CRITIQUE OF ED BLICK'S EDITORIAL IN T HE NORMAN TRANSCRIPT.
(published on 24 January 2007)
By Dr. Frank Sonleitner, Professor Emeritus of Zoology, University of Oklahoma
Ed Blick's editorial (HERE) is the most convincing evidence yet that creation science should not be taught in any school. His article contains virtually no accurate or truthful statements. In addition, Blick's comments should have been entitled "Evolution is Wrong." None of the things he said were evidence for creation. It is hard to imagine that an academic (even if he is only an engineer) could be so out of touch with reality.
BLICK: “Creationism is not Wrong”
"I was amused reading Prof. Peter J. Lamb's article in the Jan 14 Norman
Transcript. He implied that creationists (people of faith in Jesus Christ and His creation) are responsible for the lowly economic status of Oklahoma. He implied that Christians endanger our excellence in country music and football. If all Okies believed in his religion of evolution we would be in economic nirvana and might even have beaten Boise State in that last Bowl game! One of the 20th century's most cultured and scientific countries, Nazi Germany, had evolution as their national policy. Hitler hated Christianity and was a ruthless hyper-evolutionist whose admiration of Darwinism and Nietzsche caused him to murder of (sic) millions of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and mentally defective people. Hitler's
evil book "Mein Kampf" is full of the work Entwicklung (evolution)."
Answer: NOT! This is a major rewrite of Nazism. Hitler was not an evolutionist. Neither evolution nor Darwin is mentioned in English translations of Mein Kampf. (The same is true of My New Order (a collection of speeches) and Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944: His Private Conversations.) Hitler did talk a lot about the role God plays in his philosophy. Would the Nazis accept a theory that says the Master Race
descended from apes? No way. The Nazis creation mythology relied heavily on the works of the 19th century authors Gobineau and Chamberlain; both had a low opinion of Darwinism. God created the Master Race as the most perfect human race but later, through interbreeding, it "degenerated." The Nazis wanted to recreate the Master
Race through selective breeding, which is completely independent of evolutionary theory.
BLICK: “Our military (the "Greatest Generation") were the victors over Germany and Japan in WW II. Their generation and mine were basically untainted by the teaching of evolution. Not until the 1960's was our culture hijacked by the religion of evolution. When the Russians launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, biology professors joined the "hue and cry" that the "Russians were ahead of us in science." They convinced the National Science Foundation in 1959 to give them $14 million of
our tax dollars to cram a lot of evolution into biology books and also teach sex education and the need for legalizing abortion. Evolution has nothing to do with putting a satellite into orbit. I know because I taught rocket science at OU and was part of the design team at McDonnell Aircraft that built the mercury capsule, our first manned space ship. It's all based on thermodynamics, fluid mechanics and Newtonian mechanics."
Answer: INDEED? It's a radically new idea that we and our allies won the war because all our soldiers were clear-headed creationists while the German soldiers' minds were besotted with evolutionary theory! Is Blick admitting that it's not all evolution's fault - that sex education and abortion are also responsible?
BLICK: "By the early 1960s there was a full court press on teaching high school and college student’s evolution. As one newspaper columnist wrote, if you teach kids they evolved from animals they will behave like animals. That is the fruit of evolution. The U.S. Statistical Abstract from the early '60s to the '80s shows serious crime and social problems took off like a rocket. Serious crime went up over 500 percent, birth rates for young unwed mothers increased about 190 percent, venereal diseases increased by about 350 percent. SAT scores fell from about 970 to 890."
Answer: SO? What kind of animals will the students behave like? Every species of animal has its own innate behavior patterns (which the creator bestowed upon them?) What animals have religious beliefs that require their adherents to torture, burn, and generally commit genocide against others of their kind? Commit murder on vast scales in wars with weapons of mass destruction? Behaving like humans is nothing to be proud of. Hey! Good old creationist Oklahoma is a leading state with regard to unwed mothers and teen-age pregnancies. So all the problems of the USA are due to teaching evolution! If a student takes biology in high school, the class spends about a week on evolution. Teachers would
be thankful if they had only a tiny bit of such influence on their students. Other religious authors blame our social problems on the Supreme Court's banning of prayer in schools.
BLICK: "Concerning Lamb's statements of billions and millions of years for the age of the earth, man and dinosaurs. No one knows for certain any of the ages. I have in my book ("A Scientific Analysis of Genesis") a list of over 80 Uniformitarian Estimates of the earth's age, all are less than billions of years. The earth's magnetic field is decaying so fast that it couldn't be more than 10,000 years old. Helium is pouring into the atmosphere from radioactive decay, but not much is escaping. The total amount is only 1/2000th of that expected if the atmosphere were
billions of years old. Salt is pouring into the oceans much faster than it is
escaping. The sea is not salty enough for it to be billions of years old.
Radioactive dating methods have been found to be totally unreliable. Volcanic rocks formed in 1986 during the Mount St. Helens eruption were dated by the potassium-argon method to be 0.35 million years old. Similar anomalies were discoveries (sic) in other volcanoes in the Pacific."
Answer: CREATIONIST FABLES: Most of Blick's 80 Uniformitarian Estimates of theEarth's age are "strawman" calculations made by creationists based on highly flawed assumptions. Few of them come within orders of magnitude of the creationists' claims that the earth is only 6 to 10,000 years old. Why? The earth's magnetic field is not decaying. It is changing its shape preparatory to reversing itself; the dipole moment energy is going into the nondipole features. Even creationists such as Russell Humphreys admit the reality of such reversals. Recent studies indicate that polar winds can blow charged Helium nuclei out of the top of our atmosphere. Even the solar wind can do it during magnetic field reversals. But these arguments are moot because the young earth creationists have recently discarded this Helium argument for one that claims there is too much Helium in the Earth's crust. During the Flood, God allowed for a supernatural burst of
radioactivity which resulted in the long ages given by the radioactive dating methods. But there hasn't been enough time for the Helium to escape! (Much radiogenic Helium remains locked in the crystal lattices of the rocks. All of our commercial Helium comes from natural gas wells.)
The creationists Austin and Humphreys claimed that sodium is accumulating in the oceans faster than it is escaping but they both underestimated and omitted consideration of mechanisms of salt removal. Detailed studies by competent geologists indicate that all the dissolved salts in the oceans are in equilibrium. Creationists claim contemporary lava flows in Hawaii (not Mount St Helens) were dated to be millions of years old but those researchers were dating old inclusions in the lava flows, not the lava flows themselves.
BLICK: "In a stunning rebuttal of Lamb's 65 million years for the youngest age of dinosaurs, Mary Schweitzer, of Montana State University found red blood cells and soft fibrous tissue in the leg bone of a T. rex dinosaur (New Scientist 24 March 2005). This blood and soft tissue could not have lasted more than a few thousand years."
Answer: IN REALITY: Schweitzer and her colleagues found highly modified fossilized traces of blood cells and fibrous tissue. Maybe Blick should have read the original publication instead of just a news article.
BLICK: "There are no proofs of life arising from inorganic material. The Urey-Miller experiments were found worthless and discarded years ago. There are no proofs of macroevolution. Darwin tried. He came up with his gemmule theory, but no gemmules were every found. The Nobel Prize winner for penicillin, Sir Ernest Chain,
scornfully denounced his "Survival of the Fittest" theory as nothing but a truism and not to be taken seriously."
Answer: OK, BUT: Recent studies have vindicated the Miller-Urey experiment. (Urey was a Nobel Laureate.) The goo that formed on the walls of the glass vessels has been identified in meteorites, and the atmospheres of Jupiter and Titan by means of its spectral signature. Other recent studies have shows that the early earth's atmosphere really was reducing in character. And interstellar space is full of complex organic molecules. Darwin's gemmule theory was one of hereditary transmission, not of macroevolution. Survival of the Fittest was an alternate name for Natural Selection, not a definition of the process. Hence Chain's argument about it being a truism is irrelevant. (Even Answers in Genesis lists this argument as one creationists should
not use!) Incidentally Chain shared that 1945 Nobel Prize with Fleming and Florey. That these are the only two arguments (and they have nothing to do withmacroevolution) that Blick can think of to discredit macroevolution only shows his incredible ignorance of the subject. Actually, there are mountains of empirical evidence for macroevolution.
BLICK: Haeckel (one of the founders of the Nazi party) in 1868 attempted to rescue Darwinism with his embryo drawings but they were discovered to be fakes. Prof. Richard Goldschmidt failed to prove macroevolution after 25 years of mutation experiments on fruit flies in Berlin and University of California. His book "The Material Basis for (sic) Evolution" (1940) literally tore to pieces the mutation theory of evolution. He proposed a new theory he called the "Hopeful Monster Mechanism" (i.e. an alligator laid an egg and a turkey hatched out!) Of course it had to happen twice in order to have male and female. Harvard's Stephen Gould (1972)and John (sic) Hopkins Steven Stanley (1972) dressed up the "Hopeful Monster Mechanism" with more scientific ames, "Punctuated Equilibrium" and "Quantum Speciation." The Russians renamed it "Saltation Theory."
Answer: TAKE A DEEP BREATH: Haeckel was not a founder of the Nazi party. He died in 1919. The Nazi party was formed by Hitler and six comrades at Munich in 1920. Its original program comprised 25 points, one of which advocated "positive Christianity." In 1868 Darwin didn't need to be "rescued" by Haeckel. Also, Haeckel's embryo drawings contributed nothing to "Darwinism" that Darwin didn't already know. Darwin got his information on embryos that he used in The Origin from the creationists von Baer and Agassiz. The pictures of embryos that he used in The Descent of Man were taken from the works of Ecker and Bichoff, both of whom were outspoken critics of Haeckel's drawings. It's a stretch to say Haeckel's drawings were "faked." The general outlines of the early stages are inaccurate but most of the other details are correct.
Goldschmidt called his theory systemic mutation theory, not "Hopeful Monster Mechanism." It relied on structural changes in chromosomes, rather than mutations. Also, Goldschmidt was more known for his research on gipsy moths, not fruit flies. He never said an alligator egg hatched out a turkey. On p 395 of his book The Material Basis of Evolution he quotes the German paleontologist Schindewolf as saying
"The first bird hatched from a reptile egg." When an English translation of
Schindewolf's book became available, I discovered that Schindewolf in turn attributed that quote to the English biologist Garstang without giving a specific literature citation. For all I know, the quote may be a line from one of Garstang's humorous poems on evolutionary subjects! With regard to more than one hopeful monster arising, if a systemic mutation -
or any other kind of mutation for that matter - occurred in an individual's germ line, up to as many as half its gametes could possess it. If it were dominant, many such offspring might have resulted. Punctuated equilibrium is not the hopeful monster mechanism (it is based on Mayr's peripatric speciation), nor is Steven Stanley's Quantum speciation (speciation where most evolution was concentrated within an initial interval of time, brief relative to the longevity of the new lineage.) The Russians did not rename it "Saltation theory." Saltation theory, which involves macromutations, was around since Darwin's day and was a popular alternative to natural selection in the 19th century. St George Jackson Mivart championed it in the 19th century; Soren Lovtrup in the
20th.
BLICK: The prize theory belongs to Sir Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the DNA molecule). He concluded the mathematical probability of DNA forming by chance was zero. Being an atheist, he gave up on evolution forming life on earth, and pushed it back to outer space. His theory "Panspermia" (1981) assumed some unknown alien
deposited sperm on some planet in outer space (Krypton?) and life formed there. They built a "Noah's Ark" rocket ship and traveled a long journey to earth and unloaded people, animals, plants, trees, fish and birds on earth. This sounds like the old Alf TV show."
Answer: IS HE JOKING? Crick (another Nobel Laureate) never did any calculations about the probability of DNA forming by chance. Only creationists do those sorts of calculations. And Crick did not originate the Panspermia idea. It was first proposed scientifically in the 19th century by Lord Kelvin and later championed by anti-darwinian British cosmologists Hoyle and Wickramasinghe. All three of those scientists are considered "heroes" by creationists. What irony! But there's even more irony. Panspermia's logical structure is identical to the God-did-it hypothesis. Thus, rather than castigating Crick for proposing an utrageous hypothesis, Blick should be praising him for almost getting it right!Crick 1981 book Life Itself (not Panspermia), which is an elaboration of a 1973 paper by him and Leslie Orgel appearing in the journal Icarus, envisioned a rather slow-moving automated spaceship seeding planets with packets of bacteria, rather than Blick's purely farciful account. What? they didn't bring reptiles and apes?
BLICK: "Since evolution has never been proved scientifically, it must be believed by faith. Hence it is a religion. Colin Patterson, the senior paleontologist at the British Museum spent a lifetime studying fossils. In 1981 he stated that after 20 years of research he was ready to give up on evolution, because he had not been able to come up with one thing that proved it. Dr. Lynn Margolis,(sic) distinguished professor at the University of Massachusetts asked an audience of molecular
biologists if they could name one unambiguous example of the formation of a new species by accumulation of mutations. Their answer ... silence. Dr Margolis(sic) predicted that history would judge neo-Darwinism as a minor 20th century religioussect."
Answer: SORRY, DR. BLICK: Science does not "prove" anything. That only occurs in math and logic where one can prove that certain consequences logically follow from a stated set of assumptions. Evolutionists have evidence. They don't need faith.Thus evolution is not a religion. Colin Patterson never said he had not come up with any evidence "proving" evolution. He did write a textbook on the subject full of evidence supporting evolution. Whatever Margulis' molecular biologists said or did not say, there is plenty of evidence for the formation of new species by mutation.
[Response written on 2 February 2007]