How to Write an Antievolution Article
Today’s lesson is about publishing. Not writing. Not scholarship. Just the act of getting words out in front of other people without any sort of tedious labor behind them. Oh, and most important, these words will have your name in the byline. The case study is Creationism – How Entropy challenges Evolution Theory by B. G. Ranganathan. It went up on the “Best Syndication” weblog yesterday. Along with the featured article, you get the opportunity to buy Ranganathan’s book offering,
Origins?, from Amazon, as it is prominently displayed in the left sidebar. (At least if you buy it here, you support this weblog.)
The first step is to pick your topic. When it comes to antievolution, there are three things going for you. First, there is a plethora of material to be recycled without risk. As antievolution advocates sometimes point out, their ideas have deep roots, tracing back at least to certain Greek philosophers. Recognizable material of somewhat more recent vintage (and thus easier to incorporate into a pseudo-essay that passes as modern) comes from authors like the Reverend William Paley. Authors such as George Macready Price and Henry M. Morris assembled many of the arguments together in various books. And, as I said, nobody cares if you steal it. In fact, others will be confused if you provide complete references and trace back claims to sources. That just isn’t done as a matter of course in this field, and, of course, it pays to pick up the social gestalt of your new career.
Second, there is a market. As Harvard Lampoon noted, it’s the sort of market whose pant’s pockets display the sort of scorch marks produced only by large quantities of spontaneously combusting cash. Antievolution, if it accomplishes nothing else, moves money around the marketplace from folks who read the same material over and over to those who, like you, are now learning how to be the sort of person who transfers material from old sources and puts your name over the top.
Third, the mere act of repeating various hoary old chestnuts will give you a solid sense of community. Others who are doing just as you do will welcome the opportunity to come to your defense if someone criticizes you. It gives them something to do other than look for more things to recycle. You will quickly learn to do this, too. Of course, the stances taken are also all borrowed from earlier writers, so it just comes down to copying slightly different parts of the usual sources in order to label and dismiss critical forays.
Babu Ranganathan has this down pat. Let’s take a look at his effort and see where he got his material.
Few scientists have considered or pondered the full implications of the law of entropy upon the theory of evolution. And, as we shall see, entropy does occur in open systems such as our Earth.
The theory of evolution teaches that matter tends to evolve towards greater and greater complexity and order. We are so accustomed to seeing evolution of technology all about us (new cars, boats, ships, inventions, etc.) that we assume that nature must work the same way also. Of course, we forget that all those new gadgets and technology had a human designer behind them. Nature, however, doesn’t work the same way.
The spontaneous (the unaided or undirected) tendency of matter is always towards greater disorder — not towards greater order and complexity as evolution would teach. This tendency towards disorder that exists in all matter can be temporarily overcome only if there exists some energy converting and directing mechanism to direct, develop, and maintain order.
Brooks and Wiley might be surprised at this claim that “few scientists have considered” thermodynamics and evolution. Of course, since Brooks and Wiley advance the thesis that entropic considerations actually drive biological evolution, they’d likely be doubly perplexed by Ranganathan.
Beyond that, the whole topic has been done to death in the antievolution literature. These arguments take up most of section CF in Mark Isaak’s “Index to Creationist Claims”. I’ll quote a bit from one entry there:
Claim CF001:
The second law of thermodynamics says that everything tends toward disorder, making evolutionary development impossible.
Source:
Morris, Henry M., 1974. Scientific Creationism, Green Forest, AR: Master Books, pp. 38-46.
Response:1. The second law of thermodynamics says no such thing. It says that heat will not spontaneously flow from a colder body to a warmer one or, equivalently, that total entropy (a measure of useful energy) in a closed system will not decrease. This does not prevent increasing order because
* the earth is not a closed system; sunlight (with low entropy) shines on it and heat (with higher entropy) radiates off. This flow of energy, and the change in entropy that accompanies it, can and will power local decreases in entropy on earth.
* entropy is not the same as disorder. Sometimes the two correspond, but sometimes order increases as entropy increases. (Aranda-Espinoza et al. 1999; Kestenbaum 1998) Entropy can even be used to produce order, such as in the sorting of molecules by size (Han and Craighead 2000).
* even in a closed system, pockets of lower entropy can form if they are offset by increased entropy elsewhere in the system.
In short, order from disorder happens on earth all the time.2. The only processes necessary for evolution to occur are reproduction, heritable variation, and selection. All of these are seen to happen all the time, so, obviously, no physical laws are preventing them. In fact, connections between evolution and entropy have been studied in depth, and never to the detriment of evolution (Demetrius 2000).
Several scientists have proposed that evolution and the origin of life is driven by entropy (McShea 1998). Some see the information content of organisms subject to diversification according to the second law (Brooks and Wiley 1988), so organisms diversify to fill empty niches much as a gas expands to fill an empty container. Others propose that highly ordered complex systems emerge and evolve to dissipate energy (and increase overall entropy) more efficiently (Schneider and Kay 1994).
3. Creationists themselves admit that increasing order is possible. They introduce fictional exceptions to the law to account for it.
4. Creationists themselves make claims that directly contradict their claims about the second law of thermodynamics, such as hydrological sorting of fossils during the Flood.
References:
1. Aranda-Espinoza, H., Y. Chen, N. Dan, T. C. Lubensky, P. Nelson, L. Ramos and D. A. Weitz, 1999. Electrostatic repulsion of positively charged vesicles and negatively charged objects. Science 285: 394-397.
2. Brooks, D. R. and E. O. Wiley, 1988. Evolution As Entropy, University of Chicago Press.
3. Kestenbaum, David, 1998. Gentle force of entropy bridges disciplines. Science 279: 1849.
4. Han, J. and H. G. Craighead, 2000. Separation of long DNA molecules in a microfabricated entropic trap array. Science 288: 1026-1029.
5. Demetrius, Lloyd, 2000. Theromodynamics and evolution. Journal of Theoretical Biology 206(1): 1-16. http://www.idealibrary.com/links/doi/10.1006/jtbi.2000.2106
6. McShea, Daniel W., 1998. Possible largest-scale trends in organismal evolution: eight live hypotheses. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 29: 293-318.
7. Schneider, Eric D. and James J. Kay, 1994. Life as a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics. Mathematical and Computer Modelling 19(6-8): 25-48. http://www.fes.uwaterloo.ca/u/jjkay/pubs/Life_as/lifeas.pdfFurther Reading:
Atkins, P. W. 1984. The Second Law. New York: Scientific American Books.
Kauffman, Stuart A. 1993. The Origins of Order. New York: Oxford. (technical)
Lambert, Frank L. 1999. The second law of thermodynamics. http://www.secondlaw.com
See for Yourself:
You can see order come and go in nature in many different ways. A few examples are snowflakes and other frost crystals, cloud formations, dust devils, ripples in sand dunes, and eddies and whirlpools in streams. See how many other examples you can find.
Ranganathan’s further prose similarly borrows, sometimes with attribution, like the lack of 747s made by tornadoes in junkyards as due to Sir Fred Hoyle, though Ranganathan doesn’t tell you the year. You can find out by reference to Isaak’s entry CF002.1 Tornadoes in junkyards do not build things, which provides the Hoyle citation and its date (1983). Sometimes the prose is just theft, though, as when Ranganathan says, “There must also exist an energy converting and directing mechanism,” but fails to note Duane Gish as his source on that.
Ranganathan closes smugly, as should you, if you take up this lesson.
It is important to understand that belief in neither evolution or creation is necessary to the actual study of science itself. One can understand the human body and become a first class surgeon regardless of whether he or she believes the human body is the result of the chance forces of nature or of a Supreme Designer.
Of course, this isn’t original, either. Isaak’s entry CA215 Evolution is a useless theory takes up this objection, and points out various practical applications that have been due to evolutionary biology. Ranganathan is prepared to dump all that in the memory hole. Somehow, I’d defer granting “first class surgeon” status to anyone who didn’t have a grasp of evolutionary principles when dealing with matters touching on the immune system, antibiotic regimens, and compatibility of tissues for organ transplants. I think it is clear that a surgeon with a good grounding in evolutionary biology has an edge on a colleague who is ignorant of it when it comes to these aspects of surgical practice.
But, remember, when writing an antievolution article, sheer chutzpah will see you through. Nor should you sully yourself in responding to criticism; that role will be happily taken on by your fellow antievolution advocates. When you represent yourself as selling the Truth with a capital T, admitting error would be a social blunder of immense proportions, and one that your fellows will find hard to forgive. Along the way, feel free to indulge in plagiarism and the entire laundry list of logical fallacies; those simply will establish that you are one of the gang. Certainly Mark Isaak’s resource has made the job far simpler: he has collected together enough material to enable you to happily churn out essay after essay, and book after book, so long as you pay no heed to the parts that offer criticism of the arguments that you need for your new career in antievolution self-promotion.
I think it would be interesting to use the Index to create a “phylogeny” of creationist essays. The Index could provide the character states, which could be fed into Paup*.
Thanks for the suggestion, Dr. Cartwright.
That could be done, certainly, and the web application I set up to catalog antievolution arguments in sources could provide the data for the analysis. I think Paup is a port on FreeBSD; I could look into seeing if a backend could be set up to run Paup on the database contents.
http://www.antievolution.org/features/tally.php
I’d second that idea. I wonder if Wiki would be useful, as it’s really a common system used by many.
Far be it from me to defend antievolution practices, but while “matters touching on the immune system, antibiotic regimens, and compatibility of tissues for organ transplants” are certainly medical in nature, I’m not sure they qualify as “aspects of surgical practice.” If my understanding is correct (and I’d love to be shown to be wrong in this case), surgury is a very specialized field, and I suspect that the surgeon would not be involved in prescribing antibiotics or verifying tissue or organ compatibility. I suspect that it’s just this layman’s ignorance that Ranganathan is seeking to exploit; we laymen tend to view surgury as a highly vaunted branch of medicine, and to assume that a great surgeon must also be well versed in other aspects of medicine. It ain’t necessarily so, and I wonder if in fact a surgeon is like a fabulous mechanic who would not be able to design a car, or any specific component thereof.
It’s been my experience that surgeons are not only responsible for the mechanical performance of surgery itself, but also for pre-operative planning (and that includes planning that involves tissue matches) and post-operative recovery (which often involves immune system considerations and especially antibiotic regimens). For example, my surgeon was the one who specified the antibiotic regimen I got following in the hours and days after my colon ruptured and my emergency colectomy. I also interacted with surgeons during the couple of years I worked in an anesthesiology research lab, so my stance isn’t without some contact with the medical profession. Still, a medical professional may be able to be more specific about how well I did in making my claim.
That said, I do like the general idea of analogy to a mechanic, as opposed to a designer or engineer.
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(Thanks for the _Bored_of_the_Rings_ reference! After lo, these many decades, I still remember and recite some of the poetry in that, which is more than I can say for LotR.)
Very good. I stand corrected.
Ranganathan writes:
We are so accustomed to seeing evolution of technology all about us (new cars, boats, ships, inventions, etc.) that we assume that nature must work the same way also. Of course, we forget that all those new gadgets and technology had a human designer behind them. Nature, however, doesn’t work the same way.
Creationists and ID types often make this point. They should be called on it. If somebody can find an instance in which a human designer violated the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics to design a car or boat or anything else, it would be a staggering discovery. Where do these guys get the idea that intelligence gives human beings supernatural powers?
Creationists and ID types often make this point. They should be called on it. If somebody can find an instance in which a human designer violated the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics to design a car or boat or anything else, it would be a staggering discovery. Where do these guys get the idea that intelligence gives human beings supernatural powers? – Jim Harrison
Good point.
Of course, “the watch presupposes a watchmaker” analogy only works because watches cannot reproduce themselves. Certainly watch design has occurred via an evolutionary process. The reason why watches have not evolved on their own is not because such evolution would violate the second law but because they have no way to reproduce themselves with heritable variations. If clock-like objects could reproduce themselves and being watch-like was grounds for positive selection, watches would evolve on a relatively quick time-scale. Surely the Creationist and ID types don’t claim each time a living organism reproduces it violates the second law, do they?
Since clock-like objects are dependent on humans to reproduce them and to vary their design, they have evolved only as people have tinkered with the design of their clock-like object as they produce new ones — with those objects that are small and compact and accurate time-keepers being reproduced more often as there is a demand for them in the market.
This analogy also works the other way for those of us religious folks who believe in the metaphysical design argument but who think ID as a quasi-physical theory is wrong science and bad theology: just because living organisms evolve and are not designed doesn’t mean that there isn’t HWMNBN overseeing the whole process: just as a watch capable of reproduction doesn’t need a watch maker, it could be the watch-maker has just gotten clever and built a self-reproducing evolving watch. But this argument is, of course, not something that belongs in a science class as it is beyond the realm of science to figure out why the universe is as it is (because of some design?) — the realm of science is only to figure out how the universe is designed (and every so often questions of “why” become transmuted to questions of “how” and thus enter into the realm of science — but the God of the Gaps is eternal!).
“Creationists and ID types often make this point. They should be called on it. If somebody can find an instance in which a human designer violated the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics to design a car or boat or anything else, it would be a staggering discovery. Where do these guys get the idea that intelligence gives human beings supernatural powers?” – Jim Harrison
Good point.
Of course, “the watch presupposes a watchmaker” analogy only works because watches cannot reproduce themselves. Certainly watch design has occurred via an evolutionary process. The reason why watches have not evolved on their own is not because such evolution would violate the second law but because they have no way to reproduce themselves with heritable variations. If clock-like objects could reproduce themselves and being watch-like was grounds for positive selection, watches would evolve on a relatively quick time-scale. Surely the Creationist and ID types don’t claim each time a living organism reproduces it violates the second law, do they?
Since clock-like objects are dependent on humans to reproduce them and to vary their design, they have evolved only as people have tinkered with the design of their clock-like object as they produce new ones — with those objects that are small and compact and accurate time-keepers being reproduced more often as there is a demand for them in the market.
This analogy also works the other way for those of us religious folks who believe in the _metaphysical_ design argument but who think ID as a quasi-physical theory is wrong science _and_ bad theology: just because living organisms evolve and are not designed doesn’t mean that there isn’t HWMNBN overseeing the whole process: just as a watch capable of reproduction doesn’t need a watch maker, it could be the watch-maker has just gotten clever and built a self-reproducing evolving watch. But this argument is, of course, not something that belongs in a science class as it is beyond the realm of science to figure out _why_ the universe is as it is (because of some design?) — the realm of science is only to figure out _how_ the universe is designed (and every so often questions of “why” become transmuted to questions of “how” and thus enter into the realm of science — but the God of the Gaps is eternal!).
For those who think a Creationist surgeon couldn’t cause much harm, I offer the following anecdote.
A few years ago there was a little girl, known to the concerned public as “Baby Fae,” who needed a heart transplant. Human donors are hard to find, especially for infants, so a daring surgeon convinced the parents to let him implant a baboon’s heart. A hopeful world held its breath, while skeptical biologists scratched their heads (a baboon’s heart?), but everyone hoped for the best. Sadly, Baby Fae died after a few weeks. Among the contributing factors may have been that her immune system had recognized the heart as something foreign, and attacked it. After the sensational news stories had died down, it was reported that a biologist asked the surgeon why he had chosen a baboon donor, which is a much more distant relative of ours (in evolutionary terms) than a chimpanzee, which is our closest relative (DNA ~99% identical). Wouldn’t there have been less danger of rejection with a heart from a closer relative? The surgeon’s answer: he hadn’t even taken that into consideration, because he didn’t believe in evolution! To him, no creatures were related to each other, since they had all been created at once, in their present forms.
http://members.aol.com/darrwin/genesis.htm
Yes, the Baby Fae incident was one of the things that I was thinking of when responding to Ranganathan’s bald claim that evolution had nothing to do with surgery.
“For those who think a Creationist surgeon couldn’t cause much harm…”
As a second example, I offer the Senate majority leader.
“The theory of evolution teaches that matter tends to evolve towards greater and greater complexity and order. ”
It doesn’t teach anything like that, and it never ceases to amaze me that creationists have the audacity to pretend that it does. The closest thing you might be able to argue is that it “teaches” that imperfect self-replicators tend to evolve towards greater complexity, and even that isn’t accurate and highly dependent on the shape of the fitness landscape over time.
‘as it is beyond the realm of science to figure out why the universe is as it is (because of some design’
DAS I think your all wet with this comment. What makes you think science can’t give the why?
And perhaps more importantly what makes you think any religion based on what men in a clearly physical world say could give you a why better than what science can/will provide?
I think this false dicotomy of science giving way to superstition on the why is one of the most illogical rambling but is repeated often enough I think some buy into it.
“But this argument is, of course, not something that belongs in a science class as it is beyond the realm of science to figure out _why_ the universe is as it is (because of some design?) — the realm of science is only to figure out _how_ the universe is designed (and every so often questions of “why” become transmuted to questions of “how” and thus enter into the realm of science — but the God of the Gaps is eternal!).”
Science has no realm – it is a tool based on observations. There are no apriori limitations on the type of questions it can answer. (This is both argued against and admitted above.) It is in fact very hard to describe even the methods, yet more the possible results.
Faiths that tries to make contact with reality gets in trouble. If they propose miracles, evidence falsify them. The nature of nature (causality, conservations) that has been established lately make observations without natural causes testable. The existence of infinite cosmologies like endless inflation multiverses makes first causes invalid.
Today there is no longer room for dualisms like the deists. Creationism, in any form, shows that gods-of-the-gaps are bad logic, bad theology, bad science. A working view for a believer would perhaps be to say that we know that nature is a selfsufficient entity and no others exists, but that he puts aside rationality for a need of solace. Admittedly, we don’t know that beyond reasonable doubt yet. But that seems to be a matter of time as of now.
Science has no realm – it is a tool based on observations. There are no apriori limitations on the type of questions it can answer. (This is both argued against and admitted above.) It is in fact very hard to describe even the methods, yet more the possible results. – Torbjörn Larsson
I am not sure if I follow this argument: science is a tool, therefore it has no realm. Isn’t that somewhat of a non-sequitor (not that there’s anything wrong with that — I make more than my fair share of them, that’s for sure)?
All tools have their spheres of usefulness. While it is always possible to discover a new use for a tool, we must be careful that, just ’cause we have a hammer in our hands, we don’t mistake any problem for a nail.
“Science has no realm – it is a tool based on observations. There are no apriori limitations on the type of questions it can answer. (This is both argued against and admitted above.) It is in fact very hard to describe even the methods, yet more the possible results.” – Torbjörn Larsson
I am not sure if I follow this argument: science is a tool, therefore it has no realm. Isn’t that somewhat of a non-sequitor (not that there’s anything wrong with that — I make more than my fair share of them, that’s for sure)?
All tools have their spheres of usefulness. While it is always possible to discover a new use for a tool, we must be careful that, just ’cause we have a hammer in our hands, we don’t mistake any problem for a nail.
I think part of the difficulty is the ambiguity of the word “why”. If we ask “why” in a causal sense (as in, “Why does the sun shine?”), then science does answer those questions. But if we ask “why” in a moral sense (“Why is it wrong to start a war?”), then science is clearly the wrong tool for the job. If we then compound the problem by asking the question, “Why does the universe exist?”, it is unclear whether the answer might be in the form of, “Because of the Big Bang” or “So we can love one another and praise God.” Clearly, these are the answers to two very different questions. (Is there a word for two different questions that sound the same, like there is for two different words that are spelled the same, as in “a minute (small) minute (time period)” or “a lead (Pb) lead (connection)”?)
T. Larsson,
Isn’t “science is a tool — it has no realm” somewhat of a non-sequitor? Tools certainly do have particular spheres of usefulness and areas where they are not so useful. While it is always possible to find a new use for a particular tool, we scientists need to be careful to not view every problem as a nail simply because we have such a good hammer.
As Bill Gascoyne points out, science is sometimes the wrong tool for the job. While morality must deal with reality and any morality that ignores reality’s complexities (as the morality of our fundies does — in many cases, their morals indicate you cannot help but sin: how is morality effective if it doesn’t give an indication of which of a set of admittedly bad options to choose?) is nor morality at all — and thus morality must respect what the tool of science tells us about the world, you cannot infer morals straightforwardly from scientific principles. Indeed, those who do are in the same boat as those who oppose evolution because of its so-called “moral implications”. Those who ask science to be a tool, e.g. with which to discover morality and metaphysics (what lies beyond physics — and I am not using metaphysics in the sense of Popper, which concept I would call peri-physics for clarity although perhaps metaphysics is the best term for what Popper’s talking about and what I’m referring to should be called trans-physics or something clearly implying “beyond” rather than “about” — and yes, I am one who would argue that a positivist is making a metaphysical statement: that what is beyond scientific inquiry is meaningless … and, as you might expect, I disagree with that), are in the same boat as those who ask science to reproduce their peculiar metaphysics and morality and accept or reject scientific results on that basis. A hardened theist like me might throw around the label of “scientism” but apply it to the ID crowd even more than people who expect “Darwinism” (don’t you just love how that term is used — as if we worship the guy?) to explain everything.
Of course, one could certainly argue that religion is not the best source of moral instruction either … but the point still stands: there are plenty of areas in which the tool of science simply is a hammer where a spanner is really what’s needed.
DAS comments seems to have disappeared?! Why? My policy is to not post to sites that edit comments. (Banning after warning is acceptable.)
Is there a comment policy on this site?
Interesting. I’m running “Spam Karma 2”, so I went to the “Recent Spam Harvest” page to get the scoop. Here’s what SK2 had to say about DAS’s comments:
This was an automated response, and I have manually restored the comments. No, I won’t be turning off SK2. The alternative to using an automated system with occasional false positives is too horrible to contemplate. I’d just have to turn off comments, or go to some very restrictive form of registration and validation.
My comment policy is, basically, don’t be excessively annoying. I consider my weblog to be an extension of my living room, and if someone deposits a load of trash, it will get taken out. I’ve been participating in online fora since 1987, and moderated fora since 1990. I tend to be pretty lenient, but if you are looking for the free speech purity of a Hyde Park corner and soapbox, you will want to move on. It’s your call.
Thank you for restoring the comments. I only meant to put up one … but I noticed the error and that no comments were being put up, so I figured it didn’t go through. So I rewrote the comment (since I didn’t save it on my machine) — hence multiple versions of the same comment.
So your spam filter is retroactive? (I note that DAS comments are gone again.)
I can probably live with a stated policy (considered it done, for me) on such mild moderation as excessive annoyance since it should not interrupt blogging too often.
In fact, I have already commented on such blogs. My real reference bar, which I probably should have mentioned, is Uncommon Descent (additions in comments, removal of comments or entire threads, unwarned banning – all of which leads to unreadable or uncommentable threads) so your blog has some space. :-)
Yes, SK2 applies rules that can “spank” a comment retroactively. As in…
The “recent comments” criterion I’m taking as a new commenter making a bunch of comments. That should cause a spam filter to get suspicious.
Can you give me some pointers on how to write an antigravity article? Gravity is only a theory.
Whatever you do, you have to point out that all of physics’ success in characterizing microgravity does not warrant their extrapolations to macrogravity. All of the talk of black holes is based upon chains of weak inference, and beyond that, all of physics is based upon assumptions! Nobody has demonstrated that any of the proposed mechanisms of gravity are what actually is at work… therefore nothing is certain!
Etc. I think that you can take it from there.