Answering Genesis: "Some of the Things That Molecules Do"

The second episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos was considered almost entirely with the subject of biological evolution; naturally, this is not a subject that creationists are happy with, and Answers in Genesis's review of the episode shows that. But, despite everything, Darwin's theory is one of the most well understood and well tested theory in all of science. The only reason people don't accept it, as far as I'm aware, is because they either don't actually understand what the theory is (hence my earlier blog post on it), or they simply refuse to, usually for religious reasons, and can only do this by "interpreting" evidence differently.

I want to make a short disclaimer here first though. I'm not a biologist. My majors were physics and maths, and I did my utmost best to avoid biology at university. I'm not entirely sure why, but hey, what can you do. So my understanding of some of the principles of biology are flawed and I might well make mistakes. Please, please, don't take those as mistakes in the theory of evolution. It's almost certainly a mistake in my own understanding.

But enough of that. Let's get into the review!

Cosmos host Neil deGrasse Tyson opens with a story to illustrate how dogs may have been domesticated from a wolf ancestor and then undergone artificial selection to produce all the species of dogs we see today. Biblical creationists have long said on the basis of God’s Word that all varieties of dogs likely originated from a single kind of dog.

On the basis of God's Word, or on the basis of scientific evidence? The bible doesn't say that all varieties of dogs descend from wolves, it pretty much just says that two of every kind (A word creationists love to use because they can morph it into whatever they need for their "interpretation" of the evidence) went on the ark.

Showing how a mutant bear’s white fur can make it easier to sneak up on prey, Tyson describes how a selective advantage, obtained through a random mutation, can lead to speciation through natural selection. Other than the inflated dates—drawn from the faulty assumptions and circular reasoning associated with molecular clock dating¹—this segment of the program correctly shows how artificial or natural selection can produce new species and varieties of animals.

I just want to insert the footnote linked to there:

Molecular clock dating is an exercise in circular reasoning that assumes molecules-to-man evolution happened in order to prove how long it took. It attributes the genetic differences between difference kinds of organisms to the accumulated mutations evolutionists believe caused one kind of animal (or plant or microbe) to evolve into a more complex one. This method assumes that mutation rates over great spans of time can be known and remain constant. The method is based on foundational data that suffers from the statistical mismanagement of error ranges as well as the assumption that one kind of creature in the fossil record evolved into another by accumulating mutations. Circular reasoning is also inherent in the calibration of the “clocks” in accord with the radiometric dating methods, creating the illusion of “confirmed” interpretations. 

Firstly, it's worth pointing out that Dr Tyson never mentions where the dates he states come from. To be clear, I'm not saying he's pulling numbers out of his butt, he just doesn't state it because it's not relevant to the story he's telling. So I'm not sure how exactly AiG is claiming that the dating methods are flawed, apart from the fact that if they actually interpret the data properly, their world view tends to come crashing down.

They're somewhat correct in stating that mutation rates can vary over time, but their second point, that circular reasoning is used in the calibration of radiometric dating, is simply wrong. Dating methods are calibrated using a number of methods.

Firstly, by checking it against something we know the age of. This only really works for dating methods that work on young objects, such as carbon dating which can be tested on older trees (Though creationists tend not to accept tree ring dating, unless it shows a tree younger than their unquestionable age of the earth). For dating methods such as K-Ar dating, which is used to date old rocks, the decay rate is too slow for us to accurately measure the age of young rocks that we'd know the date of. We can, however, check them against rocks that we've measured the age of using different dating methods. I think this is where AiG is trying to claim the dating methods are circular. Not true. We don't say "K-Ar dating shows this rock is a million years old, so we calibrate Rb-Sr dating to show that the rock is a million years old. How do we know that K-Ar dating shows that it's a million years old. We calibrated it against Rb-Sr dating!" because doing that is absurd. We can only do this if we've already calibrated a dating method against a more objective method.

Another way we can calibrate a dating method is by checking it in a lab. Being a more controlled environment, slow decay rates are less of an issue, so it's easy to measure how slowly potassium decays and from that, we can calibrate the dating methods.

The usual creationist claim here is that this assumes that the decay rates have remained constant. Well, that's a pretty good assumption. Firstly, there's no known method by which decay rates can change, especially not to the degree that's required for AiG's 6000 year old universe. Decay rates are based on very well understood principles of atomic physics, and if they were to have changes, especially to the degree required for AiG's 6000 year old universe, the universe itself would have been an incredibly, unbelievably drastically different place. Not to mention, Adam and Eve would have cooked with the massive amount of radiation being pumped out of the earth.

We can also directly measure decay rates in the past. Light isn't instant, it's extremely quick but still takes time to get here. When we look at distant stars, we're directly looking at the past. One supernova, visible in 1987, was found to be over 100,000 light years away (And thus, the star exploded about 100,000 years ago; a fact that Answers in Genesis has no satisfactory answer for) and when this happened, produced some short-lived elements that we could detect in our labs here (I won't go into details of how, but look up spectroscopy if you're interested). These elements only lasted for a short amount of time, matching the decay rates we see on earth today.

Creationists also claim that we assume things about the initial conditions of the rocks. Again, not true. Isochron dating compares the elements we're using for dating, against chemically identical but nuclearly different elements. That's an extremely brief summary, but the end result is that we don't actually need the initial conditions of the rocks. With other dating methods, such as K-Ar, we can make very reasonable assumptions. Argon doesn't react with anything, so we know it's not part of the initial rocks that we're testing. From this, it's very reasonable to assume that the only argon we find in the rocks is the ones that have decayed from potassium.

Answers in Genesis can claim these are circular till the cows come home, but really, there's only one logical way to interpret the data that shows the age of rocks, and it isn't that the world is 6000 years old.

But that's enough about dating methods. There are plenty of resources online that explain how dating methods work, plus others I haven't mentioned, if you're curious. Back to evolution. Evolution is basically when small changes between parents and children build up slowly over time and eventually lead to them becoming so different, they can no longer breed with other descendants of the same ancestors. Consider, horses and zebras. Answers in Genesis admit it's highly likely that they came from a common ancestor (which is true), but they've become so different genetically that they can no longer produce fertile offspring. Given another few thousand years, we expect they won't be able to produce any offspring at all. That's the core of evolution, as defined by any biologist. But notewhat AiG have done: they're referring to it as speciation, and variation. They want to admit that evolution happens, because the evidence overwhelmingly supports evolution happening today, but without admitting evolution happens. They don't even hide that fact too:

After laying a brief foundation of observational science, the Cosmos infomercial promoting belief in billions of years of biological evolution began in earnest. Tyson said,

If artificial selection can work such profound changes in only ten or fifteen thousand years, what can natural selection do operating over billions of years?
The answer is all the beauty and diversity of life.
How does it work? Our ship of the imagination can take us anywhere in space and time. Even into the tiny microcosmos where one kind of life can be transformed into another.

Ken Ham recently described this tactic during the Nye-Ham Debate as a classic example of bait-and-switch with the word evolution. Species do change. In fact, nothing in the Bible even suggests otherwise. But evolutionists extrapolate from observable speciation to upward evolution because to do so suits their purposes.

Sorry guys, but it isn't a bait and switch. The mechanisms behind so-called micro-evolution and macro-evolution are exactly the same. Creationists have to drive a wedge between the two though, because the evidence for micro-evolution is so overwhelming, and it logically follows that if micro-evolution is true, macro-evolution is too. There is literally no reason why that shouldn't follow, which is why creationists tend to make up reasons why they can drive a wedge. None of these reasons stand up to scrutiny.

One of the main reasons creationists give is that we never see "one kind change into another". This is a poor argument for one of two reasons, and it depends on how the creationist talking defines "one kind changing into another". The first is that the mean dogs changing into cats or vice versa, or something equally nonsense. Evolution doesn't permit anything like this. You can't outgrow your ancestry, and you can't go into a different evolutionary branch.

The other thing they mean is a new species arising. This fails because it's simply false. We've seen new species arise, both in the lab and in nature. The most obvious example of this is a ring species, for example, the greenish warbler, or the ensatina salamander. The ensatina began at the north of California's Central Valley, and as they spread out around the mountains to the east and west, each population could breed with its nearest neighbour, but when they meet again at the bottom, the eastern line can no longer breed with the western line. They've split into two separate sub-species.

But Answers in Genesis doesn't use either of these arguments against macro-evolution. Their argument is different, and is stated pretty soon.

The next few paragraphs in the review explain how Darwin, amongst others, debunked the commonly held idea that species couldn't changed. AiG's stance on this seems to be that creationists always believed species could split into separate sub-species, but I doubt that. They're correct in stating that the idea that species couldn't evolve probably originated from Aristotle, but the church of Darwin's day still weren't terribly big on the idea of accepting new ideas. In fact, it seems to me that the main reason why AiG, and other creationist groups accept that micro-evolution can indeed produce new species of organisms (As seen with the ensatina and other such organisms) is because they kinda need it to fit all the animals on the ark. Instead of having two of every several billion species of organisms on the ark, they've got a few thousand different "kinds" of organisms. What's a "kind"? Well, as they try to explain, there's a "cat" kind, from which all felines, such as lions, housecats, panthers and so on are descended, a "bear" kind, a "dog" kind and so on. If an animal looks similar enough, it's probably the same kind, and probably descended from the original pair on Noah's ark. Because dogs and wolves are the same "kind", Noah didn't need two German shepherds, two pitbulls, two wolves and so on, they just needed two of the "dog kind".

This definition kinda falls apart, but I'll explain that later as well.

The review then goes on to explain AiG's actual objection to "macro-evolution".

Variation of organisms within their created kinds—which occurs on the basis of reshuffling, isolation, selection, and other mechanisms related to the genetic information contained in that kind of organism—does not, however, support the evolutionary emergence of completely different kinds of organisms. Nor can it, because mutations—not even lots and lots of them—do not create the new genetic information that would be required to produce a more complex kind of organism but only variations of the existing kinds.

In other words, they don't think mutations can provide "new information" (A rather poorly defined term used almost exclusively by creationists), and thus, mutations can only give information already contained within the organism and cannot give new "kinds". There's three main problems with this, and I'll go over one now, and the other two later, when the review tries to explain more.

The first is, like I said above, you can't outgrow your ancestry. Humans are a subgroup of eukaryotes, animals, chordates, vertebrates, tetrapods, synapsids, mammals, eutherias, primates, and apes because we're descended from all of those and we'll never stop being any of those. So yes, we do see new kinds but they're always subgroups of existing "kinds". The dog and cat kind mentioned earlier? They're both sub-kinds of an earlier carnivore kind.

Tyson briefly explains the DNA “alphabet”—the genetic code by which DNA blueprints the physical traits of living things—and how it gets copied from generation to generation. In the genetic alphabet, each small combination of nucleotides stands for a particular “letter” used to write instructions in each cell’s massive DNA code that tells it how to make more living cells and how to function. All living things on earth use the same genetic alphabet to write these instructions. Evolutionists claim living things could only use the same alphabet if they all evolved from a common ancestor, which itself evolved from non-living matter. At the end of the program Tyson admits that the origin of DNA and of life itself remains an unsolved mystery but declares that not being able to explain how living cells sprang from non-living elements through natural processes is not a problem. He does not mention that such abiogenesis violates the most fundamental law of biological science.

Again with the "violates the most fundamental law of biological science" rubbish? I want to point out that the article linked there has absolutely nothing to do with any law of fundamental biology. In fact, it's actually the third time they've linked to the article about how creationists claim species aren't fixed. I think they're still talking about the law of biogenesis but really guys, if you're going to claim that abiogenesis violates a fundamental law of science, explain what the damn law it violates actually is.

So how do biblical creation scientists account for the consistency of the genetic alphabet? How can we explain the fact that some of the same genetic instructions for certain essential proteins and the processes they direct are seen in all living things? Tyson says, for instance, that the instructions for these essentials evolved before life branched off to different forms. But when we realize that God created all kinds of living things to function in the same world, to subsist on the same raw materials from the environment, and to interact with each other, it makes sense that He would create a system to make the biochemistry of all living things on earth consistent and compatible. Otherwise, how could ecosystems ever be established? How could anything find biochemically compatible food to eat? God designed all the living things in His Creation to function within His Creation.

Chromosome fusion

This is a fair enough point by AiG, but it's an overly simplistic idea of why genetics demonstrates common ancestry and not common descent, though Dr Tyson didn't explain why in the episode. To summarise it though (And to repeat, I'm not a biologist so I'm probably going to make mistakes here), when mutations occur, they often leave distinctive markers in distinct places in the genetic code. These markers are then passed down in generations and, if they appear in the same place in two different people's DNA, we can be extremely sure that the two people are related. The odds of the mutations happening in the same place by sheer chance are unbelievably low. In fact, this is effectively how DNA testing of parentage works. We can use these same methods on different species. When we compare the DNA of chimpanzees and humans, we often see mutations appearing in the exact same place. Either these occurred entirely by chance in an unbelievably unlikely event, or they were inherited by both chimpanzees and humans from our common ancestor.

There's more than that too. There's a thing called retroviruses, viruses that basically attach themselves to DNA. When the DNA is copied, the virus's genetic code is copied too, and the virus code is inherited by subsequent generations. These can also be tracked and be shown to have common ancestors. We see retroviruses appearing in the same place in human DNA and other organisms. This is again, extremely unlikely but is explained perfectly by common ancestry.

Cosmos host Tyson correctly says that genetic copying errors—mutations—can be inconsequential, deadly, or even helpful in certain environments and circumstances. Such genetic differences—mutations—“provide the raw material for natural selection,” he says. While natural selection does operate on the fitness or unfitness of various traits that sometimes appear as a result of mutations, the resulting organisms are only variations of the original kind.
What Tyson fails to reveal is that mutations never produce new information such as would be needed to produce a different kind of organism. The “raw material” provided by mutations is not new information, just recycled old information. When natural selection eliminates certain varieties of organisms from a population, as sometimes happens, the genetic information in the population may even be lost. Thus mutations do not provide the “raw material” for molecules-to-man evolution.

 Going back to the problems with the "new information" argument, the second problem with the argument is that it's simply not true. Mutations can, and do, provide "new information" and we've witnessed it happen, though obviously, creationists reject this evidence.

The article linked about mutations is slightly off. It explains DNA as being like Morse code, or like an alphabet and claims that if you "mutate" SOS, you might get "DOS", which is a meaningless word in Morse code.

This is wrong. The reason Morse code, or words work is because these words have meaning that we apply to them. ···---··· is meaningless on its own, it only has meaning because we apply meaning to it.

This isn't true of DNA. DNA is a machine, and it works on its own without needing to be interpreted by intelligence (Though, I believe, there are enzymes that "interpret" DNA). Look at it being like gears in a machine. If you swap a gear out for a different sized gear, your machine might break, it might do nothing, or maybe something different will happen.

But as I stated, we've seen new information arise. The most famous example of this is nylonase, where some bacteria mutated a gene allowing them to digest nylon, something that obviously, could not be done since nylon didn't exist more than a few decades ago. Creationists claim this is information that was already present but this again, isn't true.

But, I think, the best example of this comes from a long study of E. coli, where Lenski and others separated out 12 colonies of E. coli and left them to evolve while changing their environment to force natural selection. From this, we did see new mutations arise giving new genetic information. The most remarkable of this was some developed the ability to thrive on citric acid, something E. coli cannot naturally do. AiG claims this is information that was already present that was just turned on, but that's also not true. They tracked the genetic code of the E. coli, and simply did not find the genetic information to digest the citric acid before the 20,000th generation. It was new information, by any definition of it.

But the third, and to me, most important objection to this argument is that it's completely irrelevant. We have more than enough genetic and fossil evidence that shows that evolution happened in the past. Answers in Genesis can claim that it only appears that way because that's how evolutionists want to interpret it, but that's because it's the only logical way to interpret the mountains and mountains of data. So, this whole "genetic information" argument is basically an argument of how evolution works. Even if somehow, someone manages to irrefutably demonstrate that mutations do not cause evolutionary changes, all that means is that we have to find another mechanism behind evolution. It doesn't mean evolution doesn't happen because we already know that it does.

Consider, gravity. Nobody denies that gravity exists. We see it when we drop things, we see it in planets orbiting the sun and stars orbiting galaxies. But how gravity works is a very hotly debated subject amongst physicists. One of the leading ideas is based on general relativity, but, until this year, we didn't have much evidence of gravitational waves, one of the key aspects of general relativity.

What Answers in Genesis is trying to do, is like claiming that because we don't have strong evidence of gravitational waves, gravity does not exist. No, that's clearly not it. Even if we demonstrate that general relativity is not the cause behind gravity, it doesn't disprove gravity, it just means gravity works by something else.

To illustrate how mutations supposedly provided what it took to build something wondrously complex, Cosmos gives us the human eye, morphing from an anatomical eye to the Helix Nebula that forms the icon for the program. Lining up a number of organisms with light-sensing structures, Cosmos seeks to show that evolutionary scientists have worked out the evolutionary origin of the human eye’s complexity. Cosmos instead merely shows a gallery of creatures that God designed equipped to sense and react to light according to their various needs. Nothing about the genetic differences between the various creatures with light-sensing structures can explain how a mutation here and there could add onto the genetic information in a creature to produce a different kind of creature or build a new kind of eye, much less the brain to analyze and interpret the information gathered by the eye.

You miss the point. The bit on how the eye evolved is to refute the age-old argument of irreducible complexity. According to creationists, certain parts of biological organisms, such as the eye, the immune system, bacterial flagella, and other things are irreducibly complex; take away one part and it no longer works. Therefore, it cannot have evolved and must have been designed. However, by demonstrating a mechanism by which these could have evolved, the idea that they couldn't have evolved is disproven. This is why Cosmos explains the evolution of the eye; it disproves the irreducible complexity of the eye.

There's another important note here. Creationists claim that the common DNA shared between animals and plants is evidence of a common designer, not of common descent. Dr Tyson points out one of the key problems with this idea. See, a designer can scrap things, start again from scratch. Evolution can't. Evolution is all about modifying what we already have. As Dr Tyson explains, our eyes evolved in the sea and were originally designed to work in the water. This is why fish can see better than us, and there are certain things that our land-based eyes simply don't do very well. This is explained perfectly by common descent from water-based animals, and isn't explained at all by a common designer who could scrap the water-based eye and give us one that's better suited to our airy environment. It's worth noting that Answers in Genesis has no answers to this problem.

Continuing this flight of imagination, Tyson says, “The stuff of life is so malleable that once it got started the environment molded it into a staggering variety of life forms.” Showing the evolutionary tree of life, he says, “Science has made it possible for us to construct this family tree for all the species of life on earth.” Humans are but an insignificant little twig on the tree. We shouldn’t feel special, he says, and certainly not like special creations of an intelligent Designer!

“A central premise of traditional belief is that we were created separately from all the other animals,” Tyson says. “It’s easy to see why this idea has taken hold. It makes us feel special.” Having thus rejected the biblical truth that humans—Adam and Eve and all who have descended from them—are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26–27), Tyson shares his conviction: “Accepting our kinship with all life on earth is not only solid science, it’s, in my view, also a soaring spiritual experience.”

See, this is one of the things that annoys me about creationists. Their objection is not based on science, or even really religion. It's based on arrogance. They want to believe that humans are better than all the animals, that we're special. It's a truly arrogant way to look at things.

The idea that all life on earth is interconnected is a truly amazing idea. It implies that we do have a familial responsibility to care for all life on earth and to nurture and look after it. No, it doesn't mean we're not special, we're effectively the only animals smart enough to hold these idea and to understand them. Humans are an incredible species and being made in God's image doesn't necessarily mean "God got some clay, shaped it into us and breathed into it and made it alive". There's no reason to believe that God couldn't have set life going on earth by whatever naturalistic means and guided it and gently nudged it to form humans.

We are animals, and we have every reason to believe we share a common ancestor with other animals, and we see evidence for that everywhere. All throughout the animal kingdom, we see traits that only make sense if they're inherited from previous generations. Every vertebrate has haemoglobin based blood, while every mollusk has haemocyanin based blood, with no exception on either side. Why? Evolution explains why perfectly; haemoglobin based blood evolved early in vertebrates and was passed on to every vertebrate since then, while haemocyanin based blood evolved early in mollusks and was passed on since then. Why does every land-based vertebrate and their descended have no more than four legs? Evolution explains why perfectly; we descend from four-legged tetrapods and every tetrapod has been simply modifying that four-limbed design since then. We see some creative uses of those four limbs, sure, but it's still the same basic four things sticking out of a torso. Why never more than that? An intelligent designer could make a four legged, two armed animal like a centaur, but we never see that ever. Just one would throw a massive spanner in the wrench of evolutionary biology.

Cosmos presents an evolutionary tree of life showing all living things as descendants of one single-celled common ancestor. This tree of life is not supported by biological observations, as organisms do not acquire the genetic information to evolve into new and more complex kinds of organisms. The absence of intermediate (transitional) forms between kinds of organisms likewise argues against the evolutionary tree of life. Biological observations show that animals and plants do vary but only within limits. Those limits are their kinds, which correspond within our classification systems often to roughly the level of the “family.” Therefore reality corresponds to a “Creation Orchard” model in which each original kind of created plant or animal has its own family tree of species.

A miacid fossil

Creationists are effectively required to deny the existence of transitional forms, but they're there. My personal favourite is the miacid, a small tree-going animal that was the common ancestor of all cats and dogs. That's not the only, just good transitional forms and you'll find dozens and dozens of examples of others that we see in the fossil record. But the claim that organisms don't evolve into new and more complex kinds of life is simply wrong. Macro-evolution is micro-evolution on a larger time scale and yes, given enough time, we do expect the miacid kind to split into the cat kind and the dog kind, not to mention the fox kind and the bear kind and a few other kinds closely related to those.

An artist's rendition of a miacid

As Dr Tyson says, this is one of the most amazing stories science has ever told, as Carl Sagan explains in the original series here:

From the first "eukaryote kind", that kind split into separate plant, animal and fungus kinds. The animal kind split into the chordate (those with backbones) kind and the invertebrate kind. The chordate kind split into the craniate kind (those with skulls), the tunicate kind and the lancelet kind. The cranite kind split into the tetrapod kind (Those with four legs) and a few other kinds. The tetrapod kind split into the reptile kind, the amphibian kind and the mammal kind. The reptile kind split into the dinosaur kind, the crocodilians, the turtles (Kinda, but that's a different story that I won't get into), the lizard kind, the sphenodonta kind (The only living one of these are the tuatara), while the dinosaur kind split into the various different bird kinds and the now extinct other traditional dinosaurs. But we don't descend from reptiles, so let's go back to the mammals.

The mammal kind split into the monotreme kind (The egg laying mammals, such as the platypus), the marsupial kind and the eutheria kind. The monotremes are another fascinating example of evolution, they split from mammals so early that they're the only ones that still lay eggs like our ancient ancestors did, and the only mammals that, well, poop and pee out of one hole (Like our ancient ancestors did and the birds and reptiles do), and are the only mammals that don't have nipples, and every monotreme has these traits and no marsupial or eutherial mammal does. Why is that? We only see those traits in monotremes, and reptiles and birds. There's no reason for this to be the case in creationism, God could've given the platypus nipples but he didn't. Evolution explains this fact perfectly. Creationism doesn't explain it at all.

But this is getting side-tracked from our story. The eutheria kind split into several different kinds, including primates, rodents, lagomorphs (Such as rabbits), cetaceans (Dolphins, whales and porpoises), and countless others, but the only ones we want to know about are the primates. The primate kind split into the lemurs, the new world monkeys and the old world monkeys. The old world monkeys split into, well, more modern monkeys and apes. The ape kind split into the lesser ape kind and the great ape kind and the great ape kind split into gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos and, well, us. Almost all of these splits and the ancestors that split into these groups have evidence in the fossil record and all of them have evidence in genetic history. None of this is just an interpretation of the data, it's the clear and only interpretation of the data. The biological diversity of life is explained perfectly by evolution through natural selection, and the story I've told of how life diversified to give us, and as told by Carl Sagan in the original cosmos series are clearly demonstrated by fossils and genetics. Yes, molecules-to-man evolution really happened.

And those are some of the things that molecules do, given four billion years of evolution.