1

Meyer cites Brock to claim an absence of complex forms. Brock says nothing about that issue. He's looking at steranes, and making no claims about what kind of eukaryotes were present. The planet could have been coated with a layer of dead monkeys as far as we could tell from that data. (you are aware that we are eukaryotes, right? Saying that the eucarya were present is not a claim that the metazoa were absent.)

And the antiquity of the Eucarya certainly is germane. Meyer, and many creationists in general, are enamored with this idea of an abrupt origin in the Cambrian (why, I don't know...it doesn't correspond to their religious beliefs in the slightest). But what we do know is that the antecedents of the Cambrian were long and slow -- billions of years -- and that events within the Cambrian occurred on a time scale of tens of millions of years.

Grotzinger even concludes that the evidence supports the idea of animal evolution as a "single, protracted evolutionary radiation, culminating in the Cambrian explosion." Not as a design event incompatible with modern evolutionary theory. You are aware that Meyer's thesis is that he's showing us how evolution couldn't possibly be the case, right?

And yes, I definitely do think a review paper should be a synthesis of the information in the primary research it is citing, especially when it is a review that brings absolutely no new data to the table, and consists entirely of denials. If the review disagrees with the interpretation of a source, it should say so and explain why.

2

Hi Joe,

Good work holding these guys to account. I think guys like PZ Meyers would like to think that ID researchers are hacks and/or unfamiliar with the body of work, but that's merely a straw-man characterization, a form of ad-hominem that's employed because they can't examine ID on the merits.

If PZ is accusing Stephen Meyer of cherry-picking research, I wonder what he would think of Dr. Fazale ("Fuz") Rana? Rana has a great new book out on the origins of life from an ID/Christian point of view. Rana was a researcher in molecular biology for Procter&Gamble before he joined Reasons To Believe. Every week on their radio/webcast show, Rana and his colleague Hugh Ross talk about scholarly papers at length, critiquing them and discussing how they fit into the various models (ID, decent with mod., etc.). Often times, they actually know the authors of the papers, because they've corresponded or worked with them. Doesn't sound to me like the slipshod scholarship PZ is accusing Meyer of.

Anyway, great blog, Joe, and keep up the good work.

Steve Bragg
DOUBLE TOOTHPICKS--WORLDVIEWS Behind The NEWS

3

Thanks Joe for your recent posts on issues related to ID. You've hit the nail on the head with regards to how the scientific establishment attempts to bully its position with appeals to authority. Years ago, Frances Schaeffer warned that this would happen (referring to the "scientific elite").

What the elite don't seem to realize is that the existing data can be interpreted in more than one way. Hence, you see their skepticism at those who draw different conclusions from the same data or - those who consider the existing data insufficient for the conclusions drawn.

4

"Appeals to authority"? Are you nuts?

What I did was take apart a small chunk of Meyer's article that shows he was making misleading interpretations and selectively ignoring the actual data that contradicts his position. There was no appeal to authority. Meyer claims that a source says X, and I showed that the source doesn't say X, but says Y, and also says Z, with quotes so even you can see what was actually said.

The comments and articles I see here reinforce my conclusion: that creationists make arguments completely disconnected from reality, reason, and logic.

5

PZ is right. The Grotzinger article stands squarely against ID claims about the Cambrian "explosion". When Joe asks "what does the DI want us to think?", I must assume he is merely playing coy, as the DI has made it pretty clear what they want you to think - they want you to think that at the beginning of the Cambrian there is the sudden appearance of all the phyla on earth, with absolutely no predecessors. But the Grotzinger article, which Meyers cites as evidence for that conclusion, says quite the opposite. It says that the notion that the line between the cambrian and precambrian is the dividing line between simple and complex life and the site of a sudden explosion of complex life is no longer supported by the data. It further says that eukaryotic life was not only present in the precambrian, it was already showing diversification and complexification long before the cambrian line, and that there was a sizable adaptive radiation going on prior to the Cambrian, culminating in the "explosion". In other words, the beginning of complex life has to be pushed back considerably further than the beginning of the cambrian, which diminishes both the suddenness and the notion of an "explosion". Obviously, the DI wants the explosion to be as short and sudden as possible. They have consistently played up, rhetorically, the notion that all modern phyla were present in the cambrian, despite the fact that the phylum chordata in the cambrian amounts to a single disputed classification of an tiny organism called pikaia. Lay readers who don't know what a phylum is will be led to think that there were reptiles and mammals and amphibians and such in the cambrian, but that is obviously false. The fact that the Grotzinger article extends the beginnings of complex life far earlier than the cambrian obviously cuts against the DI interpretation of that period of time, making the appearance of complex life both less sudden and less "explosive" in nature. The fact that Meyer cites it without bothering to mention that it concludes something entirely different than what he is advocating isn't terribly honest.

And by the way, this is hardly anything new. Contrary to Steve Bragg's contention that we seek to portray the DI as incompetent in citing other scientists' work as a rhetorical strategy, the fact is that they have been repeatedly caught distorting the work of other scientists just like this, and far worse. Time and time again, they have issued these lists of articles that allegedly support their position, only to have the authors of those articles say, "Wait a minute. I didn't say anything LIKE that." And this is not merely limited to not mentioning that the authors are advocates of evolution. Time and time again, they have plainly misrepresented the work of fellow scientists, even their own. They continue to cite Axe's paper on perturbation as showing "extreme functional sensitivity" to changes in amino acids, when in fact it shows that you can change 20% of the amino acids in a given enzyme without impairing function.

6

"One of the contributor’s, PZ Meyers..."

I try to tell my English students that poor spelling and punctuation make their arguments seem less credible--but even worse is misspelling a last name. It's PZ Myers.

PZ has asked a good question: if bacteria were already extant before the Cambrian "explosion," how would that relate to a theistic "creation story?" It certainly wouldn't line up well with the traditional Genesis account. ("In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth... a few billion years later, He tired of microorganisms, and decided to inject some multicellular life onto the scene....")

7

If there is a God, he is peculiarly obsessed with micro-organisms and has been for a very long time. For some reason, the Bible fails to mention this fundamental fact about life on Earth, which is quite an obvious fact -- obvious, that is, to a college-educated person who has taken one or two microbiology classes or to someone who is omnipotent or "inpired" by an omnipotent being. Evidently, Joe Carter and the writers of the Bible fail to meet either of these criteria.

8

Typical tactics of the philosophical naturalist pseudo-scientists: don't discuss the data or the reasoning, just attack the character of their opponents.

9

My "appeals to authority" comment was a general statement Paul.

For the evolutionist, the mere fact that some simpler form of life existed prior to a more complex form is evidence enough that the latter evolved from the former. Despite the fact that it was Stephen Gould who first posited that many, if not all, phyla appeared during the Cambrian Explosion, advocates of ID are portrayed as claiming that at the beginning of the Cambrian there is the sudden appearance of all the phyla on earth, with absolutely no predecessors. Meyer makes it clear that the data shows that not all phyla appeared at the Cambrian, nor were there mammals and reptiles wandering around back then.

The evolutionist is so bent on finding evidence, any evidence, of complex life prior to the Cambrian that they willingly ignore issues such as how life forms like these could have evolved into these in such a short time. For a lay reader's example of this, read chapter 7 of Brownlee & Ward's book Rare Earth titled, aptly, The Enigma of the Cambrian Explosion.

10

creationists make arguments completely disconnected from reality, reason, and logic.

*yawn*

You guys need some new anti-creationist rhetoric. The whole "creationists believe in something beyond the scope of science and therefore are no better than witch doctors and unreasoning acolytes" act is wearing a little thin, especially since it seems like it's been the default anti-creationist response for at least the last hundred years or so.

I mean, in all that time, with all of the scientific advances, shouldn't you guys have been able to come up with something better than "creationists have to shut off their brains before opening their mouths", and the like?

Speaking of logic, if the data so clearly supports a naturalist-materialist worldview (as many in your camp purport) why even engage creationists on a rhetorical level? Why not save yourself the frustration, shake your head in amazement at their closed-mindedness, and let the data speak for itself?

The only reason I can see for this almost-masochistic trend of entering into a rhetorical environment with "creationists" (a designation that is to you and your scientific ilk as "Gentiles" was to the ancient Hebrews) is that the data is not conclusive enough to stand on its own merit.

11

Joe,

Looks like PZ Myers' rhetorical cannons are now aimed at me. I respond, at DOUBLE TOOTHPICKS.

Steve

12

"PZ doesn't actual defend his claims, he just makes assertions and expects that we will agree with him."

Sorry, Joe. You don't pass the giggle test.

You omitted the quote that preceded that sentence!! It was, by the way, from the paper Meyers quoted!!!

"Considered collectively, however, the most parsimonious interpretation of the available fossil and age data is that the early development of animals proceeded as a single, protracted evolutionary radiation, culminating in the Cambrian explosion."

Meanwhile, Meyers cited that paper to support his opinion that the data does supports not development, but Design. That is a misleading citation, a misquote: intellectual dishonesty disguised as authority. That's what Meyers did. That's what PZ Myers pointed out.

When you cite a paper, you have to cite the whole of it; that's the rule of the game. If you don't, you're putting words in another author's mouth. Such an act is immoral and reprehensible.

And, in response to RC who said:
"The only reason I can see for this almost-masochistic trend of entering into a rhetorical environment [...] is that the data is not conclusive enough to stand on its own merit."

That's not it. It's about education. It's about showing how the contrarian argument's own rhetorical edifice doesn't hold up.

It's amazing how the academic world is depicted by its opponents as being cohesive and conspiracist. On the contrary: it's extremely competitive, and anyone who can be discredited *will* be discredited. In that way, only the strong ideas survive. Philosophy and science have been scrutinized in that kind of environment for hundreds of years. The idea of ID won't escape scrutiny.

13

"the default anti-creationist response for at least the last hundred years or so."

Hilarious. Whether it's the default response or not, the fact that creationism is still a pseudoscientific joke to everyone except a few religious zealots after 100+ years of non-stop yammering by creationists should tell you something about the scientific merit of creationists.

But feel free to spin that incontrovertible fact to support your "worldview." I know you won't be able to resist.

14

Steve Bragg, I read your "response" to Dr. Myers on your li'l blog and ... wow.

"'Old canard'? I thought it had been a long time since he'd seen a "creationist" (a label I reject) so "baldly" quote Darwin's "eye" passage? Which is it, old canard or new angle?"

It's an old canard. You quoted an old canard. And it was a long time since he had seen someone quote it. Not a new angle.

The rest of your "response" is about as pathetic as the quoted passage above.

Since you don't know diddly squat about biology, why do you suppose you'd have anything to contribute to an area which has been fruitfully researched by highly educated and trained scientists for over 100 years? I'm curious.

15

PZ: Meyer cites Brock to claim an absence of complex forms. Brock says nothing about that issue. He's looking at steranes, and making no claims about what kind of eukaryotes were present. The planet could have been coated with a layer of dead monkeys as far as we could tell from that data. (you are aware that we are eukaryotes, right? Saying that the eucarya were present is not a claim that the metazoa were absent.)

Are you seriously trying to claim that their might have been evidence of complex forms and the for some reason Brock simply left them out of his paper? Even those who cannot read the entire article can tell from the sample quote I have provided that he’s referring to “primordial biological diversity.” Evidence of more comlex forms would have made his paper even more valuable and noteworthy so it is hard to imagine that he would have failed to mention it if there were no absence of evidence.

And the antiquity of the Eucarya certainly is germane. Meyer, and many creationists in general, are enamored with this idea of an abrupt origin in the Cambrian (why, I don't know...it doesn't correspond to their religious beliefs in the slightest).

So creationist are claiming an idea that does not correspond with their religious beliefs? Could that be because (a) you misunderstand (or misrepresent) their argument or (b) you have no clue how they believe the evidence corresponds with their religious beliefs?

But what we do know is that the antecedents of the Cambrian were long and slow -- billions of years -- and that events within the Cambrian occurred on a time scale of tens of millions of years.

I’m certainly interested in examining the evidence for these “antecedents.” Do you have a few relevant papers that you could recommend?

Grotzinger even concludes that the evidence supports the idea of animal evolution as a "single, protracted evolutionary radiation, culminating in the Cambrian explosion."

I read that also though I didn’t see how it derived that conclusion from the evidence that he presents. He provides no evidence that there was a single evolutionary line before the Cambrian explosion. I could be wrong, though, and if I am missing the link between his data and his conclusion I would certainly appreciate someone pointing it out.

You are aware that Meyer's thesis is that he's showing us how evolution couldn't possibly be the case, right?

If you really believe that then you have no read the paper very carefully. What Meyer claims is that mutation and selection are an inadequate means of producing the forms that have evolved. You are aware that evolution doesn’t have to mean mutation and selection, right?

And yes, I definitely do think a review paper should be a synthesis of the information in the primary research it is citing, especially when it is a review that brings absolutely no new data to the table, and consists entirely of denials. If the review disagrees with the interpretation of a source, it should say so and explain why.

Did you even read Meyer’s paper? He explains in great detail why he thinks the evidence for neo-Darwinism is lacking. He does so by examining the research and showing how the theory does not fit with the data being presented. I would say that is exactly what a review paper that disagrees with a faulty interpretation should do? Perhaps if you disagree you could show how it is possible to produce novel body forms by mutation and selection.

Ed: PZ is right. The Grotzinger article stands squarely against ID claims about the Cambrian "explosion". When Joe asks "what does the DI want us to think?", I must assume he is merely playing coy, as the DI has made it pretty clear what they want you to think - they want you to think that at the beginning of the Cambrian there is the sudden appearance of all the phyla on earth, with absolutely no predecessors.

It might be easier to take you guys from PT seriously if you actually bothered to read the work of the people you criticize. Here's an article on the Cambrian explosion that is from the Discovery Institutes website that was written by Meyers:

Cambrian rocks display about half (or more) of the basic body plans or architectural designs of the animal kingdom. Representatives of nineteen of the forty known animal phyla definitely make their first appearance in the fossil record during the Cambrian explosion. Three phyla appear in the Precambrian. Six animal phyla first appear in the fossil record after the Cambrian period, twelve more are not presented in the fossil record. [emphasis added]

But the Grotzinger article, which Meyers cites as evidence for that conclusion, says quite the opposite. It says that the notion that the line between the cambrian and precambrian is the dividing line between simple and complex life and the site of a sudden explosion of complex life is no longer supported by the data. It further says that eukaryotic life was not only present in the precambrian, it was already showing diversification and complexification long before the cambrian line, and that there was a sizable adaptive radiation going on prior to the Cambrian, culminating in the "explosion". In other words, the beginning of complex life has to be pushed back considerably further than the beginning of the cambrian, which diminishes both the suddenness and the notion of an "explosion".

As Meyer points out in the previously linked article:

Treating the Vendian and Cambrian radiations as one continuous evolutionary event (itself a dubious assumption) only returns the problem to its earlier (pre-Zircon) status – hardly a positive state of affairs for advocates of neo-Darwinism. (pg. 30)

Obviously, the DI wants the explosion to be as short and sudden as possible. They have consistently played up, rhetorically, the notion that all modern phyla were present in the cambrian, despite the fact that the phylum chordata in the cambrian amounts to a single disputed classification of an tiny organism called pikaia.

The fact that the Grotzinger article extends the beginnings of complex life far earlier than the cambrian obviously cuts against the DI interpretation of that period of time, making the appearance of complex life both less sudden and less "explosive" in nature. The fact that Meyer cites it without bothering to mention that it concludes something entirely different than what he is advocating isn't terribly honest.

First of all, Meyer quotes the article to establish a single point (“Then, beginning about 570-565 million years ago (mya), the first complex multicellular organisms appeared in the rock strata, including sponges, cnidarians, and the peculiar Ediacaran biota (Grotzinger et al. 1995).”). He is not using the article as a premise in his argument and so there is no need to mention any “interpretation” since it is irrelevant.

Second, as I have pointed out many times now, the fact that microbial organisms were more complex than previously thought has no bearing on Meyer’s overall argument. If you do not see this then it is obvious you have no idea what the article is even about and your reaction is simply the typical knee-jerk response provided to any work produced by a fellow at the DI.

And by the way, this is hardly anything new. Contrary to Steve Bragg's contention that we seek to portray the DI as incompetent in citing other scientists' work as a rhetorical strategy, the fact is that they have been repeatedly caught distorting the work of other scientists just like this, and far worse.

So what should we make of your misrepresentations of Meyer’s work? Is it simply incompetence or something far worse?

Guillaume : Sorry, Joe. You don't pass the giggle test.

You omitted the quote that preceded that sentence!! It was, by the way, from the paper Meyers quoted!!!

The quote isn’t the problem, its his misrepresentation of Meyer’s claim. PZ says, “doesn't deny that there was a diversification of body plans in the mid-Cambrian, but it takes a position that contradicts Meyer's:” As I pointed out in my response to Ed, Meyers does not take the position that no phyla existed prior to the Cambrian period. PZ did just what I claimed -- made an assertion without presenting any evidence that supported his claim.

Meanwhile, Meyers cited that paper to support his opinion that the data does supports not development, but Design. That is a misleading citation, a misquote: intellectual dishonesty disguised as authority. That's what Meyers did. That's what PZ Myers pointed out.

Let me offer a useful suggestion, Guillame. If you are going to make a claim about what someone says then you might want to actually read the work yourself rather than taking someone else’s word for it. Meyers does not cite the paper in order to support his opinion. He cites the paper to support a completely uncontroversial point. Now it you had read Meyer’s paper you would have known that. Instead, you relied on what PZ wrote to draw a conclusion. That is the whole reason for these posts. Anyone who relies on the critiques at PT will find that they fail to address what is actually being presented but instead are merely exercises in knocking down strawmen.

When you cite a paper, you have to cite the whole of it; that's the rule of the game.

Forgive me for saying so but that is the most absurd claim I’ve heard all day. Citing a paper does not mean that you agree with everything that is written therein nor does it mean that every piece of data and interpretation is relevant to your point. Claiming that Meyer’s was somehow being dishonest by not citing the entirety of the paper is a desperate ploy by someone who can provide a genuine rebuttal against his paper’s conclusion.

That's not it. It's about education. It's about showing how the contrarian argument's own rhetorical edifice doesn't hold up.

That being the case, I hope you received an “education” in how the anti-“creationists” rhetorical edifices don’t hold up. ; )

16

Again I will point out: "mutation and selection" is itself a straw man. Viral transmission, endosymbiosis, gene duplication--these are all vectors for evolution ignored (and at great cost) by Meyer's review of "Neo-Darwinism."

I am curious as to why no one has yet answered this point.

17

I agree that you don't have to agree with the whole of a paper when you cite it. However,

1) when you are writing a review on some broad topic like the significance of the Cambrian event, and

2) you cite a paper that is discussing in detail the very same issue,

3) and that paper is taking a completely different position than your thesis,

4) you are obligated to at least address the conflict in the two points of view specifically. You don't get to blithely putter along, pretending your point of view is the right one.

5) And most especially, you don't get to do that when you are writing a data-free review and the paper you are citing is primary research, pulling together numbers and observations that contradict you.

18

RC asks

"Speaking of logic, if the data so clearly supports a naturalist-materialist worldview (as many in your camp purport) why even engage creationists on a rhetorical level?"

Because rhetoric is the engine of politics, and politics is the game that the Discovery Institute creationists are playing. Do you doubt that? If so, let me know and I'll set you straight.

By the way, please be aware that when you throw around the terms "naturalist-materialist" and "worldview," you sound like a fringe nutcase. If in fact you claim that you do not spend 99% of your waking hours operating under a so-called "naturalist-materialist worldview" then you are surely a liar. And that begs the question as to why you'd want to smear scientists for ignoring supernatural explanations for phenomena, when their decision to ignore such explanations has led directly to the increased likelihood that you'll live to be 70 years old (among countless other benefits).

Hypocrite.

19

This is ridiculous. All organisms to have lived on earth descended from one of, at most, a few single-celled microorganisms that lived about 3.8 billion years ago. It's not even an issue. We are learning more about how it happened. But *that* it happened is not an issue.

For those who don't think it happened, what happened instead? For example, what organisms, if any, did the deity or extraterrestrial proximately cause? Did the deity turn inert matter -- poof! -- directly into two elephants, one male and one female? Did the deity turn inert matter into the first aardvarks? T-Rexex? Humans? And what evidence, if any, suggests that a deity did this? This scenario is obviously absurd, so absurd as to be ridiculous.