[Atheist Biologist] Dawkins: Evangelist an 'idiot' on evolution

CNN ^ | November 25, 2009 | Peter Wilkinson

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

referring to U.S.-based evangelist Ray Comfort, who argues that the universe and life is the result of an intelligent creator, Dawkins said: "There is no refutation of Darwinian evolution in existence. If a refutation ever were to come about, it would come from a scientist, and not an idiot.

"You can't prove there's no God, no fairies, no leprechauns, or that Thor or Apollo don't exist. There's got to be a positive reason to think that fairies exist. Until somebody does, we can say technically we are agnostic about fairies. We can't disprove them, but we think it's a bit of a waste of time trying. And the same goes for God."

[Gumlegs]

seek help...

Why? What they did to you should be prevented, not eumulated.

[Gumlegs]

O.K. Next one, Colin Patterson.

Medved cites our old friend Dr. Patterson. Alas for Medved/tomzz/wedny1946/varmintman/jeddavis/and who knows how many other secret identities, he's citing a lie.

Here's part of a post from a couple of years back, slightly updated to account for the passage of time.

Before interviewing Dr Patterson, the author read his book, Evolution, which he had written for the British Museum of Natural History. In it he had solicited comments from readers about the book’s contents. One reader wrote a letter to Dr Patterson asking why he did not put a single photograph of a transitional fossil in his book. On April 10, 1979, he replied to the author in a most candid letter as follows:

‘… I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic licence, would that not mislead the reader?

’I wrote the text of my book four years ago. If I were to write it now, I think the book would be rather different. Gradualism is a concept I believe in, not just because of Darwin’s authority, but because my understanding of genetics seems to demand it. Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a palaeontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least “show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived.” I will lay it on the line—there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test.

[Bolding mine, to highlight Medved's misleading picked cherry of a quote].

‘

So, much as I should like to oblige you by jumping to the defence of gradualism, and fleshing out the transitions between the major types of animals and plants, I find myself a bit short of the intellectual justification necessary for the job …’

The quotation above is a deliberate distortion of Patterson’s words. How do I know this? Because it was refuted in a web page that was last updated in 1997! Twelve YEARS LATER, AIG is still peddling the same lie. So is Medved/tomzz/Wendy1946/varmintman/jeddavis. Perhaps it’s a Good Christian lie, born of “true” knowledge, but a lie none-the-less. How do we know it’s a lie? Dr. Colin Patterson, himself, told us!

It may be a little hard to read, so here’s what it says:

Dear Mr Theunissen,

Sorry to have taken so long to answer your letter of July 9th. I was away for a while, and then infernally busy. I seem fated continually to make a fool of myself with creationists. The specific quote you mention, from a letter to Sunderland dated 10th April 1979, is accurate as far as it goes. The passage quoted continues "... a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way to put them to the test."

I think the continuation of the passage shows clearly that your interpretation (at the end of your letter) is correct, and the creationists' is false.

That brush with Sunderland (I had never heard of him before) was my first experience of creationists. The famous "keynote address" at the American Museum of Natural History in 1981 was nothing of the sort. It was a talk to the "Systematics Discussion Group" in the Museum, an (extremely) informal group. I had been asked to talk to them on "Evolutionism and creationism"; fired up by a paper by Ernst Mayr published in Science just the week before. I gave a fairly rumbustious talk, arguing that the theory of evolution had done more harm than good to biological systematics (classification). Unknown to me, there was a creationist in the audience with a hidden tape recorder. So much the worse for me. But my talk was addressed to professional systematists, and concerned systematics, nothing else.

I hope that by now I have learned to be more circumspect in dealing with creationists, cryptic or overt. But I still maintain that scepticism is the scientist's duty, however much the stance may expose us to ridicule.

Yours Sincerely,

[signed] Colin Patterson

It’s part of a very interesting article shredding any credibility that AIG’s interpretation might have. Remember, the article has been on the web since 1997.

Here’s another quote from the article, explaining how Patterson’s words were distorted:

Patterson goes on to acknowledge that there are gaps in the fossil record, but points out that this is possibly due to the limitations of what fossils can tell us. He finishes the paragraph with:

". . .Fossils may tell us many things, but one thing they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors of anything else."

It is actually this statement which is the key to interpreting the Sunderland quote correctly; it is not possible to say for certain whether a fossil is in the direct ancestral line of a species group. Archaeopteryx, for example, is not necessarily directly ancestral to birds. It may have been a species on a side-branch. However, that in no way disqualifies it as a transitional form, or as evidence for evolution. Evolution predicts that such fossils will exist, and if there was no link between reptiles and birds then Archaeopteryx would not exist, whether it is directly ancestral or not. What Patterson was saying to Sunderland was that, of the transitional forms that are known, he could not make a watertight argument for any being directly ancestral to living species groups.

Got any more lies you'd like to peddle, Ted?

[Stultis]

Gumlegs to wendy1946; tomzz; varmintman; jeddavis; medved

LOL! I was never paying much attention until this thread. Did Ted Holden really have that many different FRidentities?

[Stultis]

Darwin saw the most major support for his theory being Haeckel's claim of embryos for dissimilar animals starting off being similar; that has since been shown to be a total fraud.

Congratulations, medved. You've just proved that you don't understand either evolution, or embryology, or Haeckel's "recapitulation" theory or the controversy about his drawings.

In short, embryos of different classes and orders of animals do start out far more similar, and become more dissimilar as they develop. That's not fraud, that's fact. Nor is that observation peculiar to Haeckel. His direct opponents, such as von Baer and His, all agreed on this generalization.

What is peculiar to Haeckel was his law of recapitulation, which held that an animal's embryonic development follows the exact same sequence as the sequence of its evolutionary ancestors, such that the stages in embryological development sequentially "recapitulate" the adult forms of ancestors.

Despite his friendly relations with Haeckel, Darwin never cited Haeckel's recapitulation theory in defense of evolution. In fact, Darwin consistently favored the views of Karl Ernst von Baer, who was an explicit opponent of Haeckel's views.

[Gumlegs]

Those are the ones I know of. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more.

[wendy1946]

When you see the full context it turns out he was trying to create a new species by hybridizing two existing species. Of course this is almost exactly the opposite of how evolution is supposed to work: i.e. joining two species to create one, versus splitting a population of one species to make two.

You've got Steve Gould and others with unassailable credentials claiming that mutations cannot produce new species:

"A mutation doesn't produce major new raw (DNA) material. You don't make a new species by mutating the species."

    Stephen Jay Gould,  Prof of Geology and
    Paleontology, Harvard University
    "Is a New and General Theory of Evol. Emerging?
    Lecture at Hobart&Wm Smith College,Feb4,1980

To the best of my knowledge however, neither Gould nor anybody else offers up anything to replace the idea of mutations and selection driving evolution. The punk-eek crowd uses the term "speciation event" without specifying what it means other than for the other mumbo-jumbo term "allopatry" which any reader would take to mean via mutations. The Marvel comic books use the term "Shazam!" for the same sort of thing.

That means that Nilsson's version of such mumbo-jumbo is every bit as good as anybody else's.

Now, during the first decades of the last century, REAL tests were conducted bearing on the possibility or impossibility of macroevolution. Fruit flies breed new generations every other day so that running such tests for decades will involve more generations of fruit flies than there have ever been of anything even vaguely resembling humans on this Earth. Moreover, they subjected those flies to everything in the world known to produce mutations and recombined the mutants every possible way. All they ever got were sterile freaks, and fruit flies.

That was because our entire living world is driven by information, and the only information there ever was in that picture was that for a fruit fly. When RNA and DNA were discovered a few decades later, the reason for the failure of those tests was known.

"At that moment, when the DNA/RNA system became understood, the debate between Evolutionists and Creationists should have come to a screeching halt.

    I.L. Cohen, Researcher and Mathematician
    Member NY Academy of Sciences
    Officer of the Archaeological Inst. of America
    Darwin Was  Wrong - A Study in Probabilities
    New Research Publications, 1984, p. 4

Beyond that point in time, there is no reasonable way anybody should have gone on believing in evolution.

[Stultis]

You've got Steve Gould and others with unassailable credentials claiming that mutations cannot produce new species:

"A mutation doesn't produce major new raw (DNA) material. You don't make a new species by mutating the species."

    Stephen Jay Gould,  Prof of Geology and
    Paleontology, Harvard University
    "Is a New and General Theory of Evol. Emerging?
    Lecture at Hobart&Wm Smith College,Feb4,1980

No I don't. I have your uncited source, creationist Luther Sunderland, a man with a rich record of misquoting evolutionists, or presenting snippets of their views so widely out of context that their meaning is inverted fully 180 degrees, saying that Gould said that.

Even if it were an accurate quote (it reads like a paraphrase of some sort) it's too short and isolated a snippet to determine either the actual point Gould intended to make, or the body of data upon which his point was based. Naturally, neither issue is of interest to creationists.

[wendy1946]

Gould's 1980 paper is available on the web but you'd have to pay for it and I don't feel any such need personally. There are however other quotes to the same effect from other scholars and the point appears obvious enough given the generally destructive nature of mutations:

"With ... the inability of mutations of any type to produce new genetic information, the maintenance of the basic plan is to be expected." (p.168) "There are limits to biological change and ... these limits are set by the structure and function of the genetic machinery." (p. 153)

    Ph.D. L.P.Lester & R.G. Bohlin  (Creationists)
    The Natural Limits of Biological Change
    Zondervan/Probe, 1984

"No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of (E)volution."

    Pierre-Paul Grosse
    past-President, French Acadamie des Science
    Evolution of Living Organisms
    Academic Press, New York, 1977, p 88

"A random change in the highly integrated system of chemical processes which constitute life is certain to impair - just as a random interchange of connections in a television set is not likely to improve the picture."

    James F. Crow
    Radiation & mutation specialist
    "Genetic Effects of Radiation"
    Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Vol. 14, pp 19-20

[Stultis]

I'll ignore the quote from the creationists (DUH!) and the Lamarckian (Grosse) and just deal with the one reputable scientist you quote.

Is there a particular reason, medved, that, for this reference alone, you don't provide the year of publication. Could it be that the year -- 1958 -- if given, would make it sound a bit dated? Eh?

The first paragraph of the article, readable here, underscores the datedness when Crow reveals scientific uncertainty as to whether there are 46 or 48 human chromosomes! Equally dated, the article also says that virtually all mutations are harmful, whereas we now know that the vast majority are neutral.

It should also be noted that the article is agenda driven. When you combine the source, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, with the fact that James F. Crow had pacifist (and possible commie symp) leanings, with the mid/late 50's date (when the United States was still far surpassing the Soviet Union in atomic weapons testing), and read the concluding section of the article, it's clear what is going on. This article has nothing to do with evolution. It's about scaring the American public over the effects of fall-out from atomic testing.

[wendy1946]

A fairly good description of the background involved with the numerous quotes in the literature regarding the lack of transitional forms.

[Gumlegs]

What a lovely quote salad, tossed by a veterinarian who doubtless knows more about paleontology than any twelve paneontologists one could name.

Ted, really, do you really expect anyone to lend credence to someone who emphasizes the Dr. Colin Patterson quote fraud I exposed above? (Dr. Dill's latest copyright is 1998, a year after the 1997 page I used as a source. It seems the good veterinarian is a bit behind in his reading. One hopes he keeps up with the literature in his field better than he does with the TOE}.

Do you bother reading the rubbish you cite?

[wendy1946]

seek help...

[whattajoke]

wendy1946; tomzz; varmintman; jeddavis; medved

that's funny. I'll sleep on it; I know of a couple more I can't recall right now.

[Gumlegs]

No mind-numbing pictures of rocks you're sure are fifteen year old dinosaur bone fragments? No Velikovskian double-talk? No Splifford, either in ASCII guise or animated GIF?

You're getting lazy in your old age, Ted.

[Bellflower]

ping