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GEOL 204 Dinosaurs, Early Humans, Ancestors & Evolution:
The Fossil Record of Vanished Worlds of the Prehistoric Past

Spring Semester 2023
Lies, Hoaxes, Profits and Paleoethics: Misrepresenting the Fossil Record


Detail of 1915 painting by John Cooke showing leading anthropologists and paleontologists examining the type specimen of the hoax fossil "Eoanthropus dawsoni", the "Piltdown Man"

"After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community." -- From Judge Jones ruling on the Kitzmiller vs. Dover, PA School District Decision (December 20, 2005)

and

"However, the longer I listened the clearer it became that creationism is not about science. It's about morality. Specifically, creationists worry that biological evolution undermines people's moral beliefs, leading to lawlessness, family breakdown, homosexuality, pornography, and abortion. The real heart of creationism is existential dread." -- "Creation Summer Camp", by Ronald Bailey (reason.com)


BIG QUESTIONS: What happens when people use the fossil record for unethical purposes?

The Fossil Record: A Matter of Trust

All the science discussed throughout the course is predicated on the idea that fossils are the authentic record of life in the past. Our disagreements about them would be differences of interpretation, but we accepted that the bones, teeth, wood, leaves, shells, etc. are the remains of REAL bones, teeth, wood, leaves, shells, etc. But what happens when they aren't? Or aren't in their original association? What happens when people--for whatever reason--fake the fossil record? Although they are relatively rare, there are (sadly) many notable examples. And these illuminate some of the different motives behind making faux fossils.

Fake Fossils for Profit: Sales: The legacy of the "Sue" incident was to drive a rift between many commercial collectors and professional paleontologists; to increase the sales of dramatic fossil specimens in stores and at auction; an increase of the perception of privately-owned fossils as a prestige item of the rich to display; and to increase the market for faked fossils to fill the market place.

The most famous post-"Sue" hoaxed fossil is the "Archaeoraptor liaoningensis". A 1999 issue of National Geographic Magazine featuring the newly-discovered Yixian and Jiufotang feathered dinosaur fossils announced a fossil of an as-yet unnamed species. Its front end was very derived, but its hips and tail were fairly primitive. Paleontologists (including this one!) were very curious about this specimen, as it had not been described in the technical literature. And there was a good reason for that: it was a hoax, and every attempt to publish it in a scientific journal failed peer-review as the reviewers noted the falsehood of the specimen. In February 2000, National Geographic announced that it was indeed a fake, combining the front end of a bird (Yanornis) and the rear end of a dromeosaurid (Microraptor). A study in 2001 eventually showed the steps needed to construct the hoax. The hoax had been done in China, where a market had already been developed in the sale of fossils (despite the fact this is illegal in the People's Republic!): the more complete the fossil, the better! The concern wasn't the information from the fossil, but rather how much money they could make from it.

Fraudulent Data for Personal Glory: Vishwa Jit Gupta is a retired paleontologist who taught at Punjab University. He published over 450 papers during his career, and helped to document (so it seemed) the Paleozoic history of fossil organisms of the Himalayan region. However, his work was called into question when others were unable to replicate his finds: for instance, a site he claimed produced clearly Devonian fossils were found by others to only contain Silurian ones. Others began to study his publication and found that specimens he claimed to have discovered were actually specimens previously found in other parts of the world by other researchers. (In fact, he even plagiarized several images.)

Fake Fossils as Hoaxes on Collectors (Beringer's Lügensteine (Lying Stones): This case dates back to the earliest days of paleontology. In the early 1700s natural historian Johann Bartolomeus Adam Beringer (of the University of Würzburg, Bavaria) often made collections of fossils from nearby Mount Eibelstadt. He was one of the thinkers who did not think that fossils were the remains of ancient life; rather, that they were the direct manifestation of the Mind of God trying to speak to us. Eventually he began to turn up truly remarkable fossils: not just the hard parts, but the shapes of entire animals and plants, and eventually text in Latin, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, and the like (including the name of God).

Convinced that this evidence had clinched his hypothesis, he published a book in 1726 describing these stones and his interpretation of them.

To our modern eye, even a non-paleontologist can clearly see these are fakes: carvings on the native stone. But these were still the early days of the field, so even an expert of the time was fooled (largely because it was all consistent with own favored hypothesis). However, he realized he had been tricked when some of the stones showed up with his own name written on them.

The hoaxers where his own colleagues: mathematician/geographer Jean Ignace Roderique and chief librarian Johan Georg von Eckhardt. They felt he was "so arrogant and despised us all", so they wanted to publicly shame him. The hired an artisan to help create the images, and a team to help plant the stones in areas they new Beringer liked to prospect.

Beringer tried to buy back all the copies of his book, and took the two to court. The hoaxers themselves wound up disgraced, while he kept his job. But afterwards he (and others) called these faux fossils "die Lügensteine: the "lying stones").

Fake Fossils for Profit: Showmanship: The end of the 1700s and the early 1800s were a time of many discoveries in the young United States. Among the most famous natural history finds of the time was the discovery in 1799 of the first complete mastodon (Mammut americanum) near Newburgh, NY. It's excavation by artist/naturalist Charles Wilson Peale was a celebrated local sensation, as was his display of this complete skeleton at his Museum in Philadelpha in 1806.

The success of the mastodon bringing in paying visitors did not go unnoticed, so that a generation later someone figured that creating their own even more impressive skeletons would be yet more lucrative. That person was Albert Koch, an exhibitor of "curiosities". In 1835 he had set up an exhibit hall in St. Louis, and five years later received word of a complete mastodon found on a Missouri farm. He acquired this, as well as other partial mastodon skeletons. He combined the different specimens together (with wooden spacers between the vertebrae to enhance the length), resulting in a skeleton 32' long (twice that of a real mastodon), with the tusks mounted in an odd position. His signs declared this fossil the Missourium, largest of all terrestrial animals.

The "Missourium" was the hit of his exhibit hall. In fact, it was so popular that after just one year he sold the rest of his collect and the exhibit hall itself, and took Missourium on tour around the country. As natural historians would send in letters to the local newspapers warning the public that this was a fraudulent skeleton, he actually played on the public notoriety (asking for them to pay for the privilege of seeing it so "they can decide for themselves"). Eventually he sold Missourium to the British Museum, which took it apart and remounted the main individual skeleton properly.

In 1845 Koch became interested in acquiring a Basilosaurus skeleton for display, and managed to get a good partial skeleton and at least six other individuals. He strung these together (with some ammonoid shells added as extra bones!) to create a sea serpent skeleton, which he named Hydrarchos, ruler of the waters! The resultant fossil was 114' long, much longer than a real Basilosaurus.

As with Missourium, Hydrarchos went on tour in the US, and then Europe. The Prussian king (ignoring the words of the paleontologists) bought the specimen and demanded having it displayed at the natural history museum in Berlin. (It is still there, but long since dismantled into its various components). Koch actually got a new set of fossils, created a Hydrarchos version 2.0 (this one a mere 96' long), and took that on tour in 1848. That specimen was acquired by another curiosity exhibitor, who had it on display in Chicago (under the then-used name for Basilosaurus: Zeuglodon) until it was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

Fake Fossils for National Pride & for Supporting a Particular Hypothesis: In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, early humans had been found in France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and other continental European countries, but not yet the United Kingdom. Furthermore, there was a particular theory of human origins developed at this time (this was before the fossils of earlier homininans from Africa had been discovered): it was thought that humans developed our characteristic powerful brain first, and only later developed a fully upright stance, grasping hands, reduced lower jaw, and so forth.

That changed at the 12 December 1912 meeting of the Geological Society of London. At that event, a paper was presented by paleoanthropoligst Arthur Woodward Smith, who told the following story: In the years 1908 to 1912, amateur archaeologist and antiquities collector Charles Dawson and his crew had found various remains from the Pleistocene deposits of human-like fossils and artifacts. (Dawson claimed that the workmen saw the top of the skull sticking out of the sediment, and thought it was a fossilized coconut). In the summer of 1912 Dawson approached Smith Woodward to help him collect, and the two worked together. However, Smith Woodward happened to be gone every time Dawson actually found remains of the proto-human.

The skull that Smith Woodward reconstructed from the remains had a human (or human-like) upper skull, as well as much more ape-like teeth and lower jaw; he named this a new species "Eoanthropus dawsoni" (Dawson's dawn man).This was Britain's major contribution to paleoanthropology, and it conformed to the "big brains first" model, since its braincase was practically modern but its jaw ape like.

Several other paleontologists and paleoanthropologists immediately challenged the idea that these bones and teeth were from the same species, or that they were in fact from the Ice Age. However, many accepted these specimens as genuine because they fit into their views. In 1915 Dawson brought some more specimens and artifacts to Smith Woodward from a new site about 2 miles from the originally locality; however, Dawson died in 1916 before revealing that location. After his death, not a single "Eoanthropus" fossil was ever found again.

However, in the following decades discoveries from Asia and (especially) Africa demonstrate that the "big brains first" model did not fit the vast majority of members of the human ancestral lineage: instead, they tended to be upright first, and only developed big brains later. Suspicion that "Piltdown Man" was a hoax grew; "Eoanthropus" was becoming less and less consilient with the growing body of evidence of other members of the human lineage whose authenticity was not in question.

It was confirmed in the 1950s as new chemical age-dating techniques became available, and showed that these were not a single ancient fossil, but instead a medieval human skull, a more recent orangutan jaw, and fossil chimpanzee teeth, all treated with chemicals to appear fossilized. To this day we do not know for certain who the hoaxer was, although Dawson is the primary suspect, nor the actual motive. But it is clear that many people fell for this forgery because it fit comfortably with their preconceived notions and their national prejudices.

(It should be noted that Dawson was linked to over 38 other hoaxes concerning antiquities.) It is uncertain if Smith Woodward was in on the hoax, or simply the "patsy" of the con-game. It appears that at least some of their contemporaries were aware that it was a hoax, as Dawson & Smith Woodward did uncover the rib of a wooly mammoth carved to resemble that most British of tools, a cricket bat!. (Smith Woodward considered it an authentic club of the Piltdown Man.)

Fake (Images of) Fossils: Trolling on the Internet: There are even non-intentional hoaxes! Some of these arise by people not understanding online communities... One infamous case that has had longer term consequence involves the old website Worth1000.com (later renamed DesignCrowd. This site encouraged people to show off their Photoshop skills by holding contests with a particular theme and presenting the submissions of the modified pictures of the contestants. One such contest was "Archaeological Anomalies", with the rule "Your job is to show a picture of an archaeological discovery that looks so real, had it not appeared at Worth1000, people might have done a double take."

And the evidence shows that some of the Photoshoppers definitely passed this test! They took field photographs (like this one of the Cornell Univeristy team digging a Mastodon in New York State which became this picture of a skeleton of a giant! (Here is a collection of some more of these!)

These are pretty amusing, but sadly there are those who didn't know the original context of the modified pictures and actually think these are skeletons of human giants!

A similar case happened when a photograph of a bunch of Civil War-era soldiers with a pterosaur was created as a publicity shot for a 2000 science fiction television series FreakyLinks (one of the first TV shows or movies to have its own "in-universe" website which went live before the show aired.) Unfortunately, fans of the paranormal think this really WAS a pterosaur alive in the 1800s, and long after people have forgotten the show this image lives on in online paranormal communities.


Paleontology Pseudoscience: Ignoring the the Scientific Method

There is a continuous gradation between well-established scientific ideas; ideas which are not as strongly supported but not currently rejected by current evidence; ideas on the fringes of science which are less well-supported than the main current of the field; and actual outright pseudoscience. As such, a precise definition of pseudoscience is difficult. The astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan suggested the following: that pseudoscientific ideas "purport to use the methods and findings of science, while in fact they are faithless to its nature--often because they are based on insufficient evidence or because they ignore clues that point the other way."

There are many cases where people make pseudoscientific--or at least poorly supported--claims about fossil material, often because they are simply unfamiliar with the details of the science and only have a superficial appreciation of how paleontology and geology work. For instance, British cell biologist and science writer Brian Ford has recently written a book on, and is on a speaking tour about, his idea that all dinosaurs were strictly aquatic and unable to move around on land. Although some 19th Century and early 20th Century paleontologists considered that at least the giant sauropods were mostly aquatic, that idea was long since overturned by functional anatomy, ichnology, and paleoenvironmental analysis. So the "strictly aquatic dinosaurs" hypothesis is not supported by the evidence.

In other cases, the idea is pseudoscientific now but was once a valid idea: the supporter simply refuses to acknowledge the falsification of their once-potentially-possible hypothesis. A classic example of this is the "Birds are not dinosaurs" (BAND) proponents discussed previously.

A more extreme example is pseudoscientific ideas is supporting the non-parsimonious, non-consilient idea and say that the reason it is rejected is a conspiracy by "mainstream science." One such example from the evolutionary realm is the "Aquatic Ape Hypothesis", the idea that somewhere between the split between humans and chimps and the rise of Homo sapiens that the homininan lineage went through a primarily aquatic phase. (To be fair, as discussed earlier, H. sapiens does seem to have gotten more of our food from the water than other related primates, but through nets and fishhooks and the like.) While this idea does not contradict natural laws (neither does the BAND or the fully aquatic dinosaur idea), it is not the simplest solution for the morphological, ichnological, and sedimentological data. Indeed, had humans gone through an aquatic phase (in which they lived in D-World!), the record of early stem-humans would be expected to be a lot more complete than it is! Paleoanthropologists do not reject the Aquatic Ape hypothesis due to some sort of vested interest; they do so because better evidence points to a different (fully terrestrial) solution.

Farther from reality still are examples of pareidolia: seeing things that aren't actually there. The human mind naturally sees shapes and patterns even when they aren't there: this had selective advantages in the past (individuals acting on the false belief that there is a predator at the watering hole were more likely to survive and have offspring than those not acting on the false belief that there ISN'T one when there is...) (By the way, we are VERY likely to see faces in places where there aren't any really faces!)

Some of the most spectacular paleontological pseudosciences came from pareidolia. In the 1970s and 1980s carbonate petrologist Chonosuke Okamura began to describe a number of amazing fossils from limestone thin sections from the Silurian Period. These included the first ever Silurian bird, the first Silurian camel, the first Silurian dinosaur, and more. Not only were these hundreds of millions of years older than these groups should have been, the were all microscopic!! His work eventually found microsopic Silurian people, including princesses. Since these were really just shapes he was seeing rather than real fossils, the peer reviewed literature did not publish his findings. So at his own expense he published his own Original Reports of the Okamura Fossil Laboratory, and sent copies to many paleontological libraries around the world (including the Smithsonian.)

Another famous case of paleontological pareidolic pseudoscience (also, coincidentally, from carbonate geology) was the work of micropaleontologist Randolph Kirkpatrick. He had a productive career in science, but he developed a radical new hypothesis outside of these publications. He had long studied nummulitids: a distinctive group of gigantic macroscopic foraminiferans common in the Eocene to Miocene. Their distinctiveness makes them important index fossils for those epochs.

But where most paleontologists found nummulitids only in limestones, Kirkpatrick would see them in sand grains (even though sand grains are much smaller than nummulitids!!), in volcanic and plutonic igneous rocks, and even in diamond and meteorites!! He developed a new model of how rocks formed, which he published as The Nummulosphere: an account of the Organic Origin of so-called Igneous Rocks and Abyssal Red Clays. In this he explained that ALL rocks were actually derived directly from nummulitids. (Because he saw nummulitids in meteorites he had to conclude that those rocks didn't come from space, because he thought that the idea that there was life in space was just too crazy!)

One of the most commonly head pseudoscience is the prehistoric survivor paradigm: the idea that non-avian dinosaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, Basilosaurus, and more all survive in the modern world and are the source of legends and tales of dragons, of the Loch Ness monster, of the ropen, of sea serpents, and so forth. It is true that sometimes creatures once thought extinct turn out to be alive. The archetype of this are coelacanths: fish common in the late Paleozoic and throughout the Mesozoic but apparently died out at the K/Pg, only to turn up alive in the Indian Ocean. Yes, a genus of coelacanth does still live: but that doesn't mean that EVERY well-loved ancient form still lives! In order to demonstrate that one needs the actual physical evidence of it.


Creationism: American Exceptionalism is Not Always A Good Thing!

The above data is from the 2005 study by John Miller et al. As you can note, America ranks very far behind all other industrialized Western nations included, and just ahead of Turkey. Taking these data and plotting them against a measure of national wealth, we see that the US really is an outlier compared to other rich nations:

So why this discontinuity? And why would people reject evolution anyway, particular in nations with an excellent fossil record and easy access to information by almost everyone.

NOTE: This lecture primarily examines American, Christian denial of evolution. But there are people who reject of evolutionary science from other nations and other religions, such as:


Supernaturalistic vs. Naturalistic Views of the Origins of Earth, Life, and Humanity

All cultures of the world have had some idea about where the world, its life, and humans came from. For many the traditional idea is that some supernatural force of great power (a god or multiple gods) brought them into being. But they disagreed on details: which god; in what order; by what process; etc.

For instance, Judaic chronologies traditionally held that Earth, Life, and Humanity were created over the course of the six day "Creation Week" described in Genesis, and that this was roughly six thousand years ago. Their neighboring cultures (Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks) thought that the Earth was created many 10s of thousands of years ago. Some (the Maya, for instance) had even longer time scales, and Hindu cosmologies suggesting an infinitely old, repeating Universe (with a present incarnation many many billions of years old.)

But many of these thought that the world was basically unchanged since the Dawn of Time, and did not consider any lineal connections of descent and ancestry among the species of the world.

Some philosophers suggested that it was non-divine processes to the worlds origin, and the possibility of transmutation. Among these were Anaximander of Miletus (610-546 BCE) and Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 99-c. 55 BCE).

During the early centuries of the Church, Christianity lived side-by-side with older pagan traditions of scholarship and research, exemplified by institutions such as the Library of Alexandria. Sometimes the relationship with non-Christian philosophers and thinkers was amicable, but sometimes less so. Among the philosophers of the early Christian Church was St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE), who argued that God formed the Earth and Life from pre-existing matter, and suggested that the six-day Creation Week was metaphorical or allegorical rather than historical. (However, he was adamant about a 6000-year old Earth rather than the longer Greek or Babylonian chronology.) He argued in the De Genesi ad literal (1:20) that Christians should be willing to change their minds about the natural world in light of new evidence:

With the collapse of the Roman world scholarship in the West was preserved and developed mostly by the Catholic Church, and there mostly by the professionally-trained priesthood. These were among the few who had access to both the Scriptures and other religious writing and to the scholarship of the Greco-Roman thinkers. With the Protestant Reformation, however, the Bible was translated into the vernacular tongues of Europe, and now ordinary people (or at least ordinary literate people) with no particular training in philosophy, history, or other academic disciplines had access to Scripture. For many this might be the only book they ever read.

As a consequence, the Protestant Reformation saw a spread of literalist rather than allegorical interpretation of the Bible. Some of these literalist ideas made their way to the very highest levels of Protestant hierarchies (for instance, Anglican Bishop James Ussher's 1650 chronology of the world, dating Creation to the nightfall before October 23, 4004 BC.) That said, there were many thinkers who considered other possibilities.

During the Age of Enlightenment (18th and early 19th Centuries) there were many arguments for and against naturalistic views of how the Universe operates and came to be. For example, David Hume observed order arising from mindless mechanistic processes (snowflakes from water, crystals from solution, and so forth), and considered that an ordered world might likewise come out of similar type processes. In contrast, others argued that the apparent Design of the Universe implied a Designer. This was most famously (although not firstly) argued as the "Watchmaker Argument" of William Paley in his 1802 Natural Theology.

"Natural theology" was that branch of theology that attempted to understand the nature of the Divine not through revealed wisdom and scripture, but from study of the natural world. It had a long tradition in the West (e.g., medieval bestiaries, where the aspects of different animals were interpreted as moral lessons for Mankind.) Many of the early geologists and paleontologists were natural theologians: Linnaeus and Buckland and Agassiz and Lyell and others.

But these naturalists also had to accept their discoveries of Earth vastly ancient beyond the chronologies of the Bible or the Classical World, with changing environmental conditions and inhabited by succession after succession of different life forms. Two major potential solutions were developed (or expanded from earlier concepts) to harmonize the observations of the natural world with Scripture:

Of course, much of this came to a head with Darwin and Wallace's discovery of Natural Selection. They had discovered a mechanism to produce design without any need for outside influence: simply variation, heredity, and superfecundity.

The result of the publication of The Origin resulted in some rejection of Evolution by people within religious communities, but it was far from universal. Some religious thinkers were very much in support of Darwin and Wallace's new ideas, and some scientists rejected evolution (and more specifically the model of Natural Selection) at that time.

This sets the stage for the 20th and 21st Century American situation, and the rise of organized evolution deniers.


The American Experience with Evolution Denialism

The word "fundamentalist" is thrown around by popular culture for a person exceedingly committed to religious ideas, but that is not really the true meaning of the word. It actually refers back to The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, a series of 90 essays in twelve volumes published from 1910 to 1915 by the evangelical Protestant Bible Institute of Los Angeles. A Fundamentalist is ultimately someone who holds the views expressed in these books. This was the foundational set of documents for a new literalist movement in North American religious thinking.

Among the peoples of this movement was Canadian George McCready Price, who published various books (such as The Fundamentals of Geology, arguing for Flood Geology (the idea that most geological strata and structures were laid down by Noah's Flood) and a Young (that is, 6000-year old) Earth. Price's book, and those like it, were used by the growing Fundamentalist movement to provide support for people who did not want the scientific understanding of an ancient Earth and evolving Life taught in schools.

In 1925 Tennessee passed the Butler Act, "AN ACT prohibiting the teachings of the Evolution Theory in all the Universities, and all other public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, and to provide penalties for the violations thereof." Many other states followed suit, making the teaching of evolution illegal in the public schools. It was challenged later that year in the town of Dayton, where the ACLU financed a test case for this law (to which they objected). High school teacher John Thomas Scope was charged with teaching evolution, and the resultant Scopes monkey trial (technically State of Tennessess vs. John Thomas Scopes) made international news. It pitted two of the most famous lawyers of the early 20th Century (William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution, Clarence Darrow for the defense) against each other. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100, but it was overturned on a technicality (the jury, not the judge, should have set the fine!). The Butler Law remained on the books until 1967.

After embarrassment by the United States at the Soviet's early accomplishments in space travel (the Sputnik series; first manned space flight; etc.) in the 1950s, American educators sought to greatly increase the science component in its schools. But eventually the issue of Butler (and similar laws in other states) had to be dealt with. In many cases they were simply repealed. But in one situation, it went to the Supreme Court. This was the 1967 case Epperson vs. Arkansas, over a 1928 Butler-style law. Susan Epperson (high school biology teacher) filed suit over the constitutionality of this law. The Supreme Court found:


and

So prohibiting the teaching of evolution was out. In response, states began to propose "Equal Time" laws, which stated that schools had to teach Creationism (i.e., a purely supernatural view of the origin of Earth, Life & Humans) alongside scientific ones. This led to the case Daniel vs. Waters, where the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit argued Tennessee's "equal time" act, which had stated


but also

The Court ruled that creationism--as inherently religious--was not objectively part of a secular program of education.

In response, "Creationism" evolved into "Creation Science". The idea was that by putting "Science" in the name it could now be taught as science. However, there was no actual change in content or evidence, just a rebranding. Groups to promote Creation Science were organized: the Institute for Creation Research (1972); Center for Scientific Creation (1980); Reasons to Believe (an Old Earth Creation group) (1986); and Answers in Genesis (1994).

The new Creation Science organizations helped promote a new series of "balanced treatment" laws, just like the old "equal time" Creation acts. One of these eventually resulted in the 1987 US Supreme Court case Edwards vs. Aguillard. The law in question was Louisiana's 1981 "Balanced Treatment of Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act". The US Supreme Court found that

So Creation Science was out. It was rebranded again, and now called "Intelligent Design" or "ID" for short. This was an attempt to remove references to God and the Bible from materials promoting essentially the same arguments as before, in the hopes that in so doing it would not seem religious. However, despite what people in some intellectual circles think, it was just exactly the same idea as before. For example, the standard ID textbook Of Pandas and People states that "Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact. Fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, wings, etc." In fact, study shows the systematic replacement of "Creation" with "intelligent design" and "creationist" with "design proponent" over the earlier editions of the same book that became retitled Of Pandas and People:

Indeed, during the Dover trial (see below) the speciation event was captured in mid-transformation: a case where the editors of a draft of Of Pandas and Peoples accidentally inserted "design proponents" in the middle of the word "creationist" rather than just replacing it!

The predominant organization promoting ID is The Discovery Institute (founded in 1990), which promotes their "Wedge strategy" to "to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies" and "to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God".

The ID proponents organized new sets of campaigns for laws around the country in the 1990s, such as "Teach the Controversy" and "Critical Analysis of Evolution" (basically new incarnations of "equal time" or "balanced treatment"). ID brought in new thinkers promoting particular new approaches, such as Michael Behe's Irreducible Complexity and William Dembski's Specified Complexity. We will examine these particular arguments next lecture.

With the backing of the Discovery Institute, then-Pensylvannia Senator Rick Santorum proposed the Santorum Amendment to the "No Child Left Behind" law. This was a law to promote the teaching of ID as an alternative to evolution, and to label evolution as a "theory in crisis". The amendment was not included in the federal law, but was modified to support similar measures within his home state.

This led to the adoption by the school board of Dover, PA of a statement to be read in all classes where evolution was taught:

A number of families brought suit against the School Board, leading to the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case in the US District Court. (Trivia time: my then-current phylogeny of theropods was used as part of the evidence by paleontologist Kevin Padian in the trial!)

After testimony that included leading figures on both sides, Judge Jones ruled that ID "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents" and is not Science. Additionally, it was made very clear in the testimony that although some ID thinkers might keep open the possibility that the Intelligent Designer was not divine, the supporters of the statement in the community and the School Board itself did not consider there to be any distinction between Creationism and ID, and were in fact promoting Young Earth Creationism.

The Dover ruling ground ID in its track, and the movement as such has stalled. But that doesn't mean that evolution deniers have given up. Over the last decade they continue to support "teach the controversy" laws, "strengths and weaknesses" laws, and "academic freedom" laws (which are all updates on the old "balanced treatment" or "equal time" laws). For instance Oklahoma's Senate Bill 320 (the "Science Education and Academic Freedom Act" of 2009, which thankfully died in committee) stated:

and

Numerous similar laws have been proposed (and occasionally are still on the books) in Louisiana, Tennessee, Colorado, Montana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Indiana.

With all this trouble, many teachers simply want to avoid the problem and don't teach evolution in the schools. Indeed, more teachers themselves believe in some form of ID or theistic evolution than in our scientific understanding. As a result, very few states require teaching about human evolution in the schools.

And so, the legal fights go on.

But what do evolution deniers really believe? And why do they believe it?


Who Denies Evolution?

Despite what some might want to to think, there is no simple dichotomy between "godless materialist evolutionists" and "Biblical-thumping fundamentalist Young Earth Creationists". In fact, there is a spectrum of beliefs (although not all of them are broadly represented in society at equal numbers by any means!):

Looking just at the YECs, how wrong is their chronology? The actual age of the Earth at about 4.557 Gyr, but they claim a mere 6000 yrs. This is exactly proportional to claiming that the distance from Washington, DC to Los Angeles, CA (3690 km, or 2293 mi) is really only 4.86 m (16 feet)!! And in order to do this, one has to reject physics (nuclear decay, the speed of light, and so forth), astronomy, geology, chemistry: indeed, the whole corpus of modern Science.


Common Evolution Denier Arguments, and Why They Fail

Let's take a look at a bunch of arguments, concepts, and rhetorical devices used by evolution deniers, and see how they hold up.

The Omphalos Argument: formulated by Henry Phillip Gosse in 1857, the idea that the Earth was created to LOOK ancient, but is really only 6000 years old. (It's name is from the Greek for "navel": the idea that Adam and Eve were created with navels, even if they were never gestated inside a woman and hence would not have umbilical cords!) This idea requires a trickster God (who wants to make things look ancient, up to and including light from stars and other objects more than 6000 light years away being created in transit.), which doesn't jive well with most standard modern theologies. Furthermore, if God is capable of doing this kind of fakery, what is to say He didn't create the Universe only last Thursday, and all the books, movies, photographs, even your memories, of the past were simply willed into being to appear as it there were a past. Intellectually this is EXACTLY the same argument. (This variation of Omphalos is called, not too creatively, "Last Thursdayism".) As such, you can see why it is really way outside the realm of Science.

Intelligent Design:

Two primary new arguments were suggested by the leading thinkers of the ID movement. These are
Both of these are cases of the old Argument from Design of Paley and the like. These are really just cases of Argument from Ignorance ("We don't know, therefore Creation") (or more precisely, Argument from Personal Incredulity ("We personally don't know, even if other people do, therefore Creation").

Here are a few good videos that explore ID arguments in greater details:

"It Can't Just Be Random Chance!" or "It Couldn't Just Happen!": This includes several problems. One is that evolution isn't "just chance". While randomness is a factor in the generation of mutations (that is, mutations appear without any particular direction relative to the situation the organism is in), selection itself is a non-random aspect. The other aspect is the "just" part. After all, one could say that a symphony is "just a bunch of notes in order" or a poem "just a bunch of worlds", and be technically correct. But "just" is a subjective qualifier that doesn't really have a place in Science.

"It's Just a Theory!": Ugh. As we saw earlier in this course, "theory" in Science is not a word for "guess" or "speculation" or "opinion". It is a model or set of rules with broad explanatory power about some particular phenomenon. So evolution is a theory, just like gravity, or the atomic theory of matter, or plate tectonics.

"Where are the Transitional Forms?": Ummm… Yeah. See the rest of this course...

Related to the above, Misunderstanding Sister Taxa and Ancestors: Similar to a lot of people, evolution deniers misunderstand when scientists are referring to sister taxa rather than ancestors. Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, but they aren't our ancestors.

"If Humans Evolved From Apes, Why Are There Still Apes?": This is like asking "If there are Norwegian-Americans, why are there still Norwegians?" Evolution doesn't convert all of the old taxon into a new form, just some subpopulation. This is part of the general misunderstanding that evolution is progression towards a particular goal (especially humans), rather than simply the divergence of the Tree of Life.

"There are Gaps in the Fossil Record!": Yes, we know. But as we saw earlier in the class, the vast majority of individuals, or even species, are unlikely to be preserved in the fossil record, much less discovered, described, and identified by paleontologists. Nevertheless, we get more information as time goes by. Indeed, ironically, you get more "gaps" the more information there is! As demonstrated by Futurama:

"Microevolution Happens, But Not Macroevolution!": At least some evolution deniers accept that natural selection can cause transformations from population to population over time by the differential survival and reproduction of variants in a population. But they think that this is somehow limited in scope, and cannot produce change from one "kind" of organism to another. But one of the big points of The Origin is the demonstration that seemingly distinct end members can actually be connected by small steps in between. "Macro-" and "microevolution" do not have different causes; they are simply different expressions at different scales of the same phenomenon. As critics of evolution deniers point out, accepting microevolution but rejecting macroevolution is like believing in inches but rejecting the reality of feet!

"Where You There?": A common trope of YECs. Without eyewitnesses, they claim, we can't be certain any particular event happened. Leaving aside the fact that eyewitnesses are actually notoriously unreliable as recorders of fact, we use reconstruction of past events from the limited preserved evidence all the time in society: reconstructing accidents; forensic medicine; history and archaeology; etc. And while you and I weren't there, the rocks themselves and the fossils therein damn well were!

"The Cambrian Explosion Disproves Evolution!": Why a particularly evolutionary event is supposed disproves evolution isn't clear, and the evolution deniers don't make it any clearer. In reality, this trope comes from a list that the evolution deniers got from… Charles Darwin! See the lecture on the Cambrian Explosion for Darwin's puzzlement at this, and solutions to this. (It is worth noting that many other cases on this list are from Chapter 6 "Difficulties of the Theory" of The Origin. Darwin was honest enough to understand potential objections to his idea, and elucidated why these objections were invalid or fallacious.)

"Evolutionists Get Things Wrong or Disagree!": Evolution deniers love to point out cases where paleontologists misinterpreted or reinterpreted data, and then changed their mind. This shows that they simply do not understand the basic aspects of Science: that it is not a single revealed body of wisdom, but rather a process of developing observations and models to explain phenomena. Through hypothesis falsification and reciprocal illumination we may replace older ideas with newer ones as new information comes to light. That is fine: that is how it is supposed to work. Furthermore, when the data are not clearly decisive one way or the other--or where some group (cough, the BAND, cough cough…) refuses to acknowledge the rejection of their claims for personal reasons--you will find that scientists will disagree. That is fine. (And it isn't like different religious people, even of the same denomination, agree on all matters of theology, but they don't recognize that as a reason to reject their own beliefs.)

Confusing Evolutionary Theory with any Particular Phylogenetic Scenario: A special case of the previous one, the claim that rejection of a particular phylogenetic model means that evolution is incorrect. For example, whales were once thought to derive from a group of primitive carnivorous land mammal, but new evidence placed their ancestry within (omnivorous) early members of the artiodactyls (cloven-hoofed mammals). But this change of idea was done entirely within the context of paleontology and evolutionary biology, not in spite of it!

"Darwin Said the Eye Cannot Evolve!": Yep, he sure did. It's right there in Chapter 6 (see link above), where he wrote:


Of course, the next sentence reads:

And the next several paragraphs document existing cases that demonstrate each intermediate form of eye still in use by some living animal.

(Additionally, great as a scientist as Darwin was, evolutionary biology is not the "Gospel According to Charles"! Ideas in Science are accepted by their evidentiary merit, not by who said it.)

Conflation of "Evolution" with "Abiogenesis" & "Big Bang Cosmology: When asked to state their objections to evolution, many deniers will include aspects which actually have to do with the origin of Life as a whole or even of the Universe itself. But these topics are other fields of Science: they aren't evolution. (This does go back to an earlier point, though: Creationism requires a rejection of essentially all modern science, not just the particular fields of paleontology, evolutionary biology, and geology!)

Related to the above, "How Can Something Come From Nothing?": This is a misunderstanding of both abiogenesis at one level, and Big Bang cosmology at the other. In the case of abiogenesis, there was never a magic moment when something was non-living and became living; instead, it would have been a stepwise shift of chemical processes from something unquestionably non-living through various quasi-life stages to extraordinarily primitive life and so on to LUCA. And in the case of the Big Bang: this was not, as pretty much the whole culture thinks it does, an explosion of everything inside a void. In fact, it is quite the opposite: EVERYTHING (all matter, all energy, everything) started out there in a mind-bogglingly condensed state and inflated. It wasn't an explosion of something in the nothing; it was an expansion of everything away from itself. (And neither of these are about evolution, anyway!)

"Argumentum ad Hitlerum" & "Argumentum ad Stalinum": A common trope (and theme of the misinformation "documentary" Expelled is that Hitler was applying Darwinian principles to eliminate inferior gene lines to improve the human race. (Similarly, but less often, people argue that Stalin was organizing the Soviet Union on Darwinian lines). This fails on two main lines.

The first is that even if these were true statements, it would not invalidate the reality of evolution. This is an Argument from Adverse Consequences: assuming an idea is false because bad consequences would result if the idea were true. But Hitler and Stalin's military made use of chemistry, physics, and so on to kill millions: that doesn't mean chemistry and ballistics and the like are untrue.

And furthermore, neither of these dictators actually supported Darwinian ideas of evolution, anyway! Stalin himself doesn't seem to have written much about it, but he promoted the work of the anti-Darwinian neo-Lamarckian Trofim Lysenko, who wrote:


and indeed Lysenkoists (with the support of Stalin's regime) had pro-Darwin workers banished to the Gulags along with other intellectuals who held ideas contrary to those supported by the State.

In the case of Hitler, we have his own writings to demonstrate that he rejected the transformation of species or the origins of humans from other types of animals:


and
and

Hardly the words of a man committed to an evolutionary worldview, trying to implement a Darwinist view on society!

"If We Teach Children We Are Just (or Come From) Animals, They Will Act Like Animals!": This is just another Argument from (in this case False) Adverse Consequences. Consider that in many nations (as we saw last time) there is far more belief in evolution than in the US, but their youths are not particularly prone to delinquency, rowdiness, or otherwise "animal"-like behaviors.

The "Gish Gallop": A common debating technique, named after YEC Duane Gish, and defined as "drowning the opponent in such a torrent of half-truths, lies, and straw-man arguments that the opponent cannot possibly answer every falsehood in real time." Sadly, this is by no means limited to evolution deniers, but is sort of a general rhetorical device. For proof, see the Internet...


Who Does and Doesn't Accept Evolution?
Rejection of evolution is higher in the US than other English-speaking nations (Angus Reid):

Within the US, there are different levels of acceptance in different sectors of society.

A more extensive site looking into acceptance of evolution by education, politics, and church attendance can be seen over at Gallup.

Correlation between acceptance of evolution and belief in God:

So one of the strongest indicators of rejection of evolution is indeed religion (and in particular, evangelical Protestant Christianity, at least in the US). In fact, Protestant preachers are far more likely than the public to hold evolution denier views.

But why should (at least some) religious people feel motivated to reject evolution (as opposed to rejecting other aspects of science, like cellular biology, the germ theory of disease, the atomic theory of matter, galactic astronomy, or any other myriad fields outside the scope of Scripture)?

In the report cited at the quote at the top of the notes, it was noticed by the reporter that the real reason for rejecting this aspect of science wasn't the science itself: it was the perceived implications of a material origin for humanity on the source of morality. They felt that if humans were not divinely created there could be no absolute morality dictated (literally) from On High, and that lacking such any sort of behavior might be condoned. (Of course this ignores millennia of work by ethical philosophers to find reasons for moral behavior outside of divine command, but that's outside the scope of this class!)

Additionally, this is part of what Carl Sagan called "The Great Demotions": the perception by some that as Science discovers the size and age of the Universe, Earth, and Life, that we seem more insignificant:

So why should we matter that some people fail to accept real things for personal reasons? What is the harm? In and of itself, that's all well and good. But part of the problem is that failure to think critically on one issue is generally linked with failure to think critically in most issues. In other words, pseudosciences tend to travel in packs. So those who reject evolution also tend to reject the reality of climate change, a phenomenon which effects all of us and which requires voting citizens to act:

Basically, once you accept that an ideology trumps evidence in one sphere, it becomes difficult to use your critical faculties in others. So the harm in rejecting well-supported discoveries like the antiquity of the Earth and the evolution of Life makes one susceptible to accepting untrue ideas, which will result in faulty decision making.


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Last modified: 8 May 2023

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The survival of the coelacanth Latimeria does not mean that every fossil form is still hiding somewhere in the world