A Paleontologist Takes On Creationist

A reader kindly sent me a link to this interesting blog, called Paleo Errata, where paleontologist Jeffrey Martz discusses evolution and also shares Higgs' interest in debating/debunking creationists. I agree that creationist arguments offer teachable moments and allow us to discuss the nature of science. Here's the one he chose to take on:

"Claiming that random fluctuations can produce anatomical changes from a primate to a human is quite frankly incredible, or at least has never been demonstrated. That's like saying you can through a bunch of chemicals in a bowl, whip them up with a blender and produce a single cell creature. Does anyone seriously think that is possible?"

It's not the most coherent creationist letter I've seen. The writer doesn't seem to realize humans are primates. Even Linnaeus realized that long before Darwin. It's also a bizarre analogy: non-human primate is to human as chemicals in a blender are to cells. This seems to assume that other primates represent a disordered form of matter.

Here's how Dr. Martz answers it:

When I was conceived, I was a single cell. Imagine if, just 24 hours after my conception, my mother gave birth to me as I am now, a fully formed adult man...if I grew from a single cell to an incredibly complex multicellular organism millions of times as large, and unimaginably more complex, in just one day. It would be incredible, and scientifically impossible.

But guess what? It happened..just over a longer period of time.

It took 36 years instead of 24 hours...but with the same resultas the impossible scenario.

(Okay, I just have to interject a minor point here, which is that for anyone with a vagina, the rapid growth of complexity isn't the part of this scenario that's most incredible or impossible.)

And the process by which it happened, though extraordinary and fascinating, is fully materialistic and operated within the laws of physics and chemistry (in fact, the most incredible leap in complexity took place within the first nine months...so why do creationists have a hard time believing that a single cell couldn't evolve into multicellular life over 3 billionyears? ). One way of producing a multicellular adult man is impossible. Another is totally explicable. The method is everything.

If we can get past the unthinkable image presented by the second sentence, it's a great answer. Deep time is what allows evolution to produce to the tree of life we see today. Darwin was working in the dawn of a new geology, when science was first revealing an Earth many times older than anyone had imagined.

Not that all evolution needs millions of years. Natural selection is demonstrated all the time in microbes. But real time microbial evolution doesn't seem to satisfy creationists, who want new vertebrate species to emerge overnight. Beyond that, creationists often cling to the false idea that order can never increase (or entropy decrease), without some sort of supernatural intervention. But as long as energy comes into the system, order can increase, which is why a single cell can eventually become a baby and then a grown-up human being.