FearoftheLordcomics newest endeavor, God VS. Man: Who made Who? has progressed to its first page. But in this blog posting, I wanted to discuss a tangential topic but it does reach relevancy a few paragraphs in. Many of our ancient ancestors developed elaborate myths to help them make sense of a bewildering world. Today, with the help of modern media, we have meta-narratives to help us make sense of a myriad of voices, opinions, and an oversupply of information (not to mention cat videos). When it comes to understanding the world we inhabit , we often fall into one of two categories; thinker or follower.
When two thinkers with opposing views meet, respectful discussion ensues, and both walk away with enhanced understanding of their positions. When two followers of clashing worldviews meet and exchange ideas, it often deteriorates into insult, invective, and obscenity.
Typically, followers feel threatened when the explanatory meta-narrative is challenged. The thinkers prefer to examine and probe the narrative; to ask difficult or controversial questions. Consider what happened to Socrates in 399 B.C., at the height of his career of asking thought-provoking questions that disquieted the good citizens of Athens. Sometimes in our own day, followers who don't like a thinker's line of questioning will accuse them of hate crimes, cancel them, or smear them with nasty labels and insinuations. If this process goes unchecked, the act of thinking can seem vaguely illegal, or at least likely be made so in the near future.
The Theory of Evolution has become the meta-narrative used to explain the mind-boggling complexity in the natural world around us, and to answer the proverbial question, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Fair enough - evolution is a well-credentialed candidate among scientific theories. However, it has a weakness. The coziness of the scientific establishment to the idea of macroevolution minimizes the amount of vetting it receives. We have given evolution's advocates diplomatic immunity for any of their crimes against logic. Sometimes leaps of logic and extremes in conjecture can even span interplanetary distances! Consider the rock specimen, ALH84001.
In 1996, NASA scientist, David McKay and his team decided that a meteorite discovered a decade earlier in Antarctica had come from Mars. They determined the rock sample had been projected into space by the impact of an asteroid crashing into Mars 16 million years ago. Then, 13,000 years ago, it was pulled by Earth's orbit to its Antarctic home. Scientists examining carbonate globules within meteorite cracks found chemicals that just might be decay products of microbes - microscopic worm-like forms that maybe perhaps might be fossilized bacteria. Today there isn't much excitement about the value of this rock as evidence for life on Mars, but at the time it was front-page news. The announcement of the find coincided nicely with NASA's publicity campaign to increase support for an upcoming and hugely expensive Mars mission.
But questions do come to mind. An asteroid crashing into a planet projects a 2 kg rock into orbit around the sun? It seems like something mirroring the dubious physics of Wile E. Coyote, as the speed of the rock projectile is mindboggling. When a big rock hits ground, its kinetic energy will turn into heat energy and entropy. It will do some damage to the surface it lands on. But small nearby rocks do not acquire projectile motion in the opposite direction, so much that they go into orbit. Napoleon once said "Audacity, audacity, always audacity." The quote is more appropriate on the battlefield than it is for making claims on a research paper. Humility is a more appropriate virtue. The specificity of the ALH84001's backstory doesn't seem warranted: an asteroid hits 16 million years ago, and its force sends the rock in orbit for 16 million years, etc. But researchers can only make such a claim if no one calls a bluff. The whole incident sounds like Bishop James Ussher's 1656 research claim that the first day of creation was Sunday, Oct 23rd, 4004 B.C, in the evening. Regardless, Dr. McKay's published research has proved quite forgettable. Think about it - modern forensic science can discover so much about Mars, with such incredible specificity from on Martian rock in our own back yard so to speak. They know exactly what happened 16 million years ago, on a far-away planet without anyone even having to leave a plush office on earth. With so much capability, why the need to send an uber-expensive space mission to Mars now?
Now let's look at the supposed evolution of whales. I almost thought this 3 minute video was a spoof, but it's not. Here, Richard Dawkins relates that this land-animal-to-whale evolution is "one of the best examples of intermediate fossils." However, the morphological gaps between the "intermediate fossils" are enormous. Personally, I think they should throw a duckbilled platypus in there for good measure. These gaps easily surpass the proverbial differences between cats and dogs. Part of the reason we don't realize the gaps are impossible is no one knows what a Pakicetus, Ambulocetus, or Basilosauras really were. Had we more than a bare-bones understanding (no pun intended) of these extinct creatures, we'd see that this is not evidence for the evolution of whales. A more complete analysis of whale evolution is found here.
In his 1859 book, On the Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin acknowledged that the fossil record of his day didn't provide evidence for this theory of evolution. To quote exactly, Darwin
wrote on page 85:
Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking most closely all the species of the same group together, must assuredly have existed; but the very process of natural selection constantly tends, as has been so often remarked, to exterminate the parent forms and the intermediate links. Consequently evidence of their former existence could be found only amongst fossil remains, which are preserved, as we shall in a future chapter attempt to show, in an extremely imperfect and intermittent record.
We now know there are not "numberless intermediate varieties" linking one distinct species to another. Stephen Jay Gould, a top evolutionary scientist, stated in 1977, “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils."
This and other similar observations were made to support Gould's theory of Punctuated Equilibrium. In his theory, evolution occurs very quickly in small isolated populations, and thus does not leave a fossil trail.
Later in life, Gould would complain about those outside the evolution camp quoting him liberally. But it's not that the rarity of transitional fossil forms was unknown to the intelligent design or special creation camps. It's just the establishment has been running interference for its pet theory for such a long time that proponents of competing theories are just not part of the conversation. They are more libel to be smeared will nasty names, cancelled or accused of hate crimes. The give-and-take of robust discourse on this topic that is natural to science, has acquired a feel of being verboten, vaguely illegal. Come on everybody, let's be sheople and accept the meta-narrative.
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