body hair of the type seen on most mammals would interfere with the evaporative water loss necessary for human thermoregulation by sweating. In most mammals, hair serves as an important barrier to ultraviolet radiation from the sun. While human scalp hair serves a similar function on the typically exposed top of our head, our primary defense against UV damage is tanning and wearing clothes.

 

Here again, Menton equates vestigial to useless without justification. He also missed what had been going on in the science of hair in the meantime. In 2001, a paper by Hermelita Winter et al. implicated the pseudogene KRTHAP1 as a factor in our general hairlessness (there’s an HR gene in play too, investigated by Amir Abbasi in 2011 regarding its regulation of mammalian hair follicles— mutations in that can generate complete hairlessness in humans, though that’s quite rare). As for the pseudogene, that comes from the type 1 hair keratin gene family, and the researchers suggest it was inactivated some 240,000 years ago, coinciding approximately with the dispersal of humans out of Africa (all way before the YEC universe was created apparently). With the inactivation of this gene, humans had to rely more on sweat to keep themselves cool, so there was a trade-off: less hair for more sweating. There would have then been a selective pressure on humans who could keep themselves cool via sweating, and those who could not might have a tendency to die off from heatstroke. That is why modern apes (with a functional KRTHAP1) do not sweat as much as we do. Interestingly, KRTHAP1 pops up in another fairly hairless critter, elephants, though the 2009 paper on it by Alfred Roca et al. wasn’t able to pin down what role it may have been playing in that lineage (which included some distinctly hairy models, those wholly mammoths). Sounds suspiciously evolutionary, though. Playing his “not useless” joker card that he’s snuck into the deck, Menton explained how the hair functions in sensing the environment (like in nearly all mammals), and followed that with a paragraph explaining how the arrector pili muscle is responsible for goosebumps. In other primates, the goosebumps help to insulate as well as make one seem larger; however, human hair is too sparse to accomplish either of these, which is why the response has been termed a vestigial reflex since Darwin, as biologist Jerry Coyne observed in a 2011 posting.  

Evasion Exhibit No. 3: Appendicitis Which brings us to our third evasion exhibit, where Menton way overplays that “not useless” card (our bold):

 

Declaring Useful Organs to Be Useless Can Be Dangerous Once an organ is considered to be useless, it may be ignored by most scientists, or even worse, surgically removed by physicians as a useless evolutionary leftover. The oft repeated claim that the human appendix is useless is a case in point. The evolutionist Alfred Romer in his book The Vertebrate Body said of the human appendix: “Its major importance would appear to be financial support of the surgical profession.” We can only wonder how many normal appendices have been removed by surgeons since Darwin first claimed them to be a useless vestige. Even more frightening would be the surgical removal of a “useless” parathyroid or pituitary gland. [49]  

Menton’s caught here on a fundamental creationist misunderstanding of the scientific method: the idea that if an authority in a field says something, then evolutionists must take that as holy writ, in exactly the way creationists do with the Bible. But, this is entirely the opposite of how science works. No one is going to stop doing research in the field because of the opinion of Darwin or Dawkins or Gould or anyone else. The science is going to move on regardless. In the end, authority doesn’t matter, only the data does. But here Menton isn’t about the data. He is hugging a mantra. Really now, did many people get their appendix removed simply because it was thought to be useless? Who willingly has the money, time, or desire to undergo a surgical procedure to remove an organ preemptively? Think about that. As it happens, coauthor JW has some personal experience in this matter, since he actually had his appendix removed due to developing acute appendicitis during the writing of this chapter. However “useful” his appendix was during that event, was its proclivity to malfunction one of its intended design features, or merely the defect of a less than attentive designer? And can we sue—or are class action suits invalidated by the Flood? Menton didn’t want to think about such things at all in his vestigial chapter, and Jerry Bergman skipped mentioning appendicitis entirely in his 2000 sprint on its functionality in “the immune system, strategically located at the entrance of the almost sterile ileum from the colon with its normally high bacterial content.” This silence was in spite of the fact that Bergman had relied heavily on a 1988 creationist piece by

Warwick Glover, which had devoted lots of space to the history of appendicitis treatment. Points for gutsy deflection go to Nathaniel Jeanson, though, for his tripping around this in a footnote to Replacing Darwin, punting the theology of flawed design and dangerous biological activity to a string of AiG posts downplaying the theodicy angle. On the Panglossian design side, Douglas Oliver had enthused in 2009 how snake venom is “too well-designed to be accidental” (recall the Info Box on that from Chapter 4). Jeanson added his own 2013 ICR post that assured us how any lions in Eden were “tame and strictly herbivorous.” The 2007 Answers chapter by Andy McIntosh & Bodie Hodge plainly fence-straddled, contending such features were either there to start, doing different things (and so a vestigial aspect to their contemporary versions?)—or they had appeared after the Curse, “But the Bible doesn’t specifically say one way or another.” How helpful. But the 2011 post by Joe Francis on “Good Designs Gone Bad” that Jeanson linked to probably takes the cake, or the cholera, when it affirmed “God originally made microbes to perform only beneficial functions.” Cholera was one of his examples (our bold):  

Interestingly, most species related to Vibrio cholera grow harmlessly on the surface of practically all shelled ocean creatures and some fish. There they perform a valuable task: breaking down chitin, the main component of the hard outside shell, or exoskeleton, of crabs, shrimp, lobsters, and many other sea creatures. Without their help, oceans and beaches would be littered with billions of shells. The breakdown of chitin also returns precious nutrients like carbon and nitrogen back to the ocean. Even more fascinating, some of the cholera components that are toxic to the human intestines are used to break down chitin. So creationists hypothesize that Vibrio cholera originally broke down chitin in the ocean, but after Adam’s Fall, God allowed them to spread beyond their proper place.  

No sources were offered for these claims. (How unprecedented.) But we have a sea of questions nonetheless. Why would organisms created for the idyllic oceans of the pre-Curse world need shells in the first place? To protect them from being not eaten by the non-carnivores of those times? And did Francis have some inside track on what “kind” Vibrio might be, and whether their family was a holobaramin? No

answer on that one, either, but evolutionary systematics hasn’t been so circumspect, such as Cristiane Thompson et al.’s 2009 phylogeny. And which “cholera compounds” that break down chitin were toxic to our human intestines? The actually annoying cholera toxin, whose biology was reviewed by Kaushik Bharati & Nirmal Ganguly in 2011, isn’t a chitinase. In 2005 Thomas Kirn et al. did identify “a single protein required for efficient intestinal colonization that mediates attachment to both zooplankton and human epithelial cells by binding to a sugar present on both surfaces,” but that chitin-binding protein isn’t itself toxic, and raised the issue for the creationists as to whether so specific a feature for Vibrio’s invasive proclivities had been designed into back when it was allegedly slated only for chitin disposal. As to how Vibrio manages to be such a nuisance in the real world, a 2005 paper by Karin Meibom et al. found the organism had a “natural competence” knack for extracting DNA from its environment, enabling its virulent adaptive diversity. Which can lead to some puzzling variations, as Douglas Bartlett & Farooq Azam’s commentary on the Meibom paper noted “some strains of V. cholerae have the cholera toxin genes but lack the receptor for a bacteriophage that harbors cholera toxin genes.” Someone careless back in the “created heterozygosity” provisioning department? Furthermore, was Francis under the impression that no other organisms could munch on chitin, and hence perform that vital task of chitin clearance without Vibrio butting in as exclusive cleanup crew? Sara Beier & Stefan Bertilsson found in 2013 that there were several ways of metabolizing chitins, and not restricted to old Vibrio—though bacteria are the main players, chitinases also crop up in archaea, fungi, rotifers, some algae, a few carnivorous plants, occasionally even in the digestive tracts of “higher animals”—and, oh yes, the immune system of we humans, as Karina Vega & Markus Kalkum found in a 2012 paper (where it can come in handy warding off invasive fungal chitins).[50] Was Francis equally under the impression that marine Vibrio species were restricted to chitin degradation, and hence their impact on biota there was utterly benign? Vibrio must have not have got the memo, one of its species being the major cause of fish death, reviewed by Jun Li & Norman Woo in 2003. Nor did its close

phylogenetic cousin, Photobacterium, likewise a pathogen for marine animals and humans, surveyed by Amable Rivas et al. in 2013. As for their ecological range, covered in the 2013 review by Salvador Almagro-Moreno & Ronald Taylor, besides making life exciting for shellfish and fish, Vibrio circulates among algae and protozoa, marine animals like the transparent armored copepods (often themselves parasitical, along with being hosts for other parasites), the lake fly chironomids, and assorted waterfowl. They do have two main predators, bacteriophages and those aforementioned protozoa. So how would Francis ascertain what the “proper place” was for Vibrio and the rest in their presumed Edenic ecology? From that Bible that “doesn’t specifically say one way or another”? All of which leaves us to ruminate on how far clinical applications might go in the service of creationist rationalization. If talking hypothetically, as Menton did with the prospect of pituitary glands being extracted on the whim of evolutionary dogma, “we can only wonder” whether someone in the process of dying after ingesting pufferfish tetrodotoxin would be covered by Matthew 15:11. In the New International Version: “What goes into someone's mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them.” Intelligent Design advocate Marcos Eberlin sounded nearly as peculiar as Joe Francis when he pressed close to that precipice in 2019. Reported ever so blithely by David Klinghoffer, Eberlin suggested that appendicitis “is largely a problem of the First World,” and that the organ’s capacity “as a helpful reservoir of microorganisms” compensates for another presumably designed “blessing,” our need to flush out dangerous food intake via diarrhea—a notion which Jerry Coyne caustically filed under “ID craziness.” We’ll return to bacterial reservoirs in the appendix shortly, but first we must return to the creationist implication that such organs were really ignored just because they were thought to be vestigial (not necessarily useless). Menton certainly offered no evidence of that regarding the appendix, beyond dangling the 1986 quote from Alfred Romer (1894-1973) and Thomas Parsons. Menton invoked Romer’s book again later, and we’ve highlighted some relevant bits in bold:  

Ever since Darwin, the appendix has been the prime example of a “useless” organ. LiveScience says of the appendix that “it is a vestigial organ left behind from a plant-eating ancestor.” In the middle of the 20th century, surgeons often removed the appendix electively during abdominal surgery, assuming it had no function. According to most evolutionists, the appendix is a vestige of the caecum (an expanded area at the beginning of the large intestine) left over from our plant-eating ancestors. But since humans have a well-developed caecum as well as an appendix, the appendix can hardly be considered a vestigial caecum. In his book The Vertebrate Body, evolutionist Alfred Romer said that the appendix is “frequently cited as a vestigial organ supposedly proving something about evolution. This is not the case. . . .”  

Curious how much one can learn with a few simple mouse clicks these days. Here’s the full Romer quote, with the bits Menton extracted in bold:  

In man it terminates in the narrow vermiform appendix. This is frequently cited as a vestigial organ supposedly proving something about evolution. This is not the case; a terminal appendix is a fairly common feature in the cecum of mammals, and is present in a host of primates and a number of rodents. Its major importance would appear to be in the financial support of the surgical profession.  

This is astonishing: Menton’s Romer quote was literally a joke! A flippant toss-off in an otherwise massive science volume. Unless Menton had merely secondarily quote-mined the line (not impossible given the parasitic nature of creationist “scholarship”), we may suppose he saw the whole paragraph in the course of extracting the punchline. Perhaps he has no sense of humor. Menton certainly has no sense of history. Despite his vague wondering on people having their appendixes extracted purposelessly, the truth appears to be the opposite. There are a number of papers on the history of appendectomies, none of which indicate that people were simply having their appendix removed because it was thought useless. One of these was even known to the creationist daisy chain: Rainey Williams’ 1983 “Presidential Address: a history of appendicitis,” which Warwick Glover had cited in his 1988

piece, and which Jerry Bergman could have theoretically known about when he trawled Glover in 2000. Williams traced in detail its detection as a malady starting in the Renaissance, the surgical removals of the appendix beginning in the 18th century, and the slow path after that to understand the causal factors and to cut down on the mortality rate when appendectomies were performed (notable examples of appendicitis deaths including Army physician Walter Reed in 1902 and gun maker Frederick Remington in 1909). By then the organic culprit had at least been identified, Damiano Rondelli’s 2013 article on “The early days in the history of appendectomy” noting how “the more generic ‘typhitis’ and ‘perityphilitis’” terms came to be replaced by the new “appendicitis” terminology coined by Boston doctor Reginald Heber Fitz (1843-1913) in 1886. As for the scale of the problem today, a news flash for Marcos Eberlin: appendicitis is not merely an epiphenomenon of the First World. And it can be more serious in less industrialized and urban societies, because of less available medical treatment, as Victor Kong et al.’s “Acute appendicitis in the developing world is a morbid disease” found in 2015, with incidence of it growing in those regions according to Mollie Ferris et al.’s 2017 survey of “The Global Incidence of Appendicitis.” Whatever factors (be they dietary or environmental) that may be interfering with the “blessing” of diarrhea and appendix failure, Noah Switzer et al.’s 2012 review of new appendectomy techniques reminded readers that “acute appendicitis has been a significant longstanding medical challenge; today it remains the most common gastrointestinal emergency in adults” (an involuntary wince here from coauthor JW). This is backhanded confirmation, of course, that loads of people could not been having their appendixes removed beforehand, otherwise they wouldn’t be in a position to have appendicitis (Menton and the other creationists have just not thought this one through). More interestingly, people in the mid 1900’s with appendicitis were often treated with antibiotics instead of getting appendectomies due to doctors fearing surgical complications. According to the “History of Medicine: The Mysterious Appendix” on the Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center’s website:

 

In the 1940s and 1950s, doctors in England began treating patients with antibiotics—with excellent results. During the Cold War, men on submarines received antibiotics instead of an appendectomy, as the submarines could not surface for six months or more, and patients reportedly did well with this approach. And five recent European studies reported findings consistent with those anecdotes: 70% of patients recovered using antibiotics rather than surgery in these studies.  

Here’s some more of the history Menton wasn’t keen to dive into. To start with, the appendix was not universally thought to be useless in medical and evolutionary science, and there were reasons for why there was a dispute on it. Back in 1900 Richard Berry didn’t classify it as a vestigial structure, but rather as “a specialized part of the alimentary canal” that might have some as-yet-unknown function due in part to the amount of gut-associated lymphoid tissue found with it. The failure to spot said function prompted most to relegate it to the vestigial category, though, a trend prompting an objection in 1912 from the venerable Arthur Keith (1866-1955), proclaiming “The functional nature of the caecum and appendix” based on how it looked like it was a functional organ, but which details nonetheless still escaped the scientists’ probing scalpel (Keith has been quote mine fodder on other matters, see the Info Box  . The “useless” appendix paradigm persisted for the next half century (during which there were two cataclysmic world wars to keep medical science preoccupied on other matters). But in the 1970s, researchers were poking ___________________________________________________________________

The Hovinds brainwashing Arthur Keith 1912 would be just before the anatomist jumped on the Piltdown Man bandwagon (more on that canard in a chapter in Volume 2). So it’s probably no surprise that when creationists bring Keith up, it’s not about his views on the non-vestigiality of the appendix. Talk Origins notes two favored creationist quote mine bits from Keith. The first (#4.13) is culled from his 1946 Evolution and Ethics, wherein he rejected “evolution” as a suitable substitute for his

Christian morality (not that this slowed him down when it came to promoting “scientific” racism and segregation). The other Keith quote (#81) is pithier: “Evolution is unproved and unprovable. We believe it because the only alternative is special creation, and that is unthinkable.” The creationists quoting it give a 1959 date, and some go farther to attribute it to Keith’s Forward for the centennial edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Two small problems with that: (1) Keith had not penned such a Forward (a neat trick if he had, since he’d passed away four years before the centennial), and (2) he never wrote that text anywhere, including in his actual Introduction to the 1928 edition of Origin. Oops. Despite its manifest non-existence, the ever-credulous bottom feeding Kent Hovind has been among those repeating the false Keith quote over the years, starting with his jejune 1991 “Doctoral Dissertation” from the unaccredited creationist Patriot University out in Colorado, and continuing in his 2007 Are You Being Brainwashed? book and seminar notes. Thence comes a tale of filial non-piety. Once daddy Kent was in the slammer on tax evasion, his son Eric showed himself to be a chip-off-the-old parasite by expropriating the father’s website output and retagging it under his own name, but forgetting in this Keith quote mine instance that it still referred to “my book Are You Being Brainwashed?” The product link was at least invalid, at the time of this 2019 writing, suggesting the son was less inclined to divert any potential revenue stream in the direction of the pater’s wares. Of relevance here is a June 2019 video by Paulogia with Logicked showing how prone Eric is to word-for-word copying of Kent’s arguments in his allegedly new and independent seminar series (content pre-brainwashed or dry cleaned as you may prefer).   around again at those lymphoid tissues that had so interested Dr. Berry back when Queen Victoria was around. In 1976 James Neiburger et al. worked out the “Distribution of T and B lymphocytes in lymphoid tissue of infants and children.” Pedro Gorgollón reported on what was going on in the “The normal human appendix” in 1978. G. B. D. Scott did a comparative study in 1980 on

___________________________________________________________________

The Hologenome and microbiota There is increasing interest in animal anatomical studies regarding the bacteria housed therein. For example, Sebastian Fraune & Thomas Bosch’s 2010 paper “Why bacteria matter in animal development and evolution” surveyed work showing that the epithelia (thin outer layer tissue) of animal guts selects which bacteria can thrive, which even occurs in extremely simple animals like Hydra. The necessary symbiotic interactions between a host and its symbionts has led to the concept of the “hologenome”, which is the sum of genetic material in both the host and its symbionts. Such host-symbiont interactions would have consequences on an evolutionary (not merely an individual) timescale. You can meet some of the gut tenants in Gregory Donaldson et al.’s 2016 paper “Gut biogeography of the bacterial microbiota.” Dwelling in the mucus of the small intestine is a gram negative (so called by their reaction to old staining techniques in biology) bacterium Helicobacter and the segmented filamentous bacterial family Lactobacillaceae (producing lactic acid). Next door in the large intestine, the Bifidobacteriaceae family and a clutch of those gram negatives (Acinetobacter, Akkermansia muciniphila, Bacteroides acidifaciens and fragilis) were found. Many of these taxa showed up in the 2013 paper by Caitrona Guinane on appendix microbes revealed after appendectomies that Jerry Coyne alluded to in his criticism of Marcos Eberlin.   “The primate caecum and appendix vermiformis” and in 1985 Jo Spencer et al. expanded knowledge on “Gut associated lymphoid tissue: a morphological and immunocytochemical study of the human appendix.” By 2004 Aliya Zahid could report “The vermiform appendix: not a useless organ.” Part of the reason the function of the appendix eluded researchers so long, though, was that science did not initially realize how the immune system houses bacteria beneficial to the human gut. In other words, that pieces of us might function as a symbiotically beneficial

habitat were definitely not the notions popular back in Berry or Keith’s time. Randall Bollinger et al.’s 2003 “Human secretory immunoglobulin A may contribute to biofilm formation in the gut” paved the way for their 2007 paper “Biofilms in the large bowel suggest an apparent function of the human vermiform appendix” showing how the appendix functions in maintaining a healthy gut biome. That work led in turn to Luis Vitetta et al.’s “The vermiform appendix: an immunological organ sustaining a microbiome inoculum” in 2019. The research goes on (see the  Info Box), but notably not by anti-evolutionists (even if they’re keen to draw on such findings for their apologetics, such as Casey Luskin 2007, Fazale Rana in 2008 & 2009, Dave Nutting 2011, Frank Sherwin 2012, Brian Thomas 2013, and Randy Guliuzza 2016). So, how did this appendix come to be in us at all? Or is the creationist explanation for it, and its detailed features, nothing beyond a generic “not evolution” rant? Menton veered closest to this issue when he indulged in more strained hand waving (again our bold):  

The important point is that the presence or absence of an appendix (or a caecum) reveals no evolutionary pattern whatever. An appendix is not found in any invertebrate, amphibian, reptile, or bird. Only a few diverse mammals have an appendix. The appendix is found, for example, in rabbits and some marsupials such as the wombat, but is not found in dogs, cats, horses, or ruminants. Both Old World and New World monkeys lack an appendix, while anthropoid apes and man have an appendix. The appendix is a complex, highly specialized organ with a rich blood supply—not what one would expect from a vestigial organ. The appendix is part of the gut associated lymphoid tissue (GALT), and has long been suspected of playing an immunological role much like that of the tonsils and adenoids (also once considered to be vestigial). Recent evidence suggests that the appendix is well suited to serve as a “safe house” for commensal (mutually beneficial) bacteria in the large intestine. Specifically, the appendix is believed to provide support for beneficial bacterial growth by facilitating re-inoculation of the colon with essential bacteria in the event that the contents of the intestinal tract are purged following exposure to a pathogen.  

Earlier, Menton complained that Darwin said the appendix has no function, so everyone supposedly took his word for it, ripping appendixes out of people right and left. Now, Menton is saying that researchers have not been taking Darwin’s word for this, after all. We couldn’t help smiling how Menton here is acknowledging that researchers have long suspected that the appendix has function. While we can appreciate his desire to want to have his cake and eat it too, we must object that the only ones actually involved in baking said cake have been the evolutionary scientists. We’ll leave the reader to hunt out the papers by Thomas Boehm and colleagues in our references on the half-billion year history of lymphoid tissue evolution, and its connection to the immune system. Here we’re on the trail of that distribution of the appendix in animals, where the actual uselessness of Menton’s creationism comes to the fore—and that’s not a vestigial feature for them. The very fact that the appendix appears in mammals and nothing else is indicative of an evolutionary pattern. Heather Smith and colleagues have been exploring that aspect for some years, starting with their 2009 paper “Comparative anatomy and phylogenetic distribution of the mammalian cecal appendix.” Their study suggests the appendix arose independently in diprotodont marsupials, such as the wombat, and euarchontoglires—rabbits, rodents, and primates. The last common ancestor of euarchontoglires lived some 75 million years ago, plenty of time for lineage-specific variations. Gee, an organ being present across a clade of organisms united by their genetic commonalities? That sounds pretty evolutionary to us. Interestingly, the monotremes have an appendix-like structure, too, suggestive of the commonality of developmental processes in what amounts to some necessary internal plumbing. Recall that, according to the Lightner mammal paper, Ornithorhynchidae (the platypus) and Tachyglossidae (echidnas) are separate kinds, so why would God put the same appendix-like structure in two entirely unrelated organisms? Were there really such limitations at the Designer parts store? Which reminds us of another clue, one lurking beneath Menton’s notice. While Darwin was right about some things regarding the appendix, such as the decrease in size of the cecum being correlated with an increase in frugivory (fruit eating) and the corresponding size

of the appendix, he was mistaken about one aspect of it, about the appendix being a uniquely hominoid trait. Menton had relied on Warwick Glover’s 1988 work for this factoid. Unfortunately, Menton apparently hadn’t considered the possibility that the science had moved on in the intervening quarter of a century. Which it had. As Rebecca Fisher reviewed (back in 2000!) the feature had shown up in several species of New and Old World monkeys, but had not always been recognized as such based on the terminology used over the years. Meaning Menton continued his wrong streak (and the pitfalls of parasitical scholarship) when he declared it absent in them. Another item: Menton’s allusion above to the appendix as a “safe house” drew on the aforementioned 2007 Bollinger paper, which begged the question of why there were “pathogens” in the first place (cue Vibrio and friends). Did he not realize how odd that sounded, “pathogens” in a 100% designer landscape? Menton’s persistent silence on the implications of the data may be contrasted with how Heather Smith et al.’s 2013 paper, “Multiple independent appearances of the caecal appendage in mammalian evolution and a study of relevant ecological and anatomical factors,” related to the same information. Where Menton saw only a vague designer cartoon, for them, the trend of the data suggested that “the appendix has evolved as a microbial safe-house under selection pressure from gastrointestinal pathogens potentially transmitted via a range of mechanisms rather than via a single mechanism dominated by a particular dietary or social factor.” In other words, for the Smith team there was a structure to the appendix and an ecological context to it. Maintaining gut microbiomes meant it did indeed have an adaptive function, beyond its original role in the digestive path, and that aspect would inevitably render it susceptible to natural selection (that Darwinian thing). Indeed, in their 2017 paper reviewing how variable the appendix is among primates, the Smith team concluded the statistically high frequency in them was a sign “that the appendix is of particular adaptive significance in primates.” Thus, Menton is wrong again in saying that there is no evolutionary pattern for the appendix. He just doesn’t want there to be one, and attributes any and all of the particulars to a catch-all “design”

without that leading to any new insights by light of the creationist model he’s allegedly defending. And we’re not yet done ferreting out the evolutionary pattern Menton assures us isn’t there. The organ to which the appendix is attached, called the cecum, is present in many more animals than the specialized appendix, and that brings yet more relevant data on the field to offer clues on their evolution. The cecum appears in lungfish and most amniotes (being absent in amphibians), and back in Chapter 3 we mentioned how a cecal valve formed in the Italian wall lizard as they adapted from an insectivorous lifestyle to a herbivorous one, therefore needing that larger cecum to digest cellulose. Like the appendix, the function of the cecum seems to involve the immune system, and are regarded today as forming the cecoappendicular complex. And as for an evolutionary pattern to it, Smith’s 2017 paper found  

The correlation between appendix presence and cecal morphology is intriguing and suggests that the shape of the cecum may play a role in whether it has an associated appendix. Specifically, a cecal appendix is most commonly found in association with tapering and spiral cecal shapes, in decreasing relative frequency, and is least commonly associated with paired ceca/colonic appendages or rounded ceca.  

The structural constraints of the system were noted back in 1998 by Randolph Nesse & George Williams in a Scientific American article on Darwinian medicine:  

The path of natural selection can even lead to a potentially fatal cul-de-sac, as in the case of the appendix, that vestige of a cavity that our ancestors employed in digestion. Because it no longer performs that function, and as it can kill when infected, the expectation might be that natural selection would have eliminated it. The reality is more complex. Appendicitis results when inflammation causes swelling, which compresses the artery supplying blood to the appendix. Blood flow protects against bacterial growth, so any reduction aids infection, which creates more swelling. If the blood supply is cut off completely, bacteria have free rein until the appendix bursts. A slender appendix is especially susceptible to this chain of events, so appendicitis may, paradoxically, apply the selective pressure that

maintains a large appendix. Far from arguing that everything in the body is perfect, an evolutionary analysis reveals that we live with some very unfortunate legacies and that some vulnerabilities may even be actively maintained by the force of natural selection.  

Again, this consistent pattern of morphology sounds pretty evolutionary to us coauthors, as the biological systems are shaped by the contingencies of their structure, nudged in adaptive and even conflicting directions by natural selection, yet always constrained by the limitation of being in a derived lineage, where features can’t be dropped in wholesale by a Designer that doesn’t actually exist. In summation, the appendix is still vestigial due to its decreased size relative to other closely related clades, but it is not, nor need it be, useless. By now we’re approaching the dregs—dare we say, vestiges?—of Menton’s vestigial argument. Menton brings up male breast tissue, but by definition, this is not vestigial because it is a sexually dimorphic character. That is, its size varies across males and females of the same species, not among closely related species. So, we can skip it as irrelevant. The next feature is wisdom teeth. Here is Menton’s entire argument: “When there is adequate room for their development, they are fully functional molars and are used in chewing much as the first and second molars.” As British comedian John Oliver sarcastically remarks, “Cool.” We yet again have a case where Menton is conflating useless with vestigial for no reason. Menton is not the only anti-evolutionist to chomp down on wisdom teeth. John Morris did in 2002, and Fazale Rana in 2012. But the two salient attacks were by Jerry Bergman in 1998, and James Trexel in 2018. Bergman set much of the frame for the apologetics to come. Humans, we are told, “have smaller jaws but just as many teeth as their evolutionary antecedents.” For which he relied on a curiously inaccessible set of sources: a 1981 paper by T. Sakai on “Human evolution and wisdom teeth” from the defunct Dental Outlook journal, a 1981 work in Danish by L. K. Haugen, and a 1982 one in Chinese by Y. Z. Zhang.

We’ll return to hominid dental forensics shortly, but Bergman then undercut his argument by bringing up Darwin:  

Although Darwin believed that soft diets may have influenced lack of jaw development in modern humans, many later evolutionists concluded the combination of the evolution of a jaw smaller than our ape-like ancestors and tooth number and size which have not correspondingly evolved was a far more critical reason for the current wisdom teeth problem.  

Sounds reasonable enough, but Bergman would have none of that, and thought invoking Gabriele Macho & Jacopo Moggi-Cecchi’s 1992 paper somehow helped (with a little deck-stacking which we’ve highlighted in bold):  

The conclusion that a smaller jaw cannot contain the large teeth we inherited from our ancestors, and consequently wisdom teeth are not needed, has recently been challenged on several fronts. Macho and Moggi-Cecchi concluded that compared to other primates the third molars are the smallest in Homo sapiens. Further, if the third molars are forced to develop in a more restricted space “they tend to be smaller than anterior” teeth and “in humans this reduction often leads to agenesis [failure of an organ to develop] of the third molars.”  

Right out the gate, Bergman left out the context: Macho & MoggiCecchi were referring at that point to how their own work was “in keeping with” the “morphogenetic field concept” proposed by Percy Butler (1912-2015) in 1939 “and modified” by Albert Dahlberg (19081993) in 1945, whereby genetic factors would weaken “with increasing distance from the most stable tooth” and environmental influences come to dominate. Much groundwork on primate dental development (living and fossil) was done by Holly Smith in the 1990s, and by Christopher Dean since, such as his 2001 et al. paper on how “Growth processes in teeth distinguish modern humans from Homo erectus and earlier hominins.” And María Martinón-Torres et al.’s 2006 paper on hominin molar shape identified a primitive-derived gradient as one proceeds from the australopithecines to Homo. By 2016 advances in genetics permitted Alistair Evans et al. to determine that “A simple rule governs the evolution and development

of hominin tooth size” drawing on a common morphological gradient. Our human pattern originated deep in the Homo genus, meaning by the time we get to our derived species, things have moved beyond whether the third molar is strictly “needed”, but rather whether its development might become increasingly inconvenient in a shifting environment.[51] Throughout most of our human history, the food we ate was so gritty and abrasive that our teeth were substantially worn down, which meant there was plenty of room for the primate third molar to emerge normally in the jaw. Changes to our diet (an element Darwin was aware of, as Bergman had blurted out in his piece) changed that dynamic, leaving open the prospect of bad things happening as the late-growing third molars try to emerge in a narrow human jaw already crowded with teeth that aren’t getting worn down by our changed human diet. One could quibble about whether this qualifies as a vestigial aspect of our evolutionary history, but if there’s any doubt as to just how annoying impacted wisdom teeth can be, the symptoms and treatment options covered by A. R. Samsudin & A. D. Mason in 1994, and H. Singh et al. in 1996, should eradicate any uncertainties. It’s that dietary aspect that has been the primary focus of the creationists, from Bergman to the present. Most recently, OECer Fazale Rana and YECer James Trexel invoked a 2011 paper by Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel on “Global human mandibular variation reflects differences in agricultural and hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies.” We’ll get back to that. Bergman and Trexel also highlighted unnecessary wisdom tooth extraction, as did a 2002 posting by John Morris, who preached how “wisdom teeth are valuable gifts from the Creator and should not be removed if healthy.” Here at last they had an actual situation where dentists too often yanked them out preemptively (Trexel cited a 2007 paper by Jay Friedman suggesting two thirds of these extractions were unnecessary). Though Bergman managed some sloppy deck-stacking here, as among several papers he cited on the controversy over preemptive third molar removal (J. F. Camilla Tulloch from 1987 and 1990, and works by Myer Leonard and Thomas Southard from 1992), inaccurately attributing co-authorship of Tulloch’s 1987 paper to “Eng,

R.C.S and Wilkes, J.” rather than to the single actual one, Alexia Antczak-Bouckoms. But the creationists notably downplayed the issue of impaction dental suffering. Bergman cited an older generic survey of its incidence, Stephen Dachi & Francis Howell from 1961, along with tactically playing up how rare specifically cysts were in cases of impaction, like Farouk Mourshed’s report from 1964. He also stressed examples of pain coming postoperatively from the extraction, such as Paolo Capuzzi et al.’s 1994 study. Points for optimistic misdirection go to Trexel, though, who reminded how “wisdom teeth are advantageous not only for chewing and grinding food, but also for being used as a tool (e. g., tearing, grasping, cutting) by many humans in times past and still today.” This roseate picture of a designed perfection involved worn teeth caused by the challenges of getting by in a subsistence culture, one hallmarked in the past by short lifespans and a “demon-haunted world” (to borrow Carl Sagan’s book title). There was therefore considerable irony in modern creationists not living in that pre-industrial society pervaded by prescientific superstition, trying to revive heaps of that prescientific superstition for their contemporary audience—typing away on their word processors relying on Quantum Theory’s understanding of solid state physics, and posting their paeans to a gritty diet and dental sinew massaging on a global Internet depending on Relativity Theory to keep the satellite network in sync. Furthermore, one wonders how many of the creationists reading their apologetics wear glasses (both coauthors do) —yet another recent technological intervention to compensate for the limitations of our beneficently designed eyeballs. Bergman parenthetically bringing up third molar agenesis was an even bigger mistake, though, since the issue of what teeth might not develop at all, and why, related directly to the evolving human jaw. The story of wisdom teeth is ultimately a long tale of jaw size, diet, and tools, one which is pitifully glossed over by Menton, but bumped into more tactically by James Trexel in his 2018 piece for AiG. In his effort to minimize the deep causal roots of third molar inclusion, Trexel cited (but did not quote) a 1999 paper by Anita Sengupta et al. on how dental wear affected third molar eruption. “Lack of occlusal and approximal attrition may lead to crowding,

rotation and overlapping of anterior teeth,” they had written, “with the second pre-molars and third molars being excluded from the dental arcade and consequently remaining impacted.” So more than just molar number three was involved. The Sengupta paper found “an increase in non-eruption and impaction of the third molars with modernity,” the conclusion that presumably sparked Trexel’s decision to cite them. But they went on to note their study “did not demonstrate a significant increase in the rate of agenesis,” in which the tooth didn’t develop at all. Ah—and what was the “rate of agenesis” in humans, and our hominid ancestors? Wouldn’t we need to know that to assess the implications of our recent incidence of tooth variation? And why weren’t the creationists showing any inclination to look into that, even in their own sources, since the Sengupta paper had noted medieval agenesis rates of around 15%, only slightly lower than those of Victorian and modern times. Trexel pressed his luck further with Sengupta when he cited that paper again (along with van Cramon-Taubadel) for the assertion that “Humans in preindustrial times showed this pattern of tooth wear and, in almost every case, had erupted wisdom teeth with no signs of pathology.” He added Yousuke Kaifu et al.’s 2003 paper on “Tooth Wear and the ‘Design’ of the Human Dentition: A Perspective From Evolutionary Medicine,” which had stressed “Wear that was sufficiently severe to obliterate cusp morphology and flatten the occlusal surfaces of teeth was ubiquitous and normal in virtually every prehistoric society of the world,” but had offered no evidence on “pathology” in prehistoric humans other than this caution: “Admitting that attritional occlusion is a product of evolutionary adaptation, its absence may not necessarily lead to pathological conditions.” And then there was Trexel’s fourth source: O. Mockers et al. on “Dental crowding in a prehistoric population,” who had noted that of 43 intact mandibles from a 4,000-year-old French burial ground, seven of them (16%) showed “extreme irregularities and in two canine impaction was observed”—so not just wisdom teeth specifically were affected, reflecting an overall incident rate consistent with the range in our species. As Mockers put it, “The crowding and canine impactions observed in the prehistoric population of Roaix seem to be attributable to normal-sized teeth erupting in undersized jaws.” That sounds like a

prescription for some serious dental discomfort now and then. No signs of pathology, was it? Since Trexel and the creationists haven’t been keen to ferret things out, we’ll have to look elsewhere. Which brings us to a 2016 blog post by John Hawks devoted to “Third molar agenesis: a puzzling case of recent human evolution.” Citing a 2015 study by K. E. Carter & Steven Worthington on the demographics of it, the anthropologist wrote that “We do know quite a bit about the incidence of M3 agenesis in different human populations. The trait is nearly universal—it occurs everywhere in large enough samples of people, even in hunter-gatherer peoples who have recently continued eating ‘wild’ food diets. But it differs greatly in frequencies,” fluctuating from 5% all the way to 56%, but averaging 22% globally (numbers consistent with Sengupta’s findings, as well as the 2014 study by Mohammad Alam et al.). Hawks had initially thought that this was a purely human feature, but readers brought to his attention a trio of hominid skulls revealing third molar agenesis farther back in the hominid parade. Two are juveniles: the Homo erectus Turkana Boy KNM-WR 15000 covered by Christopher Dean & Holly Smith in 2009, and the Dmanisi D2735 skull described by Ann Margvelashvili et al. in 2013. The third was the isolated diminutive Homo floresiensis LB1 “Hobbit” (possibly a remnant erectus offshoot) surveyed by Yousuke Kaifu et al. in 2015, which lacked the M3 in the upper jaw, but not the lower. Also in 2015, an archaic human from Taiwan turned up missing the M3 molars. While cautioning how difficult it was to date, ChunHsiang Chang et al.’s paper noted “The most striking observation derived from Penghu 1 is the unexpectedly late survival of the large teeth and thick mandibular corpus morphology in eastern Asia at least until ~400 ka but most likely beyond 190 ka.” So let’s pull all the threads together—our physical anatomy, the constraints and opportunities of an environment that could and did change, genetic components under the ever present pressure of natural selection, and how an ability to alter our environment set our species on a unique path. Remember our ancestral australopithecines that we met back in Chapter 3. Much work has gone into understanding their diets as well as those of early Homo, and this work

centralizes on their tooth structure. The reason is, as explained before, mammal teeth are very distinctive and tell much about the animal. Peter Ungar is one of the go-to experts on mammal teeth and their evolution, especially those of our human lineage (see our references for some of his relevant work). His 2004 paper on “Dental topography and diets of Australopithecus afarensis and early Homo” identified how “A. afarensis probably had a mixed forest-savanna resource adaptation rather than a hard-object specialization. These hominins would probably still have preferred soft, sugar-rich fruits, but would have been able to make better use of hard, brittle resources as fallback foods given seasonal availability of favored items.” For reference, fallback foods are the foods primarily eaten when two species of ape are living in the same locality. His 2011 paper on “The Diets of Early Hominins” with Matt Sponheimer further argued that while australopithecines and earlier forms like Ardipithecus (who seems to have had a diet similar to modern chimps, being mainly fruit-eating or frugivorous) may have indeed eaten brittle foods, such as seeds and nuts, this was not their main source of nutrition. Paranthropus (the “robust” australopithecine), for instance, ate primarily C4 plants, such as grasses and sedges. This mix of diet lends a biogeographic element to australopithecine ecology:  

the microwear texture complexity of eastern African Australopithecus and Paranthropus is lower than that of their South African congeners. Likewise, P. boisei and P. robustus have different carbon isotope compositions, with the South African ‘robust’ australopiths consuming a much higher fraction of C3 foods, like most other early hominins (although not to the extent seen in Ardipithecus).  

This geography-based diet is due partly to the climate change that was transforming Plio-Pleistocene Africa (and the world). Fields of C4 plants were spreading as cooler and more variable climates shrank forests, so hominins with variable diets would have been more adaptable to these changes. Some researchers argue that roots and tubers would have made up a large part of hominin diets and even that the practice of gathering plants would have driven the evolution of complex social behavior in Homo.

Thus, the hominin ancestors of Homo were primarily herbivorous or frugivorous like modern apes, but they didn’t stay that way. The transition to a larger meat diet occurred by the time we get into the Homo genus, but knowing just how early that happened has naturally shifted as more data has come on the scene. Researchers like Melissa Panger and colleagues in a 2002 paper suggested that hominid use of unmodified stones might long predate the appearance of explicitly crafted tools, and that proved to be the case when Shannon McPherron et al.’s 2010 paper discovered “Evidence for stone-toolassisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika, Ethiopia.” The cut marks seen there would represent the most basic of stone applications, taking advantage of existing rock fragments to hack away at things, but this also reflects a shift in the diet (putatively of A. afarensis) to more selectively include protein-rich meat, specifically “flesh removal and percussion marks for marrow access” of ungulates. Press on down the line to 2.6 million years ago, and we have solid examples of crafted stone tools, called the Oldowan industry. These were still very simple, being merely rocks that had been chipped a bit to create a point. And the diversity of hominins at that time (at least three genera—Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and Homo—involving four species) means researchers do not know which of them created the tools, or even that only one of them was involved. Later, 1.76 million years ago, the Acheulean tool industry appears, characterized by ovular hand axes, the chronology and distribution of which Yonas Beyene et al. reviewed in 2013. However, by this time, Homo erectus was around and expanding into Eurasia, so they were probably the originators of this more sophisticated industry, with cognitive implications (cultural learning vs genetic transmission) discussed by Raymond Corbey et al. in 2016. Just to complete this tool thread, the subsequent “Chronology of the Acheulean to Middle Stone Age transition in eastern Africa” is covered in a 2018 paper by Alan Deino et al., bringing things down to around 300,000 years ago, right about the time our species is emerging. In addition to these tools, Homo erectus is associated with those modified animal bones, indicating that flesh had definitely become an important part of their diet. One idea, the “expensive tissue

hypothesis,” posits that since the brain was increasing in size—and very expensive metabolically to maintain—a diet relying increasingly on meat would have helped fuel it. Which brings in another possible factor in our human social evolution: the rise of hunting. Hominins had to work in groups to bring down prey that was faster or larger than them, further reinforcing cooperative social behavior and communication. And don’t forget being hunted. There is quite good evidence for predation of hominins by large cats and birds, first spotted by Charles Brain in 1970 regarding a juvenile Paranthropus robustus killed by a leopard, and affirmed by Julia Lee-Thorp et al.’s 2000 revisit of the data. Klaus Zuberbühler & David Jenny went still further in 2002 by seeing such predation as a common factor affecting primate evolution. Working together in groups to ward off predators could have similarly aided in driving social behavior. For an illustration of how carefully scientists tease out the behavioral implications of the physical evidence known for hominids, see the December 2012 papers by Jay Kelley & Gary Schwartz, Phyllis Lee, Nicholas Malone et al., and Michael Plavcan will do, along with a parallel study of fossil baboon biogeography by Caroline Bettridge & Robin Dunbar. A cautionary note is in order here. There was likely no single reason for the evolution of complex social behavior, and we coauthors offer the neologism monocausism as the idea that a single cause is responsible for some phenomenon. Indeed, while the search for a single clear cut reason for the evolution of something can generate lots of interesting research, in the end the odds favor interacting synergistic processes as the causation of complex outcomes. That said, traditionally, researchers posited that the spread of more open fields forced hominins to shift to hunting grassland hooved mammals. The idea went that Homo became increasingly reliant on hunting, whose carcasses were easier to chew with the advent of fire. Evidence of fire associated with humans extends some 1.8 million years ago, surveyed by John Gowlett & Richard Wrangham’s 2013 paper “Earliest fire in Africa: towards the convergence of archaeological evidence and the cooking hypothesis,” but controlled use of fire appears to fall much later, around 1 million years ago, according to Francesco Berna et al.’s 2012 paper “Microstratigraphic

evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa.” Points for missing the point on the evolution of human fire use might go to David Klinghoffer over on the ID side, accusing anthropologists of  ... missing the point. In 2017, Barbara King reported on recent work relevant to this issue: Dennis Sandgathe on the challenges in spotting the controlled use of fire versus the habitual exploitation of natural blazes, and Jill Pruetz & Nicole Herzog noticing how savanna chimpanzees preferentially foraged in fire-cleared landscapes, even accurately predicting fire behavior. The idea that some living chimpanzees have overcome a natural avoidance of burning environments (offering clues to what hominids might have been doing in their environment) didn’t impress Klinghoffer, though: “We already knew chimps are ‘smart’,” and glibly concluded “There are good reasons why chimps may cleverly avoid harm from fire, but they do not make human-like use of it, and never will.”[52] Having campfires to sit around may have played an important part in our language evolution, as Robin Dunbar reviewed regarding Polly Weissner’s 2014 study, “Embers of society: Firelight talk among the ju/ ´hoansi Bushmen.” But we want to focus on how cooking would have softened both meat and plants, meaning having large teeth for grinding tough foods would have been unnecessary. Back to teeth at last, which is where this digression began after all. Going from australopithecines to early Homo, we see that canines reduced in size while molars and premolars enlarged. As it happens, the earliest current evidence of Homo, the partial Ledi-Geraru (LD 3501) jaw bone from 2.8 million years ago, showed signs of that, with dentition directly intermediate between earlier australopithecines and Homo habilis (though Brian Villmoare et al. did get some critical pushback from John Hawks et al.’s comment letter in Science). While teeth were undergoing gradual changes, the jaw shape was modifying as well, relating to the MYH16 masticatory myosin gene discovered by Hansell Stedman et al. in 2004, and whose relevance for hominid evolution was explored by Melanie McCollum and George Perry in the course of their separate work on the genetics of craniodental evolution. By 2015 Perry et al.’s “Insights into hominin phenotypic and dietary evolution from ancient DNA sequence data” had pinned down how MYH16 underwent pseudogenization

(transformed into a nonfunctional pseudogene) following the homininchimpanzee split, putatively playing a part in the reduction in jaw muscles. Adding to our dietary options, two of the dozen or so bitter taste receptor genes (TAS2R62 and TAS2R64) were also pseudogenized— plenty of papers on that, by Yasuhiro Go, Hiroo Imai, Stephen Wooding and colleagues. What impact this may have had on hominin evolution is still unknown, though we can imagine the possibilities, since we can see how the variable deactivation of another gene in the group (TAS2R38) has contributed to some of us being ok with eating vegetables like broccoli (loaded with nutritious vitamins), that those with the active primate allele make faces at. Differential veggie aversion apparently goes well back in our lineage, by the way, as Carles Lalueza-Fox et al. found in 2009 that Neanderthals showed comparable TAS2R38 variations. Following our split from Neanderthals and Denisovans, though, a gene for amylase (an enzyme that degrades starch) duplicated in our ancestors, helping them break down starch taken in from roots and tubers. So while the initial trend was towards larger rear teeth, this reversed as molar size began decreasing. This is what led to vestigiality in our third molars. There was no single cause, but many factors worked to reduce our jaw and molar size, starting but not ending with genetic mutations. Dietary changes caused in part by climatic shifts in turn affected social structures, including the advent of tools and fire and eventually agriculture (which shortened and widened the jaw shape known among hunter-gatherers, as that von Cramon-Taubadel paper had found). Our third molars are now highly variable because they are no longer an essential part of our derived dental toolkit, regardless of whether or not they can function.  

Evasion Exhibit No. 4: The tail wagging the dogma  

Menton had just one more vestigial tale to tell: the coccyx or tailbone. This one has been a stalwart in creationist apologetics for years, showing up in Duane Gish in 1983, Menton himself in 1994, in both editions of the Of Pandas and People book, and briefly by David DeWitt in 2008 and Nathaniel Jeanson in 2017—but also Casey

Luskin with a quintet of Evolution News posts in 2014 taking issue with theistic evolutionist Karl Giberson. More on Luskin’s posts shortly, but Menton’s Answers book version sang the main verse in the legacy chorus:  

The so-called “tailbone” is perhaps the most commonly touted example in man of a “useless” evolutionary vestige. According to evolutionary dogma, the tailbone, properly called the coccyx (because of its similarity to the shape of a cuckoo’s beak), is a vestigial tail left over from our tailed monkey-like ancestors. Once again, many in the medical profession have been taken in by evolutionary speculation but mercifully, they have refrained from surgically removing the normal coccyx.  

Again with the “useless” mantra. Only it is easy to see that the coccyx is not useless. Any surgeon can observe that it is the attachment site for various muscles. Sure, it does not function like a platyrrhine monkey’s tail, but it should also be noted that humans do form tails during embryonic development that recede into the body. So how does Menton propose to wriggle around that? Not by mentioning our embryonic tail. Instead, we get another burst of data selection and avoidance so selective that it amounts to yet more data suppression. One worthy of qualifying as next evasion exhibit. Here’s how he started (our bold):  

Even human abnormalities that have nothing to do with the coccyx have been declared to be “human tails.” In a report in The New England Journal of Medicine, titled “Evolution and the Human Tail,” Ledley described a two-inch long fleshy growth on the back of a baby, which he claimed to be a “human tail,” though he conceded that it showed none of the distinctive biological characteristics of a tail! In fact, the “tail” was merely a fatty outgrowth of skin that wasn’t even located in the right place on the back to be a tail! Still, Ledley declared that “even those of us who are familiar with the literature that defined our place in nature (Darwinism)—are rarely confronted with the relation between human beings and their primitive ancestors on a daily basis. The caudal appendage brings this reality to the fore and makes it tangible and inescapable.”  

Duane Gish had similarly cited Fred Ledley in his 1983 piece, carefully navigating through his paper in the same way Menton did,

even to that concluding quote. Casey Luskin also briefly referenced Ledley in his 2014 series, but Luskin waded far deeper into the data selection pool by parading a lengthy series of medical papers on those caudal appendages, presumably wanting to clinch the argument that no truly vestigial tails exist by sheer volume of examples of the caudal pseudotails.[53] On this point, while praising Luskin’s posts in 2014, Michael Egnor drew on his personal experience as a doctor to take Karl Giberson to task (our bold): “I have operated on quite a few children (at least five) with what Giberson, a physicist, would call a ‘tail.’ I just removed one of them from a newborn about a month ago. None of them—and none of the reports in the literature that I know of—are actual tails.” Egnor offered no technical sources, by the way. This is a fun topic to unravel. Yes, tumors can grow around the area of the coccyx, and these are known as lumbosacral or sacrococcygeal teratomas. Such growths can crop up in other areas than just near the coccyx, though—even the neck, as Sandeep Mohindra found in 2007, and the scientifically minded (like Fred Ledley back in 1982) might reasonably have wondered whether those fleshy blobs might be drawing on some developmental mechanisms that were related to that primate tail formation in a “tangible and inescapable way.” Indeed, leading up to the passage Gish and Menton quoted, Ledley specifically noted how “the human embryonic tail is virtually indistinguishable from the embryonic tails of tailed species,” but that these caudal tails were different. And what might that difference be? Ledley noted how the truncate gene, as it was called in Karl Theiler’s 1959 paper on the work (it turned out to be a mutation in the Not homeobox gene, per Hanas Abdelkhalek et al. in 2004) suppressed tail formation in mice, making it “reasonable to postulate that a sequence of developmental events similar to those in the truncate mouse would result in a structure such as the human caudal appendage.” For Ledley, “The occurrence of the caudal appendage, as well as the presence of a well-formed embryonic tail in a child, are testimony to the preservation of the structural elements necessary for tail formation in the human genome.” But neither Menton nor Casey Luskin quoted any of that, though Gish at least alluded to the

embryonic tail matter, but dismissed characteristically flippant hyperbole:

its

relevance

with

 

Presumably, then, we would also be carrying along in our human genetic apparatus other genes that are responsible for all other characteristics seen in our monkey-like ancestors but not seen in man. Following this thinking to its logical conclusion, the human genetic apparatus should still be carrying every gene ever possessed by any of our ancestors, even the genes that make a worm a worm, if indeed a worm was the ancestor of vertebrates.  

Gish maybe shouldn’t have been waving “the human genetic apparatus” at us, since that reminds us to note that Menton never got around to explaining what those “distinctive” tail features were, let alone what their genetics might be. They involved having to one degree or other adipose body fat, connective tissue, muscle, bones, vessels, nerves, and mechanoreceptors. For Gish, Menton, Luskin and Egnor, no true bony tails of that type were known to occur in humans, but only those fleshy caudal ones. Small problem. They were wrong, and all four of them could have known of such evidence had they looked. But because Casey Luskin literally tripped over it, we’ll follow his trail of citation bread crumbs. Luskin ambled oh-so-close to the subject when he acknowledged that pseudotails can occasionally contain bone. He cited no examples (the one described by Natarajan Muthukumar in 2014 will suffice), but relied on Dao & Netsky’s 1984 review on “Human tails and pseudotails” to scratch his line in the sand (his bold and ellipsis): “In humans a true tail, is vestigial, however, and never contains vertebrae. … Bona-fide cases of human tails containing bone have not been documented.” Keep the old date of that paper in mind, though, and consider how later authors might miss bits of the science based on which sources they drew on. The idea that bones might occasionally be showing up in at least some of these tails didn’t slow down Luskin, however. He insisted they “don’t contain vertebrae (as all other mammalian tails do), and they’re not located at the base of the coccyx, where a ‘true tail’ ought to be— they are found in various other places along the lower back, and may even be off to the side from the backbone.” That “not vertebrae” mantra figured further in his authority quoting of S. P. S. Chauhan et

al.’s short piece on a “Human tail with spina bifida” from 2009 (Luskin’s bold): “An article in the British Journal of Neurosurgery explains: ‘A true tail in humans is vestigial and never contains vertebrae in contrast to other vertebrate animals.’” And what source had the Chauhan paper relied on as their only source for that point? Dao & Netsky’s 1984 work, by then a quarter century down the stream. More curiously, though, Dao & Netsky popped up in a quote Luskin fielded from Herman & Siegel’s 2008 review, one which veered even closer to the relevant developmental and genetic issues (still Luskin’s bold and ellipsis):  

Caudal appendages or human tails were divided by Dao and Netsky into true tails, which contain muscle and are movable, and pseudotails, which do not move. However, this is now considered arbitrary and without clinical significance as both kinds are derived from notocordal remnants and the etiology of both is probably similar. … Their etiology is probably related to an abnormal sequence of caudal neurulation.  

That last sentence should have been raising warning bells about the biology, and how that related to how more familiar vertebrate tails do and do not form. Which Luskin could have hit on had only he looked closer at Dao & Netsky’s work (like right up front, in their abstract):  

The true, or persistent, vestigial tail of humans arises from the most distal remnant of the embryonic tail. It contains adipose and connective tissue, central bundles of striated muscle, blood vessels, and nerves and is covered by skin. Bone, cartilage, notochord, and spinal cord are lacking. The true tail arises by retention of structures found normally in fetal development.  

Yes, Dao & Netsky thought bone etc. weren’t found in these tails, but recognized how the “true tail” was still just the more typical manifestation of developmental processes that were just being worked out when they were writing in 1984. But Luskin, writing thirty years later, had some non-negotiable boundaries to lay out, concerning the wordplay of whether the various tails represented an “evolutionary

regression” or something else. To that end Luskin invoked another technical paper (his bold):  

So does the fact that human babies are sometimes born with tails suggest we are related to animals with tails? No — the actual causes of “true tails” have caused some doctors to suspect that it isn’t an evolutionary regression, but rather a “disturbance” in development. This is widely recongized [sic] in the medical community. An oft-cited paper in Pediatric Neurology by Lu et al. (1998) states: “During the seventh and eighth weeks, the vertebrated portion retracts into the soft tissue. The nonvertebrated part projects temporarily and then undergoes regression caused by phagocytosis, with the debris-laden macrophages migrating back to the body, and it disappears completely at the end of the eighth week. Thus, the presence of human tail can be considered a disturbance in the development of the embryo but not a regression in the evolutionary process.“  

Still sounds pretty vestigial. But by 1998 more clues had surfaced as to what was going on, and we can know that because of another item Luskin cited, Abraham Baruchin’s 1995 letter to the British Journal of Plastic Surgery. Luskin quoted him only for this part, presumably chosen because it fit into his “not a bony vertebrate tail” narrative:  

Although more than 10 years have passed, the ‘human tail’ is still ill-defined. It has been classified as either a true (persistent vestigial) tail or a pseudotail. A true tail is thought by some authors to be a benign condition not associated with any underlying spinal cord malformation. Other researchers have emphasized that the classification of each caudal appendage into true tail or pseudotail remains obscure and the distinction on clinical examination is dubious at best.  

Obscure was obviously how Luskin hoped to keep things. Unfortunately, Baruchin had been less obscure on this, touching on that “regression” issue in a concluding passage Luskin didn’t quote: “The occurrence of a true tail or pseudotail does not represent a regression to a lower species in the sense of recapitulationist theory; on the contrary, it is testimony to the preservation of the structural elements necessary for tail formation in the human genome.”

And what might those structural elements be? The coccyx is normally formed from three to five vertebrae—see Ronan O’Rahilly et al.’s 1990 review as typical in this area. These smoosh together in the adult form, though occasionally the first one can remain separate. All of this developmental plasticity are further clues that something interesting might be going on down in the genetic department, and Baruchin’s letter was devoted to reminding that journal’s readers of two papers that documented the occurrence of human tails retaining those multiple vertebrae. One dated from 1980 (and thus well before Gish or Menton were penning their declarations on human tails, as well as Dao & Netsky who had missed it in their 1984 paper): J. Bar-Maor et al. described one patient with “five well-developed vertebrae” in their extended coccyx, and another with “three well-developed coccygeal vertebrae.” Baruchin’s third example came from T. Matsuo et al. 1993. Though obviously much rarer than the fleshy and usually boneless pseudotails that can pop up almost anywhere along the developing spinal column, these protruding ones with vertebrae have continued to arise occasionally, such as the “human tail containing five well developed coccygeal vertebrae” documented by Chandrakanta Nayak & Barada Samal in 2015. Which compels us to ask: what exactly would a vestigial tail look like, if not that? Now for the capper. During the years that Gish or Menton or Luskin or Egnor weren’t paying much attention, the science continued to inch forward trying to figure out what was going on, biologically and genetically. In 1978, John Fallon & Kay Simandl spotted the roll of internal cell death (apoptosis) in eliminating the embryological tail, and Mirna Saraga-Babić et al. identified more of the details in 1994. Further work, by Shinji Takada et al. in 1994, Tamara Greco et al. in 1996, Panagiotis Prinos et al. and Michael Schubert et al. in 2001, homed in on the Wnt family of genes involved in tailbud formation (a genetic playground going way back in the chordates), and how apoptosis of tail cells could be induced in mice by that gene’s downregulation. Based on that, in 2017 Mahesh Pillai & Smitha Nair’s “A True Human Tail in a Neonate” reasonably considered it “possible that

mutations resulting in increased upregulation of the WNT3A gene may result in retention of the embryonic tail in human newborns.”[54] The future will see whether that holds good, and whether any creationists will have been involved in determining it. Care to take bets on that? Before you lay down your chips, though, consider how fast the field is moving. In 2019 Rui Diogo et al. conducted a comprehensive review on “Development of human limb muscles based on wholemount immunostaining and the links between ontogeny and evolution,” confirming (our bold):  

the transient presence of several atavistic muscles—present in our ancestors but normally absent from the adult human—during normal embryonic human development, and reveals the existence of others not previously described in human embryos. These atavistic muscles are found both as rare variations in the adult population and as anomalies in human congenital malformations, reinforcing the idea that such variations/anomalies can be related to delayed or arrested development.  

While you count your chips and contemplate deploying them, we can put one more card on the table of creationist data mangling. Having fully misunderstood what vestigial organs are, Menton asked, “Is the Argument for Vestigial Organs Vestigial?” and wrote this:  

Even some evolutionists are now urging that vestigial organs be downplayed or even abandoned as evidence for evolution. The evolutionist S. R. Scadding, for example, has critically examined vestigial organs as evidence for evolution. He concluded: “Since it is not possible to unambiguously identify useless structures, and since the structure of the argument used is not scientifically valid, I conclude that ‘vestigial organs’ provide no special evidence for the theory of evolution.”  

As we saw previously, no, evolutionists are not abandoning or downplaying vestigial organs. Quite to the contrary, there are reams of papers in the technical literature that study them, nearly all of which are ignored by the creationists. Menton’s claim was obviously pulled from an orifice more commonly associated with solid waste. Nor was Menton alone in the scholarly privy. Walt Brown’s In the Beginning (Kent Hovind’s go-to source for misinformation) and

Jonathan Wells’ “The Myth of Vestigial Organs and Bad Design: Why Darwinism Is False” in 2009 also quoted Scadding. Which got our curiosity going to look more closely at that. Scadding’s statement was twenty years old by the time Brown nicked it, and Reed Cartwright & Douglas Theobald noted quite a few more Scadding-quoters when they pulled it apart in a 2003 Talk Origins posting. 2003 is after Brown, but six years before Wells lit into Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True book mentioning the vestigial appendix, and eleven years prior to Menton’s 2014 chapter, meaning Wells and Menton cited a quote that had been debunked for many years. As if we already hadn’t ample verification of Menton’s inept scholarship (and Wells), this Scadding matter put it on display yet again. The story is that in 1981 zoologist Steven Scadding published the article “Do ‘Vestigial Organs’ Provide Evidence for Evolution?” in the journal Evolutionary Theory. This journal was not exactly in the Science or Nature class. In fact, it wasn’t even at the Scientific American level, but rather a free ranging venue for presenting speculative opinion. As the journal’s mission description put it, “We prefer a higher than usual probability of error to exclusion of new ideas, which are unorthodox by definition.” Menton (or Brown before him) showed no inclination to clarify that distinctly non-technical unorthodox context of what amounted to a magazine of letters to the editor. Now for the substance. Scadding’s problem turned out to be the same one Menton and Wells had: an arbitrary definition of vestigial as meaning without function. On that faulty assumption, Scadding decided you could never presume anything was really useless, hence vestigiality couldn’t be established in principle. Consequently, in that sense vestigial features couldn’t provide evidence for evolution. Vertebrate paleontologist Bruce Naylor wrote a terse commentary on that the following year in the same journal, focusing on his specialty of fossils (noting for example those vestigial toes in horses), and reminding Scadding that biology had moved on from the functionless paradigm of Darwin’s mid-19th century. Scadding penned an even terser response, in which he stuck to his vestigial = useless guns, but still affirmed how those organs offered evidence for evolution by their internal homologies.

That’s right, Scadding never claimed the organs themselves didn’t represent evidence for evolution, only that the adjective “vestigial” wasn’t the salient aspect. In their haste trawling for authority quotes, Menton (and Brown and Wells before him) failed to report on what Scadding had actually stressed. Starting with how he was aware of that lymphoid connection in the appendix, underscoring how crumbling the creationist “useless” argument was even by 1981. But the kicker comes in how Scadding wrote that “Vestigial organs represent simply a special case of homologous organs… While homologies between animal species suggest a common origin, the argument given above asserts that vestigial organs provide special additional evidence for evolution.” Either Menton was unaware of that because he glommed onto the Scadding statement secondarily (from Walt Brown perhaps?) or he had read Scadding’s original text and neglected to share that bit with his readers. And the same may be said of Jonathan Wells, who never quoted those parts of Scadding either (and was even aware of Naylor’s rebuttal, but discussed none of the several dozen biological examples of vestigiality Naylor mentioned). Which means another count of data suppression for both.[55] Thus, Scadding agrees vestigial organs provide evidence for evolution, and modern researchers with very specific definitions of vestigial still rightly use the organs as evidence for evolution. We have seen all throughout Menton’s chapter that he has failed to grasp what vestigial organs are. He did minimal research and dogmatically repeated unsubstantiated or flatly false claims, showing us all what a poor scholar he is. Though the search for all this proved to be ever so much fun for us coauthors. Menton closed out his chapter with this gem of a quote: “But like the long discredited recapitulation myth (that embryos pass through stages of their evolutionary history), vestigial organs continue to be used as evidence for evolution.” That leads us to Elizabeth Mitchell’s chapter in The Answers Book 4 on “The Recapitulation of Recapitulation: Does Embryology Prove Evolution?”  

Recapitulation and the Boogeyman of Haeckel  

The point of contention for Elizabeth Mitchell’s chapter on Recapitulation involves an idea that was formulated in Darwin’s day by one of his earliest supporters outside Britain, the German Ernst Haeckel. To say Haeckel attracted controversy is an understatement. Garland Allen summed up his reputation in 2014 with a succinct “Haeckel’s grandiose ideas gave evolutionary theory a reputation among many biologists for excessive speculation.” A strident German nationalist who described God as a “gaseous vertebrate” in a 1905 book, science historian Nick Hopwood noted how he figured in a broader conflict between liberal nationalism and conservative Catholicism. The short of it all is that “Haeckel bashing” has been a lingering hobby over the years, reviewed by Klaus Sander in 2002, with many a quote-miner among anti-evolutionists for Glenn Branch to sample in 2014 and 2015 posts. And the list of stray potshot references to Haeckel would be legion. Frank Sherwin’s 2011 article “Design of Man: No Evolutionary Evidence” would be typical of that sort of thing among YECers, and Uncommon Descent 2015 for ID, while it was a hoot to find Douglas Groothuis’ 2011 tome on Christian Apologetics relying on that supreme scholarly incompetent Richard Milton for his snipe at Haeckel. In a developing science, it’s natural for investigators to coin terminology to describe things that didn’t have words to cover them, and historian of science Richard Milner noted that Haeckel was a most prolific neologist, coming up with not only the words ontogeny and phylogeny, but ecology as well. Those first two got married in Haeckel’s most famous excessive speculation, his confidently titled “Biogenetic Law” from 1866. Known by the rhyme “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (or “recapitulation theory” for short), Haeckel thought that as an organism develops, it literally goes through the stages of its evolutionary history. Imagine a human embryo starting out in a “protist stage” followed by a “sponge stage,” later a “fish”, then an “amphibian”, and a “reptile”, all the way up to a human baby. This idea is clearly wrong and has been known to be wrong for a long time. Even contemporaries of Haeckel disagreed with his hypothesis, such as Karl Ernst von Baer (1792-1876). But that didn’t mean there hadn’t been a kernel of fact to it. While Haeckel argued

that embryos resembled the adult forms of each evolutionary stage, von Baer more correctly spotted how much the embryos of many organisms nonetheless resembled one another. Darwin too agreed that embryos diverged from each other rather than passing through the whole of evolutionary history, as noted by Elizabeth Barnes in the 2014 entry on the Biogenetic Law at The Embryo Project Encyclopedia. A 2005 American Biology Teacher article by Kurt Pickett, John Wenzel & Steven Rissing (offering a critical assessment of Jonathan Wells and Michael Behe’s antievolutionist spin on Darwin and Haeckel) went further, spotting how Darwin hadn’t in fact relied on Haeckel’s embryology work, but instead on that of the non-evolutionist Von Baer. The views of Von Baer and Darwin only reflected what we do indeed see. If you look at crab and barnacle embryos (both crustaceans), you can see that they are nearly identical. All vertebrate embryos look very similar up to a point as well. As another example, embryonic whales with their tiny limb buds look much more like their ancient legged cousins than modern whales. And as you’ve just seen, there are some vestiges of our evolutionary history in development, such as our external tail that briefly appears and recedes. This is clearly an indication of our simian ancestry, as tails are extremely prevalent throughout the Old and New World monkeys, along with tarsiers, lemurs and lorises—all the closest relatives of the tailless hominoids (gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, chimps, and humans). It is no coincidence that our morphology, physiology, and genetics all point to these being our closest relatives. Mitchell, however, is not concerned with von Baer or the fine points of primate embryological development. She charges straight into Haeckel, introducing the chapter with a lunge aimed squarely at her conservative Christian readership:  

Do human embryos replay the evolutionary history of their species as they develop? This idea has led many people to believe that what is in a woman’s womb is merely an animal that can be simply disposed of by abortion at its fish stage. The false portrayal of embryonic development has tragically convinced countless people that the evolutionary worldview must be true, that humans are just highly evolved animals, and that abortion is acceptable.  

Wow, that is quite a lot to unpack. And while the baggage is politically-charged and plastered with religious shipping labels, it also displays the same bad methods tendencies we’ve been documenting from creationists on the purely scientific front. Mitchell’s notion that women are having abortions because the embryo and fetus are viewed as fish is laughably wrong. Though it did remind coauthor JW of a 2019 video by PZ Myers, making a point about how the orderly process of embryogenesis is commonly compared to the decidedly disorderly process of oncogenesis in the technical literature because they involve many of the same mechanisms, such as Fergal Kelleher et al.’s 2006 paper on the “Common critical pathways in embryogenesis and cancer.” If creationists don't like having embryos compared to fish, they really aren't going to like them being compared to cancer. But just as with Menton’s mantra on “useless” organs being plucked out to further an evolutionary worldview, this “abortion at the fish stage” idea was clearly one Mitchell so wanted to be axiomatically true that stopping to document that such rationalization actually occurs in the real world apparently never occurred to her. And what if she had tried? A look at the websites of abortionproviding facilities, such as Planned Parenthood, turned up no results suggesting that “Haeckel”, “biogenetic”, “phylogeny” or “ontogeny” were playing a part in their efforts (we coauthors are even a little surprised by the absence of that last one, since ontogeny is exactly the word to describe what goes on as an embryo develops). If you web search “Haeckel and abortion” or something similar, scores of articles and books authored by creationists arise, a glut waving Haeckel’s Biogenetic Law as Mitchell did. Ken Ham included it in a chapter on “The Evils of Evolution” in his 1997 The Lie: Evolution, and those stuck in the YEC dogma black hole event horizon tend to repeat the mantras more than once, such as Russell Grigg’s 1996 “Ernst Haeckel: Evangelist for evolution and apostle of deceit” and 1998 “Fraud Rediscovered” currently archived at Creation Ministries International (and would later claim Stalin tried to make “ape-man Superwarriors”); Don Batten drew on Grigg’s 1998 piece for his “Is evolution true?” post in 2014. Jerry Bergman (writing in 2015 under his more formal given name of Gerald) had a lengthy piece on “Darwinism Used to Justify Abortion”

in the staunchly Christian and anti-abortion journal The Human Life Review, and took aim directly at Planned Parenthood in 2018. But while David Cloud’s “Lying Evolutionary Art, Haeckel's Embryo Chart” in 2011 at the evangelical Way of Life website at least offered a source,  it was not the most sterling one,  creationist ___________________________________________________________________

The Sanger/Weikart/D’Souza daisy chain In an area as contentious as abortion and euthanasia, and what laws society should make on them, it’s no surprise to find creationists being loose with the details. For example, David Cloud wrote that “Haeckel taught that even the newborn child has no soul and therefore infanticide ‘cannot rationally be classed as murder’,” citing his 1904 The Wonders of Life. Whether Cloud got the quote secondarily is unclear, but what Haeckel had actually penned was considerably less sweeping (our bold): “the destruction of abnormal new-born infants—as the Spartans practised it, for instance, in selecting the bravest—cannot rationally be classed as ‘murder,’ as is done in even modern legal works.” Still a position worthy of analysis and criticism, morally as well as legally (Sparta managed not to do well in the long run, after all), but Cloud’s trimmed version didn’t get that far. Cloud also drew on Richard Weikart orbiting the Intelligent Design camp, whose big issue with “Darwinism” has been its alleged influence on Hitler and the eugenics policies of the Third Reich (a subject that could warrant a chapter on its own, but we’ve included many of his pieces on that in our references, along with the critical pushback from historian Robert Richards). Coauthor JD knows that Weikart was perfectly capable of sloppy scholarship, as when he “quoted” Margaret Sanger in his From Darwin to Hitler book: “More children from the fit; less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth control,” a quote the sanctimonious conservative propagandist Dinesh D’Souza reprised for his own apologetics at the right-wing Breitbart website, an excerpt from his The Big Lie book attempting audaciously to show how “the American Left” really had roots in their ideological polar opposites, the Nazis.

As for the Sanger quote, Weikart was only a step in a long daisy chain, relying on a 1995 book by Dianne Paul, who in turn drew on a 1970 Sanger biography by David Kennedy. Kennedy at least landed on a primary source, Sanger’s Birth Control Review from May 1919.   Henry Morris opining back in 1989 in his The Long War Against God: “We can justifiably charge this evolutionary nonsense of recapitulation with responsibility for the slaughter of helpless, pre-natal children—or at least for giving it a pseudo-scientific rationale.” Couldn’t Cloud at least dredge up a less cobwebby source? Not in the world of secondary apologetics, where the urge to copy congenial authority runs strong, such as a “quote” attributed to Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) that has made the apologetic rounds (see the  Info Box). Which is how a 1990 magazine article by Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan  surfaced in  Cloud’s  piece  (and ___________________________________________________________________

The snag: it wasn’t Sanger’s quote. It turned out that a critic of legal birth control, writing in an American Medicine journal editorial, had so pissed Sanger off that she reprinted her original piece alongside it in her own magazine, bracketed by italicized comments that clearly stressed how that writer’s notion that Sanger proposed only the poor employ birth control while the privileged rich breed like rabbits was exactly not her position (where women of all classes and circumstances were urged to take control of their own reproductive destinies, no easy sell in male-dominated 1919). Anti-abortion advocates scavenging too quickly for rhetorical ammo picked up on the “Sanger” quote (burnished perhaps by Kennedy’s Yale University Press propriety for those cribbing from him) without checking who had said what. Ironically one group that correctly tracked down all the attributions was Planned Parenthood, doing so at exactly the time Weikart was getting it wrong third hand in his book. Which made D’Souza’s longer 2017 Big Lie version all the more extraordinary, as Dinesh actually cited a full online pdf of the Birth Control Review text (one with odd variations in print quality and none of the italics of the original, but with all the words still intact).

With that, we might well wonder why he included the redundant and very secondary Weikart at all (an appeal to his authority?)—but leaving as the salient exhibit D’Souza’s singular inattention to the content of his main citation. Sanger has long been an object of contempt for antiabortionists, such as the Concerned Women for America’s Tanya Green claiming in 2001 that Sanger advocated eugenics birth control for Black Americans, a canard dismantled by Glenn Kessler in 2015 when Ben Carson credulously repeated it. Carson is a creationist who believes that the Great Pyramid was built as Joseph’s granary, and is at this writing serving as Donald Trump’s HUD secretary. Intelligent Design advocates easily rallied around Carson as a fellow traveler (though not asking too much about his actual views), including a glib thumbs up from (drum roll) Richard Weikart in 2012. The circle is unbroken—and poorly researched. Such are the briar thickets of politics paralleling those of creationists.   would too in “Gerald” Bergman and Mitchell’s Answers chapter). Cloud’s version:  

In 1990, Carl Sagan and his wife, Ann Druyan, argued that abortion is ethical on the grounds that the fetus is not fully human until the sixth month. Taking Haeckel’s recapitulation theory as fact, they claimed that the embryo begins as “a kind of parasite” and changes into something like a fish with “gill arches” and then becomes “reptilian” and finally “mammalian.” By the end of the second month, the fetus “is still not quite human” (“The Question of Abortion: A Search for the Answers,” Parade, April 22, 1990).  

Sagan wasn’t shy about standing by what he had written with Druyan, incorporating it into his book Billions & Billions a few years later. The “parasite” bit had come up this way: “By the tenth day the fertilized egg has become a kind of hollow sphere wandering off to another realm: the womb. It destroys tissue in its path. It sucks blood from capillaries. It bathes itself in maternal blood, from which it extracts oxygen and nutrients. It establishes itself as a kind of parasite on the walls of the uterus.”

The creationists may not like how they worded it, but nothing they wrote was biologically wrong. Nor could they dispute what Sagan addressed next: “By the third week, around the time of the first missed menstrual period, the forming embryo is about 2 millimeters long and is developing various body parts. Only at this stage does it begin to be dependent on a rudimentary placenta. It looks a little like a segmented worm.” They also wrote that “something like the gill arches of a fish or an amphibian become conspicuous,” and again, they were right. The human pharyngeal arches are homologous to the ones that in fish end up as scaffolding for their gills, even while no longer being exactly the same structure. Clearly Way of Life had a problem with metaphor. As for Haeckel and recapitulation, in Billions & Billions Sagan commented on that in a note (our bold):  

A number of right-wing and Christian fundamentalist publications have criticized this argument—on the grounds that it is based on an obsolete doctrine, called recapitulation, of a nineteenth-century German biologist. Ernst Haeckel proposed that the steps in the individual embryonic development of an animal retrace (or "recapitulate") the stages of evolutionary development of its ancestors. Recapitulation has been exhaustively and skeptically treated by the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (in his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977]). But our article offered not a word about recapitulation, as the reader of this chapter may judge. The comparisons of the human fetus with other (adult) animals is based on the appearance of the fetus (see illustrations). Its nonhuman form, and nothing about its evolutionary history, is the key to the argument of these pages.  

It is unlikely that all the other creationist sources independently invented the same strained argument that Haeckel’s Biogenetic Law influenced people’s thoughts on abortion. Nor can we be certain how many were clandestinely relying on Morris or recalling fragments of Sagan & Druyan to arrive at the same spot. But just out of the gate, we see that already Mitchell is making unsubstantiated arguments on this Haeckel recapitulation issue, and things didn’t improve when she homed in on the recurring issue hovering around Haeckel’s name, that of his embryology drawings and what impact they might have had in science and culture:

 

While the inaccuracy of Haeckel’s drawings became apparent almost immediately, they have continued to be presented in textbooks, museums, and the secular media as “proof” of evolution even into this century. Evolutionary biologists who freely acknowledge the inaccuracy of the drawings continue to debate the validity of the “theory” and its variants. Applications of recapitulation theory are widely accepted in other disciplines such as linguistics and developmental psychology.  

Creationists want to have it both ways, don’t they? Everyone knows the drawings are wrong, and yet people are advancing the drawings as evidence anyway. That there was a genuine field of observation lurking beneath the drawings was a fact that even Mitchell was aware, though, since she wrote how Haeckel had “selectively removed limbs on one of his embryos while rendering others perfectly, commenting that they were similar with ‘no trace of limbs or “extremities” in this stage.’” Here Mitchell was channeling (from a considerable distance) the short 2001 letter to Nature by Michael Richardson & Gerhard Keuck, who had devoted much study to this matter over the years. By the way, they also had suspicions about images by one of Haeckel’s contemporary critics, Wilhelm His (1831-1904), but unlike the prolific Haeckel, they didn’t have the range of publications available to clinch their argument on His’ potential fiddling. Haeckel’s drawings were never published in scientific literature but were illustrations to his own popular works. They were generalizations or (as they are often called) schematics of the embryos, which was a common practice in Haeckel’s time. Working out how much of the problematic drawings were due to an intention to deceive scientifically rather than what got simplified for publication remains a challenge, leading Robert Richards in 2015 to rule “Haeckel’s embryos: fraud not proven.”[56] Despite all that, Haeckel was a skilled scientific draftsman, and many are still quite good reconstructions, demonstrating the similarities among embryos. One of Mitchell’s own sources (Richardson & Keuck’s 2002 “Haeckel’s ABC of evolution and development”) wrote that “Haeckel’s embryo drawings are important as phylogenetic hypotheses, teaching aids—even scientific evidence,”

and later in her chapter Mitchell even quoted that … a burp of cognitive dissonance? Which reminds us of Mitchell’s jab about psychology. Now while the recapitulation theory had a mixed record early on in biology, she was a bit closer to the mark here, where it did enjoy a vogue for decades. Granville Stanley Hall (1846-1924), James Mark Baldwin (1861-1934), and even Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) were all inspired by recapitulation theory to seek out biological underpinnings to child development. But notice these were pioneers in establishing a new discipline. As noted by developmental biologist Willem Koops in 2015, “Nowadays, although Haeckel and his theory do not play any role in developmental psychology, it is clear that they are of foundational relevance for understanding the history of developmental psychology.” It would appear that Mitchell missed the memo. Those 19th century scientists plunging into a whole new field of inquiry (developmental biology) were still human, with reputations to be made or lost. Holding everyone to a rigorous standard a hundred years later was just part of the story. Connecting their work up to subsequent research was also important, and Mitchell stepped very gingerly around that, with what comes off more as envy than insight:  

To many people, the evolutionary principles underlying recapitulation theory are fundamental truths, so the theory retains its authority in their thinking even when it requires substantial modification to exist alongside observable facts. Moreover, in recent years even Haeckel’s evolutionary critics have shifted gears and begun to rehabilitate his reputation and his work. Forgiving the “liberties” he took, some now consider him positively brilliant for manufacturing pictures to prove what he “knew” must be true.  

Does Mitchell bother with a citation for any of that? No, of course not. No one considers recapitulation theory to be true or is “rehabilitating” it, and no one is considering him brilliant for creating fudged-up drawings. Which Mitchell ought to have known, given how many writers critical of Haeckel she drew on, from Stephen Jay Gould’s “Abscheulich! (Atrocious!)” in Natural History in 2000 to Richardson’s papers.

But Mitchell had far bigger fish to fry. She wants to dispose of the whole banquet of evolution: “Phylogeny is not observable. No amount of scientific achievement makes it possible to see back through time to observe the purported upward evolution of life. Neither does biological research reveal any mechanism by which a simpler kind of organism can acquire the genetic information to become a more complex kind of organism.” Is phylogeny observable? Absolutely! Both creationists and evolutionists acknowledge that speciation has been observed both in the field and lab, so the splitting of populations from a common ancestor is definitely observable (when the generation time is small enough). Mitchell is trying to play the creationist Three Card Monte again, referring to distant phylogenetic events without actually mentioning them, let alone evaluate the numerous different lines of data that indicate deep phylogenetic events (just recall those macroevolutionary therapsids). And, we have already looked at a number of mechanisms by which evolutionary novelties can arise (see Chapter 4). In a 1998 letter to Science, Michael Richardson and colleagues decried how creationists were trying to make Haeckel a “cause célèbre” in exactly the way Mitchell was still doing decades later (including a familiar set of players, from Dave Nutting in 2007 to Uncommon Descent in 2015, plus the others we’ll be discussing presently). Richardson reminded that the “Data from embryology are fully consistent with Darwinian evolution,” and furthermore, “On a fundamental level, Haeckel was correct: All vertebrates develop a similar body plan (consisting of notochord, body segments, pharyngeal pouches, and so forth). This shared developmental program reflects shared evolutionary history.” We’d have been surprised if Mitchell had been honest enough to quote-mine that. Or likewise for the other anti-evolutionists who have cited the Richardson letter, such as Brad Harrub in 2001. Instead, Mitchell sideswiped this in a subchapter that is synapsid jaw-droppingly telling. Noting that a 2002 paper by Richardson & Keuck had heavily criticized Haeckel’s drawings, Mitchell wonders why these two do not throw out the drawings wholesale as antievolutionists have. She wrote,  

Richardson and Keuck conclude that the biogenetic law is valid after all, if applied to the evolution of “single characters only” and not entire embryonic and evolutionary stages. In other words, so long as only single traits are followed through evolutionary time and embryonic development, Richardson is now aboard the recapitulation bandwagon.  

Yes! This is precisely the point. The recapitulation theory being applied to the entire organism is an unwarranted approach, but has practical merit when applied to single characters. We’ll be exploring more of those in this section, while Mitchell managed to address none. And she continued to not address them when she declared, “Why would unused ‘gill slits,’ for instance, stick around across the evolutionary time scales through organisms that did not need gills until they could evolve a non-respiratory purpose?” Has Mitchell never heard of exaptation? It’s a dandy word coined by Stephen Jay Gould to tag the process whereby an organ or structure becomes adapted for a new purpose. Clearly, the pharyngeal arches were used (and still are) being used to form gills in sarcopterygians. In early tetrapods, they were the scaffolding for gills, and amphibians to this very day form gills that recede during ontogeny. As evolutionary time went on, the structure that produced gills slowly changed into one that gave rise to our face and throat. And we have a fossil record of this transition, tracing the transition from sarcopterygian fish to the first tetrapods, from those early tetrapods to reptiliomorphs (the amphibian-like reptiles or reptile-like amphibians), and the transition from reptiliomorphs to true amniotes—neatly covered in Donald Prothero’s previously mentioned book Evolution: What The Fossils Say And Why It Matters. Vertebrate embryos possess these features because they descended from an amniotic ancestor who also possessed these characteristics. This goes back to the question of why a designer would create increasingly inclusive clades of organisms with specific characteristics. It is almost as though any Designer wanted us to believe in natural branching speciation events occurring over billions of years. Given how clear the biology is, what then about the antievolutionist claim that textbooks make mistaken use of Haeckel’s drawings? Creationist Wilbert Rusch complained in 1969 that he’d

found four 1960’s textbooks using the drawings, but it became a recent cause célèbre when Intelligent Design advocates Jonathan Wells and Casey Luskin insisted they were widely and inappropriately used, a contention filtering through their apologetic food chain, from Michael Behe alluding to it at the 2005 Kitzmiller ID trial via a 2001 New York Times piece by James Glanz, to Jonathan Witt waving Wells’ Icons of Evolution in 2015. The hyperbole-prone Kent Hovind lunged further, claiming erroneously that all Haeckel’s embryo drawings were fraudulent).[57] Interestingly, as a college student working on a degree in biology, coauthor JW has never seen a textbook that promotes the drawings as evidence of evolution (many of the targets mentioned by Wells or Luskin date from decades back in the 20th century). The same coauthor happens to have a textbook (Monroe Strickberger’s Evolution Third Edition from 2005) that mentions Haeckel’s embryos, but only brings them up in a historical context before explaining that Haeckel’s recapitulation theory is considered false. Coauthor JD would agree with this observation: textbooks that made use of Haeckel’s drawings (or later versions of them by different illustrators, as in Donald Prothero’s 2004 Bringing Fossils to Life or Kenneth Kardong’s 2012 Vertebrates) tended to do what Strickberger did, alluding down in the text to Haeckel’s recapitulation as an old notion gone wrong. The tradition continues certainly with the various textbooks done by Douglas Futuyma from the 1980s through to the present (and we’ll take this opportunity to note that his 1982 criticism of creationism, Science on Trial, remains a dandy classic in the field). As for old notions gone wrong, Mitchell plowed that path by citing a textbook that she claimed depicted Haeckel’s drawings as evidence of evolution: “Sylvia Mader’s 2010 edition of Biology, for instance, features colorized Haeckel-ish embryos and teaches, ‘At these comparable developmental stages, vertebrate embryos have many features in common which suggests they evolved from a common ancestor.’” Oh, it is “Haeckel-ish” now, is it? Why the “ish”? The reason is that the textbook features modern embryo reconstructions that happen to be similar to the embryos originally drawn by Haeckel because the actual embryos are really similar.

We won’t have to guess at this—science has micrographs of the embryos at different stages, such as those illustrated in Michael Richardson’s 1998 Science paper, which curiously few antievolutionists have taken note of. Jonathan Wells never cited it in his 1999 article or in Icons of Evolution, nor has Casey Luskin, though over on the YEC side Wayne Frair’s “Embryology and Evolution” blipped past it in 1999, as did Randy Guliuzza’s “Major Evolutionary Blunders” in 2016, meaning at least a few anti-evolutionists cannot claim to not know why quite a few vertebrate embryos look extremely similar to Haeckel’s drawings. If you don’t happen to have Mader’s textbook handy, the images were conveniently reproduced in 2010 by Casey Luskin in “Biology Textbooks Misuse Embryology to Argue for Evolution,” and Luskin retained Mader on his 2011 and 2015 list of allegedly offending textbooks. Here were his gripe criteria:  

(1) Show embryo drawings that are either Haeckel’s originals or highly similar or near-identical versions of Haeckel’s illustrations—drawings that downplay and misrepresent the differences among early stages of vertebrate embryos; (2) Have used these drawings as evidence for current evolutionary theory and not simply to provide some kind of historical context for evolutionary thinking; (3) Have used their Haeckel-based drawings to overstate the actual similarities between early embryos, which is the key misrepresentation made by Haeckel, even if the textbooks do not completely endorse Haeckel’s false “recapitulation” theory. They then cite these overstated similarities as still-valid evidence for common ancestry.  

Comparing the Mader pictures with Haeckel’s drawings, right off the bat one can see that there are certainly some fine detail differences between them, ones sufficient to establish that they were plainly not a colored version of Haeckel’s drawings, but what is also striking is their overall similarity. A fudger he may have been at times, but Haeckel wasn’t completely blind—though we have our doubts about Mitchell, Wells or Luskin, who apparently do have a problem comparing one image with another, or with the reality underlying them. Mader’s 2010 work earned an “F” in Luskin’s 2011 grading, which he defined as “uses Haeckel‘s drawings (or a re-drawn version of them) without mentioning the dissimilarity of earlier stages; claims that

early similarities in vertebrate embryos are evidence for common ancestry and Darwinian evolution; may call pharyngeal pouches—gill slits.” But Luskin earned a failing grade of his own for persistent myopia, since his long list of offending textbooks catalogued in 2008, 2011 and 2015 included many that were doing only what Mader had, showing pictures based on actual embryos and drawing the appropriate inferences, such as Peter Raven & George Johnson’s Biology 6th edition (which Wells included on his 2009 list). Luskin went further by adding the 2011 9th edition of Raven et al.’s Biology, giving it an “F” grade. Except the revamped book didn’t have such illustrations at all (nor were Recapitulation or the Biogenetic Law mentioned). In their 1,400 pages they had shown a “generalized embryo,” compared the extraembryonic membranes of chick and mammalian embryos, and showed micrographs of early human development at four and five weeks, all of which were still completely in accord with the science facts. Haeckel only came up once, regarding his 1874 idea that metazoans originated from colonial flagellates, all of which makes one wonder whether Luskin had even bothered to read it. Did the anti-evolutionists really expect the reconstructions to change that much, or that analysts like us weren’t going to notice? What specifically did creationists expect would change? We have no idea. Whether it was Mitchell, Wells, Luskin or Kent Hovind, none of them have been keen to work this out in their own model. This goes back to the third Source Methods question we asked in Chapter 1: What do they think happened? Apart from rhetorically frothing at the mouth at the sight or mention of Haeckel’s embryos, not a lot. Mitchell all too often ran back to beat on the popular press, such as a 2002 Time magazine article by Madeleine Nash on “What Scientists Know About the First Nine Months” where one of the photo captions had declared that a human, pig, elephant, and chick embryo all possess a tail, yolk sac, and (goof alert) “rudimentary gills.” Amniotes do not have gills at any point in their ontogeny, and while the pharyngeal arches are, again, homologous to the gills of fish, they are not the same structures. PZ Myers noted in a 2016 Pharyngula post, “No one knowledgeable claims that humans develop fish-like gills. ‘Gill slits’ is a colloquialism, not a technical term.” As

Raven & Johnson put it in their 2001 Biology textbook (their italics) “the pharyngeal slits of a mammalian embryo are not like the gill slits its ancestors had when they were adults. Rather they are like the pharyngeal slits its ancestors had when they were embryos.” Not that Mitchell was primed to notice, as she fumed at those embryonic pharyngeal arches:  

The poorly named “gill slits” in human embryos are not anything at all like gills and are not even slits, just folds of tissue destined to develop into various anatomical parts of the head and neck. They never have a function or a structure remotely resembling gills. They don’t even turn into anything having to do with the lungs. Never in the course of development does a human embryo absorb oxygen from water as fish do with gills.  

Mitchell doubled down on this in a 2016 post, “Seventy Percent of Human Genes Traced Back to Acorn Worm?”, concerning Oleg Simakov et al.’s 2015 paper on “Hemichordate Genomes and Deuterostome Origins.” Without discussing substantively the extensive evidence Simakov presented to suggest that the pharyngeal folds in acorn worms and vertebrates were shared because their common ancestor was a filter feeder as acorn worms are today (including the specific gene activation and proteins involved), Mitchell dismissed the features as just (our bold) “swellings along the neck, little mounds of cells that differentiate into parts of the jaw, face, ear, middle ear bones, thyroid and parathyroid glands, and voice box.”[58] Swellings, mounds, folds. PZ skewered that cursory attitude in his 2016 post:  

I am amused by the dismissal that they are “only folds of tissue”. Yeah, right. Your brain was only a fold of tissue in the pharyngula, too. Your major organs were mere diverticula. Your eyes were just outpocketings of the neural tube. Mere, just, only. Let’s all dismiss fundamental developmental structures as silly piles of cells, since, as we all know, mere cells do nothing, unless we’re trying to argue that they’re so darned complex that only a god could have created them.  

While “gill slit” is a colloquial term, what it’s referring to is the structure from which part of the neck and face of both humans and fish form. In all gnathostomes (jawed vertebrates), the first pharyngeal arch

becomes the jaw. Indeed, there are many developmental and morphological similarities among gnathostomes—such as having a notochord, dorsal hollow cord, post-anal tail, pharyngeal arches, nostrils, and vertebrae (most having ossified bones) among other details. Why would a designer bestow these specific characters on organisms that just so happen to be more closely related genetically to each other than anything else? In addition, why would the presumably same designer make all these organisms go through morula, blastula, and gastrula stages of development where the blastopore (first hole of the gut) becomes the anus? Who knows? Well, not the creationists. Instead of thinking about why a designer would employ the exact same assembly sequence in a particular set of animals that end up so disparate in their adult forms, and for good measure going out of their way to make sure the genes that do this would match when probed by evolutionary systematics, Mitchell plopped a red herring down on the table (her italic emphasis, but our bold, since some of the topics she brought seem to us a very perilous place to go):  

Evolutionists consider homologies in fish gills, fish jaws, reptilian jaws, and mammalian ear bones to be sequential evolutionary developments that demonstrate the common evolutionary ancestry of fish, reptiles, and mammals. Homologous structures are the different anatomical structures that form from a similar embryonic structure. Meckel’s cartilage, for instance, has different destinies in different creatures. Meckel’s cartilage supports the gills in cartilaginous fish. It ossifies to form the jaws of bony fish and reptiles. And in mammalian embryos, Meckel’s cartilage helps shape the middle ear bones and the mandible; then it virtually disappears. But each creature has its own kind of DNA directing the process, and at no time in science do we see DNA of one creature mutating to produce new information that can change the organism into a new kind. And at no point do these so-called mammalian “gill slits” have anything to do with gills or respiratory structures.  

We’re at a loss as to what Mitchell could possibly have meant by fish, reptiles, and mammals each having their “own kind of DNA directing the process.” Is the DNA of fish not composed of nitrogenous bases with a deoxyribose backbone? The same for reptiles? Of

mammals? Perhaps she means the DNA involved in the developmental process is not identical? That would, of course, be expected, but only up to a point. The genes involved would be orthologs, meaning that they are descended from a common ancestor. They would naturally have their own lineage-specific adaptations, which is exactly what we’ve been seeing. As for what “information” would be involved in generating one of those (undefined) kinds, what on Earth does that mean? Does she think the DNA within an already-born organism mutates in such a manner that it could transform into a totally unrelated one? Does she expect an australopithecine’s DNA to have mutated (after already born) into the first Homo? This is reminiscent of Ray Comfort’s preposterous caricature of “evolution”: a dog as just a pile of meat that over time grew legs, eyes, a tail, etc., but had to wait millions of years for the first female dog to form (presumably because, like the Adamic story, the male must come first). Mitchell’s muddle comes into clearer focus if we think more about that Meckel’s cartilage. Fish, reptiles, and mammals all have Meckel’s cartilage (for some unknown reason), and it develops differently according to their lineages—sorry, kinds. With regard to that in mammals, there is way more to the story than Mitchell let on. Remember the scientists Cserhati vaulted around back in Chapter 4 on mammal ear development? Neal Anthwal, Abigail Tucker and company ... well, a 2013 paper they did with Leena Joshi pulled together the pieces of evidence in exactly the way Elizabeth Mitchell didn’t. It’s worth quoting at length (our bold):  

In such transitional fossils it is clear that the first step in the process of formation of a mammalian-like ear and jaw was the development of a double jaw joint, that is, two side by side joints, one between the articular and the quadrate and the other between the dentary and the squamosal. An extended upward dentary, which perhaps provided a step towards formation of such a second joint, has been observed in the non-mammalian synapsids, Scymnognathus and Ictidopsis. In tritheledontids [aka ictidosaurs] and brasilodontids, two advanced mammal-like synapsid groups, the dentary has a lateral ridge that contacts the ventral side of the squamosal forming a functional hinge but does not have a welldeveloped articulation. A clear double jaw joint is evident in the prototypical basal mammaliform Morganucodon from the Jurassic…

The formation of a double joint may have had the advantage of providing resistance against the forces produced by this searing dentition, which would have introduced a twisting motion to the jaw. Such a twisting would result in a tendency to dislocate the jaw articulation, prevented by the presence of the double articulation. The advent of a double jaw joint was therefore directly linked to a change in tooth shape and change in mode of mastication… The

postdentary

middle

ear

bones

(angular,

prearticular)

in

early

mammaliforms are housed in a trough in the dentary bone. Such a postdentary trough is observed in Morganucodon. In a similar manner, the presence of a Meckel’s groove [opening on the inner surface of the mandible that exposes Meckel’s cartilage] on the dentary has been used as evidence of a persistent Meckel’s cartilage… The next step after evolution of a double articulation appears to have been detachment of the postdentary bones from the dentary, as evidenced by lack of a postdentary trough. These postdentary bones would have still been connected to the jaw via an ossified Meckel’s cartilage. It is important to note that lack of a postdentary trough does not automatically mean that the middle ear bones were detached from the jaw. Recently, an unambiguous example of a transitionary form was described in the form of Liaoconodon, an eutriconodont mammal from the early Cretaceous… [reported in Jin Meng et al.’s 2011 paper in Nature.] The final step in formation of the definitive mammalian middle ear appears to have been a breakdown of Meckel’s cartilage, so that the ear is no longer physically connected to the jaw. This is linked with support for the ear by connection to the cranium, with the formation of the auditory bulla. Such a situation is observed in Hadrocodium, which does not have a postdentary trough or Meckel’s groove. [see Zhe-Xi Luo et al.’s 2001 paper in Science.]  

Seems that Fossil Genie was working overtime again, and not aiming to make evolutionary paleontologists in the least uncomfortable. Intriguing how the Designer decided to include the step-by-step transition of the jaw to ear bones in the fossil record, from Robert Broom’s predicted dual-jawed intermediates, to later forms with the last remnant traces of a connective Meckel’s cartilage. How peculiar that he/she/it/they would be so charitable to the evolutionists. Thanks a bunch. If Mitchell is not going to accept the well-evidenced evolutionary model, then all she needs to do is provide her own superior alternative

explanation. She needs to account for why all chordates have pharyngeal arches, of course, and why vertebrates have Meckel’s cartilage functioning as it does, and why particular jaw bones of mammals migrate upwards to become the ear bones. Mitchell has no model for any of this. She only has an anti-model, simply denying everything put forward by evolutionists in a cloud of ad hoc “design”— a blanket explanation that in the end doesn’t explain anything. Creationists have been known now and then to castigate evolutionists for offering “Just-So” stories (a nod to Rudyard Kipling penning such things long ago for mere adolescent entertainment). Ranging far and wide, there’s Frank Sherwin from 2003, Don Moeller 2004, David Coppedge 2008, David Cloud 2011, David Wilson 2015 ... and not to slight ID, Tom Bethell and Cornelius Hunter fielded the trope in 2012. With that in mind, here’s a mind-bogglingly inane example from Mitchell’s recapitulation chapter, exactly the sort of narrative that would be called a Just-So story were it spun from a non-creationist (our bold):  

Mammalian “gill slits” are folds in the region of the tiny embryo’s throat. By the 28th day of life, the embryo’s brain and spinal cord seem to be racing ahead of the rest of the body in growth. Therefore, for a time, the spinal cord is actually longer than the body, forcing the body to curl and flexing the neck area forward. (This curled embryo with the long spinal cord is mistakenly accused by some people of having an animal’s tail.) Just as many people develop a double chin when bending the neck forward, so the embryo has folds in its neck area due to this flexing.  

That very same tail-yet-not-a-tail structure turns into the tail of dogs, elephants, geckos, salamanders, and goldfish, but solely for humans, it is not actually a tail. Despite the folds having specific developmental pathways that give rise to various neck and facial structures, they are merely the result of the embryo bending forward. It is curious then that no one—and we mean no one—in the scientific literature refers to the arches as originating or undergoing any discernable embryonic modification by any flexing. The years of work by Anthony Graham, Ryan McDonald, Daniel Meulemens, Craig Miller, Amanda Rychel, Eldad Tzahor, Olivia Wendling and their

colleagues have identified ever so many factors in generating the arches (“ectoderm, endoderm, mesoderm and neural crest” cells, as a 2005 paper by Graham enumerated), but nothing to suggest they were just folds in the neck due to flexing. There is certainly evidence that arch segmentation “predates that of the neural crest,” as a 1999 paper by Emma Veitch et al. found—the neural crest gene regulatory network itself being a most ancient one, as described by Tatjana Sauka-Spengler et al. in 2007 and 2008 papers. Furthermore, Andrew Gillis et al. determined “A stemdeuterostome origin of the vertebrate pharyngeal transcriptional network” in 2012, but no sign of a flex factor. And recall the direct observations of vestigial tails discussed earlier. Not a word there either on the impact of “flexing”, nor any attempt by Mitchell to cite anyone who claimed there was—and that in spite of the fact that Mader’s textbook (which Mitchell had allegedly read) showed a scanning electron micrograph of a “human embryo at beginning of fifth week” that clearly identified the tail at that stage, extending well beyond the limb bud. We may wonder why that is. Could it perhaps be that the arches are not folds in the neck due to “flexing”? Just a thought. Much of Mitchell’s chapter churned these same talking points. She complained about people correctly pointing out that fish gills as well as parts of our face and neck arise from a homologous structure, and again bringing up the spurious abortion argument. A subchapter recounted the obvious, that some people still hold to a modified form of recapitulation theory—not entirely incorrect, and for good reason. We have noted that whales grow limb buds that recede, the whale blowhole moves from the tip of the snout to the top of the head, humans grow tails that (usually) disappear, and our jaw bones move up to our ears. Each one of these replays over a short time a piece of the long evolutionary history of their ancestors, reflecting in their embryonic development a time when whales were terrestrial with nostrils at the end of their snout, and still farther back, a time when our mammalian ancestors had multiple bones in the jaw.  

Posturing on the Phylotypic Stage  

Curiously enough, a topic that didn’t arise at all in Mitchell’s recapitulation chapter was something that had got a lot of ink spilled in the apologetics of Intelligent Design: the “phylotypic stage.” It’s “a key concept in evolution and development,” as Michael Richardson reminded when commenting on a 2012 paper by Michal Levin et al. that had extended that science understanding into the detailed genetics of Caenorhabditis embryos. Teasing out what goes on at the developmental level, even in organisms thought fairly close phylogenetically, was no easy task to work out, especially in the days before even the role of DNA was known. Olaf Bininda-Emonds et al. reminded in a 2002 study how daunting it was even identifying what tissues were doing what, especially before the genes were specified and computers came along to speed up analysis of the associated data field. In 2009 Ingmar Werneberg proposed “A Standard System to Study Vertebrate Embryos” to help sort such things out. And the work goes on. But here’s the Big Picture. The phylotypic stage is the period early in animal development “when it most closely resembles other species.” This is more than mere physical resemblance. As the Hox genes came on the scope (reviewed in 1993 by Jonathan Slack et al.), researchers like Frietson Galis & Johan Metz in 2001 suggested “that the phylotypic stage is a highly vulnerable one because of the absence of modularity” at that stage, but where a “high number of ongoing interactions” contributes to “the conservation of the temporal and spatial colinearity of the Hox genes.” By the time Richardson was writing in 2012, it was clearer that the phylotypic stage “represents a time when the transciptome is dominated by highly conserved genes involved in pattern formation.” The Levin work (and their 2016 follow-up paper in Nature) confirmed how pulses in the genetic interplay were concentrated in nematodes, in similar ways to other taxa that deployed their versions of the genes at different paces. Richardson’s commentary compared it to a car journey, where the developmental stages are like landmarks on the road, which may be reached at differing rates depending on the speed of the vehicle and the number of side stops evolution had added along the way. Viewed as a measure of conserved systems, an “hourglass” image has been for many years a preferred one in developmental

biology—though not the only one, as many a researcher has cautioned, including Bininda-Emonds et al. in 2003 and Jana Švorcová in 2012. As Alex Kalinka & Pavel Tomancak reviewed in 2012, factors to be considered include how mutations are or aren’t affecting that dynamic, to what degree selection was involved, and how many of the genetic players were ones that were conserved early in the embryonic process rather than later. But whatever the way it was visualized, there were underlying data to be accounted for, where the embryos of varied taxa were observed to funnel through a narrow zone of heightened similarity before branching out into the final disparity of their developing forms. So that’s the way nature does it. But if that sounds rather too natural and, dare we say, evolutionary, then the very presence of the hourglass model or any proposed alternatives earn the ire of Jonathan Wells and Casey Luskin over in the Intelligent Design camp, who have quote-mined and parsed their way through the edges of the science literature, with understandable pushback from their critics, including PZ Myers in 2007 and 2010. From what you’ve read so far from anti-evolutionists, you may not have much trouble guessing that some scholarly hijinks may be in store. And you’d be right. A 2013 paper by Barbara Piasecka et al. on “The Hourglass and the Early Conservation Models—Co-Existing Patterns of Developmental Constraints in Vertebrates” sparked Luskin’s quotemining instinct for a post declaring “Vertebrate Expression and Other Properties Don’t Support a ‘Phylotypic’ Stage.” Really? To this conclusion jump Luskin offered this paragraph from Piasecka (our bold):  

During development, vertebrate embryos pass through a “phylotypic” stage, during which their morphology is most similar between different species. This gave rise to the hourglass model, which predicts the highest developmental constraints during mid-embryogenesis. In the last decade, a large effort has been made to uncover the relation between developmental constraints and the evolution of the genome. Several studies reported gene characteristics that change according to the hourglass model, e.g. sequence conservation, age, or expression. Here, we first show that some of the previous conclusions do not hold out under detailed analysis of the data.

 

So much for the notion that the Piasecka paper was failing to support a phylotypic stage, when Luskin just quoted them saying the opposite. What the paper was about was how much of the data on zebrafish gathered in a 2010 study by Tomislav Domazet-Lošo & Diethard Tautz fit the hourglass model specifically, and how the genes themselves figured into what was going on in that phylotypic stage. This was an area with many genetic players, such as DNA methylation of Tet proteins found by a 2016 paper by Ozren Bogdanović et al., suggesting “an ancient developmental role for Tet dioxygenases.” But however keen Luskin was to focus on “some” of Piasecka’s findings, he stepped quite clumsily around even those. Luskin summarized the issue as “(a) whether the genes had experienced selective pressure (i.e., conservation of gene sequence), (b) the approximate age of the genes, (c) gene family size, (d) constraints on gene expression, and (e) conservation of regulatory regions.” Then Luskin lowered what he must have thought was the boom (our bold on the snippets Luskin quoted from Piasecka), though take special note of that point (e), by which time his argument was already starting to burn at the edges:  

As the authors explained, their “goal was to study developmental constraints acting on various gene properties in vertebrates,” since the “hourglass model” predicts maximum constraints on the phylotypic stage. But this is not what they found. Keeping the numbering of the properties they looked at the same as above, they found: (a) Gene sequence: “There is notably no evidence for change in selective pressure acting on sequences of protein-coding genes (i.e., dN/dS) over development.” (b) Gene age: “We do not find any support for the hypothesis that the phylotypic stage would be characterized by the oldest transcriptome.” (c) Gene family size: This property did not support the phylotypic stage, but instead supported the “early conservation” model where they found “early stages are less prone to tolerate both gene duplication … and gene introduction.”

(d) Gene expression: “Unfortunately, the available data does not allow a strong conclusion concerning the conservation of expression … despite the probable importance of this feature in the evolution of development.” (e) Conservation of regulatory regions: For this one property, they did find support for conservation in the phylotypic stage, as Hox genes (long known to be highly expressed during the phylotypic stage) are highly conserved. They thus found: “The sequence of regulatory regions is most

conserved

for

genes

expressed

in

mid-development,

consistent with the hourglass model.” Their results not only failed to support strong constraints on the phylotypic stage, but instead found that there was often no clear pattern of constraints: “Several features do not show any significant pattern over embryonic development, often in contradiction to previous reports.”  

It is precisely the matter of that point (e) that caught our eye: regulatory regions are how genes are turned on and off, which plays a big role in how organisms end up looking the way they do. So was Luskin thinking that aspect that was “consistent with the hourglass model” was too trivial a detail to fret about? Maybe, since every one of the rest of those points also supported a level of conservation that hardly favored an anti-evolutionary model that posited there was no conservation to begin with. Let’s back up to the start. Luskin’s points (a) & (d) were culled from one paragraph in the Piasecka paper, and note what factors were under consideration, along with the conclusion Luskin conveniently left out (our bold this time, and we’ve included in their brackets the cited sources, while underlining the sentences Luskin used):  

Several features do not show any significant pattern over embryonic development, often in contradiction to previous reports. There is notably no evidence for change in selective pressure acting on sequences of protein-coding genes (i.e., dN=dS) over development (in contrast to [10 Hazkani-Covo et al. 2005]). Unfortunately, the available data does not allow a strong conclusion concerning the conservation of expression (in contrast to [13 Irie & Kuratani 2011]), despite the probable importance of this feature in the evolution of development. In this respect, the

situation in vertebrates stands in contrast to the relatively clear results in flies [12 Kalinka et al. 2010], where the evolution of expression has been shown to be most constrained in middevelopment.  

There are some juicy scholarly crumbs lurking beneath just this one paragraph. Luskin had previously authority-quoted the Irie paper in a 2011 post (“Haeckelian Recapitulation Is Not the Issue”) concerning how a scientific consensus had not yet been reached on embryogenesis, and bounced off the Kalinka one in 2013 while pillorying Donald Prothero’s book. Irie had in mind “how to explain the common early embryonic stages, such as the morula, blastula and gastrula, in evolutionary terms,” about which Luskin offered no Intelligent Design accounting himself, of course, and in 2013 did not mention how Kalinka had found that “genes that conform most to the hourglass pattern are involved in key developmental processes.” For contrast to Luskin’s potshot, Steve Matheson discussed the evolutionary implications of the Kalinka work in a series of 2010 posts at Panda’s Thumb, and Irie & Kuratani explored more of the implications of the mounting data in their 2014 paper on “The developmental hourglass model: a predictor of the basic body plan?” To continue, Luskin’s terse quotes (b) & (c) on gene age and the impact of duplications inevitably made us wonder what the authors meant by “oldest transcriptome.” Luskin couldn’t be expected to offer a position on the age of any gene, since chronology is not something that figures into the Intelligent Design narrative, but a look at the full paragraph showed more particulars that weren’t shoring up the ID nonalternative (once again our bold, with bracketed sources and Luskin’s bit underlined):  

Gene orthology relations support the early conservation model. We show that early stages are less prone to tolerate both gene duplication (consistent with [17 Roux & Robinson-Rechavi 2008]) and gene introduction. The deficit in duplication in early development could also be due to a lack of opportunities for neo- or subfunctionalization in the anatomically simpler stages, which is not exclusive with strong purifying selection. The interpretation of transcriptome age is less straightforward. Our observations suggest that the oldest evolutionary stages tend to express of the oldest genes. It is possible that early stages are evolutionarily oldest, and that this is why they are enriched in oldest genes.

Consequently, it is the presence of young genes in a module that would mark relaxed developmental constraints during the corresponding stage. However, neither early nor phylotypic modules are enriched in young genes (Euteleostomi and

Clupeocephala+Danio

rerio),

which

suggests

similar

developmental

constraints in early and mid-ontogeny. In any case, we do not find any support for the hypothesis that the phylotypic stage would be characterized by the oldest transcriptome (in contrast to [11 Domazet-Lošo & Tautz 2010]).  

So knowing that the core of the genetic system making vertebrate embryos is really old and isn’t varying among them presently is a problem for evolution how? And while we’re waiting for IDers not to answer that one, step back a bit to think about what these embryological mechanisms do. They build what eventually becomes the adult organism. And what is so for living organisms is exactly as much the case for every animal that has ever lived. Which means all those fossils. So it was all too literally Tortucan of Elizabeth Mitchell in her Answers book chapter to attack the concept of a transitional fossil by bringing up this:  

Evolutionists have long debated the origin of the turtle shell. Until recently all the turtle fossils found had been fully equipped with modern-appearing shells. Therefore, evolutionists have debated whether the shell evolved over millions of years by following the sequence seen inside the turtle egg or whether it evolved as a modification of external scales. Now that two varieties of turtle with seemingly less developed parts of the shell have been identified, evolutionary researchers have noted that these shell variations more or less mirror shell developmental stages in the embryo. They therefore are asserting that turtle embryology predicted those forms successfully, proving on the one hand that those turtles are genuine transitional forms and on the other hand that ontogeny of turtle shells really does recapitulate phylogeny. In reality, no evolution from non-turtles is seen here, only two varieties of turtles. What these turtle fossils reveal is not a series of non-turtles evolving into turtles but just varieties of turtles.  

These paragraphs referenced Mitchell’s 2013 AiG article “Turtle in the Gap,” a marvel of an article in that it really makes no argument. Mitchell summarized the findings of Tyler Lyson et al.’s 2013 paper

that had documented the step-by-step evolution of the turtle shell from Milleretta to Eunotosaurus to Odontochelys to Proganochelys to Kayentachelys to the modern Chelydra (snapping turtles). The paper illustrated how the ribs broadened while the trunk shortened, how the plastron (the underside of the turtle) formed, how the carapace formed, and so on. In short, a textbook example of accounting for all the necessary steps required for turtle evolution. Steps which creationists had been demanding evolutionists account for. Mitchell’s only rebuttal boils down to “That’s what you think!” She offers no refutation of any of the work cited, settling finally on the crotchety “information” mantra (our bold on the especially tendentious parts):  

A hypothetical evolutionary ancestor would not possess the information for the next step (or for the infinite number of next steps required in a random trial-anderror process), and there is no observable mechanism in biology to show how it could acquire the information for increasing complexity. Mutations lose genetic information; they do not add the complexity needed to even incrementally produce a more complex creature. What these turtle fossils reveal is not a series of non-turtles evolving into turtles but just varieties of turtles.  

Leaving aside the obvious fact that not one of these fossils emerged from the spadework of any creationist (no curiosity or gumption?), Mitchell neglected to explain how an actual series of “nonturtles evolving into turtles” could have avoided looking exactly like what these very real fossils illustrated. Or specify what new genetic “information” (empirically not “infinite” for any organism with a genome of finite size) she would claim as the unbridgeable chasm in turtles whose every biological feature ultimately derives from that churning embryological mill we’ve been seeing so many anti-evolutionists not look too closely at. And speaking of curiosity and gumption, the paleontology work goes on. Recall from Chapter 3 how in 2015 another species of stemturtle was found: Pappochelys from the Middle Triassic, described by Rainer Schoch & Hans-Dieter Sues, and further explored in their 2018 paper on its osteology apropos the “evolution of the turtle skeleton.”

This amniote has features making it more derived than Eunotosaurus but less derived than Odontochelys. So if Mitchell wants to argue that her deity made “varieties” of turtles, then she must concede that her designer started out by making a turtle variety with no shell but broadened ribs. Then, preumably only a short time later in the compressed chronology of Eden, the designer made another turtle (of the same or different kind?), only this time with a plastron. Then, a bit later on (and all this before Adam and Eve appeared on the scene?), the designer created yet another turtle form, but this time one with both the plastron and carapace. What would be the point of all this, other than to play Fossil Genie yet again, monotonously filling in the evolutionary call sheet just as had been done with every other transitional form (ahem, like probainognathids)? That wraps up Mitchell’s chapter. Like Gary Parker, Mike Riddle, David Menton and Casey Luskin, she failed to defeat evolutionary theory in her attempted attacks on embryology. You may have further noticed, dear reader, how she mentioned almost nothing about the modern data regarding that topic of embryology, and even less regarding what she believed to have happened with any of it. Oh, she spun her wheels enough on old Ernst Haeckel—though dashing past the available information on Meckel’s cartilage, pharyngeal arches, and turtle evolution—in the end recapitulating the creationist propensity for ignoring data. On that note, we shall leave the comfortable environs of evolutionary biology, and set out on an expedition into the very bowels of Deep Time, to explore the ancient world of geology beneath our very feet.



7. Flood Geology: Tales of the Big Slosh Paleontology and evolutionary theory are inextricably linked, and as such, creationists horrendously misrepresent both. But paleontology is also shrouded in geology, and so the latter must be understood to help understand the former. We saw in Chapter 2 how badly Andrew Snelling et al. butchered radiometric dating, a disaster made all the worse by Snelling being an actual geologist. The AiG chapter we will look into presently dates from 2010: John Whitmore’s ”Aren’t Millions of Years Required for Geological Processes?” from The New Answers Book 2. There’s going to be a lot to unpack with that little chapter, but first is the matter of credentials and expertise. Whitmore is another Ph.D. professional with a B.S. and M.S. in geology (from the Institute for Creation Research) and a Ph.D. in biology from Loma Linda University (a Seventh-Day Adventist school). That geology degree will certainly come into use for a chapter on geology, right? Well…[59] Whitmore starts by explaining how naturalists have historically viewed the formation of rock layers, which was by recognizing the ones that were clearly due to sedimentation, then looking at the present rates of sediment accumulation as a clue on how that worked and extrapolating backwards. Darwin, for instance, did this in Origin of Species. Whitmore then takes a sharp turn into left field:  

Together, these early geologists and biologists used uniformitarian theory as an atheistic explanation of the earth’s rocks and biology, adding millions of years to earth history. The earlier biblical ideas of creation, catastrophism, and short ages were put aside in favor of slow and gradual processes and evolution over millions of years.  

The problem, however, is that the early geologists and biologists were not atheists. Most obviously, geologist Adam Sedgwick (17851873) was also an evangelical Anglican minister. Not that there weren’t contentious debates among naturalists of those days (religious or not) on the incoming deluge of data that needed to be accounted for.

Reviewed in 2009 by Michael Roberts for the Geological Society of London, one thing is clear: “atheists” were not notably involved. But politics and institutional turf-plowing were. As Martin Rudwick observed in his book on Earth’s Deep History, the “growing antipathy” lifelong Christian Charles Lyell (1797-1875) harbored was “not toward religious beliefs as such, but toward the political and cultural power of the Church of England, and above all its monopoly of higher education in England, as embodied in Buckland’s Oxford.” William Buckland (1785-1856) was in turn no atheist. One of the last of the geological pioneers to try and fit the rock record and the biblical Deluge together, a 1997 article by Patrick Boylan placed his work at the root of the fields of taphonomy and paleoecology—disciplines creationists remain reluctant to tread today (compare that with David Bottjer’s 2016 book). As for Darwin, old Chuck was also a Christian until years after he published Origin. For reference, the two books Darwin took with him aboard the HMS Beagle were Lyell’s Principles of Geology and the Bible. No one was trying to overthrow God or the Bible, meaning many naturalists still believed the Earth was ultimately created. And so do many evolutionist geologists and biologists to this very day. And more to the point, this narrative of “everyone believed in a literal Genesis until the 1800’s came along” is historically naïve. The Genesis myth came out of earlier Middle Eastern polytheistic religions, notably those of ancient Canaan, Babylonia and Egypt, as tracked by scholars from Frank Cross and John Day in the late 20th century, to Gordon Johnston, Nadav Na’aman and Scott Noegel in the present one. It was also adapted to be a polemic against other religions by showing that the Abrahamic God was the most powerful, whereas the other gods relied on each other for support (stand back you wimpy Egyptian animal-headed gods, ours can turn staffs into snakes way better!). The concept of either eternal bliss or torture postmortem came in later, possibly as part of being influenced by Zoroastrian beliefs, either during the Babylonian Exile or later when the Zoroastrianbelieving Persians came upon the scene, as reviewed by James Barr in 1985 and Bryan Rennie in 2007. Early Church leaders, such as Origen from the 3rd Century CE and St. Augustine in the 5th, were perfectly capable of taking some parts of the Bible metaphorically or allegorically, particularly Genesis.

Early Christians approached God through reasoning and argumentation, but centuries of institutional Catholic tradition resulted in the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s shifting towards a sole reliance on scriptures (called sola scriptura). During all this time, exactly how old the Earth was didn’t really play much of a part. Nothing in their static world (where the lives of people from one decade to the next was driven by cultural and political traditions seemingly as changeless as the heavens) made knowing when Creation took place a big deal, though it’s fair to say they didn’t think in the millions and billions of years Hindus waved about so casually in their cosmology (a culture that had invented the zero and made the most of it). You could add up the ages of the patriarchs to give a ballpark figure, but the more specific calculation of a 6,000 year old Earth relied on more than just scripture, especially the most famous of such figuring, that of Bishop James Ussher (1581-1656) in the 1600s, who drew a lot on what external historical records were by then available. Shunt down three and a half centuries, though, and that 6,000 year frame is defended by Jerry Bergman in 2014 (“Ussher’s research merits our highest respect and serves as a solid foundation for us to build upon today”) and kicked off Jeff Miller’s 2019 list of Young Earth evidences as his lead item #1. The literalism that pervades modern creationism took hold in America following the Civil War (1861-1865), parallel to a desire of Southerners to separate themselves theologically from the beliefs of Northern leaders (the Southern Baptist Convention, a stronghold of literalist creationism, originated when northern Baptists showed themselves increasingly critical of that slavery thing). As documented in Ronald Numbers’ classic The Creationists, young Earth creationism and its Flood Geology “scientific” application came about from Seventh-Day Adventism early in the 20th century, floating away in the 1940’s and 50’s from its Adventist associations to become the Creation Science of Henry Morris and others right around the time of the Beatles and the Ford Mustang, which was obviously long after evolution had been established as a scientific theory. Modern creationism was therefore a reaction to evolutionary theory, especially to its increasing inclusion in the public school system, not the other way around.

As such, because evolution does not stop regardless of creationists, creationism has turned into a spectacle of continually chasing after this continually advancing target. At first there will be haranguing about the claims, then eventually capitulating to them, though usually in the most carefully couched of terms. Whitcomb & Morris rejected natural selection as a tautology, for example (“Survival of the fittest. How do we know who is fittest? Those who survive!”), and in July 2011 John Morris was still holding the line that natural selection could never really do anything. But they were defending a faulty (though understandable) premise. Natural selection is not survival of the “fittest”; that phrase was coined by philosopher Herbert Spencer, not Darwin, and became a popular shorthand phrase after Alfred Wallace suggested using it. But if you look closely at Darwin’s actual argument, all natural selection states is that organisms better adapted to an environment are on average more likely to survive and reproduce. This is not tautological and changes as the environment does. The organisms that survive have features (phenotypic and genetic) that vary measurably, and in many cases scientists can vary those variables to test out selection models directly. See Tom Booker et al.’s 2017 paper on “Detecting positive selection in the genome” for a toolkit. But because the impact of this can show up at the genetic level, where the numbers can be crunched with great mathematical precision, top level creationist theoreticians like Nathaniel Jeanson in 2013 have had to bow to the flood of relevant evidence and accept natural selection at least at the “microevolution” level. Not that all creationists have got on board, though. In a series of Acts & Facts pieces, Randy Guliuzza proclaimed “Natural Selection Contradicts Biblical Truth” (May 2011), that it was an “Illusion” (September 2011) that operates as an “Idolatrous Trap” (November 2011) and constitutes a “Fallacy” (February 2012) “based on an erroneous view of the organism-exposure interface” (go figure on what that means). To be fair, Guliuzza grumps at most everything in modern evolutionary biology, reducing solid technical work like Bradley Hersh & Sean Carroll’s 2005 paper on Hox Ultrabithorax gene expression evolution in Drosophila to mere quote-fodder. His Acts & Facts articles on “Life’s Indispensable Microscopic Machines” in 2010, and his stab

at the recurrent laryngeal nerve in 2016, invoked Hersh & Carroll solely for the offense of describing that the genetic systems of life had been “cobbled” together. At no point did Guliuzza address the content of the paper, or subsequent findings, such as their 2007 work on “The UBX-regulated network in the haltere imaginal disc of D. melanogaster” (halteres being the fly’s stabilizing winglets). It was enough for him to complain that evolutionists were guilty of proffering “simplistic” scenarios full of “magical whimsy” but not evidence. Anyhow, by 2014 Guliuzza was getting pushback from Nathaniel Jeanson on natural selection, prompting Guliuzza to pen three lengthy responses with all the clarity of molasses. Jean Lightner rose to Guliuzza’s defense in 2015 with views sounding pretty much like John Morris, arguing that “Natural selection has not played a significant positive role in the history of life on earth for sexually reproducing animals such [as] mammals and birds.” There things stood until creationist physicist Jason Lisle dove into the fray in 2018, enumerating Guliuzza’s “Dubious Claims Regarding Natural Selection,” including Guliuzza’s “tendency to state untested hypotheses as if they were established fact.” Our irony meter had by this point blown a fuse, but the show wasn’t over. Lightner took Lisle to task in 2019 for supposedly misrepresenting Guliuzza, with Lisle rejoining with what amounted to a head scratch at Lightner’s conviction that Guliuzza had subsequently come to accept natural selection without explicitly saying so. Scholars with the stomach for it may ferret through these exchanges regarding the occasional taxa mentioned peripherally along the way, but there are two take homes we can extract from this so far. First, that modern upper level creationism is going schizoid on this. Readers relying only on the ICR version will have been assured that natural selection was just an illusory and idolatrous trap, while anyone familiar with the AiG punches and counterpunches will be aware of a serious controversy over whether natural selection is in fact a fully operating biological process even in the creationist model of nature. Which leads to the second take home: as far as we can tell, not much has advanced among them to the point where they are capable of productively employing whatever they think natural selection is in their creationist frame to anything in the natural world. Natural selection is useless for them because most everything is useless for

them. Creation Science is just plain wrong, the phlogiston theory of our times.[60] The situation is the same with speciation. As pointed out in Chapter 6, Flood Geology pusher Price rejected the idea, as do most grassroots creationists today. Stacks of writers have excluded australopithecines as being our relatives or ancestors, as well as modern and ancient horses being related. But consult the new breed of creationism, and the modern Noachian flood “model” requires speciation (a super hyper-caffeinated version). As we saw, Wood categorizes Australopithecus sediba as a member of the “human kind” without gulping for breath, and Wise, Wood & Cavanaugh fold all horses, modern and primitive, into a holobaramin that contradicts one of the deepest of creationist mantras. Whether or not most creationists accept the conclusions by Wood et al., they would have been considered heresy decades ago; the fact that they are even put forward at this point is promising—creationism so moving the goalposts that they end up scoring for the evolutionary side without realizing it. Another area where creationists are just beginning to move into the transitional form stage of begrudging acceptance concerns preFlood carnivory. The traditional dogma is that all animals were created as placid herbivores, and only went red in tooth and claw after the Fall or the Flood (they’re understandably vague on that because the Bible is vague on that). We’ll return to that later in the chapter. Regardless, while a few creationists have come quite a ways, most still have so much farther to go before they catch up to the scientific community and its ever expanding data field. But enough of wandering down History Lane. We have some geology to corral.  

Lamentations on the Green River varves  

The geological tropes creationists have presented have in one sense remained very stable over the last few decades. The examples summarized by Donald Wise defending the standard science view in 1998, or the contributors to Martin Bridgstock & Ken Smith’s 2001 booklet criticizing Creationism, are still showing up in Jeff Miller’s list of Young Earth evidence in 2019. But because the data field has

widened, just how creationists trip over that have had to evolve over time. Whitmore’s chapter hit just such familiar pay dirt with this (our bold):  

Layers in sedimentary rocks can be seen at small scales too, like the finely laminated beds from the Green River Formation in Wyoming (figure 2). When sediment turns into rock, or becomes hard, we say the sediment has become lithified. Lithification occurs during sediment compaction (which drives out water) and cementation, or gluing together of the sedimentary grains. The process of lithification is not time dependent, but rather dependent upon whether the rock becomes compacted or not and whether a source of cement is present (usually a mineral like quartz or calcite). If these conditions are met, sediment can be turned rapidly into rock.[61]  

The Green River has long been a creationist bugbear. Its very existence (spectacular plant and fish fossils preserved in its particular anoxic lacustrine environment, including stromatolites) testifies to the variety of slow natural processes stretching over five million years there, in the Eocene around 50 million years ago. We’ll get to all that, but first, let’s get some basics out of the way. Those laminations Whitmore is referring to are typically called varves, sedimentary laminae deposited annually (details nicely reviewed by Bernd Zolitschka et al. in 2015). There are natural exceptions to that annual aspect (such as from mountain runoffs that can occur more than once in a year). Scientists are well aware of such special conditions, of course, which is why those interested in Deep Time focus on places where those variables can be excluded. Lake Oeschinen in Switzerland, for example, has calibrated varves running back to 884 CE, covered by Benjamin Amann et al. in 2014 and 2015 papers. But that’s very recent compared to the jackpot in the precision varve game, Lake Suigetsu in Japan, whose sheltered environment has generated nicely stable winter/summer deposition cycles over a much longer timeframe. Calibrated against tree ring, hydrological and meteorological data, the distinctive plant and pollen remains preserved there include organic macrofossils amenable to carbon-dating.

Better still, the silt core is conveniently sprinkled with local volcanic ash deposits and rarer major eruptions that can be traced to particular distant events and also independently dated. A quarter of a century of meticulous work chronicled by Hitoshi Fukusawa, Hiroyuki Kitagawa et al., Takeshi Nakagawa et al., Christopher Ramsey et al., Gordon Schlolaut et al., Victoria Smith et al., and Richard Staff et al., has documented a continuous sequence for the last 50,000 years (significantly longer than the age of the Earth in the creationist playbook no matter how you look at it). Incidentally, the Suigetsu varve sequence straddles the Younger Dryas climate anomaly, which plays a part in the genesis of the Noah flood story (as you’ll see in a chapter upcoming in Volume 2). And just to make life even more miserable for creationists like Michael Oard taking note of it in 2007, there’s the 600,000 year record of Lake Van in Turkey, with research there not stopping on AiG’s account since, as the continuing paleoclimate research of Mona Stockhecke et al. attest in 2012 and 2014 papers. So how do the creationists derail all this work? Not by honestly grappling with the data, that’s for sure. Any long sequence of slow geological phenomena necessarily earns their ire, especially deep core drilling data like the GISP2 Greenland ice series documented in works over many decades by Richard Alley et al., S. O. Rasmussen et al., Regine Röthlisberger et al., Anders Svensson et al., Paul Vallelonga et al., and Bo Vinther et al. The precision of the cores prompted John Southon to suggest in 2004 how they could be used to further calibrate radiocarbon dating (much as tree rings have), and the data in them also relates to climatology, which has become quite a contentious football politically (though not scientifically). But that’s another story. In 2003 critic Paul Seely offered the GISP2 core evidence as the “Ultimate Proof that Noah’s Flood Was Not Global.” None of which set well with creationists, who do not allow sediments or ice to record such long timeframes, nor even that there might have been more than one Ice Age or varying climate along the way. For all those reasons there’s been plenty of creationist pushback over the years, from Larry Vardiman and Michael Oard among the old guard, to Tim Clarey, Jake Hebert and Brian Thomas joining the drum beaters more recently.

We’ve included an extensive sampler of their papers on these topics in our references, and it may be seen how seriously they treat this challenge by recent issues of Acts & Facts, which feature duplicative expositions on this almost monthly by Hebert. One aspect they tended to overlook: the GISP2 cores record volcanic eruptions going back 110,000 years. Some of those on the trail: Claus Hammer et al. in 1978 and 1980, Chester Langway et al. in 1988, Gregory Zielinski et al. in 1994 and 1996 papers, Stuart Fiedel et al. and Karl Grönvold et al. in 1995 works, and Henrik Clausen et al. in 1997. By 2013 it was even possible for Carlo Barbante et al. to suggest some of the ash in the cores came from the 79 CE Vesuvius eruption. What all these have in common are cores containing layers directly representing the impact of the far from static environments in which they were laid down. Regarding the varve data, creationist John Reed waved his hand dismissively at their implication in several articles over the last decade, thinking only in terms of gross deposition volume, not the details of what micro life was getting deposited in them —and utterly avoiding those tell-tale fine interbedded airborne ash that can filter down into the layers. All of which evasion earned a pithy response by Joel Duff in 2012: the creationists offered “nothing but name-calling rhetoric.” Reed and Michael Oard took another stab at varves together in a section of a 2012 piece, dangling the prospect that they could be formed more quickly than a seasonal cycle spread over thousands of years. Unfortunately, they relied exclusively on the overhyped sedimentology experiments of a very limited group of fellow creationists: Guy Berthault, filtered through Alexander Lalomov & Marina Tugarova. This deserves some background. Berthault’s original experiments on the rapid formation of stratification layers in flume tanks of various shapes have been lauded by YECers as undermining conventional stratigraphy—millions of years recreated in a lab! Creationists like Brian Thomas at Acts & Facts in October 2013 invoke him as an unassailable authority source, as do creationist videos and grass root lecturers. We’ve listed in our references the technical publications Berthault’s done over the years, including a 1993 paper with Pierre

Julien, as well as detailed criticisms of Berthault’s claims by Kevin Henke and Alec MacAndrew. Why wasn’t Berthault’s work up to what creationists needed? Because geologists and hydrologists had a long record of research on how depositional systems work in and out of water (Daowei Yin et al.’s 2016 experiments on bedrock substrate formation would represent a fairly recent addition to what is a very extensive field). When you can see by direct experiment how features are formed, the creationist alternative Berthault proposed was simply not in the running. All Berthault and his colleagues had done was confirm the longknown role of things like “laminar layers in turbidity currents and delta propagation” that can occur quite naturally during deposition, creating cross-beds that are only a revelation to the YECers, glossing over how inappropriate that was as a blanket way to account for most of the geological record. Geologists only use cross beds to determine the direction the sediment was derived from; they do not use them to identify the overall orientation of the bedding. Often contained within larger sets of rock, it’s those “bed sets” that allow geologists to determine the actual orientation of the rock (as reviewed by Charles Campbell in 1967). In Lalomov & Tugarova’s case, those creationists insisted that a set of Permian deposits running from 20-26 meters thick could have been laid down in only around 6,000 years. Technically they weren’t claiming that they were only that old, only that they could have formed that quickly, specifically listing for their duration of deposition: 3,354+2,469=5,823 for the two “West Zone” features, and 2,505+4,161=6,666 for the “East Zone” pair. The totals will sound awfully familiar to any Young Earther, but there are some problems not only as to how they were arrived at (the paper was vague about what was getting multiplied or divided by what to derive them) ... or whether the deposition rate they claimed was really that momentous (an inch every few years or so) ... or whether they in any way undermined the known paleoenvironment of the region (which they did not investigate, but which been described in works like Ernst Leven & M. F. Bogoslovaskaya in 2006, or N. G. Nurgalieva in 2017). No, we have to wonder whether their calculations hold up at all. And we can know that in a very precise way because the same

example showed up again in a 2017 paper by Lalomov & Tugarova, joined by Berthault himself and two more coauthors. Building upon exactly the same raw data, this time the duration of deposition column had different values: 2,810+2,989=5,863 and 1,539+6,039=6,654. Not only had the end totals changed, but so too had the four subtotals. Worse still, if you sum the subtotals you don’t even get the numbers they listed: 5,799 and 7,578 respectively. Is this supposed to inspire confidence: creationist numbers that literally “don’t add up”? There is an old adage that too many cooks spoil the broth. Here, it may be that too many creationists spoil the math. Lalomov’s scientific acumen has been criticized as well in 2002 by Roger Scott’s “Creation Geology in Russia” post, noting how his 1997 “Gold Placers in Earth History” paper with Serguei Tabolitch had seriously misunderstood the implication of their own data. Meanwhile, some Christian geologists had weighed in on the varve matter. In 2010, Gregg Davidson & Ken Woglemuth had brought them up as evidence against a global Flood. This didn’t set well with the AiG set, and in 2016 Jake Hebert, Andrew Snelling & Timothy Clarey combined their collective intellects to fire off the most extensive creationist salvo to date: “Do Varves, Tree-Rings, and Radiocarbon Measurements Prove an Old Earth? Refuting a Popular Argument by Old-Earth Geologists Gregg Davidson and Ken Wolgemuth [sic].” They were nothing if not confident:  

However, there is actually no empirical evidence to back the claim that varves form as annual deposits over extended periods of time. There are some varve pairs that form in a single year, but in many cases, the observational evidence shows that multiple supposed varve couplets can and have formed in a single year (Buchheim and Biaggi 1988; Lambert and Hsü 1979; Makse et al. 1997). In fact, it has been documented that at least five pairs of varve couplets can form in a single year due to fluctuations in water flow (Lambert and Hsü 1979). It appears then, that claiming a varve is an annual event is an assumption in itself; one steeped in uniformitarian thought, but not reality.  

Ah, if only they had paid closer attention to their sources. “Lambert and Hsü 1979”, for example, who after having identified carefully how these “varve-like” sediments could be distinguished from true varves, explicitly warned “We do not intend to make an

unwarranted generalization that no varves are deposits of annual cycles.” But “unwarranted generalization” was exactly what Hebert had in store, as seen regarding the work of Paul Buchheim & Roberto Biaggi. Their presentation on “Laminae Counts Within a Synchronous Oil Shale Unit: A Challenge to the ‘Varve’ Concept” at the 1988 Geological Society of America annual meeting was unavailable for review online (even as an abstract). But on his own in 1994 (in a paper not cited by Hebert), Buchheim described how the Green River deposits that were initially thought to be varves could be clearly distinguished from them because they were not of even thickness, showing “observed thickening” unlike actual varves that they noted are “due to annual precipitation events in the open water.” And what did all that mean? A 2015 review Buchheim & Biaggi coauthored with Robert Cushman (yet another work not cited by Hebert) noted how “laminae number between the tuff beds varied progressively, from about 800 laminae near the lake center gradually increased to approximately 1,600 laminae nearer the lake margins.” This lead them to develop a new model for their formation, “the deposition of laminated carbonates by the mixing of calcium-rich inflow waters with bicarbonate-rich lake-water and explained the origin of the lithofacies, lithofacies assemblages, bioturbation, kerogen content, and the increase in number of laminae and thickness toward the basin margins.” In other words, the whole shebang—and not junking in any way the dating of the Green River Formation, let alone lending support to any Big Slosh origin for it. As for Hernán Makse et al.’s paper on “Spontaneous stratification in granular mixtures,” the creationists followed Snelling’s prior lead (from 1997), grumping how they “did not acknowledge Berthault’s prior work”—possibly because Berthault’s “groundbreaking laboratory experiments” hadn’t actually been all that groundbreaking (or should it be sediment-breaking?) and had escaped Makse’s technical interest because they already had decades of experimental work available to them, which they had duly cited. Nor had the Makse work been seen by anybody outside the creationist camp as overturning varve geology. As the contemporary commentary in Nature by Jay Fineberg noted, their work illuminated

how abrupt landslides could occur as they do; Snelling knew about that avalanche connection, and presumably hoped that would suffice to jump from that to a Flood context taking place underwater and in hyper-turbulent conditions. Which brings us to the chief irony of the 2016 Hebert paper. In order to account for the varves in their creationist frame, Hebert, Snelling & Clarey ended up relying on the very things the Big Slosh was intended to circumvent: massive aerial dust storms they proposed occurred at the end of “the Ice Age” (only just the one, remember, which they contend occurred after the Flood, as Hebert summarized in a 2013 article) along with an abundance of volcanic ash to filter into the varves super-quick, thereby promoting diatom blooms to somehow circumvent the blatantly seasonal character of the deposited organic material, which they did not otherwise discuss. Hebert repeated the creationist position in 2016 and 2017 posts, but in 2018 Davidson & Ken Woglemuth presented their rebuttal, pointing out how the creationists had relied on bald data suppression: “For example, Hebert et al. (2016) discussed mismatches on varve counts from the SG93 cores from Lake Suigetsu published in 1995, but not the work from the new cores and analyses with much better controls and results published in 2012 and 2013.” Work the creationists absolutely knew about, since they had cited so many of them (the aforementioned Kitagawa, Nakagawa, Schlolaut, Smith & Staff), but never on the relevant points at issue. Curious, isn’t it? The nature of what was trapped between the layers of airborne volcanic ash in the Suigetsu varves reminds us of a lesson Alec MacAndrew noted in his criticism of Guy Berthault, how the time slices found in so many places around the world represented a succession of identifiable paleoclimates, not the indiscriminate jumble (micro-layered or not) of Berthault’s experiments:  

In the several miles of depth of the geological column that is present in some places, many of these different processes can be found in a vertical section through the column, indicating that the environment in which the individual strata were deposited has changed over time. So, for example, we get fossiliferous lacustrine strata (bearing index species which clearly support the conventional chronology) separated by volcanic tuff, evaporites or aeolian deposits under marine strata overbedded by lava all in the same place.

 

The whole of the Grand Canyon comes to mind on that, including adjacent real estate, like the interbedded tuffs in the late Miocene lacustrine evaporites around Lake Mead, covered by James Faulds et al. in a 2016 paper. There’ll be more of that Grand Canyon paleoenvironment stuff in Volume 2, but variations on the theme literally blanket the globe. We can start with those aeolian sand dunes. Creationists don’t like those for obvious reasons, and not just because the likes of Lorence Collins keeps bringing them up (such as in a response to Ken Ham & Andrew Snelling in 2018). Creationists can hardly have Lawrence of Arabia or Tatooine interludes interspersed with the drowning dinosaurs, now can they? All those must become underwater formations, even though the characteristics of marine dunes differ from their windblown counterparts. Aeolian dunes have more prominent cross-bedding, for example, while marine dunes will exhibit graded bedding from turbidity currents. Ripple marks may indicate wind or water flow. But what is found fossilized among them adds to the context—strictly marine forms versus distinctive terrestrial flora and fauna. Steve Baumann suggested another relevant example:  

On the north limb of the Baraboo Range near Rock Springs Wisconsin and Van Hise Rock, is an example of windblown sediments at the Great Unconformity. The orange, highly cross-bedded Galesville Sandstone butts right up to the purple and vertical Baraboo Quartzite. The Baraboo Quartzite was originally deposited as a sandstone, buried, metamorphosed, and deformed into a syncline over a billion years before the Cambrian Sauk seas. The Baraboo Quartzite served as islands during the transgression of the Sauk seas in the late Cambrian. The Galesville near the islands will often be of aeolian origin, which themselves became buried by younger marine deposits.  

It naturally helps the creationist case also to be vague. Thus Brian Thomas reported in September 2014 on a stroll he took to an (unspecified) spot in Colorado where he claimed the cross-bedded strata attributed to aeolian dunes came from flooding. Without knowing just where he was, how would that claim be checked? Take another hike to locate the place where his picture was taken? Somewhere high

above a valley, so putatively younger deposits than whatever was exposed down in the valley. Thomas later mentioned the Dakota and Glorieta sandstones, though. Straddling the border between Colorado and New Mexico, there at least one could rustle up some context. Those actually are marine in nature, though again not exactly helping the creationist case. The Glorieta Sandstone was a shallow marine deposit dating from the Permian, systematized by Donald Baars in 1974. The Dakota Sandstone is millions of years younger, laying on the edge of the Cretaceous Seaway that had by then developed. As explored over the years by Karl Waagé 1955, Donald Lane 1963, and John Holbrook & Frank Ethridge 1996, the area started out as a floodplain, then transitioned into swamp, followed by beach and surf zones. That’s an awful lot of action to compress into a few years during or after the Flood, but Thomas skips that challenge by not offering any detailed explanation for what he’d seen on his wanderlust outings. Such layered deposits reflecting very different landscapes are ubiquitous, as far from a dirty little secret as one can get, given how freely geologists are about pointing them out. Steven Baumann reminded us of his 2016 paper on the Devils Island Formation in the Jacobsville Group of Michigan and Wisconsin, which had been deposited on top of the Midcontinent Rift way back in the Neoproterozoic. On the bottom are river deposits. In the middle are the aeolian Devils Island rock (identifiable as such on account of their “highly cross-bedded” character). And on top of that are yet more river deposits. Since all this would be occurring before the Cambrian, would this represent pre-Flood Creation Week lithic designing? If so, the alternating river/desert/river environment would suggest parts of North America were very odd places to be in during the Creation Week. Was the Designer having trouble making up their mind? Now for the Pompeii razzle-dazzle: the persistent intrusion in the geological record of volcanic ash and lava. Here’s a quick sample, culled from the last few decades of relevant work (and there’s a lot). There’s big scale stuff, like the Triassic movement of the Arabian plate on the edge of the Tethys Sea, pinned down in 2004 by F. N. Sadooni & A. S. Alsharhan, where geologic activity produced a cycle of sandstone, evaporitic lagoons

and desert dunes (as well as “fair amounts of light oil, gas, and condensates”). And mini-events, like the Tertiary limestone described in a 2005 paper by James Dockal & Michael Smith: formed from the contents of a small pond in Chino Valley, Arizona, including diatoms, reeds and cyanobacteria, it was buried around 25 million years ago by an eruption of the Sullivan Buttes volcanoes. Then there’s the Salar de Atacama Basin in Chile described in 2005 by Constantino Mpodozis et al.—a stack of Mesozoic sandstones and evaporites followed by aeolian settings plus lacustrine mudstones topped by lava. Or the Late Cretaceous volcanic group of the Chatham Islands off New Zealand, which Leonor Sorrentino et al. found in 2011 erupted again and again in the millions of years after, both above and under water, upsetting a succession of marine faunal environments featuring “corals, brachiopods, molluscs, etc.” And the Wrangell volcanic belt in Alaska explored by Jeffrey Trop et al. in 2012, where pyroclastic flows and eruptions from 12 to 5 million years ago spilled into terrestrial environments whose fish and plant remains included coalified and petrified wood. Or consider the “five primary tuff beds interstratified with the lacustrine strata” of the Cañadón Asfalto Basin in Patagonia that in 2013 Rubén Cúneo et al. found “constraining ca. 33 m.y. of depositional history and biotic evolution that spans nearly three epochs of the Jurassic,” a period of major appearances among “Dinosauria, early mammals and major South American plant groups.” Or the layer cake of volcanic deposits in the Tiburón Island marine basin in Mexico, sandwiching diagnostic microfossils between tuffs and lava flows, that Scott Bennett et al. in 2015 drew on to show there had been a marine transgression at the north end of the Gulf of California around six million years ago. Or the volcanic tuffs intruding on the fish and freshwater crustaceans of the Early Cretaceous lacustrine strata of Lingshan Island in China, described by Jindong Gao et al. in 2018. We weren’t kidding on that blanketing the globe thing. With that under our belt, we can get back to varves, extremely useful in revealing the paleoclimate of the more recent Quaternary, as indicated by Patrick O’Sullivan’s 1983 paper “Annually-laminated lake sediments and the study of Quaternary environmental changes.” Pulling together data from a range of sites in Africa, Eastern North America and Europe, “These include the study of (a) geochronology

(b) climatic change, (c) vegetation history, especially the role of fire in forest ecosystems, (d) the calculation of rates of sediment influx to lakes, and of rates of erosion from their catchments, and (e) the monitoring of processes in the modern environment such as heavy metal pollution, eutrophication, and ‘acid rain’.” And yet, creationists expect us to believe that these either took place in one fell swoop during or immediately after the global Flood, or thousands of varves occurred annually since the time of the Flood (although not anymore at that rate for some reason), documenting astoundingly rapid environmental changes that slowed down abruptly the moment scientists started looking at them. In this respect, the Green River Formation (which spreads across the intersection of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming) is very interesting indeed. Generations of geologists have studied those rocks, pioneered by Wilmot Hyde Bradley (1899-1979) back in the 1920s, and continuing with Dane Picard in the 1950s, Hans Eugster & Ronald Surdam in the 1970s, Alfred Fischer & Lilian Roberts and Henry Roehler in the 1990s, and Stephen Meyers into the present century, identifying in the layers of what were once a series of lakes tracing ever so gradually the Milankovitch climate cycles as the Earth’s axis wobbled over tens of thousands of years. Creationists are peeved about Milankovitch cycles, of course, from a 2007 paper by Michael Oard maintaining it was “controversial as to whether this cycle shows up in climate variables” to multi-part shots by the prolific Jake Hebert in 2016 and 2017. Hebert was clearly undeterred by Jonathan Baker’s 2014 criticism that he was just plain wrong in trying to dismiss orbital tuning as circular reasoning. Baker noted work by Lawrence Edwards et al. in 1987 (isotope balances in coral), Basil Davis & Simon Brewer in 2009 (pollen), and Peter Köhler et al. in 2010 (various environmental measures, including dust) that independently corroborating the impact of those orbital oscillations. None of those papers involved radiometric dating as their direct calibrator, which creationists reflexively dismiss, but that dating method has come into play with the Green River, from Richard Mauger in 1977 to Elliot Smith et al. in 2003, but we don’t need atomic clocks to trip up creationism (though they do, as we saw back in Chapter 2). It’s those thousands of years chronicled directly in the strata that pokes Young Earth creationism in the eye. Wilmot Bradley determined the rate at

which this Eocene formation’s layers form in feet per year—rich oil shale, for instance, accumulates a foot of sediment over 8,200 years. So, if more than one layer of this exists (spoiler alert: they do), then that part of the formation counts out as older than the creationist universe. Of course, creationists have tried misinforming people about the Green River in the past, as Paul Garner did in a 1997 AiG post ironically titled “Green River Blues.” Besides trying to play the Buchheim/Biaggi varve card we saw bungled above, Garner claimed that the large concentrations of fossil birds and fish at the formation indicate rapid burial during the flood because otherwise they would have degraded and been lost. When one actually bothers to look at the data—as Glenn Morton did in a 2003 posting, instead of quote-mining two researchers as Garner did—then one can see that the fish are only known from the lake areas (duh!). If there were a global flood, should we not expect a total mixture of the fossil organisms, as the relentless waves churned up and mixed adjacent sea and land life? But instead we get the absolute opposite. By 1984 Lance Grande was cataloging the fish fossils preserved there, and Morton noted how a 1994 paper by Grande & (surprise!) Paul Buchheim found particular catfish (the living Ictaluridae family along with the now extinct Hypsidoridae genus) and Catostomidae suckerfish in Lake Gosiute but not the nearby Fossil Lake. Even more specifically, the catfish are only found from the deeper parts of the lake, the environment farthest from the shore, which is quite normal for a lake deposit but seems awfully finicky for a global flood. Strange how lake-specific the global flood was, no? As for Garner’s claim on fossil preservation, his one example for how soft fish parts decayed too rapidly to be preserved in a non-catastrophic way involves a fish decaying in the very different ecology of a marsh, not a lake, and he fully ignores examples of bodies being preserved for years in lakes, an example of which Morton provides—two humans submerged in a car for five years. On top of that, Morton noted how a 1977 paper by Buchheim & Ronald Surdam determined that the fish couldn’t have been transported there from any distance, the scientists stressing how “Experiments and observations made on various species of fish have shown that fish decompose and disarticulate after only very short distances of transport.”

Further proof that the geology of the Green River wasn’t going to be very cooperative to YEC expectations came in 2006 when Michael Oard grappled with Whitmore over whether the GRF was formed during the Flood itself (Oard’s position) or afterward in some manner of less cataclysmic watery retreat (Whitmore’s view). This was quibbling over only about a year or so—that is how untenably rapid all of the Big Slosh phenomena are deemed to be. Whitmore is in fact a creationist who functionally accepts the essence of the conventional view of the Green River Formation. While his Answers Book chapter repeated the mantra that the fish soft parts should not have had time to fossilize, the work he cited on it, his own 2003 Loma Linda Ph.D. dissertation “Experimental Fish Taphonomy with a Comparison to Fossil Fishes,” acknowledged that “The fish taphonomy of Fossil Basin does not contradict warm shallow lake models for the basin.” Technical hint: if trying to undermine a uniformitarian source for fossils in favor of a catastrophic Flood or its hypothetically milder aftermath, it’s probably not a good idea to accept the very paleoenvironment in which that uniformitarian sourcing would naturally take place. A further measure of just how unconvincing Whitmore’s dissertation was as an anti-evolutionary salvo: it continues to be referenced by other professional geologists and paleontologists on fish taphonomy, including 2012 papers by Patrick Chellouche et al., and Jo Hellawell & Patrick Orr, as well as one in 2013 by Karen Anderson & Adam Woods. It’s important to be clear here on just how delicate some of the GRF fossil evidence is, and how deliciously specific. Take little Notogoneus osculus. The anatomy of this extinct species of teleost fish includes a mouth oriented for feeding along the bottom. A 2010 paper by Anthony Martin et al. found that not only were there delicate trace marks of its fins nicking the preserved surface as it swam along, exactly matching where an adult Notogoneus’ fins would disturb the sand—the undulating path was added to by its “overlapping feeding marks.” Fishy forensics worthy of an Eocene CIS. Creationists have not been good at explaining how such fragile features could have withstood even the proposed post-Flood sloshing. But it’s more than just the little fishies. Never mind the primitive bat found there (recall the 2008 paper on that by Nancy Simmons

discussed back in Chapter 3), there are some quite interesting bird fossils in the GRF. Covered in many recent papers, including Daniel Ksepka et al. on stem parrots in 2011 and Sterling Nesbitt & Julia Clarke on avian systematic relationships in 2016, we learn these birds were found on the lakeshore (their normal habitat) along with numerous footprints (some rare mammal tracks too, an intractable problem for the Big Slosh). There were flamingo-like birds with eggshells and coprolites, evidence of turtles and crocodiles. Mud cracks and even rain drops are preserved too! Perhaps most amazing, mounds up to 30 feet high and 120 feet in diameter outcropping in reef-like clusters stretch over forty miles in the Green River basin, and these turned out to be composed primarily of the bunched larval cases of tiny caddisflies, as described in papers by Leroy Leggitt with coauthors Robert Cushman and Mark Loewen. Caddisfly larval cases don’t normally pile up that way, and these calcified towers suggest a sustained lifestyle with a novel ecology: thousands of years of caddisfly birthing, mulched constantly by microbial mats, and piling up into stromatolite reefs without any apparent disturbance. These caddisfly larval case columns stretched at least to Lake Flagstaff in central Utah, as indicated by Peter Hurst et al. in 2018. Those microbial mats in turn relate to the fish taphonomy covered in the aforementioned paper by Hellawell & Orr, “Deciphering taphonomic processes in the Eocene Green River Formation of Wyoming.” Directly contradicting Whitmore’s conclusion of rapid burial (“these accounts do not fully explain certain aspects of the high fidelity preservation, or the different preservational styles, observed within Fossil Lake”), Hellawell & Orr proposed that there was another factor in play: the fish adhered to microbial mats postmortem, and those microbes provided microenvironments that protected the fish from destruction. All of this indicates business as usual at the Green River—a far cry from some catastrophic flood. Whitmore acknowledges none of this, let alone explain those data within the Big Slosh model. Not that Whitmore was willing to give up on the mantra, indulging in an escalating succession of strained hand waving. Regarding those coprolites, Glenn Morton had noted the problem creationist Garner faced on them, but Whitmore was still holding firm in

his Answers Book chapter, that they must have formed quickly, citing fellow creationist (and high school student!) Daniel Woolley’s 2001 article “Fish preservation, fish coprolites and the Green River Formation” for that. In this (his one creationist piece, as far as we’ve been able to determine), Woolley argues that the feces must have been buried within twenty-four hours to be preserved for fossilization. A 2003 posting by Glenn Morton (“Going to the Bathroom in the Global Flood”) took Woolley to task for overlooking the implications of what he absolutely knew about (since he quoted it in his text): the 1977 Buchheim & Surdam paper that had found a lot of catfish feces, 100 to 350 per square meter. Woolley simply floated past wondering how the Flood could have seemingly magically organized that density of catfish poop (or the flamingo-like bird coprolites). The Flood that supposedly destroyed all human settlements and carved out vast canyons was evidently extremely tidy when it needed to be. As for the mechanism of how coprolites could have been preserved without a Big Slosh, Morton drew attention to a 2001 paper by Thomas Hollocher et al. (ironically the same year young Woolley was paddling past Buchheim & Surdam) that investigated how dinosaur coprolites were formed. The relevant culprit appears to be our old pals the bacteria, catalyzing rapid deposition of calcium carbonate and calcium phosphate. Subsequent work has extended this understanding, such as a 2014 paper by María Pesquero et al. on calcium phosphate preservation of hyena coprolites. While the bacterial factor never made it onto Woolley’s scope, going by the caddisfly reefs, we can suggest there was no shortage of microorganisms metabolizing away to this purpose in the Green River Formation. And while we’re on this matter of what calcium can do, Whitmore used his 2003 dissertation as the springboard for his chapter’s final high dive attempt: “In order for the Green River fish to be preserved as well as they are, it would have been necessary for a thin layer of calcite mud to cover the fish immediately after death.” Fair enough, but then Whitmore blew right past the formation itself to deposit this gem:  

Many examples of rock forming rapidly have been reported in the creationist literature: a clock (figure 3), a sparkplug, and keys have all been found in

cemented sedimentary rock. Also a hat and a bag of flour have been found petrified. Examples of bolts, anchors, and bricks found in beach rock have also been reported. All of these examples show that sediment and other materials can be hardened within a relatively short time span.  

Having two degrees in geology, Whitmore ought to know better than this. None of these objects were buried in sedimentary rock; they were covered in mineral concretions. Water and other materials can transport the necessary minerals, such as carbonate, to an object, and as they dry out, they can harden around it (the aforementioned tufa being an example of this process, carbonite minerals precipitating out of ambient temperature water). This is well-understood within geology, and these concretions would not fool any regular geologist. See Robert Berner’s 1968 “Rate of concretion growth” or Mark Wilkinson & Michael Dampier’s “The rate of growth of sandstone-hosted calcite concretions” from 1990, or Hidekazu Yoshida et al.’s still more recent “Generalized conditions of spherical carbonate concretion formation around decaying organic matter in early diagenesis” from 2018. Such concretions can occur at any time during geological history, and even can get embedded in the sedimentary record, but they don’t invalidate how the strata are formed generally, or how long it takes to turn those into rock. Whitmore is obviously pandering to an audience who is unaware of such occurrences, or too lazy to do some science searching (of the sort you can read in the Info Box  on the next page). Whitmore doubled down on his interpretation of the rapidly fossilized objects with this (our bold):  

All of these examples show that sediment and other materials can be hardened within a relatively short time span. In many of these examples, rock probably formed as microbes (microscopic bacteria and other small organisms) precipitated calcite cement, which in turn bound sediments together and/or filled pore spaces. Examples of rapid lithification of this type include limestones that have been cemented together on the ocean floor.  

Uh-oh, microbes again. His citation for this is Jeroen Kenter et al.’s 2005 paper “Steep microbial boundstone-dominated platform margins—examples and implications.” This article indeed discusses

microbes precipitating carbonate … but on coastal shelves (and taking place, according to the paper, over hundreds of millions of years). What at all does this have to do with the aforementioned objects being covered in concretions? Which brings us finally to the other phrase we highlighted in Whitmore’s paragraph earlier, that “lithification is not time dependent” aspect. But it is time dependent, in that merely forming layers quickly does not necessarily a rock slab make. For that you need a mix of pressure and heat and time. Kent Hovind makes the same mistake in his bumptious lectures and debates, when he declares how you can make simple sedimentary layers with sand shaken in a   ___________________________________________________________________

The London hammer and Coso artifact Conspiracy theorist Beyond Science (whom we met back in Chapter 2) played bottom-feeder when he tossed out two venerable (and long debunked) creationist examples of mineral concretions in his 2017 video “6 ‘Impossible’ Fossils That Could COMPLETELY Rewrite Human History”: the London hammer and Coso artifact. BS claimed that these “artifacts” were evidence of humans living many millions of years ago, but the only thing he proved was that he did not do any research in geology, or much of anything else. The Coso artifact was a 1920’s Ford Champion spark plug covered in a mineral concretion, discussed in 2004 by Pierre Stromberg & Paul Heinrich. The London hammer carries a bit more checkered baggage. Discovered in London, Texas, it was just a recent hammer covered in a limestone concretion, an uncontroversial circumstance recounted by John Cole in 1985 and Glen Kuban in 2006. But it has been heavily promoted by one of the master hucksters of creationist pseudoscience, Carl Baugh, who also claimed an iron pot had been found in coal (likewise investigated by Kuban). John Morris made comparable claims for an iron mask in 2020. The tale filtered through the mystery-mongering fringe, including a brief 2006 mention by Dennis Ballard in one of Frank Joseph’s books. Joseph shoots off the scale for creepy weird, an ex-Nazi

and convicted child molester, prone today to going on about the mythic lost real estate of Atlantis and Lemuria, scratching his head over megalithic circles while pining for the lost master race who he supposes diffused civilization to ancient peoples. In a 2014 posting, Jason Colavito tracked Joseph’s unsavory connections to white nationalism and Holocaust denial. jar. No one asks how many of those jars now have a chunk of rock in them. Whitmore’s first subchapter is titled “Rapid Lithification of Sedimentary Rock.” However, he only made note of two things: annual sedimentary layers (which were already known and do not support his case anyway) and non-sedimentary concretions. Whitmore did not bother to explain how such layers as the Vishnu Schist or the Coconino Sandstone (both of which are in the Grand Canyon, and will be discussed further Volume 2) or the Qomolangma Limestone (the marine fossil-bearing sedimentary rock atop the mountain, otherwise known as Mount Everest, described in a 2005 paper by Harutaka Sakai et al.) fit into his “rapid lithification” creationist framework. Indeed, he does not explain how rapid lithification works at all. That’s true also for a variety of Acts & Facts articles attempting to address this matter. In February 2011 Frank Sherwin & Brian Thomas laid out the YEC mantra:  

When The Genesis Flood was written, mainstream geologists believed that certain mudstones could only form by slow accumulation of sediments in the bottom of calm, shallow water bodies. But in 1980, layered mudstones resulted from the Mount St. Helens volcanic eruption. Then in 2009, a paper in Science caught up with Whitcomb and Morris, saying, “Mudstones can be deposited under more energetic conditions than widely assumed, requiring a reappraisal of many geologic records.”  

That “2009” paper was in fact a 2007 commentary by Joe Macquaker & Kevin Bohacs regarding a study Sherwin & Thomas didn’t even cite, Juergen Schieber et al. on “Accretion of Mudstone Beds from Migrating Floccule Ripples.” That was experimental work on the speed with which mud can move and settle out in water—not support for that mud being able to turn into rock as fast as creationism requires. When Tim Clarey wrote on “Rapid Limestone Deposits Match

Flood Account” in June 2018 he had at least “caught up” with the Schieber work directly, citing that 2007 paper along with a 2013 one (but still only two of their many studies, which we’ve included in our references). Jeff Miller sidled a tad closer to the rapid lithification issue in 2019, listing it as his item #9. The only problem being that his two technical sources (Alan Channing & Dianne Edwards 2003, and Hisatada Akahane et al. 2004) were about something else: silicification of plant matter in hot springs like Yellowstone, whereby silicates replace organic matter (as well as destroying what’s around it) resulting in petrification. George Mustoe described the processes involved in 2017, while Jo Hellawell et al.’s 2015 paper on “Incipient silicification of recent conifer wood at a Yellowstone hot spring” illustrates how work in the field has continued quite independently of the lithification-hunting creationists. The Akahane paper elicited a scholarly back pat from Snelling in 2005, by the way, pleased they had briefly alluded to his 1995 Creation magazine article on petrified wood. None of which changed the awkward facts, that lithification in the bonk-you-over-the-head hard rock sense (as even Whitmore admitted) involved more than that: compaction and cementation, neither of which were the topic of the papers Miller or Snelling cited. So when Brian Thomas asked in October 2018 “Could One Flood Form Many Rock Layers?” we reflect on their own documentation and misrepresentation and heave a sigh, no. And speaking of misrepresentation....  

Bring on the Tropes 1: Mt. St. Helens  

Sherwin & Thomas conveniently brought up the next topic Whitmore jumped to in his Answers chapter, one of the favorite tropes among creationists: Mount St. Helens. Besides Steve Austin’s writings, it gets fairly regular coverage in creationist articles and videos, including AiG in 2008, and 2013 and 2019 reminders by Brian Thomas at ICR. Andrew Snelling & Tom Vail devoted a section to it in their Answers Book 3 chapter, so what we have to say about the eruption will apply to them too.

The 1980 eruption definitely carved out part of the surrounding landscape—as a natural disaster pushing many tons of debris is wont to do—nicely detailed in Richard Waitt et al.’s 1983 paper. Coauthor JD knows firsthand about the volcano, having shoveled many inches of its ash off his driveway and sidewalk at the time, and trod through its ash-laden landscape when it when a section of the blast zone was opened to the public a few months after the eruption. Creationists have since tried to claim it as a posterchild for how the Flood could have carved out, of all things, the Grand Canyon … because a volcano moving mud and ash is somehow comparable to water cutting through solid rock, and igneous pyroclastic flows somehow comparable to the compaction of rocks to form sedimentary layers. That would seem a tall order to pull off, but Whitmore gives it a try with this:  

During the violent eruptions of the volcano, pyroclastic material (hot volcanic ash and rock) was thrown from the volcano with hurricane force velocity. One of the most fascinating discoveries following the eruption was that some of these pyroclastic deposits, those that contained fine volcanic ash particles, were thinly laminated. When geologists see thin layers like this, they usually assume that slow, delicate processes formed the layers (like mud settling to a lake bottom). However, in this case, the layers were formed during a catastrophic volcanic eruption.  

Obviously, how layers accumulate on a lake bottom is quite different from how airborne volcanic layers are formed. Steven Baumann finds this glib conflation of terrestrial and marine sediments “perhaps one of the most annoying thing about YECs.” Baumann rightly complained that “Using a volcanic terrestrial deposit as an analog of a continental shelf marine deposit is like claiming beach sand dunes form in the same way as pillow lavas in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.” So how did Whitmore think to connect the two? By appealing to someone else who didn’t do it for him: Steve Austin’s 1986 “Mount St. Helens and Catastrophism,” which claims that geologists were surprised by the laminations Mount St. Helens produced: “Conventionally, sedimentary laminae and beds are

assumed to represent longer seasonal variations, or annual changes, as the layers accumulated very slowly. Mount St. Helens teaches us that stratification does form rapidly by flow processes.” Austin neglected to cite any geologists actually expressing this surprise, however, and you can guess why. The reality is that geologists have long known about volcanic laminations. Exactly the year before the eruption, in fact, Richard Fisher’s 1979 paper “Models for pyroclastic surges and pyroclastic flows” documents volcanic laminae and reported plainly how “Pyroclastic surges are turbulent, low-concentration density currents that deposit relatively thin, finegrained, cross-bedded and wavy and planar laminated sequences.” Nor had any of his cited sources (William Fritz, Peter Lipman & Donal Mullineaux, Charles Rosenfeld & Gary Beach, Peter Rowley et al., and Richard Waitt et al.) evidenced any jaw-dropping on laminae, underscoring how Austin never got around to explaining how those volcanic layers were in any way comparable to ones made on lake bottoms. See the Info Box  on the next page for more on Austin’s St. Helens claims. After failing to establish the organizing side of the flood, Whitmore turns to the destructive side, the rapid erosion that would certainly have occurred during and after the Flood. Though when it comes to the role of erosion in geology, creationists can get mighty obtuse. Richard Milton (who is functionally a young earther without being religious) couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that erosion and sedimentation can fluctuate as environments change, making simple calculations of linear rates over time misleading. Geologists aren’t shy about sharing how they handle these issues, such as Peter Sadler in 1981, Sadler & David Strauss in 1990, Christopher Sommerfield in 2006, and we’ll toss in for good measure Eric Portenga & Paul Bierman’s extensive 2011 review of erosion rates globally since creationist Tim Clarey was certainly aware of it (citing it in a June 2019 Acts & Facts article). But the award for trying to have their cake without even baking it goes to a 2017 article by John Reed & Michael Oard, who tried to show that the existing strata were too few based on both sedimentation and erosion rates—that more should have accumulated were the Earth old, but likewise that those same deposits should have eroded away over even shorter times. Both Milton and Reed & Oard

were committing the rudimentary mistake of inappropriate extrapolation. Knowing the annual snow accumulation on your driveway is three feet, doesn’t justify calculating that over half a century you ought to have 150 feet of the white stuff, and hence failing to see that pile, concluding either that snowfall doesn’t happen or that you haven’t been shoveling for half a century. This sort of straw grasping comes into play regarding the Hawaiian Islands, which have a most interesting geological history that creationists have to tread warily around. The reason why there’s an island chain at all is because there’s a ___________________________________________________________________

Steve Austin’s Three Card Monte William Fritz’s 1980 work is of interest for how Austin tried to use it to slide his way around the forest buried by the St. Helens eruption. Fritz suggested some trees buried in pyroclastic eruptions in Yellowstone and St. Helens had been transported in the blast rather than having been buried in situ. But Fritz had garnered considerable criticism at the time from Gregory Retallack and Richard Yuretich, and it was clear by Fritz’s replies that he wasn’t claiming all such trees had been brought there by catastrophic uprooting. Austin, who so wanted them to have arrived there only during the Big Slosh, sidestepped that little detail by not mentioning any of it. A further side issue concerns Austin’s 1996 dating of the tenyear-old lava dome to 350,000 years with potassium-argon dating. The creationist was trying to show the errors of radiometric dating, but all he’d done was show how he couldn’t (or didn’t want to) spot minerals whose features indicated they were not formed in the eruption itself, but contained inclusions, and so ruled out the dating method he was trying to use. Though Kevin Henke had noted Austin’s mistakes in 2000, creationist Keith Swenson was still repeating it in 2001 (“RadioDating in Rubble”), as was Brian Thomas in 2019 (drawing on a 2003 book Austin coauthored with John Morris). Brian Dunning’s 2009 “How Old Is the Mount St. Helens Lava Dome?” summed things up: “What Austin did was to exploit a known caveat in radiometric dating; dramatically illustrate it with a

high-profile test using the public's favorite volcano, Mount St. Helens; and sensationalize the results in a paper that introduces nothing new to geologists, but that impresses laypeople with its detailed scientific language.”   magma plume hotspot there, and where the chain of islands runs has hinged on how the plate has moved over it, tracked in technical work by scientists like John Tarduno, Marcel Regelous, Cecily Wolfe and colleagues. Eventually it became clear that not only was plate movement generating a string of increasingly eroded islands trailing back 85 million years to their earliest stages at the edge of the KurilKamchatka trench far to the north of the present Hawaiian Islands, the plume itself could wander a bit in the course of mantle convection, as explained in Richard Bono et al.’s 2019 paper on the noticeable bend in the Hawaiian-Emperor island chain. There are other such plume-sparked island chains to account for, as Joel Duff noted in a 2019 post, citing Paul Wessel & Loren Kroenke’s 1998 work on those along the Juan de Fuca ridge off Alaska (Dana Desonie & Robert Duncan 1990 and Randall Keller et al. 1997 represent prior work on that region). But it’s the Hawaiian part that interests us here. Duff’s big point was that he knew of nobody in the YEC gig attempting to slip the Hawaiian Islands into the Creation Week by invoking “creation with apparent age.” That’s the old “Omphalos” argument that God just made stuff to appear old, including Adam having a navel without ever having gone through the umbilical cord stage. Robert Price noted in 1980 its resurgence in Henry Morris-style YEC apologetics, and although it gets a retread every now and then (such as John Morris expounding on “Creation with the Appearance of Age” in 2010), it has fallen out of fashion as an easily invoked “Get Out of Evidence Free” card, if only because it rightly appears so hopelessly ad hoc. No, modern creationists want to embrace all that data and offer a completely convincing explanation for it as a scientifically identifiable process, not an instantaneous divine ex nihilo spasm. Well, maybe not all the data. So it is that in 2014 Andrew Snelling didn’t dispute any of the geological sequence of the Hawaiian Islands, where the newer islands

are so much bigger than the older eroded ones because they’re still forming. Snelling just hoped to vaporize the chronology with one shot, dismissing the radioactive dating with the same argon contamination ploy we examined back in Chapter 2. But Snelling pressed further to rule out certain scenarios for when it all happened: “If the volcanoes that formed Hawaii’s eight major islands had been formed before or during Noah’s Flood, the Flood would have deposited sediments on their flanks. But they have none. So we know the volcanoes must have erupted following the Flood.” That’s a spectacle. All of those volcanic features spitted out in less than 4,500 years? For that he has to hypothesize some spectacular tectonic events for which he offers no evidence or testable mechanisms: “Furthermore, as the Flood was waning, the plate motions decelerated from tens of feet (meters) per second to their current snail’s pace of only an inch or two (mere centimeters) per year. Any movement of the hot spot also would have ceased, while catastrophic outpourings of lavas from the hot spot rapidly decreased.” A measure of how attractive this argument has been for grassroots creationists can be seen by Kirk Cameron, who blithely linked to Snelling’s piece on his website in 2015, as part of “Advancing Our Faith.” Which we’re sure the actor diligently fact-checked at the source level. (Throat clearing....) Now to be fair, that accelerated rate in Snelling creationist funhouse is around fifteen miles an hour, slow enough by megaslide standards, but still radically fast if the idea is to accommodate not movement of already existing rocks, but fresh basalt being squirted up en route. And it’s at this point that we tumble onto quite a massive array of data that Snelling somehow managed to miss in that post that so delighted Kirk Cameron. When lava cools below a certain point, its crystals lock in on the magnetic field prevailing at the time. So a lava field represents oodles of little compasses, frozen in the moment. By 1965 Alexander Malahoff & William Strange had spotted odd paleomagnetic anomalies in those Hawaiian volcanic rocks, some of which suggested not merely that either the land or the hotspot had moved, but that the magnetic pole may have shifted as well as the field undergoing reversal. ___________________________________________________________________

The Manganese Mystery Kenneth Patrick offered up the “manganese mystery” in 2010, duly repeated by Jake Hebert in 2015 (and again that year in another piece with Tim Clarey), insisting seafloor litter of manganese nodules (of interest for potential mining) yet again pointed exclusively to the Genesis Flood. The facts are less cataclysmic, and under Patrick’s nose in the sources he cited, such as Takashi Ito et al. 1998, B. L. Shcherbov & V. D. Strakhovenko 2006, Jinnappa Pattan & Gopal Parthiban 2007, and Pratima Jauhari & Sridhar Iyer 2008. Hebert stepped around still more data in 2015 when citing Urs Ruth et al.’s 2003 paper on how dust particle influx varied (to imply dating the layers was compromised). That the scientists found other implications of those variations could be seen by their 2007 follow-up paper (one Hebert didn’t cite) recognizing how those variations represented temperature proxies, which they used to track climate back 150,000 years. So what was going on with manganese nodules? Bacteria metabolize some manganese in the oceans, but what’s left over can oxidize into nodules. This is one of the slowest known geological processes, though (on the order of a centimeter over several million years, going by a 2000 study by Takayuki Kobayashi et al.). Accumulations can occur only if the setting is a quiet one, free from sediment pouring in fast enough to bury them and stop the nodule growth process (such as abyssal plains, seamounts or some shallow banks)—exactly the opposite of the turbulent dinosaur-drowning Big Slosh. See Marco Blöthe et al.’s 2015 paper for a recent review of the role microbial communities play in manganese nodule formation.   Work continued on that fascinating geological puzzle, such that by 2003 we were getting papers like Robert Duncan et al.’s “A Paleomagnetic Test for Motion of the Hawaiian Hotspot” and John Tarduno et al.’s “The Emperor Seamounts: Southward Motion of the Hawaiian Hotspot Plume in Earth’s Mantle.” And seamounts figure in

the “manganese mystery” some creationists have touted (see the  Info Box). A lot of scientific discovery has come from paying attention to those umpteen little magnetic compasses frozen into the rocks of Hawaii, but what got Joel Duff’s interest (and ours) was the paleomagnetics of the islands very nearest the actively-forming one, and the implications that has for Snelling’s compressed post-Flood formation model (our bold):  

Paleomagnetic data show that the lava from islands to the northwest of the volcanically active island have remnant magnetization and magnetic inclinations that point farther from the magnetic north pole the further away one is from the active island. By examining the degree of inclination it is predicted that the lava from these islands was likely formed when the islands were very close to the present latitude of the active island. This is despite the fact that today some of these islands are more than 3500 meters from that point. Had these islands been formed at the same moment or even some short period of time, why would the paleomagnetic signals in these layers of lava not be pointing in either random directions or in the direction of the magnetic pole as lava formed today do? That any of these islands would happen to have lava with paleomagnetic inclinations indicative of an origination at the point of the currently active island appears would NOT be predicted by any flood geology model. To explain this data within an apparent age context would require the Creator to make mountains of lava that appear to have been created in a different location in addition to creating them to appear to have been made over a long period of time.  

Amazingly, Andrew Snelling is not even King of the Hill when it comes to tendentious evasion of relevant data regarding the formation and evolution of the Hawaiian Islands. In 2017 Tim Clarey highlighted Charles Fletcher et al.’s 2012 report on beach erosion rates there (“0.4 feet/year) and the size of the Big Island (92 miles by 76, vastly larger than that of any other in the chain) to perform this leap: “Doing the math, we get 76 miles of erosion in only one million years, which would completely eliminate the islands.” But average beach erosion is not the same as the rate at which the basalt bedrock wears down in the absence of new lava, and even the Fletcher study indicated some places were adding beach sand

faster than that average rate could erode it, rendering Clarey’s stab at “Doing the math” a most tendentious miscalculation. That rock erosion takes place far slower than sandy beaches is suggested by Ralph Moberly’s 1963 estimate of “about 1 m in 7,700 years” of erosion for Hawaiian drainage basins. Assuming no other factors are involved, at that rate it would take a billion years to erode 76 miles of rock, but obviously much less time to dispose of significantly smaller islands. Changing sea levels would have to be taken into account, along with the variability of chemical weathering (reviewed by Herdis Schopka & Louis Derry in 2012) and the fact that volcanic activity doesn’t flip off like an obliging light switch, as David Clague & David Sherrod studied in their 2014 paper on “Growth and Degradation of Hawaiian Volcanoes.” Our brief vacation detour to the swaying palms on the beaches of Hawaii brings home the twin problems for all creationist explanations for geology: timing and scale. It won’t do just to have enough water for a Big Slosh, or to hypothesize super-slippery tectonic plates on the whim of the dogma, it has to generate features that actually match what we see, and have those sediments stick around afterwards as solidified rock that only make sense within the rigorously defined Flood model. Whitmore thought he had the perfect solution when he directed his Answers book readers to the “Little Grand Canyon” of the Toutle River (not to be confused with Providence Canyon near Lumpkin, Georgia, which Steven Baumann reminded us is also known locally as the “Little Grand Canyon”—a human-caused phenomenon, as poor farming practices in the 19th century generated eventually scenic drainage gullies in the adjacent clay). The Washington version drains westward from Mount St. Helens and was slopped over by massive mudflows during the main May 1980 eruption, and yet again by sediment flows that dug further trenches in a smaller but still noticeable March 1982 event. Tracked at the time by Sylvia Harrison & William Fritz, and in the decades since by many scientists, reviewed in 2005 and 2018 by Jon Major, the sediment of the “Little Grand Canyon” was loosely consolidated volcanic and avalanche debris—yet another far cry from the solid limestone of the Grand Canyon. Interestingly, there is no such thing as the “Little Grand Canyon” according to maps of the volcano;

this name was invented by Steve Austin. Along with “polystrate” trees (which we’ll get to in a bit), specialized creationist jargon is a handy way to direct people away from the science work and on to Young Earth web postings should they be innocently Googled. Whitmore even brought up the “Engineer’s Canyon”, where the story is the same. In 2019, one of Bill Ludlow’s videos noted nongeologist Georgia Purdom’s evasions on this, as she repeated the YEC claims on Mt. St. Helens in an August 2019 lecture. Engineer’s Canyon was nothing more than a modest drainage trench, which Ludlow established by showing the feature with a human in the scene for scale, which Purdom had not done with the picture she’d shown. Conceding only that it “was a lot smaller” than the Grand Canyon, Purdom skipped how the volcanic example was carved in soft soil, meaning it was in no sense comparable to the Colorado River working its way down through actual resistant rock. Purdom pressed further out on her limb by boldly highlighting the “little river” in Engineer’s Canyon, which if you look at the picture Ludlow showed, was at best a tiny drainage rivulet.[62] Is Whitmore ever going to provide an example of water or mud naturally cutting through solid rock? No. Instead, Whitmore thinks noting the depth of the “Little Grand Canyon” will help: 140 feet in some places, none of it through rock, and in essentially a straight path. That is supposed to help his argument that comparable processes account for the Grand Canyon: average depth of 2,200 feet, all of it through rock, and along a definitely winding course through a deeply incised canyon. It’s more than just that the Grand Canyon is almost eighteen times the height of the “Little” one, the differences in size and steepness are due to the fact that canyons shaped the way the Grand Canyon is (an incised canyon) simply don’t come about by a fast flow of water over a short period.  

How to Make an Incised Canyon  

It’s ultimately a matter of gravity, the availability of water, and what gets in the way. On the outflow end, there are many reasons for sea levels to fluctuate, explored in Angela Coe’s 2003 review, The Sedimentary Record of Sea Level Change, including glaciers locking

up water as ice, and tectonic forces pushing up land, displacing the water above it. The mechanics of how sediment load impact the process has been studied, too, as by Leonard Sklar & William Dietrich in 2004, relating to what happens if the grade from inlet to outlet changes. And what if that occurs as fast, or faster, than the rate at which the river can erode it? In that case, you get an incised canyon. This even happens on a small scale downstream of dams (which artificially raise the headwaters), as Douglas Shields et al. measured in a 2000 paper. In the Grand Canyon’s case, it was because of the uplift of the Colorado Plateau, pushed up during the Laramide Orogeny, a mountain building phase occasioned by those pesky tectonic plates colliding. As the uplift kept pace with the Colorado River’s capacity to carve down into it, the result was a really big incised canyon. Creationists don’t like that at all, most recently Eric Hovind’s Scarred Earth video, which attempted to bamboozle non-geologists visiting the canyon with the seeming puzzle of how could the Colorado River starting out at 3,000 feet have carved a canyon supposedly uphill through rock 7,000 feet high. Showing how the river enters the canyon at 2,800-foot elevation while leaving it at 1,800 slips in an assumption which Hovind may not even have realized he had made: namely that the plateau had always been at its present elevation, something Steven Baumann brought up in a 2019 video by Paulogia on Eric’s foray into pseudo-geology. Works tracking the measurable mantle-driven uplift process over the last billion years (starting long before the present canyon), on down to the period when the current Colorado River got in the act, include ones Baumann laid on the table: Michael Timmons et al. 2001, Christopher Sine et al. 2008, Robert Moucha et al. 2009, Lijun Liu & Michael Gurnis 2010, Karl Karlstrom with David Coblentz et al. 2012, and for good measure, we’ll add a pair of papers from 2014: Ryan Crow et al.’s “Steady incision of Grand Canyon at the million year timeframe: A case for mantle-driven differential uplift” and Karl Karlstrom et al.’s “Formation of the Grand Canyon 5 to 6 million years ago through integration of older paleocanyons.” Hovind also repeated the creationist canard that there was a delta missing were the river system as old as conventional geology would have it. The claim tracks back at least as far as Walt Brown’s In the

Beginning, and Snelling & Tom Vail’s Answers Book 3 chapter put it this way, “If the canyon was eroded by the Colorado River, an enormous delta should be found at the mouth of the river where it empties into the Gulf of California. But the delta contains only a small fraction of this eroded material,” citing only a considerably older 1989 paper by Peter Lonsdale. Wrong move again, for reasons geologist Snelling ought to have known in 2013, even if fuddle-headed Eric didn’t. The Lonsdale paper explicitly touched on a big clue: “At the northern ‘head of the gulf,’ the delta of the Colorado River has extended across the structural depression and isolated the Salton Trough, part of the gulf province now exposed as dry land (except for the artificial Salton Sea), though much of it is below sea level.” And what is so interesting about the Salton Trough and its geological context? It’s an active tectonic rift zone. As Paulogia’s video noted, the outlet of the Colorado straddles the very famous San Andreas Fault, which over the last few million years has steadily relocated sections of the ancient delta northwest into modern California, documented in a variety of papers from Charles Winker & Susan Kidwell in 1986 (before even Lonsdale’s book chapter, one may note) to Rebecca Dorsey et al.’s work in 2007 and 2011. But back to incised canyons. They can also occur when the outlet drops, as it did some six million years ago when the northward plow of the African plate sealed off the Mediterranean Sea at Gibraltar. The climate turning over from the Miocene into the Pliocene was just arid enough that there wasn’t enough river influx to sustain the old sea level (incidentally topped off by three geomagnetic reversals and general sea level fluctuations from glaciation, covered by Wout Krijgsman et al. in 1999 and 2004 papers, and further by Stella Lucifora et al. in 2012). The resulting drop in sea level triggered the Messinian Salinity Crisis (MSC) lasting some half a million years that littered the Mediterranean with extraordinary salt deposits first discovered in 1970 when the Glomar Challenger surveyed the region. It’s a rousing tale of marine investigation recounted by Kenneth Hsü in 1983, William Ryan & Walter Pitman in their 1998 book on Noah’s Flood, as well as some 2019 postings by Joel Duff.

It’s important to recall that 1970 date: this was before the full impact of plate tectonics was recognized. Geologists initially approached the Mediterranean Sea as a unified space, not as a series of separate tectonic bits that could rise and fall and shift independently. So whether the whole basin dried up entirely or produced only a series of shifting saline lakes turned into a hot area of dispute in geology. But there was no serious argument over the reality of a Mediterranean drawdown. That was not the case for creationists, however. Given the ludicrous implausibility of Flood Geology, you’d think acceptance of the verifiable MSC would be a snap for them, but having a truly natural mini-cataclysm take place without the Noah designer label has proven a slosh too far. So it was that Vol II of Henry & John Morris’ 1996 Modern Creation Trilogy disparaged the MSC as only a “fantastic theory,” and in 2005 Michael Oard dismissed the evidence as “flimsy.” By 2017, though, Oard was more disposed to try and paste the Noah sticker on the MSC anyway, insisting that “The area and volume of these deposits imply a catastrophic mechanism typical of a global Flood. The thick layer of precipitates would place the Flood/post-Flood boundary in this area in the very late Cenozoic.”[63] Oard notably did not attach a date for this. Before or after 2,345 BCE, Michael? Ahem. By the date of 2017 the geological cat was well out of the bag for the MSC anyway, from David Hodell et al.’s 1994 drill core data from Morocco adding to the forensic pile, to an extensive colloquium at Sedimentary Geology in 2006 on “The Messinian Salinity Crisis revisited” by a bevy of geologists: Maria Bassetti et al., Claudia Bertoni & Joe Cartwright, Adele Bertini, Juan Braga et al., Namik Çağatay et al., Maria Cita, Domenico Cosentino et al., Rachel Flecker & Robert Ellam, Laurent Jolivet et al., Wout Krijgsman et al., Nicolas Loget & Jean Van Den Driessche, Feng Lu, Agnès Maillard et al., Ludovic Mocochain et al., Fabienne Orszag-Sperber, Tadeusz Peryt, Catherine Pierre et al., Elisabet Playà & Domingo Gimeno, and a pair of Jean Marie Rouchy et al. papers. (The Dear Reader may wade through all of that work at their leisure; their papers are in the references.) By 2011 Daniel Garcia-Castellanos & Amelia Villaseñor could matter-of-factly report on the “Messinian salinity crisis regulated by competing tectonics and erosion at the Gibraltar arc,” and in 2019

Mathieu Debure et al. added the factor of brine formation intruding from a “serpentinized mantle” exposed under the seafloor (we’ll return to that later). So there is no shortage of evidence here, which involves integrating a broad range of data, from tectonics and seawater composition to the temperatures and pressures required to account for where particular deposits are found. But Michael Oard was about doubt-casting, not data explanation, focusing on the evaporites alone and trawling a string of technical papers with the sole purpose of implying that if the salt deposits might be formed in briny lakes without “repetitive desiccation,” they must have been the result of the catastrophic processes they wanted to have occurred. Yet even Oard’s own sources recognized what was settled and what was open to contention. Early work like Kenneth Hsü et al. in 1973 characterized the competing models as to what extent water flow from the Atlantic was cut off (they suspected it had been), and their 1977 work noted that “Whereas there seemed to be general agreement that the Messinian (Late Miocene) evaporites were deposited in shallow water conditions, controversy revolved around the basin depths at times of evaporite deposition.” That was reflecting that rising realization that the Mediterranean basin was not a contiguous blob, after all. By 2003 there was a lot of specific geology to account for, such as the Spanish deposits Svend Duggen et al.’s paper addressed: “the location and composition of volcanism in the Alborán region, but also the uplift of the northern African and the southern Iberian margins, closing the Miocene gateways to the Atlantic Ocean.” Oard’s main witnesses were papers for the controversy part that favored multiple and varying shallow basins: Lawrence Hardie & Tim Lowenstein in 2004, two by Marco Roveri et al. in 2014, two 2015 ones by Elizabeth Christeleit et al. and Stefano Lugli et al., and another by Vinicio Manzi et al. in 2016. But none of their work invalidated the pacing of the process, which involved shifts in topography taking place over far longer than Oard’s creationism allowed for the entire age of the universe, and that on top of still older rocks. For example, Manzi’s paper refers to the Lefkara Formation in Cyprus, “a unit consisting of deep water pelagic marls and carbonate deposited over a prolonged

time interval”—that would be over around fifty million years from the Late Cretaceous to the Oligocene. Lurking beneath the razzle-dazzle prospect of an entire sea (or even substantial segments of it) draining away to a salt desert, the creationists hiked past the implications of what the rivers that drained into that sea were doing. In fact, what they couldn’t have avoided doing, under the governance of gravity, but which made no sense at all in the lickety-split catastrophism of YEC. You may have guessed: change in outlet level ... hmmm ... incised canyons. Oard was certainly aware from the sources he was citing that there was significant lowering of the Mediterranean, no matter what model was involved. For example, Christeleit’s “Evidence for deepwater deposition of abyssal Mediterranean evaporites during the Messinian salinity crisis” worked out that (our bold), “After correction for isostatic rebound, our results indicate maximum drawdown of ~2000 m and ~2900 m relative to modern sea level in the western and eastern Mediterranean basis, respectively.” Even more tellingly, Oard was also aware of canyons (including submarine ones) in the region, but failed to connect any of the oh-sovisible dots for his readers. And that was even though the Roveri paper he cited on “The Messianian Salinity Crisis” had done exactly that, pointing to “the clinching argument supporting the deep-basin shallow-water hypothesis”—namely, the incised canyons onshore and submarine ones out on the Mediterranean shelf. Again (our bold): “It was these Messinian erosional surfaces, rather than the evaporitic deposits themselves, that turned out to be the ‘Rosetta Stone’ of the Messinian Salinity Crisis.” While the environment vied with the ubiquitous force of gravity, the landscape underwent slow change, resulting in a multilayered puzzle that took some years to work out. Some places revealed their prior incision history fairly easily, such as the Rhône paleovalley and its offshore segments, described by Julien Gargani in 2004 and Aurélie Tassy et al. in 2014. Similarly, papers by Wout Krijgsman et al. in 2010 and Alba de la Vara et al. in 2016 traced the impact the Mediterranean drawdown had on the Black and Caspian seas beyond (the eastern remains of the more ancient “Paratethys Sea” of 25 million years

earlier), resulting in (surprise!) an incised canyon along the Volga River. Even neater, while a 2006 paper by Julien Babault et al. found that the Ebro River in Spain seemed to lack an incised past, it turned out that’s because back then the drainage part was going on out in what is now the continental shelf, as revealed by Romain Pellen et al. in 2019. Still more dramatic is the case of the Po River, which today empties east into the Adriatic over a broad plain with wetlands prone to flooding. Work by A. Rizzini & L. Dondi in 1979 suggested the valley was only marginally connected to the Mediterranean during the MSC, but when more of the tectonic history was taken into account, by Chiara Amadori et al. in 2018, it turned out the present elevation of the basin was not the case millions of years ago. In fact, what would eventually become the Po valley was so much lower during the Messinian that even when the sea level had dropped half a mile, it was still under 600 feet of water. One river that was particularly well-connected to the desiccating basin was the Nile, whose delta worked ever farther out into the Aegean Sea as the Mediterranean shrank, documented by Emmanuelle Ducassou et al. in 2008. More to our topic of the shape of canyons, as Soviet engineers found in the 1960s when they sounded for bedrock during the construction of the Aswan High Dam, four hundred miles upstream, the ancient river had cut a classic incised channel 800 feet deep, and Joel Duff’s discussion noted that down past Cairo the canyon was over a mile deep (suggesting how different levels prevailed in the eastern Mediterranean compared to northwest in what eventually became the Po). Eventually the Atlantic Ocean cut back through the Gibraltar blockage, briefly producing one of the most mind-boggling (and presumably deafening) waterfalls of all times, nine miles wide and several thousand feet high. As modeled by Daniel Garcia-Castellanos et al. in 2009,  

Although the flood started at low water discharges that may have lasted for up to several thousand years, our results suggest that 90 per cent of the water was transferred in a short period ranging from a few months to two years. This extremely abrupt flood may have involved peal rates of sea level rise in the Mediterranean of more than ten metres per day.

 

Alas for Tertiary travel agents, this took place long before the genus Homo invented designer luggage and video recorders. Over on the Nile, for a time the Mediterranean waters filled in their own “Little Grand Canyon” to form an estuary stretching south 1,200 miles to Sudan, as I. S. Chumakov reported in 1970. But by the time humans arrived on the scene, the Nile’s relentless sediment had long since silted the riverbed up to the present level. Nor is the Mediterranean unique in this regard. A 2003 paper by Joshua Rosenfeld & James Pindell drew attention to how mountain formation in Cuba back in the Paleocene and early Eocene narrowed the channel between the tip of Florida and Yucatan, meaning that the Gulf of Mexico could undergo drawdowns, depending on sea level or how continental river drainage changed up in North America, also busy with orogeny (2014 and 2017 papers by Michael Blum, Mark Pecha and colleagues used more of those revealing detrital zircons to identify how relatively few rivers drained down into the gulf until the Paleocene). Stephen Cossey et al. reported evidence in 2016 that the sea level there dropped 650 feet for some 850,000 years during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) around 56 million years ago. Finding vast salt basins in the gulf (some over a thousand feet thick) earned them the “Whopper Sand” designation. For regular geologists that would suggest a story of shifting plates and climate, but all Tim Clarey could see in 2015 was more Flood deposit, prompting him to disparage Rosenfeld & Pindell’s Gulf of Mexico drawdown model as “bordering on the bizarre”—a cheeky turn of phrase for a Young Earther, given how many bizarre things they’ve proposed. Like the Messinian Salinity Crisis, the whole gulf may not have been insolated, and Clarey drew on work like the 2011 paper by M. Sweet & Blum that suggested a more limited draw down. But as Clarey cited Blum & Pecha’s 2014 work on drainage patterns, it can’t be claimed none of the relevant data were under his YEC microscope. Not that Clarey’s fellow AiG creationists were slowing much to look, either—Jake Hebert and James Johnson confidently took his word on it all, citing his Whopper Sand assertions in 2017 and 2018 Acts & Facts articles, while adding no further evidence of their own.

Working out the details of the “Whopper Sand” turned on advances in seismic sensing that allowed geologists to see more of the layers (the place is under water, after all). Michael Hudec et al.’s 2013 review “Jurassic evolution of the Gulf of Mexico salt basin” narrowed things down to several phases, starting long before any salt formed, as Pangaea broke up in the Triassic. Though the area underwent rifting, it was only in the Jurassic that salt basins formed over at most a few million years as sections went desert arid. That ended as plate movements continued to stretch the basin in the Jurassic and into the Cretaceous, overlaying them with the sediment that would result in the Paleogene crude that attracted the interests of oil companies. Just how equivocal Clarey’s own position is on the Whopper Sand was illustrated in a 2018 ICR post on another deposit, the Norphlet Sandstone that underlies parts of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, and extends out into the Gulf of Mexico. Clarey declared (our bold):  

How did a thick “desert” sandstone just happen to become spread across nearly the entire deepwater Gulf and on top of thousands of feet of pure salt? And how did this thick sandstone bed get nearly 200 miles offshore? Uniformitarian scientists have provided no answers, yet they continue to find more sand and oil in the Norphlet. Salt beds are only deposited in an underwater marine setting. So how did the ocean mysteriously and suddenly disappear, exposing a massive pure salt layer, and then become a terrestrial desert landscape all in the blink of an eye?  

But the “uniformitarian scientists” had offered answers; Clarey just failed to acknowledge them. His own cited source of a 2017 presentation by Michael Saunders et al. correlated the sands with the mainland rocks based on the conventional geological system Clarey’s creationism denies, including “Jurassic tectonic reconstructions based on gravity and magnetic data” that related to why parts of the gulf 200 miles out that are soggy now weren’t necessarily so 160 million years ago. Petroleum geologists have a financial interest on getting things right (more on that later) so have been investigating the place for some time (which work Clarey either was unaware of, or preferred not to

discuss). For example, the Alabama desert dune part. Because that geology could be inspected on land, it was understandably easier to work out the details, which went far beyond the “just happen” cliché Carey implied. In 1990 Ernest Mancini et al.’s “Desert Environments and Petroleum Geology of the Norphlet Formation” related that directly to the continental rifting “associated with the opening of the Gulf of Mexico basin.” By 1999, Ralph Kugler & Robert Mink were able to lay out a quite specific depositional history of the place, which they summarized thus:  

Norphlet sediment was deposited in an arid environment in alluvial fans, alluvial plains, and wadis in updip areas. In downdip areas, the Norphlet was deposited in a broad desert plain, with erg development in some areas. Marine transgression, near the end of Norphlet deposition, resulted in reworking of the upper part of the Norphlet Formation.  

Is there anything of comparable detail churning around Acts & Facts or Answers Research Journal? Not so far. In fact Clarey tripped over his own rhetoric here, as we may rightly ask, how could the Flood waters “mysteriously and suddenly disappear” and bring about the land “in the blink of an eye” that the Big Slosh model so patently mandates for only a few years only 4,500 years ago? Before leaving the Whopper Sand, mention should be made of yet another article Clarey wrote alluding to it, “Deep-Sea Dinosaur Fossil Buries Evolution” penned in 2019 one with James Johnson. This mainly concerned some supposedly anomalous fossil finds. The first was a slice of Plateosaurus bone that had been found in deep sea drilling off Norway, described by Jørn Hurum et al. in a 2006 paper they cited. “Although these discoveries baffle uniformitarian scientists, they are not an issue for Flood geologists”—and apparently lying is not an issue for them, either, as the creationists boldly contended “The tsunami-like wave that explosively scour-blasted the Plateosaurus out into the ocean was catastrophically powerful!” A tsunami so powerful it wiped all traces of it from the Harum paper they drew on, who also showed no sign of bafflement as they described how the Plateosaurus (an early prosauropod with global distribution across Pangaea) lived in a Late Triassic floodplain where

Greenland and Scandinavia were bucked up to one another. No ocean. Though there was a basin “linked to a marine borealic seaway” that eventually flooded, absolutely nothing in the paper warranted that tsunami designation. But Clarey & Johnson were keen on that anyway, citing another of Harum’s 2006 papers, which got the same tidal wave treatment (our bold):  

Similar tsunami-like waves may also have crashed across Svalbard’s main island, Spitsbergen—over 400 miles north of Norway—rapidly burying ornithopod (duck-billed) and theropod (meat-eating) dinosaur footprints there and preserving them from erosion. Massive waves must have transported the sediment much farther than most secular scientists readily admit.  

While it’s nice to read Clarey & Johnson accepting that theropods ate meat (can they send Ken Ham a memo on this?) the rest of their argument is a dismal evasion of the substance presented in the Harum paper, which at no point intimated any “massive waves” were involved. Instead the deposit represented yet another sequence of natural habitats that existed back in the early Cretaceous. The theropod tracks alluded to had been found by a prior expedition. This new work examined a deposit that started out as “coastal plain/tidal flat” followed by some “channel sandstone” above which some ornithopod tracks appeared. Over that lay coal, then “stacked coastal plain to shallow marine” rocks, followed by more coal, on the top of which another ornithopod track was found. Harum’s summary was the exact opposite of the creationists’ claim (our bold): “The interbedded coal-rich mudstone beds and the upward thickening sandstone beds seen at Festningen reflect a subaerial environment with sediment input occurring in pulses between relatively long periods of time in which peat accumulation is favorable.” After waving the Whopper Sand, Clarey & Johnson followed with a fresh misrepresentation of science. Richard Butler et al. described in a 2019 paper finding evidence of at least four of the semiaquatic phytosaurs in some Late Triassic rocks in Austria. The creationists didn’t like the idea that some phytosaurs lived in water, though.

Ignoring the available paleontology (including the work referenced in the paper) that established that semiaquatic aspect, Clarey & Johnson demanded instead to know (our bold) “How do land-dwelling animals end up in an ocean environment and in ocean sediments? The scientists themselves found no evidence other than their occurrence in marine rocks.” In their view (our bold), “Finding phytosaurs in marine rocks in Austria and elsewhere is clear evidence of massive, high-energy transport. Tsunami-like waves, generated by large earthquakes during the Flood, could easily have swept landdwelling animals out to the deep sea, miles from the original coastline.” As well they could, one supposes—except for the fact that this wasn’t what the paleontologists found. The fossils weren’t deposited in “ocean sediments” far out to sea, but rather were in a “shallow subtidal and fully marine” lagoon along the prehistoric coast, based on prior geological work by János Haas et al. in 1995. Harum’s paper reported (our bold) “Although the various skeletal elements were no longer articulated, suggesting some kind of disturbance of the carcasses (possibly by scavengers) before burial, this taphonomic pattern suggests that little post-mortem transport took place,” and these were “scattered over a limited area of a few square metres and no fossils of certainly terrestrial groups are preserved in the same deposit.” Some “high-energy transport,” one that doesn’t actually move the organisms from a spot the size of a living room rug, and failing as well to suck in any of the (unspecified) terrestrial buddies the creationists were implying in their “ecologically zoned pre-Flood world.” It must be said that Clarey has shown disdain for the details of marine fauna before. In 2015 his “Dinosaurs in Marine Sediments: A Worldwide Phenomenon” went on this fishing expedition:  

Nizar Ibrahim et al. reported that sharks, sawfish, ray-finned fishes, and coelocanths [sic] were found in the same rock layers as a Spinosaurus in Morocco. How can this be? Today’s coelocanths [sic] live about 500 feet below the ocean surface and not in freshwater rivers as many paleontologists have proposed. They dismiss the blatant physiological evidence from living specimens and insist that ancient coelocanths [sic] must have lived in fresh water simply

because they are found in strata with dinosaurs. Where is the logic in this conclusion?  

Besides misspelling coelacanth throughout, Clarey bypassed the content of the Ibrahim paper, which had reported that spinosaurids (whose battery of teeth were the curving sort typical of fish-eaters) were indeed “primarily a piscivore, subsisting on sharks, sawfish, coelancanths, lungfish, and actinopterygians that were common in the Kem Kem river system,” citing two 1996 papers (by Dale Russell and Paul Sereno et al.) and Philippe Taquet & Dale Russell from 1998. That Clarey augured in only on those “coelocanths” instead of the other fish underscored how disinterested he was in making sense of their paleoenvironment. Equally revealing was his steadfast refusal to entertain the idea that the coelacanths a hundred million years ago might have lived in more habitats than just the one the lone survivors do today, including the Kem Kem Mawsonia (the largest known coelacanth, around 12 feet long) that frequented continental shelf and estuarine habitats. Recall also our Info Box on “living fossils” back in Chapter 3. As David Schwimmer reminded in 2002, “very early coelacanths were relatively small fish of less than 30 cm, and they include both marine and freshwater forms. Freshwater coelacanths are especially abundant in Triassic deposits of eastern United States.” Species specifically found in river or lagoon habitats include Holophagus discussed by Olivier Rieppel in 1985, Axelrodicthys by Shelton Applegate et al. in 2006, Parnaibaia by Yoshitaka Yabumoto in 2008, Coelacanthus by Cajus Diedrich in 2009, and Ticinepomis by Lionel Cavin et al. in 2013. Not a Latimeria (the living genus) among them, we may note. Clarey is welcome to defend his deep ocean only model for those genera in his next monograph, but he’d need to address the substantial evidence that saltwater fish do indeed adapt to freshwater environments. Sticklebacks have done so repeatedly, per Felicity Jones et al. in 2012, and in 2018 Janna Willoughby et al. discovered that a species of California saltwater trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) stocked in Lake Michigan for sport fishing in the 1880’s went freshwater acclimated in only a century. Other organisms do it too,

which can be a nuisance in the case of the invasive copepod Eurytemora studied by Carol Lee in 2016. Researchers on that trout specifically found mutations in several genes compared to their saltwater counterparts, notably the “carbonic anhydrases and a solute carrier protein, both of which are critical for osmoregulation, and demonstrate how steelhead physiologically adapted to freshwater.” The carbonic anhydrases are ancient proteins, going back at least to sponges, as discussed by Daniel Jackson et al. in 2007, and recent work includes Ashok Aspatwar & Parag Deshpande’s “Carbonic Anhydrase Related Proteins” in 2014, and Srijoni Banerjee et al.’s “On origin and evolution of carbonic anhydrase isozymes” from 2016. Solute carrier (SLC) proteins are an equally diverse bunch (398 genes in 52 families), with Alessandro Romano et al. reviewing them among teleosts in 2014. Fish have been coping with salinity variation for a long time and in many ways, reviewed by Dietmar Kültz in 2015.[64] Rather than tackling such fishy data, though, Clarey doubled down on the coelacanth claim in 2016 (“Fresh Water and Salt Water Don’t Mix”) and again in 2019 (“Marine Fossils Mixed with Hell Creek Dinosaurs”). This time at least he spelled it correctly, but dug his methods lapses deeper in the 2016 offering, asserting that “terrestrial plant debris and lignite have been found hundreds of miles east of the Falkland Islands in nearly 10,000 feet of water, and also in deep water off the coast of California,” according to a 1977 paper by Wayne Harris and Jürgen Rullkötter et al. from 1981. Not quite. Both studies had indeed found plant debris in their cores, but these were microscopic fragments easily blown in from nearby land—California for the Miocene samples studied by Rullkötter, and either South America or Africa for the Cretaceous-era plants Harris found (the south Atlantic had just begun opening up then, per work by Dieter Franke et al. in 2006, which meant the adjacent mainland was much closer to the present drill site). But neither paper made any mention of finding brown coal lignite, just mentions of the ways to test for organic residues that can result from their breakdown. A scholarly heads up: when trying to make a case, it’s kind of important for your primary sources to say what you claim they do.  

Bring on the Tropes 2: Scrape the Scablands

 

Whitmore slid close to the Messinian Salinity Crisis in his chapter, but only in relation to salt deposits, which we’ll get to a bit later. Here we want to look at the one spot where Whitmore finally got to an example of a large flood that affected more than just loose debris: the Lake Missoula floods that caused the Channeled Scablands in Washington State. Coauthor JD knows this area well, as that’s his regional neighborhood. Many creationists have waved the “Missoula Flood” over the years, including Dave Nutting’s Think & Believe in 1989, Steve Austin in 2005, Kent Hovind in one of his video lectures that year, CreationWiki 2013, and lots of Michael Oard (2002, 2012, and again in a 2014 article on “What caused the Ice Age?” and “How valleys and canyons formed during Noah’s Flood” in 2018). It looks like just what they need for their catastrophism, a gateway trickle to their Global Flood. That’s how Whitmore used it, as a quick nod to what can happen with a little cataclysm—just imagine what the Big Slosh could do! But as we’ll see, they really shouldn’t have done that. The geological work on the Missoula floods (note the plural) run over many decades, and we’ve included in our references papers to fill in some of the science work on that, by Petteri Alho et al., Victor Baker (also with Russell Bunker), Gerardo Benito (also with Jim O’Connor et al.), John Clague et al., Roger Denlinger & D. R. H. O’Connell, Michelle Hanson et al., Eric McDonald et al., Gary Smith, Larry Smith, and Richard Waitt. There are also general works on the subject by John Allen et al. (Cataclysms on the Columbia, in 1986 and 2009 editions), and John Soennichsen’s Bretz’s Flood in 2008. We can start over a century ago, when erratics had been spotted in the region, boulders that differ in their composition from the surrounding rocks. They stand out like a sore thumb in the fairly treeless landscape of eastern Washington, but were initially attributed to the action of glaciers during the Ice Age. The curious thing was that the rest of the geology didn’t support ice sheets falling that far south, and in the 1920’s geologist J Harlan Bretz proposed that a massive flood caused the features of the Scablands.[65] It was not until decades later that his idea was accepted, though. Why? Partly because Bretz was a prickly personality who easily

rubbed critics the wrong way, but more salient was that fact that it took that long before the source of the water was identified! That came from a glacial Lake Missoula in Montana. Geologist Joseph Pardee (18711960) had identified the existence of a prehistoric lake there in 1910, but it was only decades later that Pardee, Bretz and others connected the dots, recognizing that the Washington scablands were carved by repeated collapses of the Missoula ice dams from, around 20,000 years ago down to 12,000 (still older than the creationist Earth). No one proposed fountains of the deep or windows into the firmament; instead, researchers found a natural source of water already on the Earth.[66] The Missoula flooding left specific markers, ones which didn’t make sense if scaled up to the Big Slosh, but did testify to measurable processes that couldn’t be crammed into a single catastrophic event. There were those erratic boulders for starters, carried from the lake to the Scablands via the flood—something we should expect everywhere if a global flood occurred. Rhythmically bedded silt in the Scablands indicate back-flooding, as the water encountered obstacles in its path, turning and constricting and backing up while the flow gouged fresh outlets. Silt deposited at abnormal heights indicates the scale of the glacial flooding (down at Portland, Oregon, for example, the waters still would have been five hundred feet deep, as tall as the skyscrapers in the present city). Such a torrent ripped the landscape down to bedrock, pulverizing the Columbia Basalt (itself deposited millions of years earlier, and again not all at once, despite the protestations of John Woodmorappe and Michael Oard, see the Info Box  ). The walls of these channeled scablands are sheer precipices, not incised valleys, and no one who has seen them should for even a moment confuse the landscape for the Grand Canyon. Furthermore, the Missoula floods left behind giant ripples in the ground. If a global flood occurred, we should expect similar megaripples all across the Earth, but they are absent. As it happens, those mega-ripples have been slowly modified by wind currents over the past several thousand years, documented by Larry Stetler’s 2018 paper “Holocene eolian modification of Pleistocene glacial outburst flood deposits on the Hanford Site, Washington.”

Why are these markers of the physical process not present across the globe? Well, in a way they are, but not as common as they ought to be were the Big Slosh responsible. Bretz-style super-flooding has occurred (Icelanders even have a word for that sort of thing: Jökulhlaups), but they show up only in specific areas and particular times. One would be the Lake Bonneville flood 17,000 years ago, in the basin where Utah’s Great Salt Lake is today, draining down the Snake River to the ___________________________________________________________________

Drowning the Columbia Basalt The vast Columbia basalt (some 80,000 square miles) on which coauthor JD dwells was deposited on the surface of the Pacific Northwest some 17-14 Ma, tailing off in spurts down to 6 Ma. Philip Long & Bernard Wood 1986 and Anita Ho & Katharine Cashman 1997 illustrate work on the cooling history of the flows, Ray Wells et al. provided a general review of the group in 2009, and a 2017 paper by Klarissa Davis et al. studied “Sulfur release from mainphase Columbia River Basalt eruptions.” But Woodmorappe & Oard 2002 insisted “that most, if not all, of the Columbia River basalts were extruded underwater. These include marine fossils (such as sponge spicules, diatoms, and dinoflagellates) between lava flows, and numerous areas of wellrounded, exotic quartzite gravel, cobbles, and boulders locally interbedded with the flows (but mostly lying above the basalt).” That latter was a tacit admission of the scouring and deposition of the Missoula flooding, of course. As for the “marine fossils,” these were no such thing. Woodmorappe & Oard cited only three sources: an unpublished 1996 manuscript by Harold Coffin, Oard’s own 1996 piece on “the Flood/post-Flood boundary”, and Jeanie Barnett & Lanny Fisk’s 1980 paper which had mentioned only evidence for shallow pools at the periphery of the lava fields being preserved (by serendipitous convenience, the fairly obscure geology journal their work appeared in, otherwise unavailable online, happened to be among the hard copy resources preserved at JD’s alma mater, Eastern Washington University).

Oard’s 1996 paper had likewise claimed “marine dinoflagellate microfossils” were found in the Palouse based on Barnett & Fisk, and added John Hosterman’s 1969 paper as showing “Sponge spicules”—without mentioning the teensy fact that sponges are not exclusively marine organisms, but live in fresh water environments too. That was obviously relevant to Hosterman, who had explicitly described “shallow quiet lakes damned by the basalt. Leaves, along with diatoms and sponge spicules indicative of quiet waters, are abundant in some of these deposits.”   Columbia (described in papers by Harold Malde in 1968 and 1987 with Robert Jarrett, and in 1993 by Jim O’Connor). Steve Austin dangled the Bonneville Flood in a 2008 article, though curiously not trying to explicitly plug it into the Big Slosh framework. This may have been prudent, since his piece had lots of pictures of the features, which once again showed the characteristic sheer-walled channels that are so not like what you see in the Grand Canyon. At least three more comparable glacial outburst floods are known from the Pleistocene. 15,800 years ago there were floods in the Altai Mountains (Anne Reuther et al. 2006). 15,000 years ago drainage from Lake Wisconsin carved the Wisconsin Dells (Jordon Clayton & James Knox 2008 calculated the outflow volume of that). 13,400 years ago Lake Iroquois spilled down the Hudson River, triggering the IntraAllerød cold period when its fresh water upset the salt water balance of the oceanic circulation system (Jeffrey Donnelly et al. 2005). That chill lasted only about 150 years, until glacial runoff from Lake Candona (left over from Lake Iroquois), and the later Champlain Sea, routed water east through the St. Lawrence Valley. By then Lake Agassiz sprawled across a swath of central Canada, and like Lake Missoula had multiple phases as it grew and shrank and occasionally burst along the ice margins. A 2010 paper by Julian Murton et al. described its massive drainage out into the Arctic Ocean 12,900 years ago, helping to trigger the Younger Dryas climate chill lasting 1,200 years, and 2003 and 2004 papers by Garry Clarke et al. recounted its final spill into Hudson Bay 8,200 years ago, spurring a northern hemisphere cooling blip. A further case deserves mention: a 2010 paper by Michael Lamb & Mark Fonstad described the “Rapid formation of a modern bedrock

canyon by a single flood event” stemming from the 2002 Canyon Lake Gorge flooding in Texas. Unfortunately this did exactly what the much bigger Missoula flooding had, cutting a fairly straight channel with sheer walls. That didn’t stop Brian Thomas and David Coppedge from waving the Texas event as though it buttressed their Big Slosh paradigm. In fact, maybe they should just leave Texas alone. Besides Glen Rose, where the Paluxy River dino tracks are known (some of which have been notoriously misinterpreted as mantracks, see the Info Box  next pages), Glenn Morton reminded in 2016 of the southeast section of the state, where the paleoecology of multiple sites has dinosaurs living in a tropical evergreen environment. 1994 and 2001 papers by Elisabeth Wheeler and Thomas Lehman have detailed the forest community that once lived where Big Bend National Park is now, affected by “unstable substrates or frequent storms with high winds,” but identifiably different from current woodlands by their characteristic (and now extinct) Normapolles pollen forms. In 2002 Lehman & Alan Coulsen studied the disarticulated remains of a juvenile Alamosaurus sauropod deposited in “a shallow flood-plain pond” while a 2017 paper by Ronald Tykoski & Anthony Fiorillo laid down the biogeographical implications of those sauropods found there. So dinosaurs and extinct plants were there, but no sign of people or familiar southeast Texas plants or animals. Then along comes the Flood, laying down an incredible swath of sediment. Now we have a problem, as former YECer Morton well knew:  

How would a dinosaur have been able to leave footprints on top of sediments that were deposited midway through the Flood? To survive outside the Ark for long enough to leave these tracks, a dinosaur would have had to do more than avoid drowning, and also do more than find food and fresh water during the Flood. If most of these three miles of sediment were deposited during a year-long flood, then around 40 feet of sediment was deposited per day, or 1.7 feet ___________________________________________________________________

The Paluxy Mantracks Who could write a book about creationism and not mention the Paluxy “mantracks”? Dinosaur trackways preserved in mid-

Cretaceous sediments at Glen Rose, Texas had initially were spotted back in 1908, but first studied scientifically in the late 1930’s by paleontologist Roland Bird, and the American Museum of Natural History even displays a chunk of the trackways from a later Bird expedition (illustrated in Mark Norell et al.’s 1995 book on the museum). As a few of the tracks resembled human feet, Bird’s Paluxy find sparked a brief flurry of interest in “mystery tracks” (anything vaguely resembling a human hand or foot), which creationists eagerly embraced as evidence of antediluvian man, such as the Carboniferous ones alluded to by Albert Ingalls in 1940. Martin Lockey’s 1999 book on fossil tracks noted how difficult it was to interpret them until more information came along, such as a Triassic reptile with a curiously hand-shaped paw; known since the 19th century, that wasn’t explained until the 1960’s when an odd thecodont turned up to fit them. Roy Gallant, Robert Sloan, and Arthur Strahler have variously explained how purely geological processes can produce features that can be mistaken for human footprints, which show none of the characteristic pressure patterns of a human foot. Others rocks can superficially resemble footwear, such as the Nevada “shoe” Glen Kuban noted creationist Alfred McCann heralded way back in 1922 (and still making the rounds in Michael Cremo & Richard Thompson’s Forbidden Archaeology in 1993). Cremo & Thompson also flirted with the “Meister Print,” as did Henry Morris over the years, with an oblique reference to “human footprints in ancient trilobite beds” showing up as recently as his 1985 book. This purported sandal-clad antediluvian who squashed a trilobite while strolling around the Cambrian seabed (“a strange habitat for prehistoric man,” as Utah geologist Richard Robison was quoted by Sloan) was more probably an example of spalling (where rock can fracture during or after formation), as Ernest Conrad reported in 1981 and Kuban covered in 2006. Paluxy got on the creationist front burner not only because some of the prints did look like a barefoot human, they were helped along by enterprising locals who improved the fossil evidence by carving tracks of their own (ones with more conspicuous toes) either in situ or as individual

  per hour. Before a dinosaur could leave footprints on the surface of this of the sediment, he would first have had to fight throughout the year to stay on top as it was rapidly deposited, never sleeping or getting sick, or else he would have been buried after merely 12 hours.  

Though Michael Garton and Steven Robinson were sanguine about the existence of fossil trackways in 1996 creationist articles because they were ___________________________________________________________________

prints in blocks extracted from the site. Those faked prints (and casts of them) have circulated among the creationist fringe ever since, especially the “Burdick” print, named for Clifford Burdick, one of the original promoters of the Glen Rose mantracks. The Burdick slab is a fixture among creationist hucksters, from Carl Baugh to Kent Hovind, and was featured in the NBC “The Mysterious Origin of Man” show in 1996 (narrated portentously by Charlton Heston, coauthor JD examined at length this weird tango of New Age pseudoscience and traditional creationism in his “Planet of the Apes” TIP chapter). Ronald Numbers has noted the influence Burdick’s 1950’s Paluxy research had on the budding Creation Research Society: “For a decade and a half after the founding of the CRS no one contributed more than the eccentric Burdick to furthering this agenda. Unfortunately for the reputation of creationism, no one among the leadership was so lacking in credentials, critical thinking, and caution.” While John Morris initially touted  the Glen Rose tracks, and Christian apologist Gleason Archer was still enthusiastic about them in his 1982 Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, there were dark clouds gathering on even the creationist horizon, with some of the most “merciless” criticism of the CRS Paluxy position coming, ironically enough, as Christopher Toumey noted in 1994, from the Seventh-Day Adventist Geoscience Research Institute (thus completing the short-circuit begun when Henry Morris hijacked the Adventist Flood Geology of Ellen White and Price). By then it was apparent that the “mantracks” were nothing of the kind, but merely the heel prints of theropod dinosaurs (who

normally walked on their toes digitigrade) going plantigrade now and then. This was seen in clues like the claw impressions mysteriously associated with the “heels” of these antediluvian pedestrians. All that evidence has been brought up by the many critics who have weighed in on Paluxy over the years (“The Creationist Piltdown,” as Christopher Weber dubbed it in 1981), including Martin Bridgstock, Ronnie Hastings, Glen Kuban, and more recently, Alastair Ruffell et al., Glenn Branch & Eugenie Scott, and Glenn Morton. To their credit, John Morris was among those creationists who accepted eventually that the Paluxy tracks weren’t as advertised, backing off slowly from the matter by 1986, though it had taken  quite a  lot of   willing to place the Mesozoic after the Flood (Robinson rammed the end of the Flood all the way back into the Carboniferous), things had changed a bit in the expansive creationist conception when Morton called attention to a 2014 paper by Carl Froede, Jerry Akridge & John Reed. Akridge et al. in 2007 were on the record as doubters of Austin’s CPT (compared to Catchpoole et al. still pushing it),  but on this goround they considered such Phanerozoic fossil animal tracks ___________________________________________________________________

prodding by investigators like Kuban to get them to examine the site personally. Wendell Bird in 1989, Del Ratzsch in 1996, and Paul Nelson & John Mark Reynolds in 1999 spun the Glen Rose goof as showing Creation Science willingness to appreciate new information—not as a sign of how a pervasive lack of evidence had no effect on their fundamental position (that humans and dinosaurs coexisted). Thus while Jonathan Sarfati put Paluxy among their “Arguments we think creationists shouldn’t use” in 2002, the books by Paul Taylor in 1995 and the first two volumes of the Morris & Morris 1996 Creation Trilogy simply left it out, even as the 1996 edition of Henry Morris’ 1985 book anachronistically supported the Paluxy claims. Meanwhile, Scott Huse’s 1997 book (widely relied on by grassroots creationists to this day) cited antivaxer veterinarian Randy Wysong to claim such prints “have been carefully studied and verified by

reliable paleontologists [that Huse neglected to identify] and cannot be dismissed as frauds.” Btw Huse’s inept work was among the “Bedtime Christmas Readings” laissez-faire conservative Cato Institute’s Doug Bandow recommended in 1999 as “demonstrating that religious faith does not mean checking one’s mind at the church door,” along with other antievolutionists Phillip Johnson (Darwin on Trial), Hugh Ross (Beyond the Cosmos & The Genesis Question) and Gerald Schroeder (The Science of God) circling ID and OEC. In March 2001 JD emailed Bandow asking whether he was familiar with the background of any of those books. He replied he “found them to be better argued and researched than the typical ‘creation science’ and young earth tracts, which aren’t well-founded”—clearly oblivious that Huse represented the nadir of Creation Science. Anyone fielding the Paluxy tracks in the 21st century pretty much gives themselves away as orbiting the Baugh-Hovind black hole, such as Dennis Petersen’s 2002 Unlocking the Mysteries of Creation, a superficial parasitical screed still apparently used in the “science curriculum” of some Christian schools. To finish off Paluxy, Rhonda Forlow (“CSI: Creation Science Investigation”) reported for Acts & Facts in 2011 that “Brian Thomas accompanied the students to Glen Rose for a private tour of the fossils,” suggesting how much the place still tugs at their creationist heart.   posed so serious “A Challenge for Catastrophic Plate Tectonics” that the only option to rescue the Big Slosh was to scrap altogether what he verbosely (and redundantly) tagged “the secular chronostratigraphic geologic timescale,” as if that would make the strata disappear in a puff of wishful thinking. Only Morton wasn’t going to give them time to pull off the trick, waving onstage a second Texas act: the Pennsylvanian-era Haymond Formation has 15,000 layers of sandstone and shale deposited in a sloping delta front in fairly shallow water, described by Romeo Flores in 1974, along with a continuous supply of arthropods or worms burrowing away in the sediments—all through the Flood? And their little holes subsequently filling in with sand—again and again and

again, layer on layer, alluded to in a 1966 geology study by Earle McBride (part of his ongoing work on the region covering decades). But while creationists George Howe & Carl Froede cited those papers when they wrote on the Haymond Formation in 1999 as a mark of catastrophism they focused on some Cambrian boulders imbedded in the strata (per 1984 work by Allison Palmer et al., a paper incidentally coauthored with Richard Robison, whose wry views on the Meister print are noted in the Paluxy Info Box). But nothing on the burrows above them. Meanwhile, see the analyses by Robert Hickman et al. in 2009 and James Chapman & Reid McCarty in 2013 for how geologists since then have puzzled out more of the complex history of the Marathon thrust belt. So no dinosaurs here, but lots of shallow sea life (none characteristic of the Mesozoic), and again no people. The same can be said of the Devonian Woodford Shale of west Texas, a testament to leisurely sea level cycles, as covered by Nikki Hemmesch et al. in 2014. Were none there yet? That’s odd, since Glenn Morton had one more Texas act in the wings: saunter on to Miami, or to Waco off in the northern panhandle, and we find mammoth kill sites, reviewed in 2004 by Kathryn Hoppe, representing an entirely different array of flora and fauna, obviously including humans. What a crowd we have on the stage, but none reciting anything like the Big Slosh story. At this point we demand a call sheet. Were the dinosaurs and extinct plants and layers of burrowing marine animals (along with the folds and compression of the strata afterward) and mammoth slaying humans doing all this during, or after the Flood hit Texas? We would urge creationists to specify. And that’s not even the end of the problems for Catastrophic Plate Tectonics. There are the “Wilson Cycles” where continental rifting forms ocean basins. Named for John Tuzo Wilson (1908-1993) who first proposed the idea, by 2002 Carl Froede fessed up that Wilson Cycles pose “a serious problem for Catastrophic Plate Tectonics.” But not one apparently for nature, since Wilson Cycles have been going on for at least the last two and a half billion years, as Steven Shirey & Stephen Richardson determined in 2011. And something else. Glenn Morton’s 2016 book chapter noted how Steve Austin’s CPT was contrived to explain the relative lack of ocean sediment compared to the land if the Flood had occurred, when

the opposite should have happened if those basins had settled out at the same time. This is a separate issue from the claim that there is too little sediment on the seafloor if the oceans are old (Jeff Miller’s item #11), which overlooks how seafloor spreading chews up older sediments in subduction recycling, meaning most all of the oldest current ocean floor only dates back to the Mesozoic (though a little snippet of 340 million year old Carboniferous crust has turned up in the eastern Mediterranean, described by Roi Granot in 2016). Fortunately, much older sea beds can be tracked because sections of ancient oceans have been pushed up as surface land, disconnecting them from the oceanic recycling system (though of course subjecting them to general erosion). Morton suggested that anyone can see what was going on by dumping sediment into a bathtub with landmasses of bricks. It’s physically impossible for the dirt not to settle on the tub floor thicker than the higher continents. But the problem was worse even that that (Morton’s italics): “the continents and seafloor would have had to do more than just sink and rise—their heights relative to one another would have had to be completely reversed, with the continental platforms sinking to thousands of meters below the seafloor.” That’s quite a rollercoaster. But it’s also one creationists are reluctant to ride. Instead they try to wave away the geological facts from the sidelines. So despite there being no markers of any catastrophic flood in Arizona, Whitmore’s Answers chapter posits that just such a flood did indeed carve the Grand Canyon:  

The origin of the Grand Canyon has been a topic of much speculation. Conventional geologists have not reached any consensus on its origin. Dr. Steve Austin, of the Institute for Creation Research, published in 1994 that the Grand Canyon was cut by a catastrophic flood that originated from post-Flood lakes ponded behind the Kaibab Upwarp. In 2000, a symposium was convened in Grand Canyon National Park to discuss the canyon’s origin. One paper was published that was similar to Austin’s idea, although the authors gave him no credit. Evidence in favor of the lake failure hypothesis for the catastrophic carving of the Grand Canyon is growing.  

Whitmore was quite misleading when he claims that the 2000 paper by Normal Meek & John Douglass was similar to Austin’s. Remember that Austin is a YECer, and as such, he believes that a global flood carved out the Grand Canyon about 4,500 years ago. Meek & Douglass’ “Lake Overflow: An Alternative Hypothesis for Grand Canyon Incision and Development of the Colorado River” drew attention to uncertainties about the course of the Colorado River early in its history. They posited that an enlarged Hopi Lake existed to the east of the present Grand Canyon, at the Bidahochi Formation, and that overfills of this system spilled across Arizona, cutting an incision that would eventually be carved still deeper when the Colorado switched to that new course. They were not suggesting that everything in the canyon was due to the initial overflow, however, particularly the meandering path seen today. Moreover, this was suggested to have occurred a bit less than 6 million years ago, as described by Rebecca Dorsey et al.’s “Chronology of Miocene-Pliocene deposits at Split Mountain Gorge” in 2007, and Kyle House et al.’s “Stratigraphic evidence for the role of lake spillover in the inception of the lower Colorado River” in 2008. Ergo, both the causation and the timing of the Grand Canyon formation are vastly different from Austin and Whitmore’s proposal. And while the lake overflow model was interesting, there were some issues, ones especially relevant to the creationist version. Lake overflows have occurred, as Meek reviewed in a 2019 paper, but they don’t form meandering channels as big as the Grand Canyon that easily, no matter what the flow rate. And something else: the lake spillover hypothesis has been largely abandoned among geologists over the past several years after William Dickinson surveyed newer work in 2013 indicating that Hopi Lake hadn’t been sufficient for the task nor long-lasting enough, and that by then the Colorado River had already worked through the Kaibab uplift. Indeed, the problems with the creationist version of Hopi Lake have grown so apparent that even Tim Clarey alluded to them in December 2018 at Acts & Facts, mentioning along the way the lack of uplift in the Texas panhandle (though not the presence of mammothhunting humans), which would have been needed to raise the lake high enough to do its drainage duty.

Whether creationists like it or not, big canyons take time to form. Though there is still debate about exactly which rivers were channeling where all those millions of years ago (so much of the relevant evidence having been carried away by the Colorado River itself), the main driver of the observed incision appears to be uplift of the Colorado Plateau. There was more at stake in the creationist argument than how rock formations came about, of course. There was the far from trivial matter of how do the fossils in them come about, and whether that could be fitted into the Big Slosh scenario. Which is why Whitmore brought up the rapid burial of fossils and how their soft tissue generally disintegrates before fossilization. And this is true. However, remember in the example of the soft tissue preserved for the Green River fish that they were excellently preserved because of the microbial mats. But these mats are not present in most environments, which is why the vast majority of fossils are not preserved with soft tissue. For those readers itching for us to bring up the most infamous examples of soft tissue preservation, the ones involving Mary Schweitzer and Mark Armitage, that topic is sufficiently large that it must wait till Volume 2. Right now we have a geological side to high quality fossil preservation that needs addressing, and Whitmore brought that up here (our bold):  

Simply put, in order for an animal carcass to be turned into a fossil, it must be sequestered from decay very soon after death. The most common way for this to happen is via deep rapid burial so the organism can be protected from scavengers that may churn through the sediment in search of nutrients. Many fossil deposits around the world are considered to be Lagerstätten deposits (like the Green River Formation),

or

deposits

that

contain

abundant

fossils

with

exceptional

preservation. It is widely recognized that most of these deposits were formed by catastrophic, rapid burial of animal carcasses.  

Lagerstätten is one of those fancy technical terms, a German word (givenaway by that umlaut), and that’s the plural, by the way. A “Konservat-Lagerstätte” refers to formations where fossils have been preserved with a level of fidelity that includes soft parts. Stephen Jay Gould described them as “mother lode” deposits in his classic

Wonderful Life on the Burgess Shale. The term crops up in the regular paleontological literature of course,  but isn’t one Lagerstätten Time Period Lakhanda

1020 Ma

Podkoryrov 2009 Precambrian

Country Deposition mode Mudstones in Russia

dysoxicanoxic shallow sea

Doushantuo

635-551 Ma

Muscente 2015

Late Precambrian

Phosphatization China

& salicification in anoxic lagoons

Mistaken Point

565 Ma

Liu & Matthews

Late

2017

Precambrian

Bacterial Canada

reduction of turbidity debris flow

  that gets much coverage by anti-evolutionists (William Hoesch would be a rare exception, from 2007). You’re about to learn why.  

Vocabulary Recess: Lagerstätten  

Certainly, organisms must be rapidly buried to increase the likelihood of fossilization, but as we saw earlier in the case of the Green River Formation, not all do. Sometimes, dead organisms can be sequestered away for a while before burial. At least, they must be safe from destructive forces. All that is a given. But if lagerstätten are formed by catastrophe, as Whitmore insists, wouldn’t you expect them to be ubiquitous? The Big Slosh was everywhere, after all, supposedly generating virtually all of the fossil record. But it turns out that lagerstätten are not common at all—in fact, that’s why there’s a special word for them, because they’re so rare in the fossil record that paleontologists get all oogly-boogly when another one turns up. Do those lagerstätte indicate rapid burial by a global flood, and is this “widely recognized”? Well, let’s take a look. David Bottjer et al.’s 2002 volume discussed eighteen, but there are more even than that known presently (we’re surveying 47 below). Spread as they are over

a billion years, though, we have here at most a trickle in time, not a flood. There are only a few for the  Neoproterozoic  . It’s not that there weren’t any lagerstätten conditions before that, it’s just that for the first few billion years of life there was nothing sufficiently complex on the scene to be captured by them. For the three below, we’ve marked with a dark bar those associated with oxygen limited environments (anoxia and dysoxia). None of these are attributed by the scientists to a catastrophic deposition process, let alone one consistent with the Big Slosh. Not that there has been no controversy over them occasionally, just nothing to help the Flood scenario. For example, in 1994 Gregory Retallack argued that the Ediacaran biota were terrestrial lichens, earning criticism from Benjamin Waggoner, and similarly reinterpreted several Precambrian formations, including the Mistaken Point finds Alexander Liu’s team had studied in 2010 & 2014 papers. In 2017 Liu & Jack Matthews dubbed Retallack’s position “demonstrably incorrect, due to the convincing evidence for abundant debris flows and turbidities” along with “a complete absence of evidence for terrestrial emergence.” More to our topic, in 2014 Retallack challenged Shuhai Xiao’s paper “Affirming life aquatic for the Ediacara biota in China and Australia.” A comment in Xiao’s response on the Eoandromeda  (small eight-armed  critters  which Xiao Lagerstätten Time Period Chengjiang 518 Ma

Country Deposition mode

Maotianshan

China

Mid Cambrian

Turbidity

Shales Hou 2017

currents in shallow sea

Qiangjiang

518 Ma

Fu 2019

Mid Cambrian

Sediment flows China

below storm line in anoxic waters

Sirius Passet

515-518 Ma

Sediment flows

Harper 2019

Mid-Cambrian Greenland

below storm waves

Mount Cap

513-510 Ma

Canada

Shallow water

Harvey &

Late

anoxic

Butterfield 2011

Cambrian

sediment

Emu Bay Shale

513 Ma

Silty shales

Paterson 2008

Late

below wave

Cambrian

Australia

base in dysoxicanoxic water

Burgess Shale

508 Ma

Conway Morris

Mid-Cambrian Canada

1998 Elk

rich flurries

500 Ma

Mound/Blackberry Late Hill

Benthic mud-

Cambrian

USA

Collette &

Intertidal sand flats

Hagadorn 2010 Orsten

500 Ma

Maas 2006

Late Cambrian

Shales & Sweden

nodules in dysoxic shallow sea

Weeks Formation 499 Ma

Storm-churned

Lerosey-Aubril

Late

USA

2018

Cambrian

dysoxic mud

Fezouata

480 Ma

Storm wave

Martin 2016

Early

Morocco

Ordovician

offshore deposition

Beecher’s

445 Ma

Trilobite Bed

Late

Etter 2002

Ordovician

William Lake &

445 Ma

Airport Cove

Late

Young 2012

Ordovician

Eramosa

425 Ma

Von Bitter 2007

Mid-Silurian

Wenlock

420 Ma

Herefordshire

Late Silurian

UK

410 Ma

Scotland

USA

Burial under turbidite layer Dysoxic-

Canada

anoxic mud in shallow water

Canada

Briggs 1996 Rhynie Chert

deep water

Shallow coastal waters Volcanic ash & carbonate mud Volcanic spring

Rice 2002

Early

deposit

Devonian Hunsrück Slate

408-400 Ma

Sutcliffe 1999

Early Devonian

Shallow water Germany

sedimentary fan turbidity & pyritization

Miguasha

385-374 Ma

Cloutier 2013

Late Devonian

Estuarine Canada

environment affected by bacterial mats

Gogo

380 Ma

Long &

Late

Trinajstic 2010

Devonian

anoxic water

Bear Gulch

330-323 Ma

Monsoon

Grogan & Lund

Mid-

microturbidities

2002

Carboniferous USA

affecting

Carbonate mud Australia

concretions In

coastal plattenkalks Sosnowiec

313-304 Ma

Pacyna &

Late

Zdebska 2012

Carboniferous

Siderites Poland

sporadically in river mudstones

Mazon Creek

309-307 Ma

Siderite

Clements 2019

Late

concretions

Carboniferous USA

from river sediment washouts

Bickershaw

307-303 Ma

Anderson 1997

Late

UK

Carboniferous Montceau-les-

304-299 Ma

Mines

Late

Perrier &

Carboniferous France

Brackish river delta Anoxic mud

Charbonnier

turbidity currents & siderite

2014 Mangrullo

286-273 Ma

Formation

Early Permian

Uruguay

Hypersaline dysoxic

Piñeiro 2012

lagoon

Toploje Member

272-265 Ma

Chert

Mid-Permian

Slater 2015

Peat flooded Antarctica

by mineral-rich lake waters

  classed as “a benthic diploblastic grade animal”) is highly relevant to the far more intense Big Slosh parameters: “It is highly unlikely that Eoandromeda organisms, particularly if they were a colony of bacteria, would have remained intact if they had been uprooted and transported hundreds of kilometers.” Moving into the Paleozoic(  charted on the previous page), you’ll notice how the number of lagerstätten climbs noticeably, but this may merely herald the advent of bigger metazoans with more parts to fossilize, not the appearance of fundamentally novel modes of preservation. Still no catastrophic deposition involved, but see the many dysoxic-anoxic tags, which come up in over a third of the non-volcanic examples (and regularly regarding taphonomy in general, as exampled by Peter Allison & David Bottjer’s 2011 book on the subject). These snapshots of time track a progression of life, during which animals appeared, then later plants and terrestrial fauna. But what we never see is the wholesale comingling of organisms that would have seemed unavoidable were everything living at once, and perishing together in the Big Slosh. Though they’re running on average one every ten million years, we draw your attention to how these Paleozoic lagerstätten are not spaced out regularly, but instead often cluster in time, signposts to how paleoecological conditions may have facilitated particular modes of preservation, from oxygen circulation to why there were siderite coatings. That’s because novel biology can have an impact on the rocks themselves. For example, chert beds, which creationists like Henry Morris or Paul Taylor considered inexplicable because they’re not being formed today. Arthur Strahler noted what they’d forgot to take into account: siliceous sponges, radiolaria, and diatoms draw on silicates for their casings. Once they evolved and proliferated in the ocean, the chemical opportunity for large chert beds no longer existed.

You may also have spotted another odd word cropping up regarding Bear Gulch in Montana: plattenkalk. That’s another of those fancy geology terms, in this case for limestone sediments so fine that they could have only been deposited in extremely calm conditions, where little or no bioturbation was involved. There were occasional signs of scavenging of the Bear Gulch fish remains there, but overall the calm water was inhospitable to both decay and predatory fish looking for an easy lunch. James Hagadorn’s 2002 book chapter on Bear Gulch called attention to “preferential preservation of superficial vascular structures and distended gill covers” that certainly required rapid burial (which the Big Sloshers would love) but also a “physiological response to asphyxia-induced stresses.” That “could occur if fish were asphyxiated and buried by the detached turbidity currents thought to frequently blanket the basin center.” Coupled with the plattenkalk aspects of the deposit, how that combination could have occurred during the cataclysmic Big Slosh is another of those conundrums that has one obvious explanation: there wasn’t a Big Slosh. And something else: the rocks lying on top of the Bear Gulch deposit. Back 320 million years ago, that place was near the equator, part of a continental Lagerstätten Time Period Grès à Voltzia

240 Ma

Country Deposition mode

Etter 2002b

France

MidTriassic

Monte San

240 Ma

Giorgio

Mid-

Etter 2002c

Triassic

Deltaic flooding anoxic pools Dysoxic

Switzerland

bottom waters with bacterial mats

Cow Branch

220 Ma

Fraser 1996

Late

USA

Triassic Berlin-Ichthyosau 215 Ma

Bottjer 2002a

Late

USA

Triassic Osteno

199-190

Italy

Cyclical lake sediments Stagnate water deposit Brief deposit in

Tang 2002a

Ma

calm dysoxic

Early

marine

Jurassic

depression

Posidonia Shale

182-174

Etter & Tang

Ma

2002

Early

Stagnant Germany

anoxic water

Jurassic Oxford Clay

166-157

Tang 2002b

Ma

Mid-

Storms in UK

165 Ma

Rhône

Mid-

Charbonnier

Jurassic

epicontinental seaway

Jurassic La Voulte-sur-

dysoxic-

France

Deep sea anoxic water

2014 Solnhofen

150-145

Limestone

Ma

Etter 2002d

Late

Carbonate Germany

Jurassic Yixian (Jehol)

129-122

Zuohuan Qin

Ma

2019

Early 115-108

Martill 2007

Ma

Early

Lacustrine and China

113-100

Bartiromo 2013

Ma

Early

Carbonate Brazil

87-82 Ma

Bottjer 2002b

Late Cretaceous

concretions In anoxic water Plattenkalk

Italy

calm warm water

Cretaceous Niobrara Chalk

volcanic deposits

Cretaceous Pietraroja

mud In anoxic lake or lagoon

Cretaceous Santana

plattenkalk

DysoxicUSA

anoxic calm seafloor in shallow sea

Tanis (Hell Creek)

66 Ma

DePalma 2019

Late

USA

Meteor impact ejecta

Cretaceous

  shelf studded with islands. As global sea levels dropped, the area dried out, and more arid conditions resulted in several meters of Book Canyon Conglomerate, described in a 2019 paper by Amy Singer et al. Nothing in the mythology of Creation Science geology can explain why such a distinctive flip could have occurred at all in a world of churning water, let alone at the speed implied by the Flood model. Things don’t improve for the Big Slosh in the  Mesozoic  . The average occurrence of lagerstätten falls slightly compared to the Paleozoic, though again you can see how common dysoxic-anoxic conditions were, most of the non-volcanic or impact related events. One formation is among the most famous lagerstätte, the Solnhofen in Germany, where all but one of the Archaeopteryx fossils are known— the exception from the late Jurassic is described in a 2019 paper by Martin Kundrát et al. (and duly spun as merely a bird by Brian Thomas at Acts & Facts). And my, oh my, it’s one of two more plattenkalks. Now we’ve got three placidly calm depositional environments which must have been contemporaneous in the creationist cataclysm. Bear in mind that the lagerstätten are still largely capturing marine life, but now and then some terrestrial organisms made it in. The Solnhofen preserved flying insects and small dinosaurs along with Archaeopteryx; pterodactyls and Lagerstätten Time Country Deposition Period mode Green River

53-48 Ma USA Sedimentation Hellawell & Orr

Early

in anoxic water

2012

Eocene

Okanagan

51-48 Ma Canada

Entrapment in

Highlands

Early

diatom bloom

Archibald 2011

biofilms

Monte Bolca

49 Ma

Tang 2002c

Early

Italy

Intertidal reef & anoxic lagoon

Eocene Messel Pit

47 Ma

Franzen 2001

Early Eocene

Germany

Anoxic lake

Crawford Lake

1268-

Krueger &

1486 &

McCarthy 2016

1822 CE

Canada

Bottom water anoxia

Holocene

  the early seabird Hesperornis show up in the Niobara Chalk; and disarticulated dinosaur bits were found in the Oxford Clay, floating in from fifty miles or more. But gone are the specific sea life so common during the Paleozoic, including the once ubiquitous trilobites. Think about this. The Monte San Giorgio in Switzerland preserved a wonderful range of vertebrates swimming in what was then the great Tethys Sea, including ichthyosaurs, ray-finned fishes, and even the embryo of a nothosaur (seal-like marine reptiles). Similarly, there are mosasaurs and plesiosaurs in the Niobara Western Interior Seaway, and even a splendid fish with its last fish meal also preserved in its gullet testified to the existence of vertebrate food chains back when Kansas was beachfront property. So how did those particular critters get fossilized compared to all the marine life that according to the creationist model were paddling about at the same time? And then how could they have been pushed up into a mountainous condition, becoming rock along the way? This is more complicated than leaving your licorice out in the bowl for a week and finding it’s gotten hard. Or consider the Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada. Yes, ichthyosaur fossils near the little Nevada ghost town of Berlin. In his 2002 book chapter on it, David Bottjer noted that, “Due to seafloor spreading and the continual destruction of ocean crust in subduction zones, no deep-sea sedimentary sequences currently exist in the oceans that are older than Jurassic in age.” The Berlin-Ichthyosaur lagerstätte represents a precious instance of rock that was once out in the ocean, colliding only afterward with the continental plate that continued to plow along, forcing up mountains (and that Colorado Plateau, remember). Or we are supposed to think that all that took place in a few years, all while the Egyptians weren’t noticing. Finally we come to our modern period, the  Cenozoic  . Clear away the asteroid ejecta, and cue the proliferation of more familiar

animal life, including marine forms (no more giant aquatic reptiles, though). While not of one mind on it (and are they ever?), the trend among creationists is to treat the post-Cretaceous record as occurring after the Flood, though not without claimed cataclysm like a superzippy Ice Age. With only 65 million years having elapsed, you can see there have been fewer lagerstätten showing up, yet still averaging par for the slow uniformitarian course, one every ten million years or so. Oh, did you notice that last one? Crawford Lake from the Holocene. And, no, we didn’t forget the “Ma”, as we’re talking about dinoflagellate cysts and other microfossils being preserved from medieval times and also the 19th century. What that deposit reminds us of is how the processes that permit the special preservation of fossils didn’t stop millions of years ago. They still go on in the modern world. Had a volcanic eruption occurred to asphyxiate animals and landed them in that environment, or the last wash of a mudslide brought other biota in, and if you added a few more million years of strata to press it down into rock, places like Crawford Lake could easily become the snapshots of time that the other lagerstätten are. You can see there were many causes involved in the formations, but none of the lagerstätten are attributed to catastrophic deposition of the Big Slosh variety. Not a one. Several were deep water formations buried under current-transported sediments. About half were caused by organisms ending up in anoxic or dysoxic bodies of water, which further insulated them from scavengers. Several involved volcanic eruptions and one stemmed from a meteoric impact. When taken together, it should come as no surprise that no paleontologists or geologists outside of creationist organizations believe that a global flood buried all or most fossils, and explains why Whitmore offered no evidence that any mainstream scientists had done so, let alone that this was “widely recognized.” But there’s more to the creationist failure than that. The delicate trace fossils of the Green River are exactly what you wouldn’t expect in turbulent Flood slurries. Or consider John Paterson’s work on Emu Bay in Australia, “conformably overlain by the 550 m thick Boxing Bay Formation” which “contains abundant trace fossils, including burrows and arthropod tracks.”

Now supposing for the sake of argument that the underlying shales were laid down in a catastrophe, how then to account for the burrows and tracks in the sediment above it? The animals inconsiderately insisted on going about their business unaware of the cataclysm supposedly entombing them? Some of the papers were even more explicit. The Mazon Creek deposit in Illinois was formed over time by occasional river sediment washouts clogging around a “previously drowned forest,” about which the Clements paper wrote that “No sedimentary structures indicating turbulent deposition are found in the fossiliferous layers, making a high-energy mortality site unlikely.” Meaning there was nothing so intense as even a tidal wave involved, let alone a global inundation. Want some more? Graciela Piñeiro et al.’s 2012 paper on the Mangrullo Formation in Uruguay illustrated three layers of interbedded volcanic ash—how does that work in a Big Slosh again? Antonello Bartiromo’s 2013 paper on the Pietraroja Formation in Italy noted the depositional implications of the tree branches found there from the extinct conifer Frenelopsis: “large branches could not have endured long time under high-energy transport without the shoots becoming fragmented.” And that leaves aside the whole paleobotany question sidestepped in creationist Big Slosh thinking: where did those conifers come from in the first place, why aren’t they around now, and why aren’t the plants of the region today found there, intermingled with their extinct cousins? Similarly, the Wenlock Formation in Herefordshire has some specialized ostracods that a 2014 paper by Vincent Perrier et al. fit into the larger world of 435 million years ago on, living around what was back then equatorial habitats. Creationists fail to realize the range of data they’d need to account for to be taken seriously, over and above just the forensics of their immediate taphonomy. Let’s face it, insofar as lagerstätten are concerned, from how they’re deposited to what they show in them, and above and below them, the Big Slosh hypothesis is a total washout.  

Woodmorappe Not to the Rescue  

Navigating the stormy seas of creationist pseudo-geology and pseudo-paleontology involves pulling apart the interlocking tropes to

discover the lack of evidence beneath. And few creationists have done more in this obfuscation department than John Woodmorappe, both by volume and persistence. A case in point is his 1993 article on “Studies in Creationism and Flood Geology” which waved nine of his own papers spanning a dozen years that he assured readers had resolved the niggling details of creationist Diluviology. They’re worth a closer look because they represent in miniature so much of what would continue to go wrong decades later in contemporary creationism.  

(1) 1978a. He proclaimed “the fallacies” of using cephalopods to identify geologic ages, but what that consisted of were quote-mined caveats on uncertainties in their systematics. Insisting that (our bold) “the stratigraphic distribution of all cephalopods, are simply the result of the ecologically-controlled Floodwater burial of the cephalopod fossils (a whole area which will be discussed and documented in detail),” he presented a graphic representation of what he wanted to have had happen: “The breaking up of the fountains of the deep and all the associated volcano-tectonic results on the ocean floor cause the oceans to rise sharply, overflowing completely the continent(s). The cephalopod habitats are driven unto land, preserving the ecological zonation.” But other than the cartoon of it, Woodmorappe offered no substantive evidence in the rest of the paper that any of that had ever happened, or even could have. The issue of their comparative stratigraphy remained, however. Examples like the extinct ammonites have particular temporal geological range no matter how you classifying them, meaning their distribution is as diagnostic as finding blunderbuss bullets in a garbage dump. You can be sure it doesn’t date from the Bronze Age, and equally improbable that they’re going to show up in a 21st century tip. Interestingly, this paper almost figured in Stephen Jay Gould’s 1981 McLean v. Arkansas testimony against creationism, as Gould’s deposition took issue with Woodmorappe having quote mined several of his 1970’s works on Punctuated Equilibrium.  

(2) 1978b. Woodmorappe insisted “cyclothemic rock provide a picture of the recessional aspects of the Flood.” Cyclothems are

alternating land and marine deposits, separated by unconformities, often with coal in between, but instead of showing how they all must have occurred contemporaneously, and specifically by the Flood mechanism, Woodmorappe opted for the usual parade of quote snippets from a barrage of technical papers. But cyclothems in fact reveal paleoclimate conditions, including ancient sea levels (which can fluctuate, as well as being perturbed by tsunamis), examined in decades of work since Woodmorappe’s harrumph. Some are on specific places, like Keith Miller & Ronald West on Kansas strata in 1993, Nereo Preto & Linda Hinnov on Italian ones in 2003, or Robert Gastaldo et al. on Alabama cyclothems in 2004, where they noted “Neap-spring-neap tidalite patterns indicate that entombment occurred on the order of a few decades, whereas burial of the mire and forest litter happened on the order of weeks, if not days.” Other works integrate the data over broad ranges, such as Bilal Haq & Stephen Schutter offering “A Chronology of Paleozoic SeaLevel Changes” in 2008, and Blaine Cecil et al. on “Middle and Late Pennsylvanian cyclothems, American Midcontinent: Ice-age environment changes and terrestrial biotic dynamics” in 2014. Cyclothems were all but guaranteed to crop up during this time, as ice sheets waxed and waned in the southern hemisphere, and basins subsided in the Midwest as Pangaea assembled.  

(3) 1979. Radiometric geochronology was disposed of in “a thorough and systematic refutation.” This was another cascade of data blips culled from hundreds of papers, which required care to wade through. Which geologist Steven Schimmrich did in 1997 (updated in 2003), examining ten main examples of Woodmorappe’s serious misrepresentation of cited sources and avoidance of relevant evidence in other works. To which Woodmorappe penned a flippant and evasive response, which prompted Schimmrich to advise Woodmorappe “to tone down his rhetoric since I do believe it to be excessively abusive and insulting.” Having already explored a lot of creationist muddle on radiometric dating back in Chapter 2, we’ll leave readers to explore Schimmrich’s TalkOrigins details at their leisure.  

(4) 1980. “Diluviology” was affirmed by commenting on a string of quotes which did not mention or support a global Flood but which he took to be supportive of it anyway. Along the way he mentioned fossil reefs; we’ll get to that later in the chapter.  

(5) 1981. The geologic column was decreed “Nonexistent.” While this may sound like Woodmorappe beat Froede et al.’s 2015 dismissal of the geological record to the punch by a generation, what this meant in Woodmorappe-speak was less momentous, only that all the geologic ages weren’t represented literally everywhere (apparently erosion doesn’t get to play). Glenn Morton noted in 2016 that even Woodmorappe admitted “All ten geologic periods are undoubtedly represented in the Swiety Krzys (Holy Cross) Mountains of southcentral Poland.” And because petroleum geologists were in the habit of drilling deep below ground in search of their product, rather than being restricted to just examining surface exposures, Morton was able to add more places where the full geological record was recovered just under our feet, layer on layer in the cores thus extracted, such as the Jurassic-Cretaceous Jiuxi Basin in China described by Q. M. Wang & Michael Coward in 1993, or the Williston Basin in North Dakota (and 300,000 square miles of thereabouts). The surface parts of the Williston and thereabouts have been examined extensively, at a major 1982 symposium and since. Glen Caldwell described the tropical climate there back in the Cretaceous (with datable volcanic ash layers), a landscape of seas transgressing on former hills, as had previously happened west in Montana, which back in the Jurassic was a sea rich with ammonites, described by Ralph Imlay. Press deeper in time, as Nancy Perrin did, and you encounter the Williston’s Devonian reefs and lagoons (related to the Bakken Formation with its shallow lakes that resulted in oil shales, described in further detail by David Petty in 2019). Charles LoBue covered the still older Silurian lakes beneath them, featuring “brachiopods, gastropods, pelmatozoan fragments [an older classification of certain echinoderms], tabulate and rugose corals and stromatoporoids” (an extinct clade of sea sponges). None of which resembled the present habitat of North Dakota or thereabouts.

And all a tale of plate movement. Richard Gibson described the Williston in 1995 as “a virtual casebook of basement tectonic features affecting sedimentation and hydrocarbon accumulations,” as ancient Archean (2.5 Ga) and Proterozoic (1.9 Ga) fault systems “were subtly reactivated during the Paleozoic” with effects the petroleum companies were pumping out to their profit (and climate changing along the way). Oh, and did we mention the asteroid impact back in the Triassic? The one at Red Wing Creek, which Henry Sawatzky spotted back in 1977, further explored by Nels Forsman et al. in 1996, and seen as “Evidence for a late Triassic multiple impact event on Earth” by John Spray et al. in 1998. Ed Murphy included that in a most informative 2016 video on the geological history of North Dakota from the Precambrian through to how the current Missouri River channel formed in postglacial times. Wherever you look, it seems the geology of our planet is vastly more involved than the Big Slosh cartoon would have it. Especially when they try to get detailed. As to when the layers that are found were laid down (pre-Flood, during the Flood, or post-Flood), Woodmorappe’s own speculative vagueness caught up with him fifteen years later when he had to pen some “Clarifications” in 1996 (our bold):  

I have been misunderstood by some authors. When I wrote my [1978] article on diluvian interpretation of ancient cyclic sedimentation, I assigned the Carboniferous coal-bearing rocks to the recessional phases of the Flood. But this was true of coal-bearing rocks, and was never meant to suggest that most or all Carboniferous is Flood-recessional. In fact, where Carboniferous is overlain by Mesozoic and/or Cainozoic (especially a thick mantle of the same), Carboniferous may be mid-Flood or even early-Flood. In my essential nonexistence work, I had toyed with the idea of some of the Mesozoic and Cainozoic being post-Flood, but never suggested that most or all of it was post-Flood.  

Well, gee, who could get confused by that, shunting deposits about as casually as shifting them to a fresh file folder? But then Warren Johns was still allowing for “the Flood/post-Flood boundary to be either at the end of the Carboniferous or at the end of the Pliocene/Pleistocene” in 1997. In 2003 Andrew Sibley “would broadly

agree with Woodmorappe and Oard on the geologically late Flood/post-Flood Boundary,” while in 2005 Oard was still sticking to their demise “early in the Flood,” even as Johns groused how “It would be highly unlikely for the many Chinese dinosaurs to survive a sedimentation rate of 12.5 m/hour for a period of 40 days or more, after which time they laid eggs and in a few cases saw their young hatched, only to be destroyed by another catastrophe!” And in 2007 Carl Froede castigated David Tyler for trying to place the Flood/postFlood boundary in the Triassic. Remember all this is coming from creationists, who Glenn Morton noted have come to fall all over the map as to what rocks were preFlood, which were actual Flood deposits, and which post-Flood. Because fossils are fossils and rocks are rocks, it was understandable for Whitcomb & Morris to have favored lumping virtually all of the geological record as Flood, treating the late Cenozoic as the cutoff point. But having so much of the almost-now as part of the Noah event hasn’t set so well with people like Snelling who have more than a passing familiarity with what data they need to flush down the Fountains of the Deep. Or perhaps they should realize the pitfalls of trying to sort the geological tangle so finely in what is an inherently unworkable model. Throw in the towel the way Max Hunter did in 2009: “there remains not one square kilometer of rocks at the Earth’s surface that is indisputably Flood deposited.” Or Carl Froede & Jerry Akridge’s sweeping understatement in 2013: “Assigning Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic sediments and strata to either Day 3 or the Flood creates inconsistency, conflict, and confusion when applied globally.” Back in 1981, though, Woodmorappe concluded with a much simpler and more familiar dogma sufficiently diaphanous to explain absolutely nothing (again our bold):  

I hope that diluvialists will recognise that the only sensible understanding of geologic phenomena is the recognition that the Noahic Flood was the cause of nearly all the Phanerozoic geologic column. To assign much of this geologic record to either the pre- or post-Flood does not make sense, either scientifically or scripturally. Of course, any and all problems should be dealt with by

research, not retreats to acceptance of the geologic column (or its speededup version).  

If you say so, John.  

(6) 1982. More quote-mine bits and comments appeared in his Diluviology 2 article, including geological overthrusts and additional claims on fossil reefs (hold on for them). But it was his list of “200 examples of fossils occurring in ‘wrong’ rock strata” that stood out from a methods angle. Here Woodmorappe was adding to a long tradition, from Marvin Lubenow on alleged “reversals in the fossil record” in 1977 to Duane Gish’s decades of writing on paleontology. But while Woodmorappe may have imagined this parade represented conclusive overkill, all it stood as was mere hype. Virtually all of the entries involved tiny spores, pollen, conodont teeth and such, which can easily get reworked in the course of erosion or warrant improved systematic placement as new examples were found. Which actually poses a significant problem for anyone trying to play the old hydraulic sorting game to wish away what’s found in the rocks, as Joel Duff noted in 2008, and Glenn Morton in 2016. It was revealing that only two of Woodmorappe’s examples were vertebrates. Just two allegedly out of place fossils culled from 300 million years of vertebrate fossil history. Really, we’re supposed to be impressed by that? Even then Woodmorappe wasn’t keen to supply details, identifying both only as “mammal bones.” Both were from 1970’s Russian journals unavailable even as abstracts at this writing, but that didn’t mean they were devoid of Source Methods clues to glean more of what Woodmorappe might be leaving out. The title of one paper concerned a genus of Asiatic beaver (Agnatocastor) so obscure absolutely nothing turned up about it online. But fortunately the paper itself isn’t needed to see the trick Woodmorappe was pulling. He gave its “Proper” age as the Late Tertiary, but reported this sample (just teeth, maybe?) had been found in the Early Tertiary. In other words, the fossil record of that busy little beaver had just been nudged back a bit in time. Wow, that’s a long way from a Precambrian rabbit (or beaver).[67]

The other paper’s title revealed it was about the mammalian fauna around the Kolyma River in Siberia, but mentioned no specific taxon up front, which meant that without the content it would be impossible to tell even what Woodmorappe’s example was, let alone how momentous its discovery would be for conventional stratigraphy. Again, though, Woodmorappe shot off his own factual foot with how he listed it. As with the beaver, he gave the “Proper” age of this unspecified “mammal” as Early Tertiary, while noting it was found in the “medial” Tertiary. Let’s get this straight, it is a shocking problem to find that a Tertiary mammal had lived on further into the Tertiary? Did Woodmorappe really want to try selling that? Or did he think his readers would never look? (Well, the creationists wouldn’t, but we couldn’t help ourselves.)  

(7) 1983. He examined “in great detail, how one flood accounts for the fact that different fossils are found in different layers of rock.” Apparently unmindful of his 1981 article disputing the geologic column, his “great detail” consisted of accepting that very layering of the fossils. While “Uniformitarians take the results of juxtapositional situations and imaginatively ascribe time-stratigraphic significance upon them,” Woodmorappe avoided all that gruesome specificity with a generalized pictogram depicting the layers arriving very fast. See, work done!  

(8) 1986. This piece on the “Antediluvian Biosphere” was purported to refute “anti-creationists who have claimed that the material found in the fossil record could not possible all have been alive on a recently created earth,” though the only “anti-creationist” he cited was Robert Schadewald’s criticism from 1982. Woodmorappe estimated the overall number of organisms that might have been involved in coal and oil, Paleozoic crinoidal limestones, and chalks from the Cretaceous and Tertiary, without recognizing what this might require in terms of depositional environment, or whether they could be consistent with what lay above, below, or beside them. One of Schadewald’s examples concerned the Permian Karoo Basin vertebrates from South Africa (which includes those therapsids, remember). To deflect that problem, Woodmorappe calculated a manageable “population density of 800 per hectare results if the supposed 800 billion Karroo vertebrates are evenly distributed over

Africa south of the Equator (i.e., 10 million km2 area).” So would those have been the only animals alive? Woodmorappe was sidestepping all the other vertebrates known to have lived in Africa, from the current crop people visit on wildlife safaris today, to the millennia of dinosaurs long before them, and the basal synapsida still earlier, none of which somehow ever got fossilized together (despite having supposedly perished in one and the same global Flood). As it happened, there were comments on the 1986 paper (which Woodmorappe’s summary never mentioned). Schadewald offered more criticism, as did Glenn Morton (still then a creationist, but already increasingly troubled by the airy nature of creationist arguments). Kurt Wise was the kicker, holding out the hope that “We may be able to reconstruct the biota existent at the time of the Flood’s initiation, as well as the geologic processes which occurred in the antediluvian world.” News flash from 2019: we’re still waiting.  

(9) 1990. Woodmorappe dived into biogeography, which we’ve already noted is a serious problem for creationist explanation. But Woodmorappe was nothing if not confident: “I explain why the animals on different continents are so different from each other if they originated from one point (Noah’s Ark, in the mountains of Ararat).” Written before YEC began to copy paleocontinental arrangements based on plate tectonics (YEC opposition back then included Glenn Morton in 1981 and Christoph Bluth in 1983), Woodmorappe had to account for animal distribution spreading out from Ararat with the present continental arrangement. He did so partly by being among the early adopters of post-Flood hyper-speciation, but most of his argument was a mixture of strained ad hoc rationalizations lubricated by wholesale data avoidance. He dealt with land vertebrates only, leaving out insects and invertebrates, along with all fossil forms, and birds and bats on the grounds that they could just fly to where they’re presently found (though you may recall from Chapter 5 the problems confronting Wise’s baraminology in 2008 regarding South American bat dispersal). To account for the highly specialized marsupials of Australia, along with an absence of common placental mammals, since the place can’t be reached by walking, Woodmorappe postulated they were taken by boat by attentive post-Noachian settlers. By 2017 that had

fallen out of favor, with Brian Thomas invoking lowered sea levels, though not with a great deal of detail, since even during ice ages there’s still a good fifty miles of open water to cover. That didn’t trouble Mary Jo Nutting blithely repeating the idea in a 2018 lecture (which PZ Myers recorded for posterity), imagining kangaroos hopping merrily from Ararat to Darwin without a hitch. Confessing she was “not an expert in biogeography” (!) Nutting deferred to husband Dave for calculations that all that could occur within a 400 year timeframe, punting to Jeanson’s Replacing Darwin for the raw data (good luck there). Woodmorappe, Thomas and the Nuttings all evaded the awkward coincidence of the marsupial fossil record on that continent (one which neatly correlates with the extant organisms there) by not discussing any of it. Karen Black et al.’s 2012 “The Rise of Australian Marsupials: A Synthesis of Biostratigraphic, Phylogenetic, Palaeoecologic amd Palaeobiogeographic Understanding” reviews the range of the data the creationists would need to account for. Regarding Madagascar’s comparably specialized lemurs and tenrecs, Woodmorappe imagined this island isolated off the east coast of Africa was for some reason a pivotal migration stop from Ararat for lemur lovers. And for South America’s fauna, Woodmorappe invented Pre-Columbian trans-Atlantic voyages to bring them there after the equally imaginary Tower of Babel language confusion episode.[68] If you say so, John.  

Bring on the Tropes 3: Overthrusts  

That Woodmorappe brought up geological overthrusts was especially rich. These are rock formations of an older age pushed by various means out over younger ones. Unsurprisingly, they’ve been puzzled over by generations of geologists before the advent of plate tectonics clarified one of the big driving mechanisms of rock slabs shunting over, under, or by one another. Woodmorappe was writing just as that plate tectonic revolution was kicking in, and so revealed more about how creationists weren’t figuring this out at their own end. He drew on only three 1970s papers by just two authors: two by P. E. Gretener, who studied the dynamic aspects of thrusting as conceived before plate tectonics, and D. P.

Rezvoy identifying whether a particular overthrust in the Alay Mountains of Kyrgyzstan (at that time part of the Soviet Union) represented thin overlapping layers (an “imbricate thrust”) or more isolated (“nappe”) segments (Rezvoy favored the former)—see Valentin Burtman’s 2008 review for a more modern take on the remnants of the Paleozoic Turkestan oceanic basin found around the Tien Shan region today. But Woodmorappe wasn’t dwelling on those technical details, or doing groundbreaking study to clarify the geology within the Big Slosh model. Instead it was his standard mode of selectively quoting what could be bent to serve his creationist ends. For example, Woodmorappe expressed wonderment at the sharp lines often found at thrust faults, and quoted part of Gretener’s 1977 abstract (what he left out we’ve put in bold):  

The following observations seem to have universal validity: 1. The contact is usually sharp and unimpressive in view of the great amount of displacement. 2. Structures which have been named "tongues" seem to be common. They are features where material from the overridden sequence is seemingly injected as a tongue into the base of the overthrust plate. 3. Secondary (or splay) thrusts are common. 4. Coalescence of tongues may produce pseudo-boudins. 5. Minor folding and faulting can usually be observed in both the thrust plate and the underlying rocks. The intensity of such deformations is normally comparatively weak, at least in view of the large displacements these thrust plates have undergone, and such internal distortions are strongly affected by the gross lithology of the rocks involved. 6. Late deformations, particularly by normal faulting, are present on many thrust plates. They should be recognized for what they are: post-thrusting features completely unrelated to the emplacement of the thrust plates.[69]  

So even at the time Woodmorappe wrote, geologists were identifying multiple factors that came into play in overthrusting, even as creationists weren’t having any of it. Curiously, Woodmorappe didn’t mention the classic overthrust poster child, the Lewis Overthrust in Waterton-Glacier Park (though it was discussed in Gretener’s 1977 paper). Straddling the CanadianAmerican border, the Lewis structure is a block of slightly metamorphosed Precambrian (Mesoproterozoic) strata that slid over

adjacent younger rock rather like snow sheeting from a roof when the region tilted in a spurt of plate collision and mountain building over the last 170 million years (including the “Rundle pulse” around 72 million years ago). Two sections edged down slope to end up as the Whitefish and Livingston/Lewis mountain ranges, leaving two intervening valleys, the Flathead and North Fork. This didn’t require especially rapid movement: over ten million years or so (and spread out in spurts at that) only around 1/3 inch (0.8 cm) a year would have been required, which is twenty times slower than the rate at which the Atlantic Ocean is widening today, measured over a decade at around six inches (15 cm/year) per Peter Doyle et al. in 1994. Over longer geological frames, say the 780,000 years since the last geomagnetic reversal noted by Kerry Sieh & Simon LeVay in their 1998 book The Earth in Turmoil, the Atlantic widening still averaged only 1.8 cm/year, twice the rate that would account for the Lewis Overthrust. Coverage of the Lewis Overthrust available when Woodmorappe and Morris were opining run from David Alt & Donald Hydman’s general review in 1973 to technical studies like Melville Mudge & Robert Earhart’s in 1980. Many researchers tackled the extent of the Lewis thrust sheet and its effect on the rocks, from Marc Bustin suggesting in 1983 there might be transitory hot spots produced by it, and Arie van der Velden & Frederick Cook on the seismic footprint of its movement in 1994, to Shimon Feinstein et al. striving to work out the dimensions of the original sheet in 2007, and Gregg Erickson in 2011 on the role dolomite and shale deformation played in the thrust sheet’s movement. Ultimately, thrust faulting occurs because of compressional décollement in orogenic belts, in turn the result of plate movements, and papers relevant to that regional aspect would include Dinu Pană & Ben Van der Pluijm in 2015 on mountain-building pulses, and Marco Martins-Ferreira in 2019 measuring ancient buried rift systems. The Lewis Overthrust as a creationist chestnut is one Ronald Numbers’ The Creationists tracked back to George McCready Price in the 1920’s, through the intervening creationist era of Walter Lammerts (1904-1996), on to John Whitcomb and Henry Morris founding Creation Science in the 1960s. It came up when Clifford Burdick & Harold Slusher wrote on thrust faulting in 1969, and Burdick touched

on it again in 1974. But the trope had its biggest spread from those reading Whitcomb and Morris, who exaggerated the Lewis range height in their 1970’s books, describing it as six miles thick when it was actually only several thousand feet—inaccuracies repeated parasitically by Scott Huse in 1997 citing Whitcomb. That mistake possibly stemmed from a confusion about the probable original thickness of the Lewis thrust sheet, or the Belt Supergroup of which it is a part (some ten miles thick in places, as noted by Mudge & Earhart in 1980), with what slices of it ended up as the visible peaks. Had any of them stopped to think about it, though, the numbers should have stood out as odd: adding another 31,000 vertical feet to a park elevation of 4,000 feet would have made the Lewis Range the world’s tallest mountains. The Lewis Overthrust has got sporadic creationist press since, with Bob Jones University’s 1979 textbook Earth Science for Christian Schools by Mulfinger & Snyder not alluding to it in its brief section on overthrusts. In 1985 Henry Morris begged off giving a detailed analysis of the reasons why he thought overthrusting in general was “mechanically impossible.” And when Niles Eldredge criticized creationists on the overthrust matter in his 1982 book (reprised in 2000), non-geologist Duane Gish simply didn’t respond to it in his 1993 Creation Scientists Answer Their Critics. By then Morris was off flailing a side issue (in a 1983 article, his 1987 book with Gary Parker, and the second volume of his 1996 series with son John Morris): whether the “pore-water pressure” theory of overthrusting was valid. Proposed by King Hubbert & William Rubey in pre-plate tectonic 1959, fractures in rock from water were suggested to have facilitated such slides. Though it turned out not to be a major factor compared to tectonic plate-driven movement, in particular cases pore-pressure has played a role, such as the Appalachian basin shales studied by Murat Aydin & Terry Engelder in 2014. Thrust faults have not been entirely forgotten by creationists, though. In 2013 Timothy Clarey partnered with Steve Austin, Stephen Cheung & Raymond Strom on pseudotachylytes. Those are finegrained glassy rocks that can form from shock and melting in seismic faulting (described in such papers Richard Sibson in 1975 and Håkon Austrheim & Theresa Boundy in 1994), intense landslides (per

François Legros et al. in 2000) and even impact events (reviewed by Bevan French in 1998). Clarey et al. were aware of those varied paths to pseudotachylytes, but had far more specific conditions in mind for two examples (our bold): “Data gathered from the Homestake Shear Zone supports rapid catastrophic Earth movements during the formation of the North American continent on Day 3 of the Creation Week. Evidence from the Pasagshak Thrust supports the subduction model of catastrophic plate tectonics, with the fault active during and after Noah’s Flood.” We’ve already seen how much geology conflicts with catastrophic plate tectonics. Let’s think through what Clarey et al. were trying to do with the Homestake Shear Zone. One rock formation is to be formed in a single day 6,000 years ago, while the other is divined to have occurred some 1,500 years later, more slowly but still in the range of a year or so. Let’s take the slow one first. The Pasagshak Thrust visible on Kodiak Island in Alaska involves volcanic rocks formed from the Jurassic to Eocene, but shaken up since by repeated earthquakes that forced late Cretaceous slabs over Eocene marine sediments—some of which Clarey et al. certainly knew about (as did Clarey solo in a February 2014 Acts & Facts article), since they cited Christen Rowe et al.’s 2005 paper identifying the ancient subduction thrust fault there, and Francesca Meneghini et al.’s 2010 work on the area’s history of mega-earthquakes. As the Meneghini paper noted, these represented “periods of voluminous sediment accretion that occurred in a relatively short time span: 10-13 m.y. for the Kodiak Formation and less than 5 m.y. for the Ghost Rocks Formation.” But 10-13 million years isn’t nearly short enough for Clarey’s needs, now is it, accelerating the process by millions of times. The creationists offered no evidence that this was even physically possible, let alone that it could generate the specific features observed today. Consider temperature and depth—papers like James Kirkpatrick et al. in 2012 connect the details of pseudotachylyte formation specifically to those constraints. The Meneghini paper specified these parameters for the Pasagshak formation (our bold): “The cataclasites belong to mélange zones that are regarded as paleodécollements active at 12-14 km depth and 230–260°C.” Furthermore, in 2014

Asuka Yamaguchi et al. found for some of the deposits “fluid-rock interactions at temperatures higher than 350°C.” which “is only achievable under conditions of coseismic frictional heating,” along with other sections that “exhibit no high-temperature signals,” suggesting those others were “formed by slow creep and intermediate strain rate deformation.” Over millions of years such a mix is hardly surprising, but over a Big Slosh rollercoaster of a year or two how can all that be happening at virtually the same time? Try baking a cake in the same oven where you’re storing fruit parfaits, and see how cool those stay. Jonathan Baker offered the same analogy in a 2015 post on the temperature constraints on hydrocarbon generation, asking “Can Young Earth Creationists Find Oil?” Those are culinary tricks the creationists should pull off in their kitchen first, before bringing their hypothesized Pasagshak combo dessert surprise to the table. Now for the fast one, the Homestake Shear Zone (HSZ) in Colorado, which according to the Clarey model took place on Creation Day 3. That’s 24 hours. The formation’s details and tectonic context for Homestake have been worked out in various works, some of which Clarey’s paper cited (such as Joseph Allen et al. in 2002 and Colin Shaw & Allen from 2007), others not (David Moecher & Zachary Sharp in 2004, more papers by Allen in 2005 and with Shaw in 2013, and Elizabeth Lee et al. in 2012). They are exposed Precambrian rocks involving eight fault zones stretching over 15 miles (25 kilometers), representing two separate events. The oldest rocks, about 1.7 billion years old, reflect very viscous flows taking place at 500°C or more (roughly the temperature of Venus). Toasty. Those rocks had some 300 million years to cool, though, before fresh deformation events produced the pseudotachylyte, generated at temperatures in the 350-450°C range, and another phase some 25 million years later occurring at a bit cooler 300-350°C. The creationist catastrophic model is now facing the problem of baking crystals at three different temperatures functionally simultaneously. Though strictly speaking, does temperature of formation carry much meaning in rocks supposedly called into existence by godly fiat? The baking temperature in naturalistic ovens would be irrelevant for cakes created ex nihilo. If they needed to

invoke a miracle for it, fine, but why appeal to physical evidence when it so counts against the model being offered? A puzzlement. The final example on our overthrust cavalcade is what may be the mother of all landslides, Heart Mountain in Wyoming. Around 49 million years ago a giant slab of the Madison Limestone (dating from the Ordovician into the Mississippian), some 1,600-feet thick and involving 120 cubic miles of rock, slid down what appears to have been a fairly gradual 2° slope (with implications for what physical mechanisms allowed such a thing). This broke into over a hundred mountain-sized pieces (“allochthons”), spread over 400 square miles, some involving movement of over 30 miles. The biggest blocks are five miles across, the most famous of which is Heart Mountain. Heart Mountain has featured in creationist apologetics at least since Clifford Burdick wrote on it in 1977. Michael Oard touched on it repeatedly (1996, 2006 and 2010), while Tim Clarey had actually done field geology there, penning regular technical papers on it in 1990 & 2012 (in which he accepted its Eocene dating, by the way, and attributed the movement to a gravity slide), but offering the full creationist Flood interpretation in 2013. Some background on how the current geological view of Heart Mountain developed. The region Heart Mountain lies in is tectonically interesting, with fragments of thrust faults round about, such as the Bannock Thrust Zone in nearby Idaho described in 1963 by Frank Armstrong & Earle Cressman (we’ll get back to that later). In 1970 Charles Hughes suggested a volcanic role in the Heart slide, though recall how that was before plate tectonics changed how geologists perceived moving landmasses. Most of the debate in the decades after that concerned what role gravity played versus volcanic uplifts and faulting (reflected in Clarey’s own science papers on it), and how much sediment remained on top during the process—there has been almost fifty million years of erosion and glaciation to buff the landscape. William Pierce (1904-1994) and Willis Nelson favored substantial sediment denudation in conjunction with a catastrophic gravity slide. Thomas Hauge and Edward Beutner (1939-2008) countered with a noncatastrophic gravity spreading model, with more overlaying sediments in place in the past. The particular features of calcite in the rock constrained which model was better, as John Craddock et al.

reviewed in 2000, concluding that “The presence of a chaotic arrangement of upper plate shortening strain axes can be attributed to a kinematic pattern of a collapsing, separating, and dispersing of numerous, independently moving allochthons, with some component of rotation.”[70] A geological funhouse, to be sure, but working out how the pieces interacted was a technical ping-pong match tailor made for Oard and Clarey to pit one against the other, once again supposing their Big Slosh rival could slip in and claim the explanatory high ground during the fisticuffs. Unfortunately for them, the scientists were persistent. Way back in 1933 Walter Bucher (1888-1965) suggested volcanic explosions were the propulsive cause of overthrusts, and by 1947 the Heart Mountain slide was being connected with the Absaroka volcanic province to the west of it (9000 square miles, and almost a mile thick). That idea continued to sink in as the plate tectonic revolution heated up. Although it was known that the Absaroka province was active for some 10 million years, a 1996 paper by Beutner & Amy Craven reported that most of the lava was erupted over a few million years starting just when the Madison Limestone slipped. Curious coincidence, isn’t it? By 2003, the catastrophic nature of the Heart Mountain slide was generally accepted, with Beutner & Steven DiBenedetto writing that the slippage was “probably initiated by a volcanic or phreatomagmatic explosion.” And since volcanoes have this pesky habit of generating heat, in 2005 Beutner & Gregory Gerbi homed in on what effect that might have had on those limestone rocks of the Madison formation, suggesting “that frictional heating led to dissociation of carbonate rock along the fault, producing supercritical CO2 as the suspending medium.” Quite high temperatures are involved in calcining of carbonates—some 800°C according to a 2010 paper by Mark Anders et al., who noted “The final result after 50 million years of curing time was a basal layer that has all of the characteristics of aggregate mixed with lime cement that has been poured into place.” Coupled with the intrusion of volcanic dikes, Einat Aharonov & Anders calculated in 2006 how the CO2 would increase the pore pressure at the interface of the strata (you remember that, from the Lewis Overthrust issue above). Dikes appear to have supplied a

trigger for the formation of White Mountain, an allochthon west of Heart Mountain. As described in 2009 by Craddock et al., the limestone had metamorphosed into marble before the emplacement event, which was a doozy of a slip. The Craddock paper reckoned it took place at 126-340 meters/second (that’s 280-760 mph), displacing nine miles in only about four minutes—many times faster than the Heart Mountain detachment, which Liran Goren et al.’s 2010 paper pegged at “tens of meters per second to more than 100 m s-1.” Oard and Clarey were aware of this work, which beefed up the case for quite rapid movement of the formations, but provided no support for that taking place during an inundating Flood. In fact, one of the papers Clarey’s 2013 piece cited peripherally was Anders et al.’s 2000 work on “Stratified granular media beneath large slide blocks: Implications for mode of emplacement,” which had found (our bold):  

Although many of the physical characteristics of these basal layers appear to be those associated with water-laid stream deposits, there is no direct evidence of fluid involvement. We interpret the sandstone-conglomerate–like material in the basal layer to be produced by mechanical sieving in a high-energy fluidized environment under a rapidly moving rock mass during a single catastrophic emplacement

event.

These

sandstone-conglomerate

layers

found

along

detachment surfaces may prove to be important in determining whether a detached block is simply a gravity slide or the upperplate remnant of a low-angle normal fault associated with significant crustal extension.  

We think that might be important, too. Yet Clarey never mentioned that part, though he did at least offhandedly acknowledge apropos Beutner & Gerbi’s work that “The formation of supercritical carbon dioxide seems to be an additional method to move carbonate-rich sediments rapidly.” We’re homing in on the Game-Set-Match of Heart Mountain. In 2015 Anders contributed to Thomas Mitchell et al. connecting observations with experiment to “suggest that the release of CO2 gases by frictional heating of carbonates is a viable mechanism to explain catastrophic emplacement of landslides that move for large distances on low-angle surfaces.” How many episodes were involved across the whole detachment is still understandably an area of debate (there’s a lot of rock to look at, and the contact layers are fairly thin).

A 2016 paper by Erika Swanson et al. offered “field, petrographic, and geochemical evidence for multiple slip events, including crosscutting clastic dikes and multiple brecciation and veining events.” Those intrusive fingers of volcanic rock provided more clues as to what went on, and in 2017 David Malone et al. homed in a little closer on the trigger, a “supersonic lamprophyre eruption, the root of which still has not been determined but is suspected to be upgradient west of White Mountain,” which initiated the slide 49.19 Ma. The White Mountain part pulled chunks of the erupted material with it as it not only slid eastward, but did a bit of a wheelie by rotating 35° counterclockwise as it went! Ironically, clastic dikes made it into Jeff Miller’s list of YEC evidence (#15), though not in a way that helped his argument. Miller relied entirely on a 1986 Steve Austin & John Morris paper that offered up 17,000 feet of Miocene sediment in the Split Mountain Gorge of California (part of the Salton Trough we mentioned earlier, where the Grand Canyon-carving Colorado River empties) and 14,000 feet of Cambrian to Cretaceous sediment in the Ute Pass Fault in Colorado (an extensive fault system that runs near Pike’s Peak). Austin & Morris claimed the Split Mountain strata had remained unlithified until “folded in the late Pleistocene,” while the Ute Pass rocks only got to be rock sometime after the “late Cretaceous Laramide” mountain-building event (that folding part would pick off another of Miller’s young earth items, #8). The geology of both places is interesting—a 2007 paper by Rebecca Dorsey et al. will get you started on the Split, while Christine Siddoway & George Gehrels spotting in 2014 a very old Neoproterozoic chunk of rock poking up in a section of the Ute fault will remind you of how deep the Deep Time is there. Though Austin & Morris proclaimed that “The fold geometry clearly indicates the strata were still in a soft, unlithified condition at the time of deformation!” the main sources they cited to document that, Geoffrey Woodard’s 1974 paper on Split and Glenn Scott’s 1963 one on the Ute, offered nothing attesting to their supposed unlithified history. And as to when all that was supposed to have taken place in actual dates (before or after 2,350 BCE), or how any of it managed to get lithified afterward in such haste, the creationists didn’t venture.

But then their conviction was not one even their fellow creationists were convinced of at the time (going by the appended comments), and apart from Morris repeating the argument in October and November 2013 articles for Acts & Facts (trotting out all the same older sources), nothing apparently has come of it in the creationist mill in the thirty years since. As we’re not going to get any closer to a creationist model for Big Slosh lithification, let’s put some perspective to the more ostentatious matter of massive chunks of real estate moving rapidly as they did in the Lewis Overthrust, Homestake and Heart Mountain cases. In coauthor JD’s stomping grounds, in the 1980 Mt. St. Helen’s eruption surveyed in works like Barry Voight et al. in 1983, nearly a cubic mile of rock shot across Spirit Lake at 155 mph, slowing to a leisurely 85 mph when it turned west after slamming into the far ridge, slopping then thirteen miles down the Toutle River in about ten minutes, removing the interstate highway at that point. None of that required a global Flood. And remember, that was, geologically speaking, a dinky eruption. We’ll leave aside far more massive burps, like Tambora in 1815 and Toba 74,000 years ago, or the Santorini/Thera blast in the Bronze Age that knocked the Minoans off their game and may have inspired Plato’s Atlantis legend (though it also gets dragged into the biblical Exodus narrative, see the Info Box  next page). What the Heart Mountain Detachment tells us is what a surface volcanic zone can do to the adjacent real estate by perfectly natural means. But we’ll conclude with two more examples brought up in a 2019 post on Heart Mountain by geologist Hobart King: Saidmarreh and Storegga. The Saidmarreh landslide in Iran described by Zieaoddin Shoaei & Jafar Ghayoumian in 1998 occurred on a high plateau around 10,000 years ago, when a nine-mile-wide slab of limestone, comprising some five cubic miles of rock with a surface area of sixtyfour square miles, slid over nine miles. The 2003 review of potential landslide dangers by Robert Schuster & Lynn Highland cautioned that such events are not nearly as rare as you might think. In coauthor JD’s Pacific Northwest, a cubic kilometer of land (the “Bridge of the Gods”) splashed down into the Columbia River in the mid-15th century, noted

by Thomas Pierson et al. in 2016. So check your neighborhood and sleep tight. While the Saidmarreh event involved a volume only 1% the size of Heart Mountain, marine landslides can easily reach or even surpass that. The Storegga slide is in the Heart Mountain class. 8,200 years ago, some 600-840 cubic miles of coastal shelf sediment off Norway dislodged in a seismic event. Lubricated by gas hydrates, the slide generated tsunamis washing up 12-90 feet on the land around the Norwegian Sea, described in papers by Petter Bryn et al. in 2005 and Bernhard Weninger et al. in 2008. To add to the knowledge, Stein Bondevik et al. in 2012 found mosses drowned in the disaster indicated the cold climate at ___________________________________________________________________

Santorini, Atlantis and the Exodus See the work of Walter Friedrich, Floyd McCoy & Grant Heiken, Marina Panagiotaki and Dimitris Sakellariou on the Santorini Greek eruption and its consequences. Dating has been critical and involved, with work like Felix Höflmayer and Sturt Manning suggesting the mid-17th cen. BCE, though Charlotte Pearson’s 2018 calibration study favors a mid-16th cen. BCE date that resolves many questions. It strains credulity to think the most spectacular eruption of that time could occur in the eastern Mediterranean without neighboring cultures like Egypt noticing, spurring Hendrik Bruins, Karen Foster, Robert Ritner & Nadine Moeller to correlate the physical evidence with Egyptian chronology. The Minoan-Atlantis connection surfaced in several popular books in 1969 (Angelos Galanopoulos & Edward Bacon, John Luce, and James Mavor), though historian Kenneth Feder remained skeptical even in 2010 (coauthor JD admits to having a soft spot for it, however). Regarding the Exodus angle, the argument runs that the ejecta and tsunami engendered the plagues and miracles of that story, argued most recently in 2015 by José Abril & Raúl Periáñez and Jürgen Schulze (coauthor JD has less of a soft spot on that one).   the time, as well as supplying a precise radiocarbon date. We won’t hold our breath on the creationists trying to slip these data into their

catch-all Big Slosh model. Bryn’s paper reminded that “Slides of similar type and size as the Storegga Slide have occurred in the same region on a nearly regular basis (100–200 ky interval) during the last 0.6–0.5 My, with a strong relation to the glacial–interglacial climate cyclicity and occurring mainly after peak glaciations.” And comparable slides have taken place elsewhere. The Ruatoria marine avalanche off New Zealand was another Heart Mountain/Storegga-sized landslide. Prompted by seamount subduction 170,000 years ago, it slid 40 km (25 miles) across the adjoining submarine trench fill, with a further “debris flow deposit projecting over 100 km” (62 miles) according to Jean-Yves Collot et al. in 2001. Now scale that up six times. That’s the mass involved in the slumps taking place several million years ago along the Agulhas Bank continental shelf off South Africa, over an area 470 miles long by 66 wide, reviewed by Gabriele Uenzelmann-Neben & Katrin Huhn in 2009. You may be getting the impression that the details of even the unabashed catastrophes of the geological past aren’t helping the case for the Big Slosh. Now let’s look into more of what’s been caught in such disasters. It’s more than moss. Whitmore thought he still had some cards to play regarding which fossils ended up preserved in the geologic record:  

If the fossil record has accumulated by slow gradual processes, like those that are occurring in today’s oceans, then the fossil record should be biased toward thick, durable shells and against thin, fragile shells. This was exactly the hypothesis that a recent paper tested. The authors used the online Paleobiology Data Base, consisting of extensive fossil data from all over the world and throughout geologic time. Contrary to their expectations, they found thin, fragile material is just as likely to be found in the fossil record as thick, durable material. A reasonable interpretation of this finding (which the authors did not consider) is that much of the fossil record was produced catastrophically! This finding supports the hypothesis that much of the record was produced rapidly, during the Flood.  

The paper Whitmore is referring to is Anna Behrensmeyer et al.’s 2005 “Are the most durable shelly taxa also the most common in the marine fossil record?” This paper looks at whether the most common

brachiopods, gastropods, and bivalves are the ones with the most durable shells. It should be noted that these fossils are extensive throughout the fossil record because of their (already) durable shells, so the paper was merely testing whether the less durable shells are as likely to fossilize as the sturdier ones. The authors, of course, propose explanations for why the shells fossilize in this manner: “taphonomic effects relating to durability are either neutral with respect to the shell durability factors in the groups we examined or compensated for by other biological factors (e.g., less durable taxa were more abundant in the original communities).” In other words, shells are liable to be captured by natural processes regardless of their size or comparative fragility, meaning paleontologists can reasonably regard what we see as a fair sampling, and not one skewed to just big or especially hardy shells. But in that 2005 paper (or in any of the other work by those scientists over the years), they totally forgot to mention how a global flood buried everything. Apropos shells, in his Trials of the Monkey book, Matthew Chapman (the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin) chided Kurt Wise’s attempt to explain the formation of a cavern, and what was found in it as fossils: “Kurt seems to want to have his cave and eat it too: a deluge so fantastically fierce it burrowed this vast warren out of solid rock in under a year, yet not so fierce as to pulverize the delicate twin-shelled brachiopod.” Which represented an irony for the whole Creation Science venture, as Chapman wrote: “Unable to resist the lure of science, creationists have been seduced into a rationalistic trap. Their attempts to explain miracles through science can only end in sorrow: a miracle explained is a miracle destroyed.” Miracles aside, creationists show how restricted their rationalistic limits are. The Behrensmeyer paper exemplified the scientific dedication to taking no expectations as unassailable, putting them to test, and revising or discarding them based on the evidence. Whitmore’s creationism, in contrast, involves selectively trawling the science work, while not even trying to account for the data in it. And we can see this by moving beyond these shelly examples to the rest of life, and not just of the lagerstätten class. It would be much more interesting if soft-bodied organisms were as extensive throughout the fossil record as those with hard parts. But

if everything got buried at once, then why are soft-bodied organisms so few? Why do several whole phyla of animals—such as placozoans, gastrotrichs, acanthocephalans—lack fossils altogether? (See Appendix 2 for a walk through the phyla and their fossil record.) Creationists accept taphonomic explanations when they can be bent in line with their beliefs, but reject those very same explanations when they conflict with creationist dogma.  

Bring on the Tropes 4: Polystrate Fossils  

Another reasonable expectation is that many organisms would be between the layers if all of them were laid down at once (leaving aside how all the fossil-bearing layers were even picked up to be deposited in the first place). We have no examples of a single organism being deposited between layers in that Big Slosh way, but creationists really want that to be the case. Enter the world of “polystrate” fossils. To start, paleontologists do not consider any fossils to be “polystrate”, in the sense of trees or animal remains extending up impossibly through more than one temporally distinct geological layer, or even mixed rock types that would have suggested significantly different deposition conditions. Tony Reed did a very tidy video in 2014 illustrating this, laying out “How Creationism Taught Me Real Science 04 Polystrate Trees.” Coined by Nicolaas Rupke in 1970 (just as he was sliding away from creationism, a tale recounted by Ronald Numbers), that creationist connotation may have contributed to “polystrate” never catching on as a standard geological term. ”This makes it difficult for the uninitiated to find conventional literature about these fossils,” noted Andrew MacRae at TalkOrigins, which creationists have made the most of when it comes to internet searches. John Morris, Eric Hovind (still cribbing his dad’s old posts), Tas Walker and John MacKay come up among the first entries these days. Further search by the masochistic will turn up many other familiar creationist writers expounding on the purported mystery of polystrates, including Joe Deweese & Bert Thompson, Bob Enyart, Michael Oard & Hank Giesecke, Jeff Miller (#2 on his list), and Jonathan Sarfati.

The critical MacRae in 1997 and Don Lindsay in 2009 have supplied short internet summaries on why polystrate fossils have never been a problem for conventional geology, and how creationists have mistakenly thought otherwise. The creationists assume that these must have been buried rapidly, which is actually the case. But they also believe that the geological “evolutionist” alternative is that these trees were buried gradually over thousands of years. The geological facts are very different. The most obvious buried forests to account for are ones caught up in volcanic events. Yellowstone National Park is the classic example here. A supervolcano, with a massive caldera forty miles wide, atop a magma plume that has generated disastrous eruptions over many millions of years in the landscape that happens to be above it as the tectonic plate slides along. For some basics on mantle plumes and supervolcanoes, there’s Kent Condie’s 2001 book on them, articles by Ilya Bindeman and Joel Achenbach, and obviously lots of technical work, such as Matthew Jackson & Richard Carlson’s 2011 paper on flood basalt genesis, and Hsin-Hua Huang et al. specifically on “The Yellowstone magmatic system from the mantle plume to the upper crust” in 2015. To say the least, the effects are dramatic. Pyroclastic flows will incinerate biota close by, while the dissipating edges will leave stands of stumps now and then, as well as depositing uprooted trees far and wide. That may last long enough for some regrowth to occur, only then to be buried by subsequent ash falls layer on layer, long before the stumps could have a chance to erode away. William Fritz set out that mixed model in a 1980 paper, with reactions pro and con by Gregory Retallack and Richard Yuretich. By the time creationist Arthur Chadwick penned “A paleoecological analysis of the petrified trees in the Specimen Creek area of Yellowstone National Park, Montana, U.S.A” with Tetsuya Yamamoto in 1984, it was clear that “The model proposed by Fritz (1980) permitting some transport of wood and plant remains from different habitats appears at present to offer the best explanation for the observed data.” Not that all creationists have thrown in the towel, from Harold Coffin (1926-2015) and John Morris in the early days of YEC, to a 2008 posting on “Petrified Forests in Yellowstone” at Answers at

Genesis that spared their readers the perils of source checking by not including any. Things get more interesting when it comes to how creationists tackle forests buried by processes under than strictly volcanic ones. Many of these involve giant lycopsid (or lycopod) trees of the Carboniferous, which were buried upright in such places as Joggins in Nova Scotia. The basics of their burial was worked out in the mid 1800’s by Canadian naturalist John Williams Dawson (1820-1899), who was a Christian who balked at Darwin’s evolution in several books (especially for humans), but accepted and used the principles of the uniformitarian geology then being pioneered. Dawson therefore recognized how such trees were buried rapidly, reasoning in 1855  

It is evident that when we find a bed of clay now hardened into stone, and containing the roots and rootlets of these plants in their natural position, we can infer, 1st, that such beds must once have been in a very soft condition; 2ndly, that the roots found in them were not drifted, but grew in their present positions…  

There is evidence that some of the Carboniferous trees partially buried underwent subsequent natural growth, though, as Robert Gastaldo noted in 1992 of fossil horsetails, and in a 2004 book chapter he coauthored on the lycopsids and ferns from a peat forest. We would suggest this is extremely rude and tenacious behavior for vegetation ripped up and buried during the Flood. Further evidence of their in situ origins are the fossilized root structures (stigmaria), and since that represented their burial in place, Harold Coffin strenuously denied their existence in the 1960s. But then Coffin had, to say the least, a strange view of science generally. In a 1967 article on “Deception through Science!” for the Adventist The Ministry magazine, he fulminated how “Satan Gladly ‘Uses’ Science,” and illustrated this with how Satan as talking snake deceived Eve wandering around in the Garden of Eden. When Nicolaas Rupke (still in his YEC mode) disputed the reality of stigmaria, he garnered stiff push back from Laing Ferguson (19352013) in 1970. But time and the science marched on, even among creationists. David Tyler recognized in situ roots in some Jurassic plants in 1994, though Michael Oard managed not to notice that in

1996 while trying to pin down “the Flood/post-Flood Boundary,” even while citing Tyler’s paper, as Glenn Morton dryly noted in 2016. Today there is no argument over the reality of prehistoric fossil forests, reviewed by William DiMichele & Howard Falcon-Lang in 2011, and stigmaria provide yet more clues regarding the biology of ancient plants, such as Alexander Hetherington et al.’s 2016 paper on “Networks of highly branched stigmarian rootlets in the first giant trees” (reaching heights back then of over 150 feet). Comparable work has been done on the Joggins deposit, from what lived in its tropical rainforest ecosystem to how it was formed. Recent papers we’ve tucked in our references include those by John Calder, David Carpenter, Howard Falcon-Lang, Brian Hebert, Robert Holmes, Alessandro Ielpi, and Michal Zatoń. The picture is one of an environment unlike that of modern Nova Scotia, with plants and animals representative of their time, 310 million years ago, occasionally buried in the wash of sediment driven by understandable natural sea level surges. And what could cause that? Plate movements for starters. We know that sort of thing happens in the current world, such as the many buried forest traces described by Roger Hart in 1997 along the Cascadia subduction fault off the coast of coauthor JD’s Washington. But there’s another factor involved, one that requires pulling together the geography and climate of the time (which of course the creationists avoid doing). The Gondwana supercontinent sprawling over the southern hemisphere resulted in coal forests north in the tropics, and glaciation in the mass of land around the South Pole. As Christopher Cleal & Barry Thomas described it in their 2005 paper:  

The forests were initiated as a major palaeotropical habitat through a combination of a fall in sea levels due to the growth of polar ice, and an influx of large quantities of clastic sediment onto the newly exposed continental shelf. Continued movement of the component plates of Pangaea during the Late Carboniferous and Permian resulted in uplift and increased sediment-input, causing parts of the wetlands to be drained, thereby destroying the edaphic conditions necessary for the growth of the wetland dominant plants  

Followed eventually by deglaciation. That meant water moving back in, of course, disrupting the habitat with immense consequences for animal life, described in 2010 by Sarda Sahney et al.’s “Rainforest collapse triggered Carboniferous tetrapod diversification in Euramerica.” While amphibians were devastated, early amniotes found the drier conditions just what their adaptations favored. At times the influx of water was gradual, but sometimes not. Recall what happened towards the end of the Pleistocene glaciation in the Northern hemisphere, that string of glacier-dammed lakes that carved out canyons and even affected the climate. So how likely was it that comparable giant glacial lakes formed behind impermanent ice dams as that glaciation phase wound down? Setting the stage for Missoula-style floods, except running northward down Gondwanan drainage basins that could have been as vast as the Amazon or Mississippi today. Not the Big Slosh, but more than sufficient to bury forests now and then at the margins when the water flows. Some examples have already been identified in the Paleozoic. A 2002 paper by Romana Begossi & Jorge Della Fávera spotted signs of a Jökulhlaups event in the Paraná Basin of Brazil back in the Early Permian. And in 2016 Allen Archer et al. suggested “Cataclysmic burial of Pennsylvanian Period coal swamps in the Illinois Basin: Hypertidal sedimentation during Gondwanan glacial melt-water pulses.” That Archer paper surfaced ever so briefly in Warren Johns’ lengthy 2019 Answers Research Journal discourse on “The Challenge of Fossil Forests for Creationist Research,” one of several sources listed but never cited (Johns inexplicably clumped the sources into two separate lists, a “Bibliography” and “References”). That not tidying up boded poorly for his coverage of the geology, as Johns darted around many of the classic examples (Yellowstone and Joggins). With considerable understatement, Johns acknowledged creationists had fallen behind the science investigation curve, but nonetheless held most fossil forests to have been formed in the Flood, though permitting a pyroclastic role in two rather notable spots: “the Yellowstone and Mount St. Helens trees were buried in water-laid deposits containing large amounts of volcanic-eruption sediments.” We may imagine one can view the water of Spirit Lake being moved and vaporized by the St. Helens eruption as somehow the

dominant factor rather than the pyroclastic flow doing the moving, but that’s a strained rationalization that misses the point. Even more incongruously so for the Yellowstone caldera, a mega-volcano that makes St. Helens seem like a grade schooler’s baking soda eruption display. Such are the dictates of Flood Geology, which requires water at all costs. Johns was willing to concede that  

Currently, the two fossil forests with the highest probability of being autochthonous are the Junggar Fossil Forest of western China in the upper part of the Jurassic and the Hindostan Whetstone Quarry with its accompanying evidence of lycopsid root and rootlet growth in the Lower Pennsylvanian of southern Indiana. Those two fossil forests mark either the end of the Flood or its beginning if the forests are confirmed in future studies as being in situ.  

Do they now? That Whetstone matter referred to the Illinois Basin the Archer paper was accounting for by Gondwanan glacial runoff, but Johns didn’t specifically cite any papers here, which required a dive into his source References and Bibliography to glean more of the data. On the Indiana case, a 2009 paper by William DiMichele et al. would seem pertinent, “Catastrophically Buried Middle Pennsylvanian Sigillaria and Calamitean Sphenopsids from Indiana, USA: What Kind of Vegetation Was This?” What kind indeed, as the place reflected an ancient coastal ecosystem filled with presently extinct plant life, buried over a few years by mud surging in. The presence of those Sigillaria lycopodiophytes, looking like tall bottle brushes, and giant sphenopsid horsetails, reflects a prehistoric environment Johns made no attempt to incorporate into any hypothetical pre- or post-Flood context—was Indiana even in the same place 4,500 years ago? We’ll get back to Sigillaria shortly, because of what can happen to lots of that plant squashed and baked for a few million years, but there’s more to explore regarding the background of Johns’ bringing up the Hindostan Whetstone Quarry. While there was indeed such a place in Indiana (active in the 19th century as a source of cemetery headstones), the one paper in Johns’ references with “Whetstone” in the title was a 2009 one by Stanislav

Opluštil et al., which noted how the “Whetstone Horizon” has come to refer to rocks of a particular structure, not a localized time or place. Opluštil described it this way: “In its typical development, the Whetstone Horizon represents a complex of primary volcaniclastics and reworked volcaniclastics mixed with siliciclastic material.” That’s not sounding very global floodish, is it? There was also a subtle geographical hint in the title to suggest dwelling on Indiana as an isolated outlier might be misleading (our bold): “peat-forming forest preserved in situ in volcanic ash of the Whetstone Horizon in the Radnice Basin, Czech Republic.” We’re a long way from Indiana now, and no closer to 4,500 years ago. And Johns’ visit to the Junggar Basin was even a slower boat to China, due to the information in the works Johns cited along the way. The large tree stumps with extensive root systems shown in a 1990 paper by Cleavy McKnight et al. were presumably too obviously in situ for Johns to argue the point. But Johns definitely glossed over the paleoclimate implications of other papers he had in his references. Juliane Hinz et al.’s 2010 reconstruction of the Junggar fossil forest had described the sequence of changing environments shown by the strata:  

The lower part of the formation shows a change from alluvial floodplains, with lowto-high sinuosity channels to low-gradient alluvial-paludal settings with shallow lakes and ponds, minor shallow channels and crevasse splay sands. The upper part starts with an identical facies, but ephemeral channels and caliche layers also occur. Further upsection, the facies changes distally to a paludal-lacustrine setting and proximally to minor meandering channels. The top part of the Shishugou Formation contains ephemeral alluvial floodplains with caliche, sheet floods, lowsinuosity channels and crevasse splay sands (Eberth et al. 2001).  

Shun-Li Li et al.’s 2014 paper (whose content Johns made no reference to) related the place to even broader climate factors:  

In the Early to Middle Jurassic, the warm and wide Tethys Sea generated a strong monsoonal circulation over the central Asian continent, and provided adequate moisture for Junggar Basin. Coal-bearing strata of the Badaowan, Sangonghe, and Xishanyao Formations were developed under warm and humid palaeoclimate

in Junggar Basin. In the late Middle Jurassic, Junggar Basin was in a semi-humid and semi-arid environment due to global warming event.  

A 2015 paper by Jingeng Sha et al. (which Johns did not have in his references) correlated the Junggar data with the effects of our planet’s slow axis wobble and Earth-Mars orbital resonance, along with the lingering impact of high CO2 levels due to the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP) that had triggered the mass-extinction at the end of the Triassic and began opening up the Atlantic Ocean as Pangaea fragmented. That’s a bit of a stretch to account for in the Flood, we think. Now Johns is welcome to try and cram all that into the few centuries of the pre-Flood or post-Flood world, but he’ll have more than just atmosphere, volcanos and plants to take account of, courtesy of many other works on the paleontological finds of the area. We must suppose Johns was aware of the plethora of animal life known from those formations (including dinosaurs and early mammals). We must suppose so, since he didn’t think to mention any of them. And yet we know they were there, because the paleontologists found them. Let’s take a walk-through. In 2004 Michael Maisch et al. described the remnant temnospondyl amphibian that showed that group had survived into the Jurassic following the mass extinction occasioned by that CAMP volcanism. In 2006 Xing Xu et al. found (our bold) “A basal ceratopsian with transitional features from the Late Jurassic of northwestern China.” A 2011 paper by Hans-Ulrich Pfretzschner & Thomas Tütken drew attention to the desiccation cracks in dinosaur bones there, features (our bold) “quite distinct from radial microcracks, which occur during fossilization under aquatic conditions.” They noted that (our bold) “Similar patterns of desiccation cracks are present in recent goat bones and Upper Jurassic dinosaur bones from the Junggar Basin. This allows to infer that the dinosaur bones were deposited under dry conditions, which is in agreement with other palaeoclimate proxy data.” Zhihuan Qin et al. added one more piece of the mosaic in 2019, finding an alvarezsaurian showing yet more variation in the limb anatomy of that enigmatic theropod. Now we’re faced with a stampede of creationist conundrums. How could fossilization occur at all apart from the Flood? Wasn’t it all supposed to be cataclysmic and wet? And speciation and variation on

top of that. How many kinds of temnospondyls and ceratopsids are there again? And having come off the Ark, where are they now? While no problem for evolution, the Junggar offers a factual road so littered with spiky data that we can practically hear Johns’ creationist juggernaut blow its tires. We’ll leave the creationist polystrate theme park with a whale of a tale—literally, as it involves a baleen whale supposedly fossilized vertically by its tail. Now that would be something, provided it were true. Unfortunately, a lot about it was fuzzy. Darby South’s account in a 1995 TalkOrigins post reported:  

According to museum staff at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History in Los Angeles the whale that started this particular piece of folklore in 1976 still remains in its cast on a flatcar in one of the GREFCO diatomaceous earth quarries as a result of lack of the money and space needed to curate it. Currently, it is rumored to have a small tree growing in it. If this story is true, the story of the ‘whale found on its tail’, in addition to being completely false, has a sad ending.  

By then a swirl of fringe creationists were waving the Lompoc Whale as a challenge to evolution, but without slowing down to check their facts. South reported that it was the Miocene strata that had been tilted in that tectonically active area, not the whale embedded in it, and those “lack any sedimentary structures that would indicate catastrophic deposition. Rather, the strata exhibit laminations indicative of slow accumulation on an anoxic bay bottom.” Furthermore, work like Hans Schrader et al. in 1980 discovered “identical sediments are currently accumulating without the involvement of a Noachian-like flood,” and South clinched the logic chain with Craig Smith et al. from 1989, and their 1991 follow-up paper by Peter Allison et al, who’d found “a partially buried, articulated whale skeleton slowly being covered by sedimentation in the deep ocean off the coast of California.” Enter Andrew Selling. In 1995 he accepted that the fossil had not been buried vertically, and confirmed South’s point about the whereabouts of the remains (adding some photos of the quarry site). But he held the line against the non-catastrophic model South summarized, bounding around regarding diatom deposition rates, which his own sources (S. E. Calvert 1966, John Compton 1991 and

Robert Thunell et al. 1994) indicated varied significantly from place to place, from a few centimeters to many meters in a thousand years. Other research, such as the global silica estimates offered by David Nelson et al. in 1995, have done nothing to change that picture. For all that, Snelling ended up not attributing the formation to the Big Slosh: “In the biblical framework of earth history the Monterey Formation and its diatomite beds would be regarded by most as being deposited during the post-Flood era in a local catastrophic event. Prodigious outpourings of silica-rich volcanic fluids would have provided ideal conditions for gigantic blooms of diatoms to flourish in the shallow waters adjacent to the then western U.S. coastline.”[71] What exactly that “western U.S. coastline” looked like 4,500 years ago Snelling declined to specify. In fact, aside from the hilariously compressed timeframe, how was his solution notably different from the uniformitarian model Snelling’s own source of Compton had laid out? Volcanism accompanied a “rapid” regional subsidence 15-18 million years ago, with sedimentation rates quadrupled in the late Miocene into the early Pliocene. By then “the adjacent Santa Ynez Mountains were uplifted, and during a late Pleistocene tectonic event, much of the California borderland was uplifted and reorganized.” That’s when the Sisquoc Formation was laid over the Monterey Formation, during which that baleen whale breathed its last. Subsequent tectonic activity folded, tilted and uplifted the rock to the spot where Snelling could take his photos. But in all these “prodigious outpourings”, hadn’t Snelling forgot something? Or, rather, someone—namely the Native American peoples who had come to live there. There’s a large body of archaeological and genetic data on that done since 1995, papers by Ted Goebel, Bastien Llamas, Matthew Magnani, Ugo Perego, Anna Roosevelt, Theodore Schurr, Michael Waters, and their many colleagues—none of which will be any easier to incorporate into the Big Slosh mythology. And remember what that entails: descending apparently at breakneck pace from Noah and the kids only 4,500 years ago, Snelling’s hide the demography model implicitly required them all to have embarked on an Olympic sprint to populate not only Lompoc (roughly 12,000 miles from Ararat), but all of the Americas. And let’s not forget a little impediment in the way: the Bering Strait. The

ancestors of all Native Americans had to wait for ice caps to form lickety-split to drain the sea level down to the point where the path would be passable, after which they high tailed it all the way to Terra del Fuego. Or maybe even less than 4,500 years ago. Tim Clarey burbled on “The Ice Age and the Scattering of the Nations” in 2016 (our bold):  

The timing of the Ice Age was no accident. Michael Oard calculated that the glacial maximum and the simultaneous maximum drop in sea level could have been achieved within 500 years after the Flood from high ocean temperatures and a late-Flood and post-Flood period of intense volcanic activity. The timing coincides nicely with the ‘division’ of the earth that occurred during the days of Peleg.  

This scenario suggests the Americas were being populated only after around 1,800 BCE, though that date falls some 400 years after the traditional 2,200 BCE time of Peleg (a name which simply means “Division”) mentioned only once in Genesis 10:25 & 11:16, and with nothing whatsoever on catastrophic plate tectonics. Make no mistake that creationists are perfectly serious about rewriting the Old Testament to retrofit their cataclysm, though, from Larry Pierce in 1999 to John Morris & James Johnson in 2009. Andrew Snelling & Bodie Hodge wrote a whole chapter on “Did the Continents Split Apart in the Days of Peleg?” for The News Answers Book 3 in 2013. The spectacle of some of Noah’s descendants racing along beside steaming and plunging oceans (which must have been fun for any of them deciding to canoe their way across) and freezing glaciers screams for Michael Bay to do an IMAX flick. Though for cultures that apparently took some notice of the geological phenomena happening around them (as Ruth Ludwin & Gregory Smits noted in their 2007 study “Folklore and earthquakes: Native American oral traditions from Cascadia compared with written traditions from Japan”) we can’t help wondering whether any of those populating Lompoc were noticing the Santa Ynez Mountains lunging up in their midst. Maybe we should pull the Peleg project. We still have plants, and rock, and volcanic ash. What to do with them all?  

Moving Violation: Coal Formation  

Back in 1985, when Henry Morris was still relying on Nicolaas Rupke, the creationist notion of the uniformitarian model of coal formation was that it involved peat bogs gradually transitioning into coal seams. But by that time, as Arthur Strahler noted in his 1987 critique of creationism or Cesare Emiliani covered in his 1992 roundup of geology, the science had moved on, recognizing the part the larger environment played, especially in deltaic wetlands and tropical rainforests. A big factor in how coal forests originated and then how they declined was the role of lignin. Though that complex polymer appeared convergently in seaweed, as a 2009 paper by Patrick Martone et al. found, it was their development in land plants that provided the strong woody scaffold of trees from which coal eventually formed. And although around 300 million years ago several species of fungi in the orders and Polyporales had evolved the enzymes to digest lignin, a 2016 paper by Matthew Nelson et al. showed “Delayed fungal evolution did not cause the Paleozoic peak in coal production” because the wet conditions as Pangaea formed provided an ideal habitat for forest growth (though by no means as “wet” as John Whitmore imagined in a 2019 paper, supposing “Pangea would have assembled about midway through the Flood, and it would ___________________________________________________________________

Heretic Matt Leisola Leisola’s background was in protein engineering (we’ve included a 2007 paper by him in the references), and his conversion to Christianity was highlighted in Jonathan Sarfati’s 2010 interview with him for Creation magazine. Sarfati never discussed any YEC geochronology dogmas with him, nor did any of the coverage by YECer Dan Reynolds or David Klinghoffer, & Evolution News in 2018 occasioned by his book Heretic with Jonathan Witt. That volume was a superficial retread of ID talking points, especially via Steve Meyer and Jonathan Wells, with no indication Leisola was even passingly familiar with contemporary paleontology beyond what they claimed about the Cambrian Explosion (such salient

biology topics as endosymbiosis or gene duplication were not addressed). Though Heretic steered clear of most YEC themes, one favorite (dinosaur soft tissue) briefly surfaced, and the Finnish version of Wikipedia’s 2019 entry on him noted assorted creationist connections, including a 2006 interview for the Finnish magazine Nuotta. In that, Leisola (1) deemed evolution “a heresy” and recommended YECer Marvin Lubenow for the rejection of natural human origins. He then (2) flipped off the Big Bang with “There are a number of scientists who do not see it as a credible explanation for the findings” (whom he did not identify). He said he knew (3) “a Christian Christian [sic] geologist from the United States who has researched the Grand Canyon strata in Arizona. According to radioactive assumptions, strata assumed to be young are as old as strata estimated to be hundreds of millions of years old.” Leisola may have been reluctant to name names, but we’ll nominate Steve Austin. Those three strikes put him out, but he went for YEC overtime with this (our bold): “Huge quantities of fossils and fossil fuels (coal and oil) indicate major natural disasters. The flood report gives a credible explanation for these phenomena. The Bible also speaks of dinosaurs and dragons. I haven't seen them myself, but stories about dragons suggest that someone is.”   have been mostly underwater”). Under those conditions, tree growth kept well ahead of the many microbial modes of degradation. But Pangaea is long gone, and under present circumstances those lignin-processing fungi are more than up to the task of rotting trees away before they ever have a chance to get buried and cooked into coal by the accumulating pressure of whatever rock might settle above them. Which is why coal seams don’t form easily today. Many recent works have clarified this fascinating lignin story. Jung-Ke Weng et al. contributed papers in 2008 and 2010 on the convergent origins of lignin biosynthesis in plants. In 2011, Daniel Eastwood et al. found “The Plant Cell-Wall Decomposing Machinery Underlies the Functional Diversity of Forest Fungi,” while Dimitrios Floudas et al. worked on “The Paleozoic Origin of Enzymatic Lignin Decomposition Reconstructed from 31 Fungal Genomes” in 2012. The

range of the biology was expanded in 2014 by Robert Riley et al.’s “Extensive sampling of basidiomycete genomes demonstrates inadequacy of the white-rot/brown-rot paradigm for wood decay fungi,” and in 2018 Iván Ayuso-Fernández et al. found further “Evolutionary convergence in lignin-degrading enzymes.” Incidentally, plant lignins and their degradation constitute an enigma in the view of Finnish Young Earth creationist Matti Leisola (see the  Info Box), coauthoring a paper on this in 2012 with Ossi Pastinen & Douglas Axe in the Intelligent Design camp (with some laudatory thumbs up posts by Ann Gauger). Appearing in BioComplexity (which journal Leisola just happened to edit), the paper rather boldly declared “Considering its massive abundance and its high energy content (40% higher than cellulose, gram for gram), it is striking that no organism seems to have tapped it as an energy source.” What, fungi are supposed to burn lignin, like little furnaces? Actually they do, in a sense, spurred by glucose oxidase and like molecules (which the organisms had available in their metabolic kit). In a 2012 Evolution News post, though, Leisola objected further to the idea that a bacterium (Comamonas) might have developed that knack too, as reported by Yue-Hui Chen et al. regarding “kraft lignin” (a noxious sludge produced as waste byproduct in paper making, and therefore something with commercial value should bacteria be able to digest it on an industrial scale). Leisola admitted that  

The resulting monomers can be used by some bacteria as energy and carbon sources, but only to a limited extend [sic]. In particular, bacteria that produce peroxidases and laccases (to protect themselves?) can use the monomers as an energy and carbon source but can do nothing with the resulting condensed and repolymerized lignin, or with the highly polymeric lignin found in wood matrix.  

Alas, the bacteria seemed rather indifferent to Leisola’s limitations. By the time Jing Duan et al. wrote their paper on “Kraft Lignin Biodegradation by Dysogonomonas sp. WJDL-Y1, a New Anaerobic Bacterial Strain Isolated from Sludge of a Pulp and Paper Mill” in 2016, half a dozen bacterial species had been found to do that, from ones in soil to several found in “the guts of wood feeding insects.” But back to the saga of coal formation.

Remember old Sigillaria? A 2009 paper by Jun Wang et al. delved into its Asian biogeography in “Confirmation of Sigillaria Brongiart as a coal-forming plant in Cathaysia: occurrence from an Early Permian autochthonous peat-forming flora in Inner Mongolia.” And (no surprise) there were yet more instances there of interbedded volcanic tuff. That was the case too with that Radnice Basin that Warren Johns sprinted past in his 2019 paper. In particular, Stanislav Opluštil et al. authored a detailed analysis of that fossil forest in 2014, which Johns also had in his sources, but without alluding to any of that volcanic stuff. Which is understandable, given the implications it has for what is supposed to have happened during the Big Slosh. The Radnice is sandwiched between several coal beds, and as many volcanic ash layers, but the specific evidence of that slice is even more problematic for the creationist model. As described by Opluštil in a graphic, an “intact coal forest colonizing peat swamp of the Lower Radnice Coal” was partially buried in ash and then later “completely covered by tephra,” followed eventually by a shallow lake “produced by compaction of peat under volcanic ash load.” Over time more “unconsolidated tephra washed down the valley from surrounding” highlands, after which a fresh “peat swamp (Upper Radnice Coal) re-established over the Ovčin coal deposit after lake filling by sediments.” Think about that. If coal requires the catastrophe of the Flood to produce, and can be made in no other way, if the Radnice dates before the Big Slosh, how was the coal below it made? And if it dates after the Flood, how then to account for the coal above it? And if all the coal there was made during the Flood, how then can the detailed stratigraphy of the Radnice be accounted for, including all the airborne volcanic tuff interspersed there? Creationist myopia on volcanic ash appears to be as pervasive as the volcanic ash. They simply don’t think to look. For example, a 2019 video by Viced Rhino dived into to the problem while dissecting creationist biologist Timothy Standish’s “Creator Revealed” show. Standish casually waved a Permian coal seam in Australia (Sydney Basin) as refutation of radiometric dating (claiming radiocarbon was often found in coal). We’ve been around that racecourse already back in Chapter2, but the fun comes as Viced tracked down the 2003 technical papers on that deposit (Paul Carr et al. & Paul Grevenitz et

al.) that didn’t back up Standish’s claims. Worse still, the scientists had determined that it had taken something under 12 million years for the “airfall tuffs” resting atop the coal to have accumulated. Such tuff questions were not surfacing in Whitmore’s book chapter, of course. Instead, he sought to end run the problem by proposing the ease of rapid coal formation (our bold):  

The extensive coal beds we find throughout the world may have also been the result of pre-Flood floating forests that were destroyed and buried. Coal has been produced experimentally in the laboratory from wood and peat. Most of these experiments have used reasonable geologic conditions of temperature (212– 390°F, 100–200°C) and pressure (to simulate depth of burial). These experiments have succeeded in producing coal in just weeks of time. It appears time is probably not a significant factor in coal formation. The most important factors appear to be the quality of the organic material (peat), heat, and pressure (depth of burial).  

The idea that coal can be formed quickly has been a trope of long standing in the creationist literature. Andrew Snelling & John Mackay were linking “Coal, volcanism and Noah’s Flood” in 1984 (and no, they weren’t coming to grips with how all that volcanic ash had come to clutter up so much of the Big Slosh). Snelling was still holding out hope for it when asking “How Did We Get All This Coal?” in 2013, and Brian Thomas’ “How Did Coal Seams Form?” in 2020. Whitmore’s Answers chapter hit all the desired buttons in condensed form. While Whitmore concluded that time is not a significant factor in coal production, a look at the three studies he cited on attempts to create natural-style coal in the laboratory (William Orem et al. in 1996, Arthur Cohen & Alan Bailey in 1997, and Suping Yao et al. from 2006) shows they made no such claims. Nor has any of the follow-up literature suggested they had, including Orem’s own 2003 review of coal formation with Robert Finkelman. In fact, one of those citing the 1996 Orem paper, Bat-Orshikh Erdenetsogt et al. in 2010, took pains to remind readers how much remained still to be understood, precisely because such experimental tests could only reproduce stages of the process, not press up authentic coal in one laboratory go. These scientists are attempting to model how coal forms naturally by subjecting peat and other organic materials to high heat and

pressure—conditions, by the way, not occurring either on Earth’s surface or in the ocean but within rock layers. For coal to form naturally, time, organic matter, heat, and pressure are all involved. There’s even the absence of inorganic ash in natural coal to account for, investigated by Raphael Wüst et al. in 2008. And a 2010 paper by James Hower et al. traced the varied occurrence of fungal activity in coal (another clue that natural coals were not being produced in laboratory-scale time frames). All this is well understood among geologists, and is not only misleading for creationists to imply otherwise, it’s evading the parameters of their own model. The reality is far from their “reasonable geological conditions” because of the environment the Big Slosh demands: water. While an ocean of it can generate enormous pressure by depth, heat is another matter. Even scalding hydrothermal vents dissipate their temperatures so quickly that a menagerie of organisms can live around them without frying. How the flood waters were generating the heat and pressure together, sufficient to turn organic matter into coal, is not explained by creationists. It’s not that they’re unaware of the problem. William Worraker and Richard Ward have been trying to calculate the thermal load implied by Genesis Flood models in several papers recently, though they’re facing a daunting task. As Worraker conceded in the abstract of a 2018 paper, “Preliminary estimates for granite suggest that this radiogenic heat load would be overwhelming without the operation of a powerful in situ cooling mechanism which has yet to be identified.” Back in Chapter 2 we saw how Andrew Snelling failed to pull the accelerated radioactive decay rabbit from his cavitation hat. The hope that cavitation might generate canyon-carving gyres burbled up in the creationist canon, such as John Morris in 2012, and in 2017 Jonathan Sarfati tried that more modest trick, though without examining whether the result would actually resemble the Grand Canyon rather than a hit or miss gouge piled with debris. One head-scratcher in Sarfati’s attempt: drawing on David Flannigan & Kenneth Suslick’s “Plasma formation and temperature measurement during single-bubble cavitation” and Detlef Lohse’s commentary for the power of cavitation effects, Sarfati insisted “Noah and the Ark were safe” even while acknowledging the briefly toasty micro-temperatures attending the operation: “as high as 15,000 Kelvin

(~15,000°C; 27,000°F), about 2.5 times hotter than the sun’s surface,” sufficient to damage modern metal propellers but apparently benign for gopher wood barges even as coal was getting baked somewhere. And what is that about floating forests? Robert Gastaldo traced the roots of the idea back in a thorough 1999 essay on coal formation and how creationists didn’t understand it. As you might expect with creationism, the culprit is George McCready Price. In 1923 he imagined vast rafts of vegetation were ripped up in the Flood, to be deposited and squished into coal afterward. But the more grandiose idea that living forests were existing in pre-Flood floating mats is more recent. Suggested by Steve Austin (under his then pseudonym of “Stuart E. Nevins”) in 1976, by 1987 Henry Morris & Gary Parker were enthusing “His model, still in the developmental stage, already explains many features of coal that the swamp model cannot explain. Even more importantly, his theory—a real scientific breakthrough—is the first ever to be used to predict the location and quality of coal.” Yet when Paul Taylor and Henry & John Morris touched on fossil fuels in their tomes in the mid-1990’s, Austin’s “scientific breakthrough” was nowhere to be found, not even in Austin & Wise’s 1994 paper pinning the pre-Flood boundary to the Precambrian prior to Kingston Peak in Death Valley (a Neoproterozoic deposit reflecting the glaciation going on in the Cryogenian Period 700 Ma).[72] Joachim Scheven picked up on the floating forest idea in a 1996 piece, “The Carboniferous Floating Forest—An Extinct pre-Flood Ecosystem,” but it was Kurt Wise putting his oar in the antediluvian waters in 2003 to paddle the floating forests across the Noachian finish line. And like Whitmore, Snelling’s 2013 paper promoted Wise’s retooled version. Steve Austin got back into the fray in 2018 with a pair of papers with Roger Sanders, a “Historical Survey of the Floating Mat Model for the Origin of Carboniferous Coal Beds” and another insisting that “Paleobotany Supports the Floating Mat Model for the Origin of Carboniferous Coal Beds.” Since Wise’s “The pre-Flood floating forest: a study in paleontological pattern recognition” picks off the salient pseudoscientific claims, we’ll focus on that. Laden with paleontological jargon guaranteed to sound ever so impressive to the creationist

audience, it’s quite a hoot. We’ve highlighted the especially juicy bits in bold:  

The first appearance of higher plant taxa occur in an order strongly correlative with the order of evolutionary branching predicted from published cladograms. The higher plant taxa represent a strong stratomorphic series. The probability that this pattern could be arrived at randomly is so low as to suggest that an explanation is required in the young-age creation model. The synapomorphy sequence of plant cladograms is consistent with a character trend up the cladogram towards increased resistance to dessication (or increased terrestriality) and is highly correlative with the stratigraphic order of both first appearance and maximum diversity. It is proposed that the Flood destruction of pre-Flood floating forest biome would explain this data. In a fashion analogous to the plants of a quaking bog, it is suggested that the floating forest biome grew out over the ocean through an ecological succession of rhyzomous plants of steadily increasing size generating and thriving upon an increasingly thick mat of vegetation and soil. It is suggested that the plant succession from open water inward began with horneophytes, and continued with a sequence of rhyniophytes, zosterophyllites, and progymnosperms. This was followed in turn by a full forest biome including herbaceous lycopods and ferns on the forest floor, seed ferns in the understory, and arborescent sphenophytes and lycopods making up the canopy. It is also suggested that living in the floating forest was a succession of animals (the Paleozoic ‘land’ animals). This would have included the large Paleozoic insects as well as the Devonian aquatic tetrapods (like Ichthyostega) in pools on thinner portions of the forest floor and a wide variety of large amphibians (including the labyrinthodonts) on the thicker sections of the forest. Not only does the Flood destruction of the floating forest explain the first appearance and maximum abundance order of fossil plants and animals, it also explains the strong association of Paleozoic plants with marine sediments and how the pre-Flood world could support the plant biomass represented in the Carboniferous coals. It also incorporates the pre-Flood floating forest theory of Joachim Scheven, and the floating logmat theory of Steven A. Austin for the origin of coal. It is further suggested that the residual catastrophism of the post-Flood period prevented the restoration of the antediluvian floating forest biome and resulted in the extinction of most of the Paleozoic plants and ‘land’ animals.  

Let’s break this down. Without skipping a beat, Wise started off with what must rank as one of the most astounding concessions in all of creationism: he acknowledges the entire Paleozoic evolutionary sequence! In the conclusion, he even wrote (our bold), “Evolutionary theory suggests that land plants evolved from marine green algae and that land animals evolved from marine fish. The first appearances of fish, amphibians, and reptiles as well as the position of morphological intermediates between fish and amphibians are in exactly the order predicted by evolution.” Ah, but what one creationist hand might giveth, the other taketh away, for in the very next statement he proclaimed (our bold): “Statistically examined, the first appearance of higher plant taxa is too consistent with an evolutionary branching order to be explained by randomness.” How does that make any sense? How does evolution predict a certain order while at the same time have it repudiated by its allegedly random character? (Spoiler alert: evolution is not a random process.) Further, how does one conclude that data fits a prediction too well? Is that not the point of predictions? Such argument is worthy of Lewis Carroll, especially since Wise was trying to stuff his White Rabbit (or craniates) down a waterlogged rabbit hole. Wise is claiming that the series of plants in the fossil record (which according to him matches evolution exactly) came together to form floating forests, which range from subcontinent to continent size according to the paper. The smaller Ordovician and Silurian plants were the first to aggregate followed by the increasingly larger Devonian and Carboniferous plants. Later, insects and the first tetrapods somehow colonized these forests. All the while, these plants are in the open ocean. Oops, we’ve just fallen off our seat. How plants acquired enough freshwater to support this chimeric ecology is a complete mystery. Especially when all Wise proposed to account for it was this (our bold): “I would like to suggest that the floating forest biome may have floated atop marine waters and may have generated a fresh-water water table in the mat.” May have? Given the ease with which creationists have been known to complain when evolutionists let slip a “may” or “perhaps” in

their hypotheses, we feel compelled to put our foot down and demand more than that. But how terrestrial plants were converting saltwater to freshwater under these conditions is, unfortunately, an amazing biological feat (one essential for his argument) not explored by Wise. Something else that wasn’t explored by Wise: those Silurian horneophytes and zosterophyllites, and Devonian rhyniophytes and progymnosperms, which he dangled in his opening summary. Being extinct early vascular plants, sorting out their phylogenetic relationships have depended on improvements in their fossil record, reflected in work like Peter Crane et al.’s 2004 “Fossils and plant phylogeny” and Borja Cascales-Miñana et al. “An alternative model for the earliest evolution of vascular plants” in 2019. Wise spared us a look at their baraminology by not offering any. In fact those first three groups were never mentioned again, and the fourth only peripherally, as Wise sucked the air out of generations of creationists who had relied on “hydrodynamic sorting” to explain away the fossil record. This is truly amazing to read, and not just because Wise used one of coauthor JD’s favorite words (sessile). Pay special attention to what we’ve put in bold:  

Given that vascular plants are sessile, it can be assumed that differential mobility and differential intelligence did not produce any part of the fossil record pattern we see. An examination of the major features of vascular plant fossil record suggests that hydrodynamic sorting is not responsible for the firstorder pattern. First, arborescent forms with secondary wood are separated in the fossil

record

according

to

their

higher

taxonomic

classification

(Progymnospermopsida vs. Gymnospermophyta vs. Magnoliophyta) and not buried together and separate from herbaceous forms as one might intuitively expect with hydrodynamic sorting. Second, although one might expect the pitch-laden gymnosperms to float longer than angiosperms, the opposite order is seen in the fossil record. Third, one might expect that understory plants such as herbaceous lycopods and ferns would be grouped together in a particular stratigraphic level, whereas these groups are scattered through virtually the entire fossil record of vascular plants.  

Wise’s only option in the face of this fossil reality is to smoosh the whole shebang together into his polyglot continent-sized floating forests. But while his attribution of the order of plant appearance being

due to an increasing resistance to desiccation might seem to accommodate the range of Paleozoic plants, this does not explain the distinctive distribution of either Mesozoic or Cenozoic plants that he certainly was aware of. In the fossil record, the first angiosperms (flowering plants, the relatives of the modern magnolia), appear long after the first gymnosperms (conifers, cycads, and their relatives). What is the explanation for orchids and roses appearing so much later in the record? Remember that creationists claim virtually all fossil-bearing strata appeared at once, and Wise is trying to pull the same trick with his magical floating forest canopy, which by the way he described to Steve Austin in a 2008 AiG article (“Sinking a Floating Forest”) as his “crazy idea.” We must agree. Surely, no one is going to claim that a petite flower is more desiccation-resistant than a mighty pine tree! Oh, but Wise does. He places Magnoliophyta (the magnolias and their relatives) as one of two most desiccation-resistant plants for this reason: “flower increases water-independence in fertilization by further protecting the embryo.”[73] What on Earth? The flower is a very sensitive organ and only makes up a small portion of the total plant, especially in magnolia trees. The part of the plant that is most relevant when discussing desiccation would be the trunk and the roots, since those make up most of the tree. Wise’s explanation, devoid of biological and ecological context, is nonsensical, or a “crazy idea”, we’ll go with that. Now for the Bigger Picture. Given what we’ve learned of Gondwanan paleogeography and climate, what Wise offered in 2003 proved to be ostentatiously wrong (our bold):  

As powerful as these fossil record explanations are, intuitive expectations of evolutionary theory do not so easily explain why the stratigraphic order of maximum diversity should also be consistent with evolutionary branching order or how Carboniferous coals could be so widespread and so often interbedded with marine sediments. Nor does it provide explanation for the rhyzomous nature of arborescent lycopod 'roots' which do not seem as if they could penetrate traditional soils.  

Wise does not provide any citation for the lycopod roots that do not seem able to penetrate “traditional soils,” still less that his hypothetical floating forest habitat was more suitable in that regard. You may refer back to Hetherington’s paper we noted earlier on the “Networks of highly branched stigmarian rootlets developed in the first giant trees.” Whether early coal forest giants like the Lepidodendron lycophytes growing a hundred and fifty feet tall (with root structures twenty feet across and interlocking with their neighbors in denselypacked groves) may be thought of as suffering from wimpy root systems would seem a moot point if Wise’s floating forest alternative was not itself tenable. And you don’t even have to take our word for it. Guess who also has dumped on the idea. In 2016 Tim Clarey & Jeffrey Tomkins accepted that fossil lycopods didn’t support the floating forest model after all, and their 2017 Acts & Facts article recommended abandoning it. Just how “crazy” does a creationist idea have to be for Clarey & Tomkins to dis it? Sanders & Austin didn’t like that at all, and doubled down on the argument in their 2018 paper with a response dripping with evasive wordplay (our bold):  

Clarey and Tomkins (2016) argue that arborescent lycopsids were rooted in rich clay soils of coastline swamps. We believe that the lycopsid’s rhizomorphs were incapable of growing through even dense peats or peaty soils. Scheven (1996) and Woolley (2011a, b) have already pointed out that the bottlebrush arrangement of the appendices attached at radiating right angles (see also Frankenberg and Eggert 1969; Hetherington et al. 2016) suggests that the rhizomorphs were suited to water not soil, analogous to roots of modern aquatic plants.  

While the creationists Scheven and Joanna Woolley certainly wanted those radiating appendices to imply a “watery environment” in the floating forest sense, the only technical research Sanders & Austin cited apparently hadn’t got the memo. Julian Frankenberg & Donald Eggert’s paper was half a century old, but the Hetherington work reflected modern understanding. Though briefly alluding to “the waterlogged conditions in which these trees grew” (think mangrove swamp), at no point had Hetherington et al. (who also cited

Frankenberg & Eggert) suggest in any way that these giant plants inhabited anything other than a terrestrial soil system. Nor was there any intimation of an aquatic option in Hetherington’s 2017 paper with Liam Dolan on “The evolution of lycopsid rooting structures: conservatism and disparity.” And finally, we want to leave with one more gem from the introduction of Wise’s paper (our bold):  

Somewhat paradoxically, it has been common for creationists on the one hand to reject any claimed order in the fossil record and on the other hand to claim that the order in the fossil record can be explained by Noah's Flood. Sometimes both of these claims can be found within the same work. To explain any order which is admitted, one or more of four theories are usually invoked: differential mobility, hydrodynamic sorting, differential flotation, differential intelligence, and ecological zonation. Unfortunately, some combination of these claims can be utilized to explain any order (or lack thereof) that could ever be imagined for the fossil record. As a result, ad hoc appeal to such theories does not provide adequate explanation of fossil record order.  

Hurray, something else to agree on. In one fell swoop Wise has washed away the arguments of his fellow creationists (from Whitcomb & Morris to Austin and Snelling) far more completely than the Big Slosh ever has. And it shows how little progress Flood Geology explanations have made even under their own rather leaky Ark roof. Carl Froede & Jerry Akridge expressed similar chagrin in 2013, acknowledging how, “As an organized scientific pursuit, the development of diluvial geology has advanced very little over the course of several decades.” Before we bid adieu to the Creation Science world of fossil fuel origins, we can’t overlook several episodes pertaining to how they believe oil originated and how far they’re willing to go in pursuit of their vision. On the theoretical side, Andrew Selling asked “How fast can oil form?” in 1990, and that bubbling crude of optimism has seeped through the extremely porous creationist mythology chain, such as Tim Clarey on “Oil, Fracking, and a Recent Global Flood” in 2013, down to the Eric Hovind subbasement, parroting the undocumented claims of his dad Kent, as Paulogia & Logicked dismantled in a 2019 video.

Meanwhile, there was good old fashioned hucksterism, as Donald Wise recounted in 1999 of the efforts of Harold “Hayseed” Stevens (1938-2003) to find oil in Israel. His Ness Energy company was joined in 2000 by the Zion Oil & Gas company, explicitly founded to use Flood Geology—a potential double whammy, prove the Bible and make money at it. But putting their money where their mythology was has not proven a road to riches—that is, if its only petroleum you’re looking for. Stock trades are quite another matter. Shady stock manipulation plagued Ness Energy, but that escalated with Zion, as Mariah Blake reported for Mother Jones in 2008 (our bold):  

Zion is a legitimate wildcatting venture, with respected geologists on its board of directors. Still, some of its activities are questionable. The firm was first brought to wide attention by Hal Lindsey, host of the prophecy-focused TV show The Hal Lindsey Report and coauthor of the best-selling The Late Great Planet Earth. Lindsey has bet very publicly on Brown’s company, telling his viewers in March 2007 that “Zion Oil right now is on the verge of discovering oil,” a sign that “we are really on the very threshold of Lord Jesus’ return.” Around the same time, he touted the company in his column on the popular conservative website WorldNetDaily, saying, “Zion Oil has sunk eight exploratory wells, all of which have shown signs of oil and gas” (it has, in fact, sunk just one), and suggesting Israel’s oil “could rival that of Saudi Arabia.”[74] What Lindsey neglected to mention was that he and his relatives own millions of dollars of stock in the company. In 2002, John Brown gave Lindsey a gift of 50,000 shares, worth $337,500 at today’s price. Ralph Devore, Lindsey’s cousin and a director of his ministries, controls nearly 725,000 shares, worth about $4.9 million. Devore was also a founding member of Zion’s board and was at one point hired to promote the company.  

Ka-ching! Readers may not be unduly surprised to learn that as of this writing Zion Oil & Gas has failed to turn up diddly in the way of pumpable oil, as reported in an updated 2019 posting at RationalWiki. Just how long this has been going on may be seen by stepping back to 1981, when Ronald Reagan was President and the Apocalypse was on Hal Lindsey’s Any Minute Now calendar. Henry Zuidema took a look at some examples of “Creationist Field Research” then going on, during which he recounted the saga of the Institute for

Creation Research’s foray into applied creationist geology. Since it bumps into several locations and issues we’ve covered in this chapter, it’s worth quoting in full (our bold):  

Another challenging task was undertaken by the Institute in its investigation of the Bannock overthrust complex, which extends along adjoining corners of Wyoming, Utah, and Idaho. Mapping of rock outcrops in the area by the U.S. Geological Survey and various universities for over half a century shows widespread faulting along mountain fronts with strata pushed up and over other strata, this causing a doubling-up of the normal rock sequence in comparison to what is in adjacent undisturbed regions. The rocks involved are millions of years in age and more recent strata are found buried beneath overthrusts of much older formations. This set of conclusions on overthrusts conflicts with the opinions of many creationists, including Professor Harold Slusher who teaches physics at the University of Texas-El Paso and who is head of the physical sciences department at Christian Heritage College, of which ICR is a division, and Clifford Burdick, who has been the advisor on geology for the Creation Research Society and was a consultant for, but nonparticipant on, the ark expeditions. Assigned to the Bannock project, Slusher and Burdick, together with John Morris and Frank Baxter, proposed that the overthrusts and, in fact, the whole geologic column were the misconceptions of faithless stratigraphers in an attempt to support a sequence of evolutionary deposition over vast eras. To some creationists, such as John Morris, there was a destruction of preexisting strata during a worldwide flood, hence a mixing of sediments and their fossils. All this happened just prior to the Ice Age. Therefore, if they could prove that the Bannock overthrust, with attendant implications, did not exist, then evolution would be deprived of a major support, since fossils would lose their significance. The four researchers were not pioneers in this venture. The same ground had been covered by George McCready Price, a "scientific" creationist of another generation, whose text, The New Geology, has a place in history as a classic example of pseudoscience. The initial step in investigations such as these is to consult the literature of previous projects in order to determine what others have already done. Maps and reports were available that could have led the explorers to key areas, such as Monticello Canyon in Utah. There was no need to accept them as authority, but they did indicate where best to search.

Published reports of the ICR Bannock investigation in the November 1974 Acts & Facts, and elsewhere, suggest a hasty reconnaissance of a small part of the overthrusts region in the Wasatch Mountains near Ogden, Utah, and the Heart Mountain area in Cody, Wyoming. The research team reported some evidence of very rapid deposition of strata with an absence of thrusting or sliding. Yet there were inconclusive results, which will necessitate that some factors be rechecked. Major oil companies, impelled by current energy needs, subsequently invested millions in stockholders' money in the costly venture of deep drilling in order to reach oil and gas which geologic maps suggested could be deeply buried beneath the overthrust. If creationist doubts proved to be valid, would the investments be misspent? Or would geophysics save the oil seekers from metaphysics? The drillers penetrated ancient sterile strata, which thrust faulting had forced atop more recent petroliferous rocks. They were guided by the recovery of rock fragments and microfossils that have been identified in other oil and gas reservoirs. The result? They struck it rich with the discovery of new fields in both the Rocky Mountain (including the Bannock) and Appalachian thrust belts. The geologic column still stands.  

Can there be a more glaring demonstration of the uselessness of Flood Geology that real petrochemical companies never for a moment consider relying on it to find new resources? And that anyone who thought to do so brought on only gushers of failure and corruption? We could contend this petrochemical example alone demonstrates how the creationist mindset is inextricably mired in the mud of their own useless Flood Geology. Recounting his own creationist backstory in 2016, Glenn Morton recalled his experience working in the old industry, and how confronting the physical evidence of the rocks forced him to face the problems with the YEC model. He also knew eight other Institute for Creation Research alumni who worked in the petroleum field as he did. Not one could name any Flood Geology claim that turned out to be true. And for those who might what to rub salt in the wound, it turns out the creationists supply that, too. Earlier we noted that Whitmore had bumped into the Messinian Salinity Crisis in his Answers chapter. But he didn’t mention it by name, nor address the technical issues we laid out. Instead, it was another sidebar windup for the creationist explanation of something else: salt evaporites.

 

A Pinch of Salt  

The presence of salt in the sea and in precipitated beds has been a staple of creationist apologetics (such as Frank Sherwin 2010 and Snelling et al. 2019), and made it to Jeff Miller’s 2019 cavalcade as item #10, so it was understandable that it would make it into Whitmore’s Answers chapter. Things appear straightforward on the surface (our bold):  

In other words, they picture a large basin of seawater (like the Mediterranean Sea) being enclosed and sealed off from the surrounding ocean. The confined salt water evaporates, forming a thick deposit of salt on the bottom of the basin. Conventional scientists have recognized that this model is fraught with many paradoxes and unresolved problems. Recently, a new theory of salt formation has been proposed that overcomes some of these difficulties. This theory points out that salt is not very soluble at high temperatures and pressures. These situations are common near deep-sea hydrothermal vents. The authors cite examples from the Red Sea and Lake Asale (Ethiopia) where these situations exist and are associated with abundant salts. Several times throughout the paper, the authors cite that rapid deposition of the salt with accompanying rapid sedimentation rates are necessary conditions for the salt to be preserved. If the salt is not rapidly covered, it will dissolve back into the seawater when the conditions change.  

So, let us take this in parts. First, evaporites generated in the Messinian manner is just one of a number of methods by which evaporites form, but still a major way, as the very paper Whitmore cites regarding the “new theory” (Martin Hovland et al.’s 2006 “Salt formation associated with sub-surface boiling and supercritical water”) points out: “Solar evaporation of seawater has long been established as the main process for the formation of salt deposits; mainly halite (NaCl) and anhydrite (CaSO4).” We’ll remind readers also of the 2019 Dubure paper we mentioned back regarding the MSC, where this very process appears to have been involved in the Mediterranean desiccation. Nor was this restricted to the 4,500 years posited in Whitmore’s creationism. In one

of a pair of 2018 follow-up papers on the dynamics of hydrothermal salt production, Hovland et al. reminded that (our bold) “the supply of energy and the availability of seawater during billions of years in the Earth's history make deep salt and brine production unavoidable.” Since Whitmore brought their 2006 work up, though, perhaps we should look at exactly what their “new theory” proposed. It rested on “five main prerequisites”:  

(1) a source of seawater or brine, (2) a heat source of geological origin, i.e., a magma chamber (T