The Creationism vs. Evolution Debate
David Barber
Issue date: 12/2/09 Section: Viewpoints
Several weeks ago our campus was flooded with large full color posters and large portable billboards advertising a "Creation/Evolution Seminar" with Dr. Brad Harrub.
I'm interested in evolution and I could tell that Dr. Harrub would be arguing for creation. I called the phone number on the poster and was told that Dr. Harrub would be speaking for about 20 minutes and then have a discussion with the audience. On these terms I decided to join about 200 people at Watkins for the session on November 21, "Evolutionary Hoaxes and the Dinosaurs."
Dr. Harrub, a charismatic man in the mold of a seasoned televangelist, established the parameters of his argument in the first minutes of his talk. As I understood him, Dr. Harrub believes that Americans have been indoctrinated into a false belief in evolution. Champions of evolutionary theory, Dr. Harrub contended, largely base their claims on falsified evidence and even evolutionists themselves know that the evolutionary story they tell is a lie.
Dr. Harrub began his talk with a discussion of "Evolutionary Hoaxes." He chose for his example the story of the peppered moth, a famous case about which many of us have heard something. Prior to the industrial revolution in England the peppered moth was a light colored moth with a sprinkle of black spots. As England's industrial towns began to pour sooty pollutants into the atmosphere these moths turned much darker in color, evolutionists claiming that this was a case of natural selection. That is, the moths with less "pepper" in their coloration were easier prey for birds when cast against the darker background of the soot-laden trees. Moths with more "pepper" survived and passed on this trait to subsequent generations, leading to a progressive darkening in the moths' coloration.
Dr. Harrub exposed this classical example of natural selection as a falsehood. The scientist who conducted the experiment in which he tested light colored versus dark colored moths for their vulnerability to predation had conducted shoddy science, at best.
People not familiar with the extensive scientific work demonstrating natural selection's power might well assume that this peppered moth story was typical of how scientists hoodwink the public.
That this is false, that species do change, and change radically, in response to their environment, is proven every single day, however. Insects, for example, have developed resistance and immunities to poisons that formerly killed them in droves. We now have strains of staph bacteria that have successfully engineered resistance to a variety of drugs. Formerly treatable bacterial infections are now killing people. In other words, these insects and bacteria have evolved before our eyes.
But having discredited the peppered moth story, Dr. Harrub felt no need to conduct a serious discussion of natural selection. It was time to get to the heart of his lecture: evolutionists, according to Dr. Harrub, begin indoctrinating Americans from a very young age using for their purpose that creature which every child loves, the dinosaur. Go to any museum, Dr. Harrub urged, and you will see reconstructed fossils of these giant reptiles. Beneath these fossils you'll see little explanatory plaques telling you that the dinosaurs lived a hundred million years ago and became extinct 65 million years back, long before human beings came on the scene.
Dr. Harrub determined to set this record straight. His first witness: the Bible, or rather how Dr. Harrub reads the Bible. According to this Ph.D. in Neurobiology, God created the world and everything on it in six days some 6000 years ago. If this is so, then it would be obviously impossible for the dinosaurs to have died 65 millions years ago; and, human beings and dinosaurs must have coexisted with one another.
Evidence? Dr. Harrub offered a powerpoint slide of a small dinosaur within the gut of the fossilized remains of a mammal. I am not sure why Dr. Harrub believes that this is evidence that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. Evolutionary scientists affirm that mammals and dinosaurs coexisted over a period of nearly 150 million years. This piece of Dr. Harrub's presentation makes sense only if you hold that animals don't evolve. The presence of a single mammal, I guess, proves that human beings must have existed too.
I should mention that by now Dr. Harrub had consumed the twenty minutes I'd been told he'd speak and he was still going strong. I was getting antsy because I had as yet heard no real evidence for Dr. Harrub's argument. But now Dr. Harrub was threatening to demolish one of the key elements of evolutionary theory: radiometric dating. Radiometric dating is one of the most important tools scientists use to date the age of the earth and the age of fossils.
A variety of chemical elements - potassium, carbon, uranium, thorium, etc. - exist in stable and unstable, or radioactive, forms. Over time, the unstable forms of these elements deteriorate and leave behind a stable element in its place. This deterioration of the unstable "isotope" occurs on average at a steady rate, expressed in terms of radioactive half-life.
Radioactive carbon, Carbon-14, for example, has a half-life of not quite 6,000 years. When an animal or plant dies it ceases to consume Carbon-14, and the Carbon-14 begins to deteriorate, turning into the stable element Nitrogen, Carbon-14's "daughter" element. Since the amount of Carbon-14 in the environment remains fairly constant, if the remains of a given animal contain only half the Carbon-14 that one would expect to find in the cells of a living animal, then scientists can say that the animal likely died 6,000 years ago. To be sure, especially given the peculiarities of Carbon-14, and its relatively short half-life, scientists must be extremely cautious in their Carbon-14 dating, cross-checking their findings with other means whenever possible.
Naturally enough, Dr. Harrub trained his guns on Carbon-14 dating as the sole representative of radiometric dating. Powerpoints of living animals dated as having died 10,000 years ago! Powerpoints of one and the same animal with widely divergent ages! And, of course, since Dr. Harrub offered not one word of how scientists attempt to compensate for and cross-check Carbon-14 datings, it was hardly necessary for him to ask the obvious: how could any intelligent human being rely on such unreliable data to assess the age of dinosaurs, or of anything?
But wait, Dr. Harrub was not done demolishing the validity of radiometric dating. He called as his next witness AGAINST radiometric dating none other than Richard Dawkins, world renowned atheist and one of the foremost champions of evolution in the world today, a modern day Darwin. Here is the confession that Harrub extracted from Dawkins and placed on his powerpoint :
"The radiocarbon stopwatch buzzes round at a great rate, so fast that, after some thousands of years, its spring is almost wound down and the watch is no longer reliable. It is useful for dating organic material on the … timescale where we are dealing in hundreds or a few thousands of year, but it is no good for the evolutionary timescale where we are dealing with millions of years" (from Dawkin's book, The Blind Watchmaker, p.226).
Well, this is certainly a triumph for Dr. Harrub. How could scientists seriously say that dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago when the great Dawkins says that radiocarbon dating is worthless for measuring millions of years? Only … only, Dr. Harrub has avoided the fact that scientists don't use radioCARBON dating for measuring the age of ancient fossils or rocks. Of course, this is precisely what Dawkins was explaining when Harrub lifted Dawkins's words out of context.
Some radioactive isotopes have extremely long half-lives. Rubidium-87, for example, has a half-life of 49 billion years. Thorium-232 has a half-life of 14 billion years; Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, and so on. Because an ancient rock has a combination of these and other radioactive elements, each with a different half-life, you can cross-check the findings on one radioactive isotope with the findings of two, three, or more isotopes in the same rock. So for example, the same sample of moon rock taken back to Earth by the Apollo 11 astronauts was tested using three different radioactive isotopes, Argon, Rubidium, and Samarium, and all came back with ages ranging from 3.49 billion years to 3.57 billion years.
The oldest rocks on earth, ancient meteorites, have, by these means and cross-checks, been dated at 4.5 billion years of age. And it has been through these careful samplings and cross-checks of radioactive isotopes that scientists of whole variety of nationalities and religious beliefs have come up with the estimate that dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago, on the one hand, and that modern day humans first walked the earth less than a million years ago.
Well, at about this point Dr. Harrub announced that he'd go on for another 30 minutes. As his first 20 minutes were already up, and as he had made no serious argument for his thesis to that point, I left, angered and dismayed. Angered and dismayed because I suspected that the majority of people in Watkins that night knew very little about evolutionary theory going into Dr. Harrub's talk, and went away with even less knowledge. Angered and dismayed, because many of those people left Watkins that night more convinced than ever that they are the victims of a massive effort at indoctrination, indoctrination aimed at taking away from them everything they hold dear.
And of course, ironically, they are right. A massive effort at indoctrination is afoot. But it is not the scientists doing the indoctrinating.
Dr. David Barber is Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee at Martin.
I'm interested in evolution and I could tell that Dr. Harrub would be arguing for creation. I called the phone number on the poster and was told that Dr. Harrub would be speaking for about 20 minutes and then have a discussion with the audience. On these terms I decided to join about 200 people at Watkins for the session on November 21, "Evolutionary Hoaxes and the Dinosaurs."
Dr. Harrub, a charismatic man in the mold of a seasoned televangelist, established the parameters of his argument in the first minutes of his talk. As I understood him, Dr. Harrub believes that Americans have been indoctrinated into a false belief in evolution. Champions of evolutionary theory, Dr. Harrub contended, largely base their claims on falsified evidence and even evolutionists themselves know that the evolutionary story they tell is a lie.
Dr. Harrub began his talk with a discussion of "Evolutionary Hoaxes." He chose for his example the story of the peppered moth, a famous case about which many of us have heard something. Prior to the industrial revolution in England the peppered moth was a light colored moth with a sprinkle of black spots. As England's industrial towns began to pour sooty pollutants into the atmosphere these moths turned much darker in color, evolutionists claiming that this was a case of natural selection. That is, the moths with less "pepper" in their coloration were easier prey for birds when cast against the darker background of the soot-laden trees. Moths with more "pepper" survived and passed on this trait to subsequent generations, leading to a progressive darkening in the moths' coloration.
Dr. Harrub exposed this classical example of natural selection as a falsehood. The scientist who conducted the experiment in which he tested light colored versus dark colored moths for their vulnerability to predation had conducted shoddy science, at best.
People not familiar with the extensive scientific work demonstrating natural selection's power might well assume that this peppered moth story was typical of how scientists hoodwink the public.
That this is false, that species do change, and change radically, in response to their environment, is proven every single day, however. Insects, for example, have developed resistance and immunities to poisons that formerly killed them in droves. We now have strains of staph bacteria that have successfully engineered resistance to a variety of drugs. Formerly treatable bacterial infections are now killing people. In other words, these insects and bacteria have evolved before our eyes.
But having discredited the peppered moth story, Dr. Harrub felt no need to conduct a serious discussion of natural selection. It was time to get to the heart of his lecture: evolutionists, according to Dr. Harrub, begin indoctrinating Americans from a very young age using for their purpose that creature which every child loves, the dinosaur. Go to any museum, Dr. Harrub urged, and you will see reconstructed fossils of these giant reptiles. Beneath these fossils you'll see little explanatory plaques telling you that the dinosaurs lived a hundred million years ago and became extinct 65 million years back, long before human beings came on the scene.
Dr. Harrub determined to set this record straight. His first witness: the Bible, or rather how Dr. Harrub reads the Bible. According to this Ph.D. in Neurobiology, God created the world and everything on it in six days some 6000 years ago. If this is so, then it would be obviously impossible for the dinosaurs to have died 65 millions years ago; and, human beings and dinosaurs must have coexisted with one another.
Evidence? Dr. Harrub offered a powerpoint slide of a small dinosaur within the gut of the fossilized remains of a mammal. I am not sure why Dr. Harrub believes that this is evidence that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. Evolutionary scientists affirm that mammals and dinosaurs coexisted over a period of nearly 150 million years. This piece of Dr. Harrub's presentation makes sense only if you hold that animals don't evolve. The presence of a single mammal, I guess, proves that human beings must have existed too.
I should mention that by now Dr. Harrub had consumed the twenty minutes I'd been told he'd speak and he was still going strong. I was getting antsy because I had as yet heard no real evidence for Dr. Harrub's argument. But now Dr. Harrub was threatening to demolish one of the key elements of evolutionary theory: radiometric dating. Radiometric dating is one of the most important tools scientists use to date the age of the earth and the age of fossils.
A variety of chemical elements - potassium, carbon, uranium, thorium, etc. - exist in stable and unstable, or radioactive, forms. Over time, the unstable forms of these elements deteriorate and leave behind a stable element in its place. This deterioration of the unstable "isotope" occurs on average at a steady rate, expressed in terms of radioactive half-life.
Radioactive carbon, Carbon-14, for example, has a half-life of not quite 6,000 years. When an animal or plant dies it ceases to consume Carbon-14, and the Carbon-14 begins to deteriorate, turning into the stable element Nitrogen, Carbon-14's "daughter" element. Since the amount of Carbon-14 in the environment remains fairly constant, if the remains of a given animal contain only half the Carbon-14 that one would expect to find in the cells of a living animal, then scientists can say that the animal likely died 6,000 years ago. To be sure, especially given the peculiarities of Carbon-14, and its relatively short half-life, scientists must be extremely cautious in their Carbon-14 dating, cross-checking their findings with other means whenever possible.
Naturally enough, Dr. Harrub trained his guns on Carbon-14 dating as the sole representative of radiometric dating. Powerpoints of living animals dated as having died 10,000 years ago! Powerpoints of one and the same animal with widely divergent ages! And, of course, since Dr. Harrub offered not one word of how scientists attempt to compensate for and cross-check Carbon-14 datings, it was hardly necessary for him to ask the obvious: how could any intelligent human being rely on such unreliable data to assess the age of dinosaurs, or of anything?
But wait, Dr. Harrub was not done demolishing the validity of radiometric dating. He called as his next witness AGAINST radiometric dating none other than Richard Dawkins, world renowned atheist and one of the foremost champions of evolution in the world today, a modern day Darwin. Here is the confession that Harrub extracted from Dawkins and placed on his powerpoint :
"The radiocarbon stopwatch buzzes round at a great rate, so fast that, after some thousands of years, its spring is almost wound down and the watch is no longer reliable. It is useful for dating organic material on the … timescale where we are dealing in hundreds or a few thousands of year, but it is no good for the evolutionary timescale where we are dealing with millions of years" (from Dawkin's book, The Blind Watchmaker, p.226).
Well, this is certainly a triumph for Dr. Harrub. How could scientists seriously say that dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago when the great Dawkins says that radiocarbon dating is worthless for measuring millions of years? Only … only, Dr. Harrub has avoided the fact that scientists don't use radioCARBON dating for measuring the age of ancient fossils or rocks. Of course, this is precisely what Dawkins was explaining when Harrub lifted Dawkins's words out of context.
Some radioactive isotopes have extremely long half-lives. Rubidium-87, for example, has a half-life of 49 billion years. Thorium-232 has a half-life of 14 billion years; Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, and so on. Because an ancient rock has a combination of these and other radioactive elements, each with a different half-life, you can cross-check the findings on one radioactive isotope with the findings of two, three, or more isotopes in the same rock. So for example, the same sample of moon rock taken back to Earth by the Apollo 11 astronauts was tested using three different radioactive isotopes, Argon, Rubidium, and Samarium, and all came back with ages ranging from 3.49 billion years to 3.57 billion years.
The oldest rocks on earth, ancient meteorites, have, by these means and cross-checks, been dated at 4.5 billion years of age. And it has been through these careful samplings and cross-checks of radioactive isotopes that scientists of whole variety of nationalities and religious beliefs have come up with the estimate that dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago, on the one hand, and that modern day humans first walked the earth less than a million years ago.
Well, at about this point Dr. Harrub announced that he'd go on for another 30 minutes. As his first 20 minutes were already up, and as he had made no serious argument for his thesis to that point, I left, angered and dismayed. Angered and dismayed because I suspected that the majority of people in Watkins that night knew very little about evolutionary theory going into Dr. Harrub's talk, and went away with even less knowledge. Angered and dismayed, because many of those people left Watkins that night more convinced than ever that they are the victims of a massive effort at indoctrination, indoctrination aimed at taking away from them everything they hold dear.
And of course, ironically, they are right. A massive effort at indoctrination is afoot. But it is not the scientists doing the indoctrinating.
Dr. David Barber is Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee at Martin.
Viewing Comments 1 - 10 of 60
Christopher
posted 12/02/09 @ 2:11 PM CST
The difference between education and indoctrination is not whether the information is true or false, but whether the student is given the tools and freedom to critically assess whether the information is true or false. (Continued…)
Matt Young
Matt Young
posted 12/02/09 @ 4:36 PM CST
I am afraid you have been a bit credulous accepting Dr. Harrub's supposed debunking of the peppered moth story. Bernard Kettlewell's pioneering work on the peppered moth was nothing short of brilliant, and it has been replicated in both the peppered moth and other species. (Continued…)
RBH
posted 12/02/09 @ 5:29 PM CST
Christopher wrote
"But most teachers (and not just of evolution, but of any subject) do the same thing. They teach "facts" (anything from "evolution" to "George Washington was the first President of the USA") as true, but do not teach the students how to tell fact from theory, and do not show them how to tell a strong theory from a weak theory. (Continued…)
okraeater
posted 12/02/09 @ 5:44 PM CST
I too attended the "misinformation presentation" as I like to call it and what I found most disturbing about Dr.Harrub's seminar aside from the bogus biblical claims was that I seemed to be the only person who actually asked intelligent and though-provoking questions after Dr. (Continued…)
RickK
posted 12/02/09 @ 6:09 PM CST
As Judge Jones pointed out in Kitzmiller v Dover, it is always amazing how utterly inane and how fundamentally dishonest the creationists are. And what is so terribly ironic is that, as they lie, the creationists often claim the moral high ground. (Continued…)
Reuben K.
posted 12/02/09 @ 11:27 PM CST
How delightful. A history professor attends the first thirty minutes of a 1+ hour presentation on Biological topics, walks out, and then passes condescending judgement on the speaker. (Continued…)
A Greenhill
posted 12/03/09 @ 12:04 PM CST
Reuben K... 99 point something percent of earth and life scientists agree on the validity of evolutionary theory... and you say defining them as the "real scientists" is a poor definition? Really? You'd prefer to define "real scientists" as the small handful who use scriptures instead of the scientific method?
I somehow doubt you have any real education Mr Reuben. (Continued…)
Rasta Mon
posted 12/03/09 @ 2:54 PM CST
Thank you, Dr. Barber, for offering your voice of reason. Perhaps this will help some people who read this to venture outside their zone of ignorance. (Continued…)
Reuben K.
posted 12/03/09 @ 3:45 PM CST
99 point something percent of earth and life scientists agree on the validity of evolutionary theory, according to a survey conducted by A. Greenhill, presumeably within a relevant time span - say the last ten years. (Continued…)
okraeater
posted 12/03/09 @ 4:33 PM CST
Oh snap Ruben!
But seriously I attended all of both sessions of the "seminar" and there was hardly any convincing evidence for any of his bogus counter-claims about evolution or dinosaurs for that matter. (Continued…)
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