ATI Wisdom Booklets: The Evils of Evolution - Part One

Oh, boy!  I've been waiting for this one!  *rubs hands together gleefully*

I love evolution.  That's not a strong enough statement.  I adore evolution.  *dances around the room*

ATI does not love or adore evolution.  Like most evolution-haters, they have cobbled together a counter-argument based on misleading statements about the theory of evolution, mangling (or ignoring) basic facts, and a deep hope that no one asks them any follow up questions.

In science, the term "theory" means an over-arching process that explains many different phenomena.  Evolution is a theory because it explains why:

•  Humans and chimpanzees have similar DNA
• Antibiotic resistance spreads between bacteria
• The frequency of the gene that causes sickle-cell anemia is different in African-Americans than populations in Western Africa
• Pepper moth coloration has shifted from whitish to grey to whitish within 200 years
• Human babies generally weigh between 5-9 pounds at birth
• A million other facts in biology

The term "theory" does not mean unproven, experimental or controversial.

Evolution will never become a law because the term "law" describes a single process.  For example, the ideal gas law describes how temperature, pressure and volume in a gas interact.

The basic idea of evolution is very straight forward.

• Genes comes in different forms that are known as alleles that control traits that form in organisms.  
• An example in humans would be the gene that controls making lactase - a protein that breaks down lactose.  Some people have an allele that causes lactase to be produced their entire life; others stop producing lactase in early childhood.  
• Environmental pressures affect which genes are most beneficial to organisms surviving until reproductive age.
• Continuing the previous example - people who live in communities who domesticated milk-producing animals benefit from lactase-production as an adult since milk is a good source of protein and fat.   On the other hand, communities without animal milk benefit from shutting off lactase production since that energy can be used for other purposes.
• Over time, the frequency of alleles that are beneficial to the average conditions in an area increases while the frequency of harmful alleles drops.
• This explains why many (but not all) people of European ancestry can drink milk as adults without discomfort while most (but not all) people of Japanese and Native American descent cannot drink milk without gastrointestinal distress. 
• Over longer time scales, a single species exposed to different environments can become so adapted to those environments that members of the species who breed only with members from the same environment produce more offspring than those that interbreed.  This leads to two new species forming due to behavioral changes, mating preferences, and genetic changes that prevent interbreeding.
• This hasn't happened in modern humans- but it happens in ducks frequently.  Many species of ducks can interbreed to produce living offspring - but those offspring look so different than the parent species that they cannot attract a mate.  The species stay separate because of mating preferences rather than genetic changes.  On the other hand, donkeys and horses can interbreed but their offspring is sterile.  This is an example of species formed by genetic incompatibility.

Alright.  Now we can start looking at the ATI version of evolution.  

ATI loves to use the derivation of words - but it's not that important for the content.

The second paragraph implies that evolution is a one-to-one process where one animal or plant species becomes a new species.  It's not that neat; some species go extinct, other remain present with minor genetic changes for millions of years, and some species split into multiple groups.

Science answers questions about the physical universe - not theological questions.  Evolution doesn't imply anything about whether man was created in the image of God.

The Wisdom Booklet parrots a very, very common error about evolution - the idea that evolution moves in a single direction from simple organisms to more complicated organisms.  That is simply not true.  For example, many cave-dwelling fish have lost complicated organs like eyes because the local dark environment made the eyes useless.  Species of plants have evolved many complicated internal structures - then gone extinct and left more simple internal plants to take over the world. 

There's a reason "yield fruit after his kind" appears 30 times in three books of the Bible; entire sections of each of those books are based on oral tradition.  In many cultures all over the world, repetition of the same phrases over and over has been used in oral traditions to simplify memorizing massively long stories.  For people at the time of these oral traditions, the idea that cows give birth to cows and dogs breed more dogs while planting wheat seeds brings up more wheat was an important idea - but the idea that God created the world and everything in it was the major idea.

Even if we take the Bible literally (which is a terrible idea), there's a massive problem with claiming that dinosaurs were running around in the Garden of Eden.  The issue is that no one in the Bible noticed the massive die-off of dinosaurs - and no one blamed it on people disobeying God!   Seriously, heaps of dead dinosaurs would have been noticeable.  Don't blame it on the Flood either; God had Noah build a massive ark to save all the terrestrial, non-human animals including the dinosaurs according to Genesis.

Awkward.  Piltdown Man was proven to be a hoax in the 1950's - but had people actively disputing the find as soon as 1913 which was one year after it was found.  The basic issues noticed first were that the molars showed wear of a jaw that moved side-to-side but the canine teeth were so large that the jaw could only move up and down - plus the entire skull was broken into such small chunks that the skull could be reconstructed in many, many different ways.

ATI's ability to lie when needed amazes me.

Evolution in tested in labs all the time because there are plenty of organisms that reproduce fast enough and are small enough to do these types of experiments.    When I was in college, I took a genetics class where we bred fruit flies to see how geneticists determine the inheritance of new traits based on the ratios of offspring that are affected.  At the same time - and without meaning to - we bred flies who were resistant to Fly-Nap, a chemical we used to temporarily knock them out.   The flies were kept in vials with a medium that worked for feeding the adults as well as growing their eggs.  To examine the flies, we switched the normal vial topper with a sponge dipped in Fly-Nap.  Some flies fell asleep quickly while others took longer to knock out.  The first week we used Fly-Nap the flies would all be asleep within 5 minutes or less.  Six weeks out, the time had stretched to 15-20 minutes because the flies who were most susceptible to Fly-Nap often died by the time the most resistant ones had fallen asleep.  Since the most resistant ones always survived to reproduce - and were reproducing with other flies who were at least somewhat resistant, soon we had flies that needed longer and longer exposures to be knocked out.  That's evolution on a small scale.

Scientists have bred different species in labs - although they rarely think about it that way.  Another experiment wanted to see if the toxins found in male fruit fly seminal fluid that kill the sperm of other males would get weaker if flies were placed in single-pair mating vials.   This experiment ran for years - and the toxins completely disappeared.  When offspring of the single-pair mating experiment were placed with fruit flies from standard, multiple mates conditions, the females died from the toxins in the male fruit fly sperm before laying eggs and the sperm of the males was killed off by the other fruit fly toxins.  IOW, the single-pair fruit flies could reproduce with themselves and the multiple mate fruit flies could reproduce with themselves but the two could not interbreed successfully.  That's two new species.

For people using ATI's Wisdom Booklets as an educational source, trying to understand evolution is EXACTLY like trying to put together a puzzle without knowing what the final picture is supposed to look like and missing most of the pieces to boot.  The Wisdom Booklets grossly misrepresent the theory of evolution while bypassing the basic understanding of chemistry, biochemistry, cellular biology, genetics, ecology and population dynamics needed for evolution to make sense.

I've always wondered if the person or persons who wrote this section included someone who genuinely believed in evolution - but was afraid to lose their job in Gothard's ministry.    The first paragraph of the quoted section is completely true and is never refuted in any way.  Lots of species of plants and animals have gone extinct and we have the fossils to prove it.  The oldest rocks (referred to as "deepest" ) have only the most simple life-forms.  The newest fossils are a mixture of simple and complicated life-forms.

The next two paragraphs are deliberately misleading.  Paleontologists receive extensive training in determining what rock layer a fossil is found in.  Rock layers can be identified very specifically to a time period of millions to hundred of thousands of years and to a specific region.  This greatly limits the number of species that a found fossil could be.   Likewise, paleontologists receive extensive training in comparative anatomy.  When a person has looked at enough bones, recognizing what species a bone comes from is fairly easy.  In my area of Michigan, we find skeletons of deer, mammoths, cows, dogs, cats, coyotes, raccoons and rabbits when holes are dug.  Many people are really good at ID-ing partial bone fragments - especially ones found in the jaw.  (Teeth can give an amazing amount of information about an animal if the person knows how to "read" the information.)

Scientists aren't idiots.  Some fossils are found in heaps of bones from stream deposition.  Interestingly, people can still sort the skeletons out.  Imagine I made a pile of bones from common Michigan species.  I'd start by sorting into piles: cat, cow, coyote etc., plus a pile of "not sure".  The next step is showing someone else with more training the "not sure" pile.  Most likely, that person will recognize that the bones I'm unsure about are an opossum and part of a turtle.    It's quite rare that someone finds bones that no one else recognizes - and that may be the sign of a new species.

Strangely enough, the last three paragraphs are actually in support of evolution.  The fossil record is not complete!  Not every species fossilizes well - we've never found a fossil of a bat for example - and most environments produce few or no fossils.  That's why scientists use other evidence like DNA sequences to support evolutionary hypotheses.  (To be fair, DNA analysis was quite young when these books were written - but protein analysis was well-established and works well to show evolution.)

Next Wisdom Booklet Post:  ATI's contradictory statements that mutations are always bad - and evolution can't explain why the bad outcomes of mutations do better in some environments.