Hey everyone, we’re back with
Part 2 of this little series, in which I’m exposing all of the clowns at the
Discovery Institute for the charlatans that they are. In Part 1 we demonstrated that Casey Luskin
is a fraud and a liar beyond any shred of doubt. In Part 2 we will address Stephen Meyer,
another pusher of intelligent design hiding behind a thin veneer of
legitimacy. What’s he all about? Meyer is one of the cofounders of the DI, and
currently serves as program director for its “center for science and culture”. As a cofounder,
he was intimately involved in ¬¬the creation of the so-called “wedge document”, an internal
document that was leaked to the internet in 1999 and explicitly states their religious
agenda, with words AND pictures, as they chose to put Michelangelo’s Creation of
Adam right on the cover. Subtle. That’s right, the seriously-all-about-science-and-totally-not-about-religion
institute is, surprise surprise, religiously motivated by their own secret
words. This document is horse manure right from the first sentence, which is a lie about
Western civilization being built upon humans being created in god’s image, and then a list
of things they want to give religion credit for, which quite honestly have only been possible
once religion loosened its grip on humanity. There is the typical tripe about how without fear
of a vengeful god we would all be savage murderers stealing and raping 24/7, failing to mention
all of the genocides that have been performed in the name of one god or another, and there’s
Meyer’s name with a bullet at the end of page 1. On the next page, there are only two governing
goals listed for the DI. The first is to “defeat scientific materialism”, that idiotic buzzword
we deconstructed in part 1, and the other is to “replace materialistic explanations with
a theistic understanding”. In other words, to replace science with god. The last of these
twenty year goals is to see “design theory” penetrate our religious, cultural, moral, and
political life. It can’t be made any clearer than this. Religion everywhere, including government.
Anyone who is convinced that the DI does not have a religious and political agenda is a sucker.
Their pathetic attempt at damage control as a result of this leak was to craft a response called
“The Wedge Document: So What?”, like an insolent teenager who got caught pulling the fire alarm.
This response basically consists of the DI acting shocked and appalled by people making claims that
the document says things that it factually says. For example, right in the second paragraph:
“One group claimed that the document supplied evidence of a frightening twenty-year master
plan to have religion control not only science, but also everyday life, laws, and education.”
Oh my, wherever would anyone get that wild idea? I’ll spare you the details of the 18 pages of
desperate backpedaling, but it’s linked below and a laugh riot, especially the parts where they
pretend “materialism” is responsible for all the heinous acts that have historically been the
exclusive domain of religion. Oh, sweet irony. Anyway, as we elucidated in Part 1, the immediate
goal of Meyer and the rest of the DI is to get religion taught in schools. This was formally
attempted in the Kitzmiller v Dover debacle of 2005, in Pennsylvania. This was their first
direct attempt to fulfill their agenda and they failed miserably, as the court ruled that
intelligent design is religion, not science, and the mandate was deemed unconstitutional. While
they won’t formally admit that they want religion taught in science class, even though it’s clear as
day, they certainly won’t admit to being motivated by a shift toward theocracy and a reunification
of church and state. Their response to the wedge leak says they can’t believe they have to say it,
but they don’t want that nasty, nasty theocracy. Honest! But this too is a hollow claim.
We can see that by Meyer’s own admission, most of their funding comes in the way of enormous
donations from wealthy Christian fundamentalists, who in their own words, want to see “the total
integration of biblical law into our lives”, and who abide by “the infallibility of the
Scipture”. These are the types the DI answers to. Churchy McMoneybags. If the Christian
equivalent of Sharia law is what they want to get for their money, you have to
wonder why they’re giving it to them, hmm? So, with everyone up to speed on precisely what
the DI really is, let’s dig into Meyer and his pseudoscience. What’s his background? With a
bachelor’s in physics and earth science as well as a master’s and PhD from Cambridge in philosophy
of science, one might presume that he has a firm grasp on the scientific process. But alas, his
allegiance is not to science, as is evidenced by his primary output, his books, the medium of
choice for those who are allergic to peer-review. “Signature in the Cell” attempts to argue that
the structure of the cell points to intelligent design. “Darwin’s Doubt” says the same regarding
the Cambrian explosion. And most recently, “Return of the God Hypothesis” recycles old talking
points and rounds out the trifecta of trash. With so much rubbish to address, I’ll be focusing
on just two of his most favorite arguments and demonstrating that they constitute a
deliberate attempt to misrepresent science. I’ll be staying away from arguments regarding
the origin of life since I already covered that very neatly in my response to James Tour. Again,
if any fans of the DI haven’t seen that content, I implore you to finally check those out
when you’re ready, as they’re quite thorough. But for now, let’s move on to the fossil record,
since it’s something all of the DI folks seem to be having a little trouble with. Here’s a snippet
from “Stephen Meyer Takes on Darwin’s Tree”. Because what we see in the fossil record, in
particular when we’re looking major innovations in biological form and structure, is the
abrupt appearance of such major innovations where in each case… those new biological forms
are lacking any discernible connection to similar forms in the lower sedimentary strata. So you
get an abrupt appearance of a new form of life, usually persisting through the fossil record
with some slight variation but the basic form remaining static over long periods of time,
and then either the form going extinct or persisting right up to the present. We don’t
see the gradual morphing of form from one major type of organism to another that is described by
Darwin’s tree of life and predicted on the basis of the action of his mechanism of natural
selection and random variation slash mutation. Ok, so this quite nicely sets up the main strategy
of folks like Meyer. Biologists say that evolution involves gradual change, so we should see the
gradual change everywhere in the fossil record, and we totally don’t at all, so evolution
didn’t happen. This is a blatant denial of what is contained in the fossil record, coupled with
the hope that the viewer will not lift a finger to check and just take his word for it. There are
countless examples of slow, gradual morphological change in the fossil record. From fish to
tetrapods, from amphibians to reptiles to birds, from land mammals back to sea
mammals like whales and dolphins, from early hominids to humans as we discussed in
Part 1, and countless others. One could fill up an entire semester of undergraduate study simply
by discussing and categorizing these specimens. To pretend they don’t exist is science denial,
plain and simple. Of course, we do not have specimens for every single species that has ever
existed, because of how fossilization works. It’s a relatively rare occurrence. Some short-lived
species may have never been fossilized, and there are undoubtedly plenty of fossils
that we have not yet found or may ever find, two facts which Meyer himself summarizes
with the term “The Artifact Hypothesis”, without bothering to acknowledge the
validity of these two limitations, choosing instead to lie about something called the
Doushantuo shale, which contains organisms we will discuss a bit later. But with the overarching lie
well-understood, let’s dig into some of the more specific claims and compare them to the scientific
literature to show how they are clearly false. When asked for examples of organisms showing up
very suddenly in the fossil record, he said this. There are many examples of the abrupt appearance
of new forms of animal and plant life in the fossil record. I wrote a book about one of the
greatest of those events called the Cambrian explosion, which is an event about 520 to 530
million years ago, where the first animal forms arose abruptly in the fossil record with no
discernible connection to similar forms in the lower Precambrian strata. It’s really dramatic.
So, he may chalk this up to a misspeak, but he clearly said that the first animal
forms appeared in the Cambrian explosion. This is objectively wrong not just according
to science, but even Meyer’s own work. He points out in chapter 4 of 2013’s Darwin’s
Doubt that sponges and the mollusk-like Kimberella are known from Ediacaran strata. He is well aware
that animal life predates the Cambrian explosion. This event was a diversification of animal life,
not its origin. Second, claiming that the Cambrian explosion lasted from 530 to 520 million years
ago is wrong too, which he doesn’t even clearly state as a range rather than an approximate
singular date, to deliberately maximize confusion. According to the 2011 paper “The Cambrian
Conundrum: Early Divergence and Later Ecological Success in the Early History of Animals,” we
read as follows. “The earliest skeletal fossils occur in the latest Ediacaran, but the first
appearance of an array of plates, spines, shells, and other skeletal elements of bilaterian affinity
begins during the early Cambrian Fortunian Stage, 541 to around 530 Ma”, where Ma stands for
“mega-annum”, or millions of years ago. Reading further, “Although many new groups have
been described over the past decade, the pattern of diversification of both body fossils and
trace fossils has remained largely robust: A recompilation of the first occurrences of all
metazoan phyla, classes, and stem-classes (extinct clades) of equivalent morphologic disparity shows
their first occurrences in the latest Ediacaran (by 555 Ma), with a dramatic rise over about 25
million years in the first several stages of the Cambrian, and continuing into the Ordovician.”
So, the Cambrian explosion itself is just the rapid appearance of bilaterian phyla in the early
Cambrian, but this is already at least 25, not 10, million years, lasting from 555-530 million years
ago. Given that this study was published before Meyer’s book, and well before this 2021 video, he
is either ignoring this information or unaware of it, neither of which looks good for someone
posing as an expert. Beyond this, more recent research has changed this picture substantially. A
2018 paper titled “The two phases of the Cambrian Explosion” argues that the Cambrian encompassed
two separate radiations, one of stem lineages from 542-513 million years ago, and one of crown
lineages extending from 513 million to the start of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification
Event about 485 million years ago. We will elaborate on what we just said in a
moment, but we should first quickly summarize the dishonesty in how ID proponents portray the
Cambrian explosion. They exploit the suddenness that is implied by its name in order to
pretend that enormous numbers of species showed up in an unimaginably short period
of time, allowing the uneducated viewer to presume that this means almost instantaneous, as
though they emerged from a puff of divine smoke. In actuality we can now see that we are talking
about around 70 million years. Although relatively brief for geologic timescales, hence the colorful
name, for biological organisms this is quite a long time, plenty long enough for the impressive
diversification to take place given the intense evolutionary pressure of many animal forms
suddenly in direct competition for resources. Now, let’s get back to the previous point
regarding lineages to further highlight Meyer’s dishonesty. We need to define some terminology.
Meyer is fond of saying that various animal phyla appeared in the Cambrian without predecessors, but
what is a phylum in the first place? Meyer defines the term phylum in chapter 2 of Darwin’s Doubt as
“the highest (or widest) categories of biological classification in the animal kingdom, with each
exhibiting a unique architecture, organizational blueprint, or structural body plan.”
While that sounds fine at face value, the 2000 paper “A critical reappraisal of the fossil
record of the bilaterian phyla” points out why this definition is problematic. Reading, “Claims
that the phyla are characterized by particular types of ‘body plan’ features which putative
super-phyletic groupings do not possess thus seem to be based on an artifact of how we classify
groups of animals: if such ‘super-phyletic’ features were readily identifiable, the larger
grouping would itself probably be called a phylum, as it would be recognized to be phylogenetically
unified. As the level at which this ignorance of relationships becomes important is likely to
vary between groups, the cladist’s standard criticism that phyla (and other such ranks) should
be positively discouraged on the grounds that they engender spurious comparisons between members of
the same ‘rank’ seems to be valid.” That was a bit wordy, so to simplify, we are saying that, phyla,
like other taxonomic ranks, are largely arbitrary. So, we should concern ourselves less with whether
or not some animals fall into a particular phylum and more with whether the features they
possess are explicable under evolution. As we will see, this is definitely the case.
This paper also defines “body plan” as a “set of features plesiomorphically
shared by extant taxa in a monophyletic clade.” That word plesiomorphically just refers
to traits that are shared by all the members of a group but are not unique to that group. So,
while this adds objectivity to our definition, it also means we can’t necessarily equate a phylum
with a particular group of organisms that share a body plan. For example, insects share a body
plan that is a modified version of the common arthropod body plan. All of the features shared
by arthropods are present in insects, but not all the features shared by insects are present
in all arthropods, such as wings and six legs. This brings us to two other terms we need
to be familiar with before proceeding, those being “crown” and “stem”. This paper
defines both: “The crown group of a phylum consists of the last common ancestor of all living
forms in the phylum and all of its descendants; the stem group consists of a series of entirely
extinct organisms leading up to the crown group away from the last common ancestor of this phylum
and the most closely related phylum.” To take one example, trilobites, chelicerates, myriapods,
crustaceans, and insects are all crown-arthropods, but the Cambrian forms Opabinia and Anomalocaris
are stem-arthropods because they lack features diagnostic of the crown group, like a sclerotized
exoskeleton, tagmosis, and specialized appendages. Some might even call them transitional species.
At any rate, this claim that the animals of the Cambrian have no predecessors in the Precambrian
is one of Meyer’s central theses. Here he is making this same claim in a PragerU video called
“Evolution: Bacteria to Beethoven”, since one propaganda outlet doesn’t seem to be enough for
him. And with an image of a bacterium right next to a primate, we can tell we are going to get
some Kent Hovind level dishonesty on this one. First, the Cambrian explosion. A weird and
wonderful thing happened 530 million years ago. A whole bunch of major groups of animals, what
scientists called the phyla, appeared abruptly within a geological short window of time. About
ten million years. These novel animal forms exhibiting prototypes of most animal body designs
we see today, emerged in the fossil record without evidence of early ancestors. Did you catch that?
Yes, Stephen. We caught you lying on the internet. It’s not that shocking. Let’s now properly examine
Cambrian radiation to thoroughly expose one of Meyer’s biggest and most persistent lies. This
will get a little technical, but bear with me, we need to see how thoroughly he contradicts real
science. The earliest current evidence of animals dates to about 650 million years ago in rocks from
Oman. This evidence comes from molecules called steranes, specifically ratios of certain steranes
unique to sponges and a few other eukaryotes. Researchers have concluded after some debate
that the ratios of those particular steranes and the varieties present are indicative
of sponges instead of algae or protists. I’ll link to the relevant studies for those
interested in digging into this research, but in short, researchers have tended to regard
the presence of those steranes starting at about 650 million years ago as the earliest evidence
of animals. Following the Cryogenian Period, the Ediacaran Period extended from 635-541
million years ago. It is in this period, not the Cambrian, that we find the first animal
body fossils. From 635-590 million years ago, the evidence of animals includes putative
cnidarians like Lantianella, and phosphatized animal embryos. These embryos too have been the
subject of extensive debate since they were first discovered in the 1990s. Interestingly, their
first description pinned them as animal embryos, but later studies had regarded them as potentially
being protists, algae, or even giant bacteria. A recent study investigated a large number of
these potential embryos and found that at least some of them are developmentally complex enough
to be animal embryos, including Megasphaera, Caveasphaera, and Helicoforamina,
rejecting algal and protistan assignment. Acritarchs also attained some evolutionary
innovations at the start of the Ediacaran, developing conspicuous ornamentation possibly due
to coevolution with the newly evolved eumetazoans. Again, some definitions might help:
Eumetazoa includes all animals that aren’t sponges. Sponges are the most basally
derived animals, and Eumetazoa encompasses ctenophores, placozoans, cnidarians, and then
all the bilaterians. More information on these clades can be found in my zoology series.
Interestingly, experimental evidence has revealed that both sponges and ctenophores
have low oxygen requirements, which makes sense given that only the ocean surface
was oxygenated until the middle Ediacaran. Finally, 571 million years ago, we
find the first macroscopic communities. The organisms from 571-541 million years
ago are lumped into three “assemblages” or recurrent community compositions: the
Avalon from 571-555 million years ago, the White Sea from 560-551 million years ago,
and the Nama from 555-541 million years ago. It is from these assemblages that
the classic Ediacaran biota hail, also known as Vendian biota. The affinities of
these organisms, or compatibility with certain taxa, are extremely important for understanding
the Cambrian explosion. When first described in the 1940s, the mysterious Ediacarans were written
off as a failed early experiment in evolution. Indeed, this was still the case when
Stephen Jay Gould wrote the popular book Wonderful Life in the late 1980s, which is
why ID proponents love to quote Gould, because they pretend his eminence in the field weighs
more than the obsolescence of his quotations. At that time they were thought to be
independently multicellular protists, fungi, or lichens, while homologies with animals
were few and far between. As time has gone on, better technology has improved our ability to
understand these organisms, and a wealth of new fossils has radically changed the picture. As a
2016 paper notes, “Further, Ediacaran candidate animals were probably dominated by deep stem-group
representatives of various modern clades. Thus, perhaps not surprisingly, the phylogenetic
interpretation of putative Ediacaran animal fossils is not straightforward; many of them
have suggestive but not definitive characters for phylogenetic placement, presenting tantalizing
but frustrating cases for animal affinities.” It has also been claimed by some,
like paleontologist Gregory Retallack, that Ediacaran communities were terrestrial rather
than marine, and that some of the more famous Ediacarans like Dickinsonia were lichens. Both
of these conclusions have been heavily disputed. The terrestrial Ediacaran hypothesis
contradicts, according to one paper, “abundant data collected during decades of
detailed sedimentological and geological research by numerous international authors.”
The earliest of these assemblages, the Avalon assemblage, is dominated by the sessile,
frondose, fractal rangeomorphs, such as Charnia and Fractofusus; frond-like arboreomorphs like
Charniodiscus; and strange disc-like organisms, such as Cyclomedusa. Their affinities have
been extensively debated, from algae to fungi to stem-animals to crown-animals. Recent
work has pinned the bizarre rangeomorphs as stem-eumetazoans. According to a 2021 paper,
“Charnia masoni maintains differentiation of elements with concurrent axially delineated
inflation, exhibits evidence for transitions in the primary developmental mode, and is
compatible with indeterminate growth, and the form of the organism is regular and predictable.
This combination of characters is only otherwise seen within the Metazoa. Algae do not display
a conserved form, and fungal fruiting bodies do not display the maintained differentiation
of new elements. Therefore, using these data in tandem with a large, multicellular
organization, we conclude that there is no justification for considering an affinity for
Charnia outside the animal total group.” If true, then arboreomorphs could also be stem-eumetazoans.
Another very interesting Avalonian is Haootia quadriformis from 560 million years ago, which
has been convincingly shown to be a cnidarian, the same clade containing modern jellyfish.
Next, many of the famous Ediacarans hail from the White Sea assemblage, such as Tribrachidium,
Dickinsonia, Ikaria, and Kimberella. First, Tribrachidium is a strange organism plausibly
interpreted as another stem-eumetazoan, being a member of the extinct phylum Trilobozoa. It was
evidently a sessile, benthic, suspension-feeder with tri-radial symmetry. Second, Dickinsonia is
perhaps the most famous of the Ediacarans, and despite a long contentious history, ichnological,
developmental and biomarker evidence have argued strongly in favor of stem-bilaterian affinity.
As Dickinsonia is a member of the extinct phylum Proarticulata, this conclusion applies equally
to the whole clade. Third, Ikaria is a recently discovered bilaterian from South Australia.
According to the paper that described it, “We find that the size and morphology of Ikaria
match predictions for the progenitor of the trace fossil Helminthoidichnites, indicative of mobility
and sediment displacement.” Lastly, Kimberella is another historically contentious fossil with
affinities ranging from cnidarian to mollusc. More recent analyses have tended to settle
on stem-mollusc or stem-spiralian affinities, the latter of which is the clade encompassing
molluscs, annelids, rotifers, brachiopods, and many other familiar invertebrates.
The final Ediacaran assemblage is the Nama, and evidently, an extinction occurred at the beginning
of this period, drastically reducing biodiversity. Following the extinction event, we find fossils
like Cloudina, Yilingia, and Namacalathus. Cloudina is a tubular, biomineralized animal that
has recently been argued to be an annelid based on the possible remains of a digestive tract found
in some specimens. Some relatives of Cloudina, collectively termed cloudinomorphs, have been
argued as cnidarians, so “cloudinomorphs” may not actually represent a single monophyletic
clade. More fossils are needed to confirm this. As for Yilingia, this segmented bilaterian is
proposed to be either an annelid or panarthropod, the clade containing tardigrades, velvet worms,
and arthropods. The latter affinity is evidenced by each segment bearing three lobes, similar
to trilobites. Third, pyritized soft tissue in Namacalathus appears to support assignment as
an early relative of brachiopods and bryozoans. At this point, it’s completely ridiculous to
even imply that there are no animals in the Precambrian. There are a host of fossils that can
easily be interpreted as animals preceding the Cambrian, giving no support to Meyer’s repeated
claim that animals just appeared out of nowhere. One has to presume that Meyer is aware of most
or all of the research I just cited, and have linked below, and is deliberately ignoring it.
But, there’s another issue here that goes deeper than merely pointing out the existence of animals
in the Precambrian that Meyer tries to hide. It is that the evolution of Ediacaran animals follows a
gradual stepwise pattern, completely in line with evolutionary principles. When the Ediacarans
first show up around 570 million years ago, like the rangeomorphs, they are all soft-bodied,
but between 560 and 550 million years ago, the first organic-walled, non-biomineralized forms
appear, such as Corumbella and Shaanxilithes. Finally, around 550 million years ago, the first
hardened, biomineralized animals showed up, like Cloudina, collectively called the “small
shelly fauna.” Along with these organisms, we see a proliferation of trace fossils, indicative
of various motile animals. And though most of the bizarre Ediacarans perished by 541 million
years ago, a select few, such as Cloudina and Swartpuntia, straggled into the early Cambrian,
indicating an undeniable continuity of faunas. Since that was a lot of information, it’s worth
pausing for a moment before diving into the Cambrian radiations to think about just what ID
proponents mean to propose instead of evolution for all of these organisms. Did the designer
create the first eukaryotes separately from those of the Cambrian? Did the designer design
successive related or unrelated assemblages piecemeal throughout the Ediacaran? Are any of
the Precambrian animals related to any of the Cambrian ones? Is the Precambrian Cloudina related
to the Cambrian Cloudina? How do we differentiate designed organisms from non-designed? The simple
fact is that there is no intelligent design model to explain the Precambrian animals, or as we
shall see momentarily, the Cambrian either. I repeat. There is no model. There is nothing
to test, and no attempt to correlate or explain. They simply ignore all the data that contradicts
the desired conclusion and say “god did it”. This is why intelligent design, truly, fundamentally,
undeniably, isn’t science. Not because of any “materalist agenda”, but because it
doesn’t do the things that science does. Moving forward, given all of this Precambrian
preamble, how does this contribute to our understanding of the Cambrian itself? The last
of the soft-bodied and organic-walled Ediacarans fizzled out in the early Cambrian, and this was
likely due to competition with the newly evolved biomineralized animals. As a 2016 paper argues,
these biomineralized animals “were equipped with innovative adaptations of active feeding
modes and sediment restructuring capabilities, biomineralized armament against predators,
generalist and opportunist adaptability to varying substrates, sexual and asexual reproduction for
enhanced dispersal, resilience to environmental disturbance, and presumably high fecundity and
rapid achievement of sexual maturity.” The first evidence of predation in the form of boreholes in
Cloudina fossils indicate that there were novel selective pressures in the terminal Ediacaran,
which likely helped drive evolutionary arms races between predators and prey. Furthermore,
bioturbation of sediments, meaning disturbance of sedimentary deposits by living organisms, expanded
vertically in the late Ediacaran, disrupting the cyanobacterial mats upon which Ediacaran organisms
grew, which also likely led to their extinction. As for environmental factors, oceanic oxygen
levels continued to rise into the Cambrian, significantly lifting size restraints
on organisms. In addition, greater oxygen levels also allowed for longer food
chains, and thus highly complex food webs. A general rule is that 10% of the
total energy stored in biomass is available from each trophic level to the
next, on the so-called ecological pyramid. Respiration with oxygen is the most
efficient way to convert biomass into energy, so more oxygen means more trophic levels and more
complicated ecosystems. Indeed, the Cambrian is the first time we see complex ecosystems with
many styles of feeding, including apex predators. Some researchers have pointed to modern
polychaete feeding-ecology in support of this. When oxygen levels are higher, there are more
predatory polychaetes. Analogously, this too would have contributed to the evolutionary arms
race in the early Cambrian, and this immaculately sets the stage for the Cambrian explosion
itself, which occurred in a series of steps. The trace fossil record of the early Cambrian
is indicative of a major diversification event, as indicated by ichnotaxa, or taxa based on
fossilized remains. Burrowing abilities in the latest Ediacaran are all horizontal, with the
first vertical examples appearing at the start of the Cambrian, along with arthropod trace fossils.
The global maximum of ichnogenera rose from 10 to 42 across the Cambrian boundary, but the deepest
vertical burrows only dug a few centimeters into the substrate. This first age of the Cambrian
is called the Fortunian, and it lasted from 541-535 million years ago. The second stage
of the Cambrian, also called the Tommotian, lasted from 535-525 million years ago, and
the global maximum of ichnogenera rose to 43. Bioturbation markedly increased during this time,
as organisms were burrowing deeper than they had been previously. Global ichnodiversity
rose again to 55 genera in the next age, the Atdabanian, which lasted from 525-514 million
years ago, and the behavioral complexity indicated by trace fossils was greater compared to the
preceding Tommotian. Cambrian stage 4 lasted from 514-510 million years ago and showed no increase
in ichnodiversity or behavioral complexity. As a 2014 paper concludes, “The
initial diversification (Fortunian) is coincident with the appearance
of the first sediment bulldozers, but preceded the establishment of
infaunal suspension-feeder faunas that were ecosystem engineers of paramount role
(Cambrian Stage 2). In turn, the rapid increase in depth and extent of bioturbation associated
with these suspension-feeding communities may have triggered another diversification
event of biogenic structures that took place during Cambrian Stage 3, and involved the
appearance of new behaviours by deposit feeders. Capture of organic particles by suspension feeders
allowed enrichment of organics by biodeposition, promoting diversification of infaunal deposit
feeders. Therefore, infaunal suspension feeders may have been ecological drivers of
the Cambrian Stage 3 diversification phase of biogenic activity, representing
a dramatic case of ecological spillover.” What this picture indicates is that a big chunk
of the Cambrian explosion occurred in a stepwise fashion over the course of about 27 million
years, from 541 to 514 million years ago. Clearly, the gradual nature of this event speaks to
evolutionary causes, not supernatural ones, and we even have firm ecological explanations for these
steps, as we just discussed. This will become even more apparent with the next few examples.
A 2018 paper broadly describes the two phases of the Cambrian explosion as indicated by
body fossils. The first phase lasted from 560-513 million years ago and was dominated by
non-bilaterians, such as poriferans, ctenophores, and cnidarians, as well as stem-bilaterian
lineages. Notably, stem-lophophorates, like hyoliths and tommotiids, as well as stem-molluscs
like halkieriids, wiwaxiids, and helcionelloids, comprise most of the spiralians of this period.
At 513 million years ago, an extinction event occurred called the Sinsk extinction, and
this wiped out many of the stem lineages, allowing the crown lineages to predominate.
Crown group brachiopods, bivalves, and gastropods diversified in the second phase, which
lasted from 513-485 million years ago, followed by the appearance of cephalopods
and bryozoans near the end of the period. Okay, let’s regroup for a moment. I
know that was a lot of information, and I’m sorry to have to put you through all
that, but it was necessary. Meyer presents himself as a scholar and academic, and he is able
to do this because he has rehearsed terminology that is unfamiliar to most people. That’s how
he comes off as an expert. He uses words most people don’t know and he uses them confidently.
That’s all it takes to trick a lot of people. But when you compare what he says to the
scientific literature, which he knows almost no one will ever do, you can see that he’s just
completely full of shit. After looking at dozens of studies that profoundly contradict everything
he says, it becomes clear that everything about the Cambrian explosion, from what preceded
it to the actual unfolding of the event, and the aftermath, perfectly matches what we expect
from evolution. We see the progressive stepwise evolution of animals where sponges, cnidarians,
and stem-bilaterians show up first, followed by a diversification of crown-bilaterians. This makes
no sense in the context of intelligent design, and again, ID proponents do not have a model
of any kind to explain the events of the Cambrian explosion. All they can do is lie about
science and pretend to poke holes in evolution, as though that would substantiate any
alternative, scientific or otherwise. With this information now understood, we can
all resoundingly conclude that Meyer’s book “Darwin’s Doubt” is complete and utter garbage.
Of course this is old news. Essentially everyone with relevant expertise who reviewed the book
when it was published said as much themselves, and of course the DI had their stock responses
ready as damage control. Every scientist who criticizes it is a moron, or misrepresenting
the book, or didn’t focus on the main points, it’s just deflection after deflection, like
an abusive gaslighting alcoholic boyfriend. But this charade should be pretty transparent at
this point. It’s an empty gesture for thoughtless followers who want any reason whatsoever
to dismiss these criticisms point blank without a moment’s thought, and have the lowest
standards imaginable for such judgements. Ok, ready to get back to the science? Moving on
chronologically from the Cambrian explosion, Meyer lies about every other era he attempts to discuss.
But the Cambrian explosion isn’t the only such event in the history of life. There are many. A
little bit later in the fossil record there is an event called the Great Ordovician Biodiversity
Event, or GOBE, where there’s a whole slew of new forms of life that come into existence. And
then as you go up and down the sedimentary column you find the first winged insects, the
first dinosaurs, the first turtles, the first birds, the first marine reptiles, the
first flowering plants, the first flowering plants come into the fossil record in an event that’s now
known as the big bloom, the biological big bloom. And then another striking event occurs in the
Eocene period where you get the first mammals, and where there are between 15 and 17 new orders of
mammals that come suddenly into the fossil record, again with no discernible connection to similar
creatures in the lower strata beneath the Eocene. Every single one of these claims is flat out
wrong. Let’s take them one by one. First, the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event, or
GOBE, was an evolutionary event that occurred in the period following the Cambrian, which involved
the replacement of the more generalized Cambrian fauna with more specialized marine fauna that
would be common throughout the remainder of the Paleozoic Era. GOBE occurred in two phases.
Animal diversity increased somewhat in the early Ordovician, followed by a sharp increase
in the middle Ordovician. The benefactors of GOBE include, among others, stromatoporoid sponges,
corals, brachiopods, echinoderms, trilobites, ostracods, bryozoans, and nautiloids. In fact, the
number of species on Earth tripled during GOBE. Now, there are a couple of problems for Meyer with
regard to GOBE. First, this event doesn’t fit with Meyer’s idea of phylum-level intelligent
design. Fine-scale resolutions of animal evolution during GOBE reveal that the radiation
is merely an extension of the Cambrian explosion. For the first problem, let’s define some
terminology. “Disparity” refers to the differences between clades, while “diversity”
refers to variations within clades. Therefore, the Cambrian explosion was a radiation of
disparity, while GOBE was a radiation of diversity. Or to use Meyer’s terminology, we
see the origin of body plans in the Cambrian, and variations on those body plans in the
Ordovician. Remember that according to Meyer, a phylum equates with a body plan, but no
known phyla originated in the Ordovician. Instead, the Ordovician saw the evolution
of different species within those previously established phyla. In some cases, we can see
the step-by-step evolution of certain clades, such as trilobites. No sign of intelligent design
to be had, and nothing but lies from Meyer. Continuing, as discussed previously, the second
phase of the Cambrian explosion, in which crown lineages underwent a radiation of their own,
lasted right up to the end of the Cambrian. The transition from the Cambrian radiations
to GOBE is so seamless that some papers have included the late Cambrian as part of it. A 2020
paper defines GOBE as lasting 30 million years, from 497 to 467 million years ago. Then at the
end of the Ordovician, an extinction occurred, reducing species diversity, but this was followed
by a radiation at the start of the Silurian. In other words, we see continuous natural processes
occurring, not isolated supernatural ones. Next, Meyer said the first winged insects appear
without predecessors. We have to wonder what he could possibly mean by this. After all, arthropods
evolved in the Cambrian, and the subphylum that includes insects and their closest six-legged
cousins like springtails is called Hexapoda. Molecular clocks estimate that the common ancestor
of Hexapoda lived in the early Ordovician, while the last common ancestor of insects lived
either in the late Silurian or early Devonian. The earliest insect fossil is a pair of mandibles
called Rhyniognatha from Scotland dating to about 412 million years ago, which is early Devonian
age. Though these may have belonged to a winged insect, there are no wings associated with the
fossils, and the earliest winged insect fossil dates to the Carboniferous, some 324 million
years ago. As insects are phylogenetically nested within the paraphyletic crustaceans,
it also makes perfect evolutionary sense that fossil crustaceans are found before the first
fossil insects, like those Ordovician ostracods. Finally, Insecta is a class of
arthropods, so by Meyer’s classification, insects represent deviations
on the “arthropod body plan,” not independent body plans, making his claim
of “without predecessors” totally nonsensical. Of course, the major innovation of insects over
their hexapod cousins is wings and the power of flight that accompanies them. While we can
all hear a creationist in our heads flipping out about how wings could suddenly appear,
let’s all learn about this process together. Developmental analyses of the genes involved
in wing formation have shown that crustacean orthologue genes called vestigial, nubbin, and
apterous were likely exapted for new purposes, meaning a purpose other than its original
function. Further, the origin of the wings involved mergers between different tissues, from
the limbs and abdomen, rather than the wholesale invention of new tissues. So, the evolution of
wings was about changing and rearranging existing tissues and genes, not inventing new ones.
The story is similar with the first dinosaurs. Amniotes, or tetrapods whose embryos are
surrounded by an amnion during development, evolved from reptiliomorphs in the late
Carboniferous about 330 million years ago, and split into the two clades Sauropsida and Synapsida
shortly thereafter, about 312 million years ago. The latter contains mammals and their extinct
relatives, whom we’ll return to in a little bit, and the former contains all so-called “reptiles”
and birds. The common ancestor of lepidosaurs, which includes lizards and snakes, as well as
archosaurs, which includes crocodilians and birds, lived in the late Permian about 259 million years
ago, as evidenced by fossils like Protorosaurus. And the earliest dinosauromorphs, like Asilisaurus
and Lewisuchus, date to the early Triassic. The first dinosaurs appeared in the late
Triassic about 233 million years ago, such as Herrerasaurus, Eoraptor, and Saturnalia. Again, no sign of any intelligent
design, just slow and gradual change. Turtles have a good fossil record as well. The
evolution of the turtle’s unique morphology is exquisitely documented in transitional fossils
such as Eunotosaurus, Pappochelys, Odontochelys, and Proganochelys. Next, at present the
earliest known bird is Archaeopteryx from the late Jurassic, but this isn’t
even the oldest feathered dinosaur. Xiaotingia, Anchiornis, and Aurornis predate
Archaeopteryx and show evidence of feathers. Like the evolution of flight in insects, the evolution
of flight in birds involved a lot of mergers. Many bones fused to make flight easier, and flight
feathers were exapted from insulating feathers. By the way, if you want to make a creationist’s
head explode, inform them that scales and feathers are made of the same protein, keratin, simply in
different arrangements, and that a single point mutation in certain chickens causes them
to grow feathers where scales should be. Moving on, “the first marine reptiles” refers to
ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and placodonts, all of whom evolved in the early Triassic. Yet again,
we have fossils documenting these transitions. Though ichthyosaurs are fully aquatic,
paleontologists have found early Triassic sauropsids that are related to them but do not
display such extreme specializations, including the hupehsuchians and Cartorhynchus. Plesiosaurs
have semi-aquatic relatives, like nothosaurs and pachypleurosaurs, and there are even transitional
placodonts known, such as Palatodonta. The origin of the first flowering plants
had actually been a bit of a mystery, and there is indeed a bit of debate around them.
However, recent analyses of fossil clades like the Bennettitales, Pentoxylales, and Gigantopteriales
have helped narrow the gap between molecular and fossil estimates for the origin of flowers.
Just last year, a Jurassic angiosperm was found, meeting predictions for flower evolution based on
molecular estimates. And yet again, the evolution of flowers was largely about the modification
of existing structures. All the floral organs: sepals, petals, androecium, and gynoecium, are
simply modified leaves. More on plant evolution in my botany series if you’re interested. So we’ve
got transitional species that lead to flowering plants, all the kinds of insects, reptiles,
amphibians, birds… isn’t it fun to learn about all the organisms the DI pretends never existed?
Finally, Meyer actually said the first mammals appeared in the Eocene. This is completely,
laughably incorrect. Remember from earlier that mammals nest within the larger clade of
synapsids, the earliest of which appeared in the Carboniferous. Stem-synapsid fossils are
known all throughout the Permian and Triassic, and the first crown-mammals appeared in the
Jurassic. For reference, the Eocene epoch lasted from 56-34 million years ago, but the crown-mammal
Fruitafossor is dated to 150 million years ago. Way, way, way off, Steve. Relatives of all
three extant mammal clades, the monotremes, marsupials, and placentals, are known from
well before the Eocene. This is a really embarrassing error on his part. Or course we
all know that Meyer isn’t a paleontologist, but he still should’ve done an ounce of
research before making this absurd statement. So to finally conclude this very long section
on fossils, Meyer is wrong on all points. He is lying about an absence of transitional species
for every single era of biological history he opens his mouth about, and beyond this he provides
absolutely no justification for how intelligent design is a better model than evolution, or how
it even qualifies as a model in the first place. Just lies and “god did it”. This is a profound
insult to the entire scientific community, in particular the scientists who put
in the work to find, prepare, analyze, and categorize these fossils, and Meyer deserves
nothing but contempt and ridicule for it. Ok my friends, now we will move on to a
shorter but equally important assessment of his second main gripe with evolution, genetics.
The reason this won’t take as long as it took to go over all that paleontology literature, is
that for most of these points we won’t have to reference anything other than a freshman year
undergraduate understanding of genetics. That’s how clueless Meyer is when he opens his mouth
about DNA. Let’s sample some of his stupidity. If the Darwinian mechanism lacks the
creative power to generate the large scale, what are called morphological innovations, the big
changes in form that arise in the fossil record, that raises the question, well what
could produce those new forms of life? And what we know from biology is that whenever
you see new forms of life arising, you also have to have new information. It’s very much like in
our computer world. You wanna give your computer a new function. You have to provide code. You have
to provide information in the form of software. And something very similar is true in life.
If you wanna build a new form of animal life, you have to have new organs and tissues. But new
organs and tissues require new dedicated proteins to service those organs and tissues. For example,
many of the animals that came into the fossil record in the Cambrian period had a gut. But guts
require digestive enzymes, and digestive enzymes are proteins, and proteins are built in accord
with the instructions stored on the DNA molecule. So as you see these explosions of form in the
Cambrian period or other periods in the history of life, what you’re also seeing therefore, is
explosions of biological information. Biological form requires biological information. Genetic
information, and other forms of information. And that raises the question, where did that
information comes from? Now what we know from our uniform and repeated experience, which is the
basis of all scientific reasoning about the past, is that information, especially in a digital form,
always comes from an intelligent source. Whether we’re talking about a paragraph in a book,
or a section of software, or a hieroglyphic inscription, or even information embedded in
a radio signal. Whenever we see information and we trace it back to its ultimate source, we
inevitably find a mind, not a material process. Well if the mutation-selection mechanism is not
capable of generating the amount of information necessary to build new forms of life, then a
better explanation is actually intelligent design. It’s that a mind played a role in the
origin of those new forms of life. And that’s consistent with everything we know about
the cause and effect structure of the world. Ok, so he does this all the time. Computers
use code, and humans created that code, so all codes have a creator. This
talking point is on every ID bingo card. This is Kent Hovind level tripe. Someone created
this cup I’m using, so everything was created. It’s mind-bogglingly stupid and a dishonest
talking point. To get more specific, he complains about digestive organs requiring digestive enzymes
without bothering to make the obvious conclusion that the enzymes can predate the organ, and also
that rudimentary organs complexify over time. He’s trying to pretend science is suggesting
that something like the human stomach appeared out of nowhere millions of years ago, which is
ridiculous. But to get to the heart of the matter, Meyer is a complete dumpster fire when
it comes to the concept of information. We know from our experience that information
always arises from an intelligent source, whether we’re looking at a hieroglyphic inscription, or a
paragraph in a book, or information in a section of software code, or even information embedded in
a radio signal. Whenever we see information, and we trace it back to its source, it always comes
to a mind, not an undirected material process. He wants the viewer to believe that information
is a material substance that needs to be forged by intelligence, rather than what it
really is, a pattern or sequence of items. If nucleotides polymerize to form a nucleic
acid, and that sequence acts as a template for the synthesis of another molecule, it’s
information. It’s just a word we use to describe something that exists, and it has zero
implications toward intelligence. Let’s watch him milk this computer analogy some more.
What happens if you introduce a few random changes into computer code? You’ll likely mess it up,
right? Though it might still work if you don’t make too many changes. But if you make enough
random changes your program will stop functioning altogether. You certainly can’t keep doing this
and expect some cool new program to pop out. There is so much wrong here. First, he
insists upon an excessive accumulation of “random changes” to the code, which is not
how biology works, nor how software works. He ignores both natural selection and principles
of coding. Not that it matters for biology, but when programmers allow programs to make changes to
their own code, also known as self-modifying code, with feedback mechanisms in place, we do not
get what Meyer says. We instead see a kind of evolution in action, with a gradual improvement in
performance and efficiency, similar to biological evolution. But more importantly in terms of
DNA, again, no one is proposing that there are loads and loads of random changes occurring
very rapidly in one organism. That would be the equivalent of someone getting blasted by huge
amounts of radiation, like a Chernobyl event, and sustaining a ridiculous amount of mutations.
Guess what, that person would certainly develop loads of tumors and die. That’s perfectly
analogous to his program that has its code changed randomly and dramatically such that it doesn’t
work anymore. That’s not how evolution works. Mutations crop up slowly and are selected for,
from one organism to the next. Each organism must be viable for any mutations to proliferate to the
next generation. Evolution is not just mutations, it’s mutations AND natural selection. When we want
to engineer enzymes to perform a novel activity, the best strategy is to speed up nature, we use
random mutagenesis and select the best mutant. Run the cycle ten times, each time picking the
best mutant, and you get a highly efficient enzyme. It’s evolution in vitro, not design.
Similarly, if you let a program change its code with a feedback mechanism in place analogous
to natural selection, the code will improve. This concept is not just an analogy but actually
directly relevant to the concept of evolution by natural selection. Stevie, do you think we
can drop this computer code thing anytime soon? If you’re a computer programmer, you
know that if you start randomly changing sections of functional code, you’re gonna
degrade that code long before you ever come up with a new program or operating system.
Ok, buddy. Unfortunately for Meyer it ges much worse than this. He frequently makes the claim
that mutations cause degradation of information. Mutations degrade information. But minds
generate information, and therefore mind provides a better explanation for the origin
of information than the Darwinian mechanism. This is one of my favorite sentences Meyer
has ever said, because it demonstrates what an unbelievable moron he is. “Mutations
degrade information” is a meaningless sentence that can serve no purpose other than to capitalize
on the complete and total ignorance of his viewers toward what DNA is and how gene expression works.
For people who don’t know what any of these words mean, their personal connotation with the
word “mutation” will probably be a vat of toxic green goo. Bad, nasty mutation ooze that
dissolves kittens and all of their information. In reality, to anyone who remembers their 9th
grade biology, mutations are simply changes in the nucleotide sequence of a gene. For those who
are a bit rusty I have a very short and very clear tutorial on transcription and translation
in my biochemistry series, but in short, a gene is transcribed to generate an mRNA
which is then translated to produce a protein, and any change in the sequence found in the
gene may result in a change in a particular amino acid in the protein. A different sequence of
nucleotides yielding a different sequence of amino acids. That’s it. For the organism, some mutations
are bad, the vast majority are neutral, and improved function by random mutation is observed
in viral and bacterial evolution every single day, both in culture and in vivo, so he would be wrong
even if he was talking about cellular function. But he isn’t. He said “information”, again as
though referring to some nebulous, magical entity that is separate from the DNA itself. Mutations
simply change the information. They don’t “degrade” it, and Meyer is profoundly stupid for
having said so. He pulls this crap all the time. Unless the chemical letters in the
DNA text are sequenced properly, a protein molecule will not form.
Nope. As long as the resulting mRNA has a start codon, the sequence can be
literally anything, and the corresponding protein will be produced. Astounding.
In all codes and languages there are vastly more ways of arranging characters that will generate
gibberish than there are arrangements that will generate meaningful sequences. And this applies
to DNA. Remember, natural selection only selects sequences that random mutations generate. Yet
experiments have established that DNA sequences capable of making stable proteins are extremely
rare, and thus really hard to stumble on randomly. Even more astounding. He claims sequences that
produce stable proteins are extremely rare, when in actuality, literally any sequence would
produce a protein that is perfectly stable. There is nothing inherently “unstable” about
proteins. Again, as long as there is a start codon present in the resulting mRNA so that translation
can begin, the rest of the sequence is irrelevant. Every possible three letter sequence is a codon
that corresponds to an amino acid, so no matter what the sequence, a protein will be produced.
And proteins don’t just fall apart for no reason, no matter what the sequence of amino acids, so
any sequence will result in a stable protein. This “so few stable proteins” thing is an
even dumber lie than the lie he meant to tell, which is that very few proteins have biological
function. This is obviously what he meant, because this is what he goes on to talk about.
How rare? While working at Cambridge University, molecular biologist Douglas Axe showed that
for every DNA sequence that generates a relatively short functional protein, there
are 10^77 power non-functional sequences. Of course Axe is just another DI clown, so it’s
not a surprise that this is who he references. It’s also not a surprise that they are both
profoundly wrong. This is just another example of the “wow big scary numbers” game that ID
proponents play. First, when insisting that 10^77 proteins would not have any function, he is
pretending that he made all of these proteins and tested their functionality. He has no idea what
functionality all those sequences would produce. Many new sequences could have any number of other
functions. What they mean to say is that all those other proteins would not have this particular
function held by the protein in question, which is also unbelievably wrong. If a protein
such as an enzyme has a particular sequence, they would have you believe that this is the
ONLY sequence that would result in this function. That’s ridiculous. There are hundreds
of amino acid residues in a protein, and most of them could be many different
amino acids. Anyone who thinks switching one random leucine to isoleucine would result in
a non-functional protein is an idiot. A dramatic change from a hydrophobic to hydrophilic residue,
for example, might change the folding pattern slightly, and this may or may not change binding
affinity, which could become worse or better. But many of the 20 amino acids are chemically
very similar and swapping them would result in no change for the protein at nearly all
of the positions in the protein. I repeat, there is plenty of variability at virtually
every single amino acid residue in any protein, barring key residues in active sites. Therefore,
the number of amino acid sequences that would result in a protein that carries out precisely
the same function is astronomical. Would you like proof? Take any enzyme, like a polymerase
enzyme, which copies DNA during replication, and look at its sequence in different organisms.
What do you know! The sequences are not identical. They differ from species to species, despite
carrying out precisely the same function. Let’s say it again for emphasis. There are
different versions of the same enzyme in different species that perform the same exact function.
Clearly, nature finds something by chance that carries out a function, this protein is retained,
and is then slowly optimized over millions of years, or potentially exapted for another purpose,
with neutral mutations cropping up along the way that we can use as molecular clocks to trace
lineages. Any time you hear an ID proponent start to go off on odds of one in 10 to the 120
to the billion or whatever, you know immediately that they are totally clueless, and just
rattling off big numbers for shock value. This completes the analysis of Meyer’s lies about
genetics that require only a modest recollection of freshman year biology to spot. Now let’s get
a little more technical so that we can make a few more sophisticated points. Let’s recall how
evolution works broadly before looking at certain organisms more specifically. Organismal variations
are the result of mutations and, in sexually reproducing organisms, recombination, which occurs
during meiosis, as I explain in my biology series. There are a variety of types of mutations,
including point mutations, deletions or insertions, inversions, transpositions, and
duplications. Of course Meyer likes to pretend that point mutations, or a change in one base
pair, are the only game in town. Or who knows, maybe he really knows so little about genetics. At
any rate, biologists understand that mutation and recombination occur naturally, due to exogenous
mutagens and also replicative error in the cell. Any organism accumulates dozens of mutations even
in early embryonic development. These mutations can affect an organism’s capacity to survive
in a given environment. Beneficial mutations promote survival and therefore reproduction,
harmful mutations hinder them, and neutral mutations have no effect. Thus, mutations will
spread at different rates throughout populations depending on their effect, and these rates can be
tracked in organisms that have short generations. Again, though the vast majority of mutations
are neutral, some beneficial mutations have been detected in real-time. Perhaps the most
famous of these occurred in the Richard Lenski long-term E. coli experiment where one population
developed the ability to metabolize citrate in an aerobic environment. This happened because of
a gene duplication that placed a gene which was only activated in anaerobic conditions under the
control of a promoter that operated in aerobic conditions, thus conferring a novel phenotype.
This concept of promoters is covered in my tutorial on regulation of gene expression, but
the important thing to understand is that even without a new gene, it is merely the new location
for the duplicated gene elsewhere in the genome which bestowed the organism with a novel cellular
function. There are many other ways large-scale change can occur. Earlier we mentioned the point
mutation that causes the production of feathers instead of scales, but even more significant
alterations to body plan can occur as well. ID proponents like to pretend that organs found in
modern animals had to instantly form precisely as they are today, but in reality, one need only look
at organ formation during embryonic development to see how a slight difference in the instructions
or the placement of cytoplasmic determinants can change the way cell layers are folded
to dramatically alter their layout, as well as precisely how and
when cells differentiate, in order to produce new organs whose
functions can optimize over long time scales. We can even look at simple forms of extant life
to see just how simple some of these organs can be. And a modern understanding of Hox genes
and TALE genes reveals the manner in which relatively few genes coordinate the developing
body plan for all of Eumetazoa, and therefore how a few changes in these genes can easily
result in dramatically different body plans. Meyer is equally clueless when he cites what
has been called the “waiting time problem”, or the idea that changes requiring multiple
“coordinated mutations” are impossible because it would take so long for those specific mutations
to occur from the standpoint of probability. And the waiting times problem has emerged as
evolutionary biologists have realized that certain biological traits or anatomical features
would require coordinated mutations. And whereas a single mutation might not take that long to
occur, we might not have to wait very long on average for a single mutation to occur, with
each additional mutation the waiting times, the expected waiting times for such an event
to occur, rises exponentially. And so if you have complex adaptations or anatomical structures
that would require multiple coordinated mutations, you’re going to, by the math of population
genetics, the mathematical expression of neo-Darwinian theory, you’re going to have
to wait an enormously long time on average for such mutations to occur, such coordinated
mutations to occur. And so once you get beyond about three coordinated mutations the waiting
times rise dramatically, exponentially, into the hundreds of millions or billions
of years, far more time than is allowed for the appearance of given anatomical traits
as we find them arising in the fossil record. This argument ignores many obvious facts. It
implies that nature must be directed toward specific sets of mutations, which it isn’t, there
is no target. It implies that each mutation along the way can’t have any quantifiable benefit that
could then be selected for, which makes their calculations totally unreasonable, since their
concept of “coordination” becomes meaningless. It implies that the changes must occur in a
sequence rather than occurring in parallel fashion across a population, when in fact
many different mutations can indeed be arising simultaneously across the population. And it also
ignores recombination in sexual reproduction, which baselessly discounts the profound
evolutionary benefit of this form of reproduction, which is the mixing and matching of genotypes,
thus dramatically accelerating the accumulation of beneficial mutations, that again can be arising
in parallel fashion across a population. The whole argument is ignorant of what evolution is and
does, which is why it is astounding that a handful of papers from ID proponents citing this argument
somehow made it into peer-reviewed journals, despite having been thoroughly discredited by
biologists. People like Meyer have a field day whenever there is a real paper they can
point to as it almost never happens. But unfortunately, the science just isn’t there.
In general, given enough time, separate populations develop their own mutations and
this ultimately leads to reproductive isolation, also known as speciation. This can
occur over long stretches of time, or in some cases, a single generation depending on
the organism. Plants, for instance, often speciate by whole genome duplication, or polyploidy, but
this has also been observed in some animals. For example, the marbled crayfish Procambarus
virginalis speciated from its ancestral species Procambarus fallax in the 1990s due to a whole
genome duplication. That we have physically observed speciation events is another dirty secret
that many creationists don’t like to acknowledge. At first, sister species are very similar to
each other, differing only slightly in genetics, morphology, and perhaps behavior. But over the
course of generations, these differences become more and more pronounced. For instance, compare
the genomes of closely related species within a genus, or multiple genera within a family.
What is apparent is the exaptation of existing genes for new functions rather than the wholesale
development of totally new genes. Here’s just one example. Multiple species of garter snakes within
the genus Thamnophis have evolved resistance to newt tetrodotoxin by developing several point
mutations in a muscle sodium channel protein. Looking even more broadly to animals as a whole,
many genes possessed by animals are also possessed by fungi, ichthyosporeans, filastereans,
and choanoflagellates. We even share a triple gene fusion for three genes involved
in pyrimidine biosynthesis with amoebozoans. Animals share with the unicellular
choanoflagellates a variety of genes that animals have fashioned for multicellularity, such
as cadherins, C-type lectins, tyrosine kinases, and more recently discovered, a Hedgehog homolog.
And, recent phylogenetic analyses have shown that animals underwent major gene duplication
events early in their evolutionary history followed by large amounts of gene loss. Gene gain
and loss occur differentially across the animal tree rather than new genes being invented
suddenly. This again favors an evolutionary scenario rather than some kind of design.
One final point before wrapping up, the concept of “genetic information” as Meyer
applies it is so vague that it’s unusable. There are no metrics for determining how much
information any given sequence of DNA has. Does a longer gene have more information than a
shorter one, even if the shorter one is involved in more processes? How much information does
a promoter region have, or a repressor region, or an enhancer region? We can’t quantify how much
“genetic information” is needed to go from a fin to an arm, but we can calculate how many mutations
have evidently occurred. It is for this reason that biologists talk about specific genes and
genetic regions instead of vaguely gesturing at “information”; the word is intentionally used
in this manner to muddy the conversation. So that concludes a thorough assessment
of Meyer’s two biggest talking points, the fossil record and genetics. To summarize,
we can see that when it comes to these topics, Meyer has only one strategy. He puts forward some
premise that is really just a lie about science, and from that he draws the conclusion “god did
it”. There are two huge problems with this. First, again, the premise is always false. He’s
just lying. He’s lying about the duration and nature of the Cambrian explosion. He’s
lying about the lack of transitional fossils. He’s lying about basic, freshman year
undergraduate level genetics concepts. The premise is always false. Furthermore, the
logic he uses to get to his conclusion is also invalid. Even if his premise were correct, and he
was actually citing some unexplained phenomenon, to conclude “god did it” is not scientific,
ever. End of story. We don’t know things and we seek to figure them out. That is done through
scientific research, not pontification that is motivated by a specific desired theological
conclusion. As an alleged philosopher of science, it is astounding that Meyer does not grasp this.
It is also astounding how many ways these DI folks can dress up the god of the gaps in different
costumes, to fill not just temporary gaps in human knowledge, but gaps in their own personal
knowledge which could quickly be rectified by learning about existing science. But in
the end that is truly the only god they have. The pathetic, impotent god that Meyer
so desperately fights and lies for, the one who can’t seem to figure out exactly
what it is he wants to create and when, having to step in every few million years to
make some new stuff from scratch because he isn’t powerful enough to manufacture a mechanism
by which the diversification happens on its own. This is what makes Meyer yet another apologist
hack, just like the rest of them. To a layperson, does he sound like he knows what he’s talking
about. Yes. Does he sound like a reasonable, grounded person? Yes. Does he sound sincere
in his convictions? Yes. Is he actually any of those things? Not even a little bit. It’s a
façade. A costume he wears for those who only need a friendly tone and a message they want to hear,
but have no desire to actually learn a thing about science. He is fully aware of all the research he
contradicts in his content. His career is centered around it. One could therefore say that Meyer is
slightly more sophisticated than some apologists, in that while some of his lies are blatantly
obvious to anyone who got a B or better in 9th grade biology, some of them do require
an investigation of the primary scientific literature, an investigation he knows that not a
single member of his target audience will produce. But that’s why I bring the investigation to
you, so that we can all conclude together, religious or otherwise, that like
everyone else affiliated with the DI, Meyer is a complete fraud. And we can now safely
cue the desperate response from Meyer and pals, whining in their safe little blogs
shielded from outside commentary, about what an unqualified uncredentialed loser I
am, with no acknowledgement of being completely unable to address anything I say with even a
shred of honesty. It must be embarrassing to get so thoroughly exposed and humiliated by someone
with such a poor pedigree, isn’t it fellas? So that’s it, I hope you enjoyed part 2 of
this series exposing the lies and agenda of the Discovery Institute. But don’t worry, we have many
more frauds to expose. I’ll see you next time.
Stephen Meyer is very credible, this will be interesting
The Kitzmiller v Dover decision is worth reading. The judge eviscerated ID. Their degree of dishonesty is astounding, but creationists in general cannot be trusted. I still laugh at the cdesign proponentsists example, an actual in situ transitional fossil where ID proponents did a shitty search-and-replace job on the creationist book Pandas and People.
My only hope on the subject of creationism is the ongoing gradual decline in religiosity in the US. Creationists don't come around, don't get better. They have the truth, so what would they have to learn from skeptics and god-deniers? It's apparently very difficult (though not impossible) for creationist and conservative believers to move to more liberal churches. Because they're already preconditioned to consider those more liberal (theologically or politically) faith communities to be "dead churches."