[NV Greens] Fwd: Creationists' misunderstanding of science

Sat Apr 2 23:44:31 PST 2005

>
>The Fossil Fallacy
>
>      Creationists' demand for fossils that represent
>      "missing links" reveals a deep misunderstanding of
>      science
>
>By Michael Shermer
><http://sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0003EFE0-D68A-1212-8F3983414B7F0000&chanID=sa008>
>February 21, 2005
>
>Nineteenth-century English social scientist Herbert
>Spencer made this prescient observation: "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." Well
>over a century later nothing has changed. When I debate
>creationists, they present not one fact in favor of
>creation and instead demand "just one transitional
>fossil" that proves evolution. When I do offer evidence
>(for example, Ambulocetus natans, a transitional fossil
>between ancient land mammals and modern whales), they
>respond that there are now two gaps in the fossil
>record.
>
>This is a clever debate retort, but it reveals a
>profound error that I call the Fossil Fallacy: the
>belief that a "single fossil"--one bit of data--
>constitutes proof of a multifarious process or
>historical sequence. In fact, proof is derived through a
>convergence of evidence from numerous lines of inquiry--
>multiple, independent inductions, all of which point to
>an unmistakable conclusion.
>
>We know evolution happened not because of transitional
>fossils such as A. natans but because of the convergence
>of evidence from such diverse fields as geology,
>paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and
>physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more.
>No single discovery from any of these fields denotes
>proof of evolution, but together they reveal that life
>evolved in a certain sequence by a particular process.
>
>One of the finest compilations of evolutionary data and
>theory since Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species
>is Richard Dawkins's magnum opus, The Ancestor's Tale: A
>Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Houghton Mifflin,
>2004)--688 pages of convergent science recounted with
>literary elegance. Dawkins traces numerous transitional
>fossils (what he calls "concestors," the last common
>ancestor shared by a set of species) from Homo sapiens
>back four billion years to the origin of heredity and
>the emergence of evolution. No single concestor proves
>that evolution happened, but together they reveal a
>majestic story of process over time.
>
>We know evolution happened because of a convergence of
>evidence.
>
>Consider the tale of the dog. With so many breeds of
>dogs popular for so many thousands of years, one would
>think there would be an abundance of transitional
>fossils providing paleontologists with copious data from
>which to reconstruct their evolutionary ancestry. In
>fact, according to Jennifer A. Leonard, an evolutionary
>biologist then at the Smithsonian Institution's National
>Museum of Natural History, "the fossil record from
>wolves to dogs is pretty sparse." Then how do we know
>whence dogs evolved? In the November 22, 2002, Science,
>Leonard and her colleagues report that mitochondrial DNA
>(mtDNA) data from early dog remains "strongly support
>the hypothesis that ancient American and Eurasian
>domestic dogs share a common origin from Old World gray
>wolves."
>
>In the same issue, molecular biologist Peter Savolainen
>of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and
>his colleagues note that even though the fossil record
>is problematic, their study of mtDNA sequence variation
>among 654 domestic dogs from around the world "points to
>an origin of the domestic dog in East Asia" about 15,000
>years before the present from a single gene pool of
>wolves.
>
>Finally, anthropologist Brian Hare of Harvard University
>and his colleagues describe in this same issue the
>results of a study showing that domestic dogs are more
>skillful than wolves at using human signals to indicate
>the location of hidden food. Yet "dogs and wolves do not
>perform differently in a nonsocial memory task, ruling
>out the possibility that dogs outperform wolves in all
>human-guided tasks," they write. Therefore, "dogs'
>social-communicative skills with humans were acquired
>during the process of domestication."
>
>No single fossil proves that dogs came from wolves, but
>archaeological, morphological, genetic and behavioral
>"fossils" converge to reveal the concestor of all dogs
>to be the East Asian wolf. The tale of human evolution
>is divulged in a similar manner (although here we do
>have an abundance of fossils), as it is for all
>concestors in the history of life. We know evolution
>happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad
>fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of
>life's pilgrimage.
>
>(c) 1996-2005 Scientific American, Inc.
>_______________________________________________________
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-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand