So, a few weeks ago there was a debate between Bill Nye, an
engineer, scientist, and the host of many science television programs, and Ken
Ham, a creationist nutjob, and I’m not speaking in the pejorative; he is proper
bonkers, as the debate showed. I’m not
going to focus on what was said, or who won, although Bill basically lost just
for turning up and thus creating the impression that there was a debate to
have. A debate is where one party makes
a statement, or argument, and the other party exposes the logical fallacy in
the statement, perhaps with a powerful remark, or a joke, and the original
party has to modify their statement to counter the original fallacy or expand
their point so as to add detail and show the counter statement to itself be
fallacious, and so it continues until both sides have expanded their argument
to the point that they either find common agreement, or the audience has the
information to weight the discourse themselves.
If half the debate includes anyone who considers Bronze Age
mythology to be literally true, which requires ignoring practically everything
the human race has learnt since the Bronze Age, then progress cannot be made,
as they will ignore their debating partner as well.
For me, of more interest, was a project by Mark Stopera at Buzzfeed, who
asked 22 creationists to write their own question to the science side of the
debate.
I have read a few replies to their questions online, and
most are simple mocking the ignorant fools, but I don’t see that as
practical. I have always been a wild
optimist, and this is one area in my life where I really do ignore the
evidence, and assume that people who ask questions, want answers. And so I have decided to give answers to the
questions as best I can, in an attempt to educate. I have the crazy notion that sometimes people
will ask these silly questions because they don’t know they are silly; they
have been fed a lie which includes a form of science so distorted that it
becomes nonsense. Or, that,given the
poor state of science education in the world, they know nothing of the power
and grandeur and beauty of scientific thinking, and with just a little help
from our side, they will see that there is actually something in this science
So here are my, hopefully, constructive answers to the 22
questions.
1
What? Compared to religion? Really? Ok, I said I’d answer properly. Presumably the question is based on the
rather strange idea that Christianity is the source of morality, and that if
you remove one, you remove the other.
That is plain nonsense. As I lifelong
atheist I have murdered and raped everyone I have ever wanted too, it just
happens to be zero, because I understand that it is wrong, that it would ruin
lives, and that I could not live with myself.
I do not need the invisible surveillance camera in the sky to cower me
in to peaceful coexistence. Teaching
children science, teaching them to think, to question, and to examine, is the
most positive influence you can possibly have.
And not just that; it inoculates from deceit, from religion, sham medicine,
low quality journalism, and hi-fi accessories made of bullshit.
2
Er, no. If the creator exists then they seem to take no
part in our lives, so can be ignored, and if they don’t exist, there is nothing
to be scared of. This is what I meant
about these ideas coming from ignorance.
To think that a creator is in anyway interested in you is only possible
if you have no sense of the proportion of the question. The universe is perhaps ninety billion light
years across, it contains at least a billion trillion stars, and as the Kepler
mission has shown us, planets are more common than stars. Everywhere we look we find the ingredients
for life; water and organic carbons. We
have even found amino acids in supernova remnants and interstellar dust. Nothing that created a space to big to
comprehend, or, who set the fine structure constant and Planck’s constant
exactly right, could be as small minded as religion. The creator of a universe as full of life and
complexity and splendour as ours, would not be obsessed with what happened in
the eastern Mediterranean two
thousand years ago, or if men were having sex with each other, or indeed if I
was frightened of something I couldn’t possible understand?
3
Logical. You keep
using that word; I don’t think it means what you think it means. Yes it is illogical. I think you mean, is it impossible? No it is not impossible. An infinitely powerful creator could create
the universe at any point, perhaps half way through me writing this, or you
reading this, or not yet, and you only think you read this two weeks ago. That, basically is a route to madness. Also, even if the universe is a forgery, Adam and
Eve still didn’t exist. This idea of a competition,
that either science is true or the Old Testament is true; that is illogical. All the science we have now will be replaced
in the future with better science, in a never ending, on going process. The
Old Testament will remain untrue throughout all of that. Also, if you think the age of the universe
was faked, and God is some sort of con artist, why are you worshipping them?
4
If you're going to think archaic, you may as well speak it too. This is a classic question, but not a good one. Even creationist have been told not to use
this as an argument because it just makes them look stupid. Just because it is a science word, doesn’t
mean you can use it in a science argument, unless you know what it means. This is a prime example of scientific
illiteracy causing trouble. The second
law of thermodynamics is fairly simple and dictates that a hot thing and a cold
thing, if stored together, will end up the same temperature, because energy
only flows downhill. The hot object
cools down and the cold object warms up.
The trouble comes from the literal explanation of this effect been, that
in a closed system, equilibrium can only be achieved through an increase in
entropy, and entropy is not simple. Let
me have a go. A stained glass window is
beautiful and intricate, but as described by physics, it is not complex, and
its entropy is low. A pile of sand on
the other hand is complex and its entropy is high. This is because if you view a stained glass
window from different directions, it changes, or if you do anything to it, you
alter it. A pile of sand is identical
from any direction, and can be rearranged in a vast number of ways and still be
a pile of sand. It’s because its structure
is always the same that it is described as complex by physics, but in common
language the window is more complex. I
expect that causes a lot of the confusion.
Now, I did say in my explanation that in a closed system, entropy always
increases. Yet the window is made of
sand, and its entropy is lower than the sands.
How is that possible? Simple, you
melt the sand. You pump energy in from
outside, so it’s not a closed system.
For the second law of thermodynamics to be irrelevant to evolution, or
life in general, then all we need is for the Earth to be an open system, and
have a supply of energy. Well, we are
orbiting a thousand trillion trillion ton fusion reactor. That will do it.
5
What?! This is more stupid than question 1. Is she smiling because she thinks this is a
good question, or a question, or a sentence?
Ok, it is a sentence, but not a worthwhile one. Ok, I said I’d answer the questions properly,
even if they’re not actually questions.
I am standing on a rotating sphere, orbiting another, shiny sphere. Sometimes the sphere I’m on blocks the
sunlight, and it goes dark, this happens roughly half the time. One of the advantages of my sphere is that it
has an atmosphere, so I don’t die. As
the sun appears, and disappears over the horizon, the light from the big hot
burning sphere has to travel through more air then when it is directly
overhead. Interestingly, if you want to
make a scale model of our atmosphere on a school room globe, then give it a
coat of varnish, a thin coat. Light
interacts with molecules in general, and the longer journey through the atmosphere at sunrise and sunset gives it more opportunity to interact, so the light is coloured. I think that’s what she meant, or maybe it
was a question about Helios driving the sun chariot across the sky?
6
Oh god not you again.
Did you miss the thermodynamics memo?
It now rules out all of cosmology does it? I think that science would have noticed that
one by now, since the whole purpose of the scientific method is to test
predicted outcomes with observed realities.
This is an example of another common mistake, to confuse cosmology and
biology, although I’ve no idea how you mix those two up? Thermodynamics is one of the central
principles of science, any hypothesis that went against it would disappear
immediately. I already wrote about how
science is a framework of interconnection, mutually supportive ideas. Nothing in cosmology goes against
thermodynamics. Nothing in biology goes
against thermodynamics. Nothing in
anything goes against thermodynamics.
7
8
Well, I don’t derive it from the Bronze Age. Why does the universe require your life to
have an objective meaning? The fact you
think it does tells you where to find the meaning. It is a human construct, a product of our
history and society, of language and neurological patterns unique to our
species; and your own personal meaning can be found in civilization to. My own meaning? To try and learn and experience this amazing
universe. To not be too detrimental to
those around me, and to try and care for those I care about.
9
At
last, this is actually a science question, and shows that with a bit of help
and knowledge, this one could be saved.
The answer is in effect yes. In
that it was not preordained, or mandated by the laws of physics that it had to
arise, it was in essence, chance. How
and where are not yet known, although the current leading idea centres on the
chemistry of hydrothermal events on the juvenile Earth, that created proton
gradients in pre-organic rock formations.
This energy allowed the molecules to partake in reaction that replicated
the molecule. How we got from chemistry,
to organic chemistry, to biochemistry, to life, is also not yet known, but trying to
find the answer is much better than giving up and saying it was probably some sort of god.
10
Deism, the once fashionable philosophy which believed in a creator, but rejected organised religion, and
the divinity of scripture, which makes this lady a pretty bad biblical
literalist. As I’ve already said there
is no way of ever knowing if an infinity powerful creator was at work, all we
can say is that it wasn’t the God of the Old Testament; the most petulant,
childish, vain, jealous, murderous, wicked, misogynistic, and dishonest
character in all of fiction. That mythos
has a very specific creation event that has been disproven by a catastrophic
amount of contradictory evidence.
Cosmology has a very specific creation event, which makes specific
predictions about what we should find in our universe, and when we look, we
find those things, and we don’t find contradictory things. We're still looking; we'll never stop.
11
This
is a real mess of conflicting, fragmented ideas. Apart from there been no such thing as an
evolutionist, there is no sort of cabal joining them together via alien
intelligent design. I think that he’s
trying to refer to panspermia, the idea that life on Earth didn’t start on
Earth, but was seeded over interstellar distances by something arriving on a
rock. To answer his question, the
difference is that genetic engineering by aliens, or organic precursors
travelling light years is at least in principle, feasible, although
fantastically unlikely. The invisible
man in the ancient books is simply unfeasible.
Anyway, panspermia, apart from not been taken seriously in science, is
not an answer. If life was brought here,
you still need a scientific answer for how did it arise wherever it came from. Given the abundance of water and carbon in
our own solar system, it is vastly more probable that we originated here. It also shows the difference between
scientific and religious thinking. An
essentially unknowable answer is fine in religion, but not in science. A fantastically complex answer just means you
now need a fantastically complex explanation.
It solves nothing.
12
Back to needing a better education in order to be able to
break free of the brain washing, and form your own arguments. Someone else has told you this, and you
haven’t bother to check it. Lucy or LH
4, is a 3.2 million year old, partial skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis. She, and she is far from a proven gender, was
found in Ethiopia in 1974. Lucy may be a
famous fossil, but certainly not the only one.
The Wikipedia page on human fossils lists a few hundred finds. Some are older, many are younger. The path of human evolution is far from
settled, but it can only be settled by the scientific method. As to ‘official proof’, I think she is
referring to the supposed fossil gap, which is not even a cogent augment. Apparently you can’t relate species A and C
unless you find fossil B, but when you do find it, now you need the fossil
between A and B, and B and C. So every fossil
doubles the number of gaps to fill, and more evidence means less evidence. That is not a rational argument; that is
defence of an indefensible dogma.
13
Thank you for an
intelligent question. Yes it does. The transformation from water borne larva to
airborne adult, or tadpole to frog, or caterpillar to butterfly, prevents a
creature competing with its own offspring.
Since evolution is all about successful offspring, it is just the sort
of life cycle that would be favoured, and much used. This is why it is found in all of the winged
insects, whether complete, larva to adult, or incomplete, nymph to adult, as
well as appearing in amphibians and fish.
In fish it is always incomplete, such as changing from a fresh to a salt
water environment, as in salmon, or in flat
fish,where the juvenile has an eye on each side, with one migrating later in the
adult form. These changes are always
accompanied by a changing in habitat, and so still removes the competition
between mature and immature forms. Evolution is really not difficult.
14
This is a clear misunderstanding of the word
theory. It has one meaning in general
society, but a specific meaning in science.
Science likes specific meanings.
A theory is an explanation for an event that matches all the available
evidence and is generally held to be true.
The theory of evolution is supported by a veritable mountain of evidence
without a single contradiction or caveat.
There is a layer of added complexity here as evolution is also the name
of a process. Species change over time,
we know this, we have seen it and measured it, and even caused it. The process, evolution, works via sexual
selection, or natural selection, and gives us the theory of evolution by
natural selection. Do you now see why it
is not like creationism or the bible, which both have approximately no evidence
at all?
15
We object because of people like you. Science is only science in the presence of the
holy trinity; testable, measurable, repeatable.
This is a mangling of a common creationist argument. She wrote science, but meant evolution, as if
evolution was all of science. The ridiculous
argument is that you can’t observer evolution, because it has already happened,
and you can’t repeat it as you can’t rerun the history of the Earth. Again, only a total lack of science education
allows these notions to persist. Evolution
is still happening, and we have observed it.
Exquisite experiments run over years, sometimes decades, applying
consistent selective pressure to generations of bacteria have produced
repeatable, reliable results entirely in keeping with evolution. As biologists have highlighted, if there were
not a single fossil in the ground, evolution would be overwhelmingly supported
by comparing the structures found in existing creatures, and a myriad of
unrecorded, extinct animals could be inferred.
16
This is a good question. It is a bit misinformed, as it assumes
information increases, and that as a very modern species, humans must somehow
have more information, and therefore be better; a variation on the supremacy
that religion gifts mankind. There are
massive differences in the amount of generic information between species. Once, it was thought that simple animals or
plants had small genomes, and complex life had big genomes. It turns out that this is not the case. The Marbled Lung Fish for example is
separated from humanity by hundreds of millions of years, yet has a genome over
forty times bigger than ours. The
largest genome yet found, over two hundred times larger than ours belongs to an
amoeba. You don’t even need the evidence of genetics to
support evolution, Darwin and Mendal were contemporaries, but because Mendal
published in German, Darwin never saw his papers, yet he could still support
his argument. Genetics just means you
don’t really need any more evidence, as at that point it becomes simply
overwhelming. Still, the question is
about mechanisms that account for a change in the volume of information, and we
do indeed need to be able to answer this.
A good first choice is genome duplication, which is where a whole
section is copied twice by mistake at some point. Now, there are two sections coding for the
same protein, and if later a mutation occurs in one section, then the original
protein is still been made, and so it’s biological function is still performed,
but also a new function may have arisen, and if it useful then natural
selection may retain it. Another method,
which happens to have an awesome bit of evidence to support it, is viral
insertion. There are lots of bit of
viral DNA in your genome, left over from an infection that some ancestor of
yours had. Often this just takes up
space, but sometimes it is put to good use.
All multicellular life, during development, takes lots of small cells
and merges them to make big cells.
Muscle tissue in everything is formed this way. The cells merge when they touch and a protein
on their surface makes a hole in the cell membrane, allowing them to fuse and
mix their contents. The DNA that codes
for this protein is virus DNA; and there are
many viruses that infect their host cells by tearing the membrane. At some point, a billion years ago, this DNA
was added to a genome, and if the selective pressure of evolution had not
allowed this new function to be retained, there would be no animals or plants.
17
And we’re back in the room! Why do I need a purpose? I don’t mean prefer to have one, I mean need;
unable to function as a life form without it?
On that basis, I don’t need one.
If there is a purpose that is universal across life, then it is to pass
our genes on, as that is what every single organism on the Earth does. You of course, mean what higher purpose do I
have? Well that is a unique human idea,
and just like question 8, it is a construct of our intelligence, language and culture. I don’t see how salvation would give me a
purpose, unless the knowledge that a super being sent part of itself to Earth,
to be sacrificed to itself, to atone for a woman eating an apple, was meant to serve
the purpose of confusing me?
18
I want to give the benefit of the doubt here. He may have been told that we have found
hundreds of dinosaurs, but only one proto human, so that makes us different or
special or divine somehow. It’s rubbish
of course. We have found at least 7
other Autralopithecus afarensis fossils, and hundreds of other hominids, and
nothing that we have found puts them outside of the process of evolution from
an ancient ape ancestor to modern humans, even if many of them are extinct cousin
species, rather than true ancestors. The
fact that we have found thousands of fossils covering billions of years of life
obscures the fact that fossilisation is a phenomenally rare process. Of the quadrillion organisms to exist in the
Earths long history, virtually none of them left any trace at all. And as I have said already, we could prove evolution without a single fossil existing.
19
An easy one this that goes right to the heart of
the difference between science and religion.
Evidence. Of course the subjects
can be very complex, but it is possible to go as deep in to the evidence as an
individual can manage. I am not a
scientist, but know that cosmology and biology are different, as once again we
have a cosmology question in an evolution debate. The evidence demonstrates that a theory is
true. New evidence may demonstrate that
a different theory is true. There is
currently no evidence that big bang cosmology is wrong, and lots and lots of
evidence that is it correct. Science is self-correcting,
which gives us the confidence in our current ideas, even if they will change in
the future, our current ideas are useful and explain that which we have the
current capability to explore. Our
knowledge will advance as our capabilities advance, and as our capacity to
utilise that knowledge advances. This sort
of goes back to question 1; yes science is a positive influence on a child.
20
I agree; it is amazing. But I suspect my universe is more amazing
than yours, because I know more about it.
There is the surface beauty, plus the hidden beauty of how it actually
works. I am connected with the universe
by been made of recycled universe. I am
just a temporary home for atoms that are billions of years old, and were made
from even older atoms being fused inside a long dead star. The use of ‘world’ suggests this is about
life on Earth, which is not just amazing, it is also complex, amazingly complex,
and it seems hard for some to believe that this complexity created itself, but
that is because our human experience is too disconnected from the processes that
created it; an inconceivably large number of iterations of tiny changes over unbelievably
deep time. Science is true whether you believe
in it or not.
21
Ok, someone has heard of supernovae, but that is not
what the big bang was. To be fair this
is an understandable mistake. Dumbed down
science programing often uses the same graphic in different shows. I have seen the big bang represented in lots
of ways over the years, almost all wrong, including what are clearly animations
of supernova. So he is quite right that
this star could not have existed before the universe itself. Unfortunately, instead of trying to find the
answer to the dilemma, he has just dismissed all of cosmology as wrong. If it was that easy then science would have
already done that. The big bang was not
a conventional, albeit big, explosion like a supernova. It did not expand in to anything. It expanded in to itself. Every point in the universe was at the big
bang. The entire width and height of
your screen was at the big bang. I love
knowing that.
22
This is both cliché and a fair question. Creationists used to use it, till even they
got sick of been shot down, but there are still people, who due to their patchy
knowledge, think it is a genuine question, and been an optimist, I believe they
genuinely want to know the answer. So
here it is. We are not descended from monkeys,
we are descended from apes, as are monkeys.
The common ancestor of apes and monkeys is extinct. The ancestor of chimpanzees and humans is
also extinct, but extinction is not required by evolution. Let us imagine there is a forest dwelling animal
that gets divided in to two populations as a mountain range forms. The mountains affect the climate on one side,
and the ancient forest is replaced by grassland. On one side of the mountains the original
species may remain unchanged, but on the other side it will have to adapt or
die. Eventually they will be two separate
species, one young and one old, but the forest dweller will not be evolving in
to the grassland dweller, as it does not live in grassland. Natural selection will be continually shaping
it for life in a forest, and if the environment is stable, it may remain
unchanged for millions of years. It may
be that we have this obsession with ancestor species having to be extinct,
simply because it is so often the case, with an estimated 99.9% of all the
species that have evolved in the last three billion years having become extinct
in that time also.
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