The next chapter of Coyne’s book is on vestigia, atavistic throwbacks, embryonic recapitulation, topped off with alleged screw-ups in the so-called process of intelligent design.
Let’s start with this last item, since we should be able to dispense with it in a paragraph or so. The structure of this argument is strange, in that Coyne is trying to disprove the existence of automotive engineers by showing that carburetors can get gummed up. The reason Coyne falls into this trap is that he is failing to interact with the entire creationist narrative, which is creation and fall. The point is not that everything about the world is perfect in every way, but rather that the universe exhibits design everywhere we look, even in those places where some of the features of that design are busted. Their bustedness is part of the narrative, so finding examples of it doesn’t refute anybody or anything. Paley’s argument from the watch could still work even if we found a watch that wasn’t ticking. The argument could still work even though the watch wasn’t. But Coyne says:
“Perfect design would truly be the sign of a skilled and intelligent designer. Imperfect design is the mark of evolution; in fact, it’s precisely what we expect from evolution” (p. 81).
Imperfect design is also something we would expect to find in a created and fallen order.
When it comes to vestigia (like the appendix) or atavisms (like whale legs or human tails), there are two ways to engage with the argument. One is to deny that the data is being represented fully, fairly or accurately, and the other is to grant the data and point out that it doesn’t necessarily mean what is being claimed for it. I would want to reject the idea that God put a bunch of false leads into the created order so that He might test our faith (p. 85).
Creationists do not have a problem granting that variations (some of them significant) can occur over time within the classification of “kinds” (Gen. 1:21). Take the lowly skink, for example. Out of all of the skinks, some have legs, some have no legs, and some have various kinds of in between thingies. If our father Noah took no more than two skinks on board the ark, there is no problem whatever caused for any thinking creationist by the appearance or disappearance of legs in any of the descendants.
One example of atavism that Coyne cites is that of the whale leg. “About one whale in five hundred is actually born with a rear leg that protrudes outside the body wall” (p. 64). My first method of doubt mentioned above would want to ask questions — how far outside the body wall does it protrude? Five centimeters? On a whale? Should we call it the leg pimple? Why just one leg? Did they hop? Those bits of bone you found inside it, what are the grounds for identifying one bit (just centimeters long) as a whale tibia, other than that it fits with the “just so” story you are telling?
Reasonable questions, but let’s move on to the second approach to evolutionary skepticism. Remember the skink. Some whales do have a pelvis (which has a function for them), but not the function that our pelvis does. Suppose that whales are not descended from really big cows of some sort, as the evolutionary theory demands. Suppose they are descended from other whales, identifiable as such, that used to have flippers in the rear? Suppose whales got tired of being taken for sea lions? or walruses? and so they pulled a skink? If you ask me to prove my hypothesis, I will point proudly to this five centimeter flipper bump. See it flapping?
Embryonic recapitulation is a weird one, because it seems like a odd dependence on something that doesn’t really prove anything. The slashes on the side of a human embryo look like the slashes that turn into gills on a fish, but on us they turn into our head and upper body instead. Even on evolutionary assumptions, what would be the point (as in, survival advantage) of having each embryo of every living species go through a historical reenactment of the history of all life heretofore? Is it like having kindergarten kids dress up like Pilgrims at Thanksgiving? Is our time in the womb some kind of evolutionary Heritage Days?
My last comments will be addressed to vestigia, things that are still hanging around but which we have not discovered a function for yet. You can have your appendix taken out, and appear to be no worse for it, which we could not say about the stomach or the pancreas. So why wouldn’t we assume that the appendix is a left over from days gone by? Here are a couple of brief responses. First, it could be vestigial. Remember that the creation is fallen. Maybe the appendix was something we needed when we were still eating from the tree of life. Second, remember that medical science is still in its infancy. Most of what is going on in the body is still opaque to us, and so I would be leery of pronouncing on anything like this. The fact you can take an appendix out and not have the patient keel over dead is certainly suggestive of something. But perhaps we don’t know the whole story yet.
But the place where modern scientific hubris really kicks in is with the whole subject of “junk DNA.” and “dead genes” (pp. 66-73). How long have we even known about DNA? Since April of 1953, which means that our knowledge of the existence of DNA is two months older than I am. For pity’s sake! It is as though a couple archeologists discovered that the library of Alexandria didn’t really burn down, because they found the whole thing buried under sand, got into the first chamber, read two books, and declared the rest of the library worthless. They knew it was worthless because there were countless languages in there that they didn’t understand. Just a bunch of gibberish. For an example of some of the pronouncements that ought not to have been made about this, you can check out the book trailer here.
One of the things my friend Mitch Stokes likes to emphasize is the importance of true skepticism. Reading a chapter like this just underscores that point.
Doug, Ironically, while the appendix is supposed to be a so called “vestigial” organ, it does have an important function. It serves to sample contents of the small intestine to check it for foreign and dangerous bacteria as it passes into the large intestine. So, while not critical, it is an important part of our body. What’s really funny, is that we don’t technically need our spleen, or our atria of our heart. But they (evolutionists) never use that argument…mainly because we know now why it’s rather useful to have those parts. We could live without lots of things, a… Read more »
At the Scopes Trial, Horatio Newman (a zoologist) had a prepared statement read into evidence. In it he said, “There are, according to Wiedersheim, no less than 180 vestigial structures in the human body, sufficient to make of a man a veritable walking museum of antiquities.” But vestigial organs are actually a problem for evolutionism. Gradual loss of function or information by mutation, etc, doesn’t present a difficulty for the creation model, but evolution can’t have produced the biodiversity we see today out of successive degeneration and loss of information. If a horse loses some toes, or a whale loses… Read more »
Any chance of putting these thoughts together in a book?
Also, what is the best (recent) book that I could read that lays out a scientific argument against evolution?
Most of the ID books out there are comfortable with evolution as a whole but simply point to various steps that appear designed. In other words, Behe is really a theistic evolutionist who simply thinks that there are certain systems that God helped move to the next step. Are there any pure creationist works (OEC or YEC) out there that could interact with Dawkins’ Greatest Show on Earth (for example) and be convincing?
Is paragraph 4 supposed to say “…for any *thinking creationist…”?
Just wonderin’
” The vestigial argument says that God would not have designed things such-and-such a way, therefore evolution did it.”
I think it could also be characterized as “I would not have designed things such and such a way, and since I am competent to judge good design, God ought to have done it my way if He’s actually God, therefore evolution did it.”
Just a mite hubristic.
Yes, that’s a more complete form of their theological argument. Thanks.
I think you missed a key part of the argument. Vestigia, which appears completely arbitrary under your creation-and-fall narrative, is more parsimoniously explained in a framework of common ancestry. Whale legs and human tails, seemingly the capricious consequences of adam’s sin, are actually the kinds of vestigia one would expect if we shared a common ancestor. In other words, common ancestry imposes constraints on the vestigia of all living creatures, and the vestigia we observe is consistent with those constraints. “The Fall” explanation does no comparable thing.
Embryonic recapitulation is more evidence of common ancestry, “recapitulation” being the key word.
Willis, it depends on what you are wanting to read about: biology, geology, or information/ message theory.
This is about 10 years old but it is a good introduction and is free: Refuting evolution; as is the sequel Refuting Evolution 2.
Moor, thanks. Fixed it.
Pastor Wilson, in an earlier post you talked about how there’s no way evolution could have taken place fast enough to account for today’s differences, even on the scale of millions of years. Now you want to claim that in just 5,000 years since Noah, whales and skinks lost their legs and all sorts of other microevolution at the family level was occurring? That would require an evolutionary rate FAR faster than anything you were attempting to debunk before. No matter how fast scientists think evolution has occurred, no one is saying that whales would have differed in major structures… Read more »
Jonathan, great question. That is because I don’t believe that variation within kinds is random or haphazard. It is a design feature, and not up to chance at all.
There is also an assumption that the only selection in nature is survival selection. Why should that be the case? Survival, as a mechanism for selection pressure, is barely above random noise in many cases. For example, an older ram could be challenged and defeated by a genetically far “weaker” ram simply because of circumstance. A genetically “superior” gazelle calf might be taken by cheetahs simply because it was near the outside edge of the herd that day. What about the finely tuned structures of animals like the dead leaf butterfly or the elephant hawk caterpillar? After a certain quality… Read more »
The dead leaf butterfly link above didn’t work for some reason, so I’m trying one more time.
alleged screw-ups in the so-called process of intelligent design.
So, something like the fact that mice and giraffes have the same number of vertebrae (a non-optimal design) is the result of the fall?!
Willis, the best creationist book on science I have read recently is “God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?” by Oxford mathematician John Lennox.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_10?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=god%27s%20undertaker&sprefix=god%27s+unde%2Caps%2C480
FWIW, Lennox is an OEC, but don’t let that put you off if you take a YEC position. The book is well worth reading for anyone who is interested in the science surrounding creation/evolution. Lennox is easily a match for Dawkins et. al., having had some high profile debates with Dawkins and other high profile evolutionists.
Thursday wrote: “So, something like the fact that mice and giraffes have the same number of vertebrae (a non-optimal design) is the result of the fall?!” Why would having the same number of vertebrae be a result of the Fall rather than original design? I think what Thursday meant to ask is, “why doesn’t God do things the way I would do them?” On the other hand, if having seven neck vertebrae is such a “non-optimal design” for the giraffe, why didn’t the processes of evolution simply fix this “screw-up” along the way? Was there no survival advantage to be… Read more »
Lennox is good. He’s got a bunch of them phd things.
Pastor Wilson, couldn’t that apply for all the results of evolutionary theory though? Couldn’t you say that all the evidence that we have does point towards common descent of species, and that we are only arguing about the whether the mechanism is random or God-driven? I believe that evolutionists are far overstepping their evidence and their science if they say that evolution is “random”, or based on “random mutations”. There’s no evidence for randomness – in fact, randomness is something almost impossible to prove. I do believe that God either directs the whole thing (using the principles of nature that… Read more »
Jonathan, sure. God’s power could easily have brought us to this point through common descent. Theistic evolution has to be countered with different arguments. The question would then become “what did God say He did?”
Doug – I don’t have much to say on this post (it seems like you are more trying to pose a possible alternative, not a refutation here). But I was wondering if you are going to respond to the lengthy counter-arguments in the comment section of the previous post. My second point is that as a theologian, it might be profitable, as you are writing this series, to comment on the alternative interpretations of the text you are claiming to be defending – such as the Framework hypothesis, or the view that looks at Genesis and further on within the… Read more »
“My last comments will be addressed to vestigia, things that are still hanging around but which we have not discovered a function for yet.” And yet I continue to search this post in vain for this promised discussion of Joe Biden.
So Doug, your hypothetical explanation rests on the idea that the way that internal evidence, the fossil record, and everything in how our DNA works look one way for the last 5,000 years at an arbitrary family-level distinction? And even though the evidence projecting back from that look EXACTLY the same, you have to propose a completely different explanation for it because of how you misread Genesis? To put it another way, you claim that all these external changes like whale flipper disappearing happened in the last 5,000 years with the result evidence in the internal structures and DNA, but… Read more »
As Augustine said, “Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel (um, he means ‘nonbeliever’) to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of… Read more »
And also:
“In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.”
Jonathan wrote: Unfortunately, if you convince someone with knowledge of science who can’t perform the mental trickery to reject common descent to instead believe that they have to reject the God of the Bible instead, then you’ve committed a horrific error. We’ve heard this line of reasoning before. We are supposed to be ashamed of offending the sensibilities of intellectual types. The problem is that the argument works so well that we would need to drop all the offensive stuff about miracles too. What sort of mental trickery does someone with knowledge of science have to do in order to… Read more »
Katecho, I address most of your lies and misrepresentations of my beliefs in the post on the later chapter, where you reposted them. Suffice it to say here that once again, as you’ve done dozens or perhaps hundreds of times (yet as almost no one else on this blog ever does), nearly all the substantial things you say about my position are completely untrue. Here, I’ll just address one question of your ignorance of the Bible: Regarding rock hyraxes, I’m not sure where Jonathan got that translation. Most translations simply render the word as rabbit. Jonathan may be unaware, but… Read more »
Doug is an insensitive hater, I’m a biblically ignorant liar, and Jay is a hypocrite. Strong rhetoric may have its place, but Jonathan seems to be turning up the heat and shrillness to a new level. Anyway, Jonathan hasn’t persuaded me that the substance is not on my side, so I’ll stick with substance. First, I’m happy to acknowledge that I erred in thinking that Jonathan was referring to the classic skeptic’s argument that rabbits don’t chew cud. I knew that rabbits do indeed bring up their food to digest it a second time, and I wrongly assumed Jonathan was… Read more »