Stephen Jay Gould has been one of the most vocal opponents of such icons because they imply a sense of direct linear progress from some primitive ancestor to a modern species when, in fact, the actual evolution involves branching trees with multiple lineages, most of which have gone extinct. In one of his most famous essays, Life's Little Joke (Gould, 1987, 1991), Gould explains why the evolution of horses is falsely depicted as a march of progress.
I think it's only fair to post links to my efforts to demonstrate the serious flaws in his arguments. I'm particularly proud of the series of articles I wrote when he published his book The Myth of Junk DNA. I went through every chapter and analyzed his arguments against junk DNA. It won't surprise anyone to learn that I found those arguments lacking in substance and in some cases I discovered that Wells had misrepresented the science.
Here are my posts.
Jonathan Wells never responded directly to my criticism but he did respond to a comment that Paul McBride made on one of his blog posts. Paul asked him why he didn't respond to my post and here's what Wells said,
Oh, one last thing: “paulmc” referred to an online review of my book by University of Toronto professor Larry Moran—a review that “paulmc” called both extensive and thorough. Well, saturation bombing is extensive and thorough, too. Although “paulmc” admitted to not having read more than the Preface to The Myth of Junk DNA, I have read Mr. Moran’s review, which is so driven by confused thinking and malicious misrepresentations of my work—not to mention personal insults—that addressing it would be like trying to reason with a lynch mob.
This is typical of the attitude of most Intelligent Design Creationists. They are happy to publish lengthy books denegrating science and scientists but couldn't be bothered responding to criticism.
Here's are some other post of mine where I demonstrate the flawed thinking of Jonathan Wells.
I've debated him frequently over the years since those are my areas of interest as well. The last time we met was at an evolution conference in London (UK) in 2016 (see photo).
I've always found Jonathan to be more honest and more willing to learn than most of his creationist colleagues so that's why I'm addressing his latest post on Evolution News (sic) where he challenges the evolutionary origins of the glycolytic pathway. As you might expect, his argument is largely based on the idea that since the glycolytic pathway is very complicated, there's no way it could have arisen all at once. He then goes on to reject the idea that the pathway could have evolved incrementally, one step at a time.
Everything that's happening in the world today is very depressing but there's at least one bright spot. The Intelligent Design Creationists have finally come up with a scientific theory of intelligent design. It's described by mathematics professor Ganville Sewell on the Evolution News (sic) website: Introduction to the Scientific Theory of Intelligent Design.
Here's how Sewell desribes this "scientific theory."
Of course, normally if a scientific theory for some observed phenomenon fails, we just look for an alternative “natural” theory. But what has long been obvious to the layman is finally becoming clear to many scientists, that evolution is different. We are not talking now about explaining earthquakes or comets or volcanos, we are talking about explaining hearts and lungs and eyes and ears. How many theories without design can there be for the origin of circulatory systems, nervous systems, and human brains? Design has finally started to be taken seriously by scientists not because there are minor problems with Darwin’s explanation, but because it has become absurdly, blindingly obvious that neither it nor any other theory that ignores design will ever completely explain living things. Contrary to common belief, science really has no reasonable alternative to design to explain either the origin or evolution of life. In fact, we really have no idea how living things are able to pass their current complex structures on to their descendants without significant degradation, generation after generation, much less how they evolve even more complex structures.
That's it? The scientific theory of intelligent design is that evolution has failed and it is now "absurdly, blindingly obvious" that you need design in order to explain the origin of life or the evolution of life.
I'm still depressed. Is this the best they can do after three decades of pushing intelligent design creationism?1
1. Yes.
Intelligent Design Creationists are heavily invested in refuting junk DNA because it casts doubt on their model of an intelligently designed human. Over the years they have advanced all kinds of arguments against junk DNA and some ID supporters actually address the real scientific issues (e.g. Jonathan Wells). However, most Intelligent Design Creationists are as ignorant about the scientific dispute over junk DNA as they are about evolution and lots of other science issues that conflict with their underlying religious beliefs.
A few days ago (March 26, 2024), the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture published a short video on "The MYTH of Junk DNA" where they ignored most of the science and appealed to the majority of creationists who don't care about the truth. We have enough data to conclude that the Discovery Institute isn't just ignorant of the real science but is actually lying in this video. We know this because there are prominent Senior Fellows of the Center for Science and Culture who know that the material in this video is wrong and/or mispleading.
The photo was taken in London (UK) in 2016 at a meeting on evolution. It looks like I'm holding my breath because I'm beside a creationist but I assure you that's not what was happening. We actually get along quite well in spite of the fact that he's wrong about everything. :-)
A recent post on Evolution News (sic) promotes a a new podcast: Casey Luskin on Junk DNA’s “Kuhnian Paradigm Shift”. You can listen to the podcast here but most Sandwalk readers won't bother because they've heard it all before. [see Paradigm shifting.]
Luskin repeats the now familiar refrain of claiming that scientists used to think that all non-coding DNA was junk. Then he goes on to list recent discoveries showing that some of this non-coding DNA is functional. The truth is that no knowledgeable scientist ever claimed that all non-coding DNA was junk. The original idea of junk DNA was based on evidence that only 10% of the genome is functional and these scientists knew that coding regions occupied only a few percent. Thus, right from the beginning, the experts on genome evolution knew about all sorts of functional non-coding DNA such as regulatory sequences, non-coding genes, and other things.
I know Stephen Meyer and I have discussed his views on creationism many times. Some of the issues he raises are quite interesting and they aren't easy to refute. In this video from 2020, he presents two standard creationist objections to evolution: the Cambrian explosion, and the probability of evolving a gene.1
This is a very slick video from the Discovery Institute. It shows you what we are up against. Anyone who thinks they can easily refute the claims in this video hasn't tried.
Intelligent Design Creationists know exactly what they are doing and they are very good at it. There are so many thing wrong with this video that it would take a book to correct them all and, furthermore, you would have to convince people that their entire worldview has to change in order to really understand biology. I bet there are many scientists who couldn't deal with a video like this and that's a problem.
Real biology is messy and sloppy. Things do not look as neatly designed as Richard Dawkins and the creationists would have you believe. I've tried to present the case for a sloppy worldview in my latest book.
I've been trying to reason with creationists for more than 30 years, beginning with debates on talk.origins back in the early 1990s. Sometimes we make a little progress but most of the time it's very frustrating.
Over the years, we've encountered a few outstanding examples of creationists whose "reasoning" abilities defy explanation. One of he most famous is Otangelo Grasso - his ability to misunderstand and misconstrue science is legendary. He is one of only a small number of people who are banned from Sandwalk.
Here's an example of his unique unreasoning abiltiies.
Trying to educate a creationist (Otangelo Grasso)
I bring this up because he recently posted an artilce on the Uncommon Descent blog and you just have to read it if you want a good laugh. It shows you that 30 years of attempting to teach science to creationists isn't nearly long enough.
Otangelo Grasso on the difficulties of reasoning with atheists
Michael Denton is a New Zealand biochemist, a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, and the author of two Intelligent Design Creationist books: Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985) and Nature's Destiny (1998).
He has just read Michael Behe's latest book and he (Denton) is impressed [Praise for Behe’s Latest: “Facts Before Theory”]:
Behe brings out more forcibly than any other author I have recently read just how vacuous and biased are the criticisms of his work and of the ID position in general by so many mainstream academic defenders of Darwinism. And what is so telling about his many wonderfully crafted responses to his Darwinian critics is that it is Behe who is putting the facts before theory while his many detractors — Kenneth Miller, Jerry Coyne, Larry Moran, Richard Lenski, and others — are putting theory before the facts. In short, this volume shows that it is Behe rather than his detractors who is carefully following the evidence.
I don't know what planet Michael Denton is living on—probably the same one as Michael Behe—but let's make one thing clear about facts and evidence. Behe's entire argument is based on the "fact" that he can't see how Darwin's theory of natural selection can account for the evolution of complex features: therefore god(s) must have done it. This is NOT putting facts before theory and it is NOT carefully following the evidence.
It's just a somewhat sophisticated version of god of the gaps based on Behe's lack of understanding of the basic mechanisms of evolution.
(See, Of mice and Michael, where I explain why Michael Behe fails to answer my critique of The Edge of Evolution.)
Michael Behe has published a book containing most of his previously published responses to critics. I was anxious to see how he dealt with my criticisms of The Edge of Evolution but I was disappointed to see that, for the most part, he has just copied excerpts from his 2014 blog posts (pp. 335-355).
I think it might be worthwhile to review the main issues so you can see for yourself whether Michael Behe really answered his critics as the title of his most recent book claims. You can check out the dueling blog posts at the end of this summary to see how the discussion evolved in real time more than four years ago.
Many Sandwalk readers participated in the debate back then and some of them are quoted in Behe's book although he usually just identifies them as commentators.
My Summary
Michael Behe has correctly indentified an extremely improbably evolution event; namely, the development of chloroquine resistance in the malaria parasite. This is an event that is close to the edge of evolution, meaning that more complex events of this type are beyond the edge of evolution and cannot occur naturally. However, several of us have pointed out that his explanation of how that event occurred is incorrect. This is important because he relies on his flawed interpretation of chloroquine resistance to postulate that many observed events in evolution could not possibly have occurred by natural means. Therefore, god(s) must have created them.
In his response to this criticism, he completely misses the point and fails to understand that what is being challenged is his misinterpretation of the mechanisms of evolution and his understanding of mutations.
The main point of The Edge of Evolution is that many of the beneficial features we see could only have evolved by selecting for a number of different mutations where none of the individual mutations confer a benefit by themselves. Behe claims that these mutations had to occur simultaneously or at least close together in time. He argues that this is possible in some cases but in most cases the (relatively) simultaneous occurrence of multiple mutations is beyond the edge of evolution. The only explanation for the creation of these beneficial features is god(s).
This is the second post discussing creationist1 papers on pseudogenes. The first post addressed a paper by Jeffrey Tomkins on the β-globin pseudogene [Creationists questioning pseudogenes: the beta-globin pseudogene]. This post covers another paper by Tomkins claiming that the GULO pseudogenes in various primate species are not derived from a common ancestor but instead have been deactivated independently in each lineage.
The Tomkins' article was published in 2014 in Answers Research Journal, a publication that describes itself like this:ARJ is a professional, peer-reviewed technical journal for the publication of interdisciplinary scientific and other relevant research from the perspective of the recent Creation and the global Flood within a biblical framework.
Jonathan Kane recently (Oct. 6, 2017) posted an article on The Panda's Thumb where he claimed that Young Earth Creationists often don't get enough credit for raising serious issues about evolution [Five principles for arguing against creationism].
He mentioned some articles about pseudogenes as prime examples. I asked him for references and he responded with two articles by Jeffrey Tomkins that were published on the Answers in Genesis website. The first was on the β-globin pseudogene and the second was on the GULO pseudogene. Both articles claim that these DNA sequences aren't really pseudogenes because they have functions.
I'll deal with the β-globin pseudogene in this post and the GULO pseudogene in a subsequent post.
Watch this video. It dates from this year. Almost everything Wells says is either false or misleading. Why? Is he incapable of learning about genomes, junk DNA, and evolutionary theory?
Jonathan Wells has written a new book (2017) called Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution. He revisits his famous Icons of Evolution from 2000 and tries to show that nothing has changed in 17 years.
I wrote a book in 2000 about ten images images, ten "icons of evolution," that did not fit the evidence and were empirically dead. They should have been buried, but they are still with us, haunting our science classrooms and stalking our children. They are part of what I call zombie science.I won't bore you with the details. The icons fall into two categories: (1) those that were meaningless and/or trivial in 2000 and remain so today, and (2) those that Wells misunderstood in 2000 and are still misunderstood by creationists today.
Otangelo Grasso is a creationist who's convinced he can learn to understand biochemistry by reading what's on the internet and copy-pasting it into his website. He then takes that limited knowledge and concludes that evolution is impossible. He often poses "gotcha" questions based on his flawed understanding.
His behavior isn't very different from most other creationists who suffer from Dunning-Kruger Disease but he happens to be someone who I thought could be educated.
