The Theory of Evolution

[vicsinad]

The same old information creates new information:

The theory of evolution explains how strands of DNA change. An X-ray, cosmic ray, chemical reaction or similar mechanism can modify a base pair in the DNA strand to create a mutation, and this modification can lead to the creation of a new protein or enzyme.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/evolution/evolution9.htm

The explanation doesn't get much simpler than that. Just because you insist that something new needs to be thrown into the pile of old in order for something new to come into existence, it doesn't make it true or applicable to evolution.

[vicsinad]

Or here for a little detail with examples:

Most people lose the ability to digest milk by their teens. A few thousand years ago, however, after the domestication of cattle, several groups of people in Europe and Africa independently acquired mutations that allow them to continue digesting milk into adulthood. Genetic studies show there has been very strong selection for these mutations, so they were clearly very beneficial.

Most biologists would see this as a gain in information: a change in environment (the availability of cow's milk as food) is reflected by a genetic mutation that lets people exploit that change (gaining the ability to digest milk as an adult). Creationists, however, dismiss this as a malfunction, as the loss of the ability to switch off the production of the milk-digesting enzyme after childhood.

Rather than get bogged down trying to define what information is, let's just look at a few other discoveries made by biologists in recent years. For instance, it has been shown a simple change in gene activity in sea squirts can turn their one-chambered heart into a working two-chambered one. Surely this counts as increasing information?
TRIMming the genome

Some monkeys have a mutation in a protein called TRIM5 that results in a piece of another, defunct protein being tacked onto TRIM5. The result is a hybrid protein called TRIM5-CypA, which can protect cells from infection with retroviruses such as HIV. Here, a single mutation has resulted in a new protein with a new and potentially vital function. New protein, new function, new information.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13673-evolution-myths-mutations-can-only-destroy-information.html#.VFz1EWc_jXQ

[spitfire]

According to creationists, cancer cannot exist. So there is no point explaining any further.

The root of that problem is elsewhere. It's because they have a name for the life for all living organisms. The soul. This soul - according to them - was given for a purpose.
There is no "purpose" in nature. This is purely a man made idea. It is a pseudo-purpose in reality.

[George S.]

how about leprosy.There are all sort of sicknesses in the world.Think about how jesus healed the sickWith the power of god.You underestimate god he has over life.Look at man he is just an animal soon to be made immortal and behave as god.What more can anyone want.Also in the future life when you are composed of spirit you will NEVER be sick.So all these present sicknesses cancer etc are just nothing as compared of whats coming.Yes creationists agree that god permits all these sickneses but man will be on a different plane in the future.Note such is the state of the physical decay,illness etc etc not with the spirit.

[spitfire]

What about leprosy? That's an infection George S.

We are talking about mutation here. Cancer is dna change of cells. That's new information in case you didn't know.

[Philosopher]

I will preface this post with the following remarks.

Variations within species, or microevolution, is not disputed or doubted by anyone. No one denies that genes mutate and that this mutation can produce changes within species. However, the argument put forth in this thread – that of H2O – is frankly weak, and absurd.

New genetic information is necessary to produce a single novel gene or protein. The mathematical odds of this occurring in 100 million years by chance is virtually naught. This does not even scratch the surface for the need to produce new genes and proteins to produce new animals.

Here is an excerpt of an article called “To Build New Animals, No New Genetic Information Needed? More in Reply in Charles Marshall”. The article is by Stephen C Meyer, PhD.

A Telling Admission

Interestingly, in his review and especially when writing elsewhere, Marshall acknowledges the need for new genes and genetic information in order to produce the Cambrian animals. For example, in a 2006 paper entitled "Explaining the Cambrian 'Explosion' of Animals," he noted that: "Animals cannot evolve if the genes for making them are not yet in place. So clearly, developmental/genetic innovation must have played a central role in the radiation."10 Later in the same paper he argues that: "It is also clear that the genetic machinery for making animals must have been in place, at least in a rudimentary way, before they could have evolved."11 Marshall insists that Hox genes, in particular, must have played a necessary causal role in producing the explosion, a point that he also makes in another paper where he explains that developmental considerations "point to the origin of the bilaterian developmental system, including the origin of Hox genes, etc., as the primary cause of the 'explosion.'"12 While in these papers Marshall also emphasizes the importance of rewiring gene regulatory networks to generate new body plans, he clearly acknowledges that new genes would be necessary to produce new animals.

New Animals Require Many New Cell Types and Specialized Proteins

Of course, building the Metazoa (multi-cellular animals) would not have just required new Hox genes, ORFan genes, or genes for building new regulatory (DNA-binding) proteins. Instead, the evolutionary process would need to produce a whole range of different proteins necessary to building and servicing the specific forms of animal life that arose in the Cambrian period. In Darwin's Doubt I note, for example, that the first arthropods would have likely required genes for building the complex protein lysyl oxidase.13 Why? Because what we know from studies of modern arthropods shows that this protein is necessary to support the stout body structure of arthropod exoskeletons.14 Similarly, building Metazoa requires specialized proteins (and metabolic pathways) to produce the kind of extra-cellular matrices that allow developing animals to knit cells into tissues, tissues into organs, and organs and tissues into fully developed animals. Furthermore, different forms of complex animal life exhibit unique cell types and typically each cell type depends upon other specialized or dedicated proteins. As I wrote in Darwin's Doubt:

new] complex animals [such as arose in the Cambrian period] require more cell types to perform their more diverse functions. Arthropods and mollusks, for example, have dozens of specific tissues and organs, each of which requires "functionally dedicated," or specialized, cell types. These new cell types, in turn, require many new and specialized proteins. An epithelial cell lining a gut or intestine, for example, secretes a specific digestive enzyme. This enzyme requires structural proteins to modify its shape and regulatory enzymes to control the secretion of the digestive enzyme itself. Thus, building novel cell types typically requires building novel proteins, which requires assembly instructions for building proteins -- that is, genetic information.15

Thus, our present observations of animals representing the phyla that first arose in the Cambrian show that these animals would have needed many specialized proteins: proteins for building extracellular matrices or exoskeletons, for facilitating adhesion, for regulating development, for building specialized tissues or structural parts of specialized organs, for servicing gut cells, for producing eggs and sperm as well as many other distinctive functions and structures of individual metazoans. Obviously, these proteins would have had to arise sometime in the history of life. Since most of the Metazoa first arose in the Cambrian explosion, it is reasonable to infer that the proteins necessary to sustain those forms of animal life also arose around that time or just before.

Begging the Central Question

Although Marshall characterizes my claim that new Cambrian animals would have required new genetic information and new protein folds as "unsubstantiated," he doesn't actually dispute the need for genetic information in order to build the proteins required by each new form of metazoan life. Instead, he only seems to dispute that all that information arose during the Cambrian explosion itself. Indeed, in both his technical publications and his review of Darwin's Doubt, Marshall simply assumes that most of the genetic information necessary to build the Cambrian animals already existed before the Cambrian explosion. In fact, he seems to presuppose the existence of what Susumu Ohno called a "pananimalian genome,"16 a nearly complete set of the genes necessary to build Cambrian animals within some phenotypically simpler, ur-metazoan ancestor. Thus, he states the new animal phyla "emerged through the rewiring of the gene regulatory networks (GRNs) of already existing genes."17 The article "The Causes of the Cambrian Explosion," which accompanies Marshall's review of my book in Science, also presupposes such a universal gene toolkit and suggests that it might have arisen 100 million years or more before the explosion of animal life in the Cambrian period.18

Nevertheless, this question-begging assumption does not solve the central problem posed by Darwin's Doubt -- that of the origin of the genetic (and epigenetic) information necessary to produce the Cambrian animals. It merely pushes the problem back several tens or hundreds of millions of years, assuming that such a universal genetic toolkit ever existed. (Marshall also makes no attempt to rebut my argument about the inability of the mutation/selection mechanism to generate new epigenetic information, a problem that has led other prominent evolutionary biologists to express skepticism about the adequacy of the neo-Darwinian mechanism.19) In any case, Marshall does not explain how the neo-Darwinian mechanism could have overcome the combinatorial search problem described in Darwin's Doubt to produce even the new genetic information necessary to build new proteins and Cambrian animals.

Readers of the book will recall my discussion, in Chapters 9 and 10, of recent mutagenesis experiments. These experiments have established the extreme rarity of functional genes and proteins among the many (combinatorially) possible ways of arranging nucleotide bases or amino acids within their corresponding "sequence spaces." Readers will also recall that the rarity of functional genes and proteins within sequence space makes it overwhelmingly more likely than not that a series of random mutation searches will fail to generate even a single new gene or protein fold within available evolutionary time. This extreme rarity also helps to explain why mathematical biologists, using standard population genetics models, are calculating exceedingly long waiting times (well in excess of available evolutionary time) for the production of new genes and proteins when producing such genes or proteins requires even a few coordinated mutations.20

For these reasons, defining the Cambrian explosion as a 25 million year event, as Marshall does, instead of a 10 million year event, as many other Cambrian experts do (and as I do in Darwin's Doubt), makes no appreciable difference in solving the problem of the origin of genetic information -- such is the extreme rarity of functional bio-macromolecules within their relevant sequence spaces. Nor, for that matter, does positing the origin of a complete set of genes (that is, many more than just one) for building all the Cambrian animals 100 million years before the Cambrian explosion. That merely pushes the problem back and raises other problems such as (a) explaining exactly what selective advantage all these genes for building new animals would have had before they were actually used to build the diverse animals that arose in the Cambrian and (b) how the maintenance of this overly complex genome could have avoided exacting a huge energetic and fitness cost on its host organism, and thus the effects of purifying selection over 100 million years of evolutionary time.

In any case, the experimentally based calculations in Darwin's Doubt show that neither ten million, nor several hundred million years would afford enough opportunities to produce the genetic information necessary to build even a single novel gene or protein, let alone all the new genes and proteins needed to produce new animal forms. Indeed, neither stretch of time is sufficient to allow the mutation/selection process to search more than a tiny fraction of the relevant sequence spaces. Marshall's review does not even allude to a solution to this longstanding mathematical,21 and now experimentally based,22 challenge to the efficacy of the neo-Darwinian mechanism. Instead, his proposal merely presupposes the prior existence of the genetic information necessary to produce the Cambrian animals.

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/10/to_build_new_an077541.html

[spitfire]

Intelligent Design. Creationism in disguise.

[Philosopher]

Another good article by Meyer.

(CNN) -- While we officially celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" on November 24, celebrations of Darwin's legacy have actually been building in intensity for several years. Darwin is not just an important 19th century scientific thinker. Increasingly, he is a cultural icon.

Darwin is the subject of adulation that teeters on the edge of hero worship, expressed in everything from scholarly seminars and lecture series to best-selling new atheist tracts like those by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. The atheists claim that Darwin disproved once and for all the argument for intelligent design from nature.

And that of course is why he remains hugely controversial. A Zogby poll commissioned by the Discovery Institute this year found that 52 percent of Americans agree "the development of life was guided by intelligent design." Those who are not scientists may wonder if they have a right to entertain skepticism about Darwinian theory.

We are told that a consensus of scientists supporting the theory means that Darwinian evolution is no longer subject to debate. But does it ever happen that a seemingly broad consensus of scientific expertise turns out to be wrong, generated by an ideologically motivated stampeding of opinion?

Of course, that does happen. Many ideologically driven crusades in science -- the earth-centered solar system and eugenics, for example -- survived long after supposed evidence for these ideas evaporated. And precisely the same thing is happening today in the ideologically charged field of evolutionary biology. Indeed, there are strong scientific reasons to doubt the consensus about Darwin's theory and what it allegedly proved.

Contrary to Darwinian orthodoxy, the fossil record actually challenges the idea that all organisms have evolved from a single common ancestor. Why? Fossil studies reveal "a biological big bang" near the beginning of the Cambrian period (520 million years ago) when many major, separate groups of organisms or "phyla" (including most animal body plans) emerged suddenly without clear precursors.

Fossil finds repeatedly have confirmed a pattern of explosive appearance and prolonged stability in living forms, not the gradual "branching-tree" pattern implied by Darwin's common ancestry thesis.

There are also reasons to doubt the creative power of Darwin's mechanism of natural selection. While many scientists accept that natural selection can produce small-scale "micro-evolutionary" variations, many biologists now doubt that natural selection and random mutations can generate the large-scale changes necessary to produce fundamentally new structures and forms of life.

For this reason more than 800 scientists, including professors from institutions such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale and Rice universities and members of various national (U.S., Russian, Czech, Polish) academies of science have signed a statement questioning the creative power of the selection/mutation mechanism.

Increasingly, there are reasons to doubt the Darwinian idea that living things merely "appear" to be designed. Instead, living systems display telltale signs of actual or "intelligent" design such as the presence of complex circuits, miniature motors and digital information in living cells.

Consider the implications, for example, of one of modern biology's most important discoveries. In 1953 when Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule, they made a startling discovery. The structure of DNA allows it to store information in the form of a four-character digital code, similar to a computer code.

This discovery highlights a scientific mystery that Darwin never addressed: how did the first life on earth arise? To date no theory of undirected chemical evolution has explained the origin of the information needed to build the first living cell.

Instead, the digital code and information processing systems that run the show in living cells point decisively toward prior intelligent design. Indeed, we know from our repeated experience -- the basis of all scientific reasoning -- that systems possessing these features always arise from an intelligent source -- from minds, not material processes.

DNA functions like a software program. We know that software comes from programmers. Information -- whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, or encoded in a radio signal -- always arises from a designing intelligence. So the discovery of digital code in DNA provides a strong scientific reason for concluding that the information in DNA also had an intelligent source.

Despite the consensus view that Darwin showed that "design could arise without a designer" there is now compelling scientific evidence of actual intelligent design in even the simplest living cells.

The question of biological origins has long raised profound philosophical questions. Is life the result of purely material processes or did a purposive intelligence play a role? It's not surprising that such a worldview-shaping issue would illicit strong passions and disagreements. All the more reason to let the evidence, rather than a supposed consensus, determine the outcome of what is, in fact, a very legitimate and important debate about the Darwinian legacy.

Editor's note: Stephen Meyer is director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, which supports research challenging "neo-Darwinian theory" and supports work on the theory of "intelligent design." He is the author of "Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design." He received his Ph.D. in the Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University.

http://www.discovery.org/a/13391

[vicsinad]

New genetic information is necessary to produce a single novel gene or protein.

Is this not circular? "New information is required to make new information." That is essentially what you're saying. It doesn't make much sense, and it is not supported by any evidence. Evolution doesn't say that. Never has. Never will. Creationists and IDers say that new information is necessary to make new information so they can point out the probability of evolution is zero...yet, they forget to mention that it also make the probability of everything else...zero.

[Philosopher]

Is this not circular? "New information is required to make new information." That is essentially what you're saying. It doesn't make much sense, and it is not supported by any evidence. Evolution doesn't say that. Never has. Never will. Creationists and IDers say that new information is necessary to make new information so they can point out the probability of evolution is zero...yet, they forget to mention that it also make the probability of everything else...zero.

I'm assuming your response is directed to me. It is not circular at all. To produce new animals requires new genes. Mutations do not produce new animals. They produce variations within species, or micro-evolution. This still does not address where the body of genes came from, which you refuse to discuss, because you have no answer. Nor does it address how new information produced new animals spontaneously in what is known as the biological Big Bang in the Cambrian period.

Dr. Meyer's scientific experiments have demonstrated that to produce a single novel gene or protein by chance in hundreds of millions of years is essentially zero. Imagine producing new genes and proteins to produce new animals.

[vicsinad]

I'm assuming your response is directed to me. It is not circular at all. To produce new animals requires new genes. Mutations do not produce new animals. They produce variations within species, or micro-evolution. This still does not address where the body of genes came from, which you refuse to discuss, because you have no answer. Nor does it address how new information produced new animals spontaneously in what is known as the biological Big Bang in the Cambrian period.

Do mutations produce new genes? If the answer is yes, then there you go -- you have new genes that causes animals to evolve into other animals. If the answer is no, do you know much about genetics?

I don't refuse to discuss where the body of genes come from. I refuse to believe that either you or Vangelovski have the requisite understanding of chemistry or biology to enter such a detailed discussion. However, I do refuse to discuss where the original information came from because a) I don't know and b) it's not necessary to talk about evolution.

[vicsinad]

A critique of Mr. Meyer:

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a well-known phenomenon in psychology first named in 1998, but it has been recognized since before the Bible and Shakespeare. In a nutshell, it is (as Bertrand Russell put it) 
”The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt”. There is also another well-known psychological phenomenon: motivated reasoning. Our brains have many blind spots in them that allow us to reconcile the real world with the world as we want it to be, and reduce the clash of cognitive dissonance. The most familiar of these is confirmation bias, where we see only what we want to see, and ignore or forget anything that doesn’t fit our preferred world-view. When this bias emerges in argument, it takes the form of cherry-picking: finding a few facts out of context that seem to support what we want to believe, and ignoring everything else that contradicts what we are trying to promote.

The entire literature of creationism (and of its recent offspring, “intelligent design” creationism) works entirely on that principle: they don’t like any science that disagrees with their view of religion, so they pick tiny bits out of context that seem to support what they want to believe, and cherry-pick individual cases which fits their bias. In their writings, they are legendary for “quote-mining”: taking a quote out of context to mean the exact opposite of what the author clearly intended (sometimes unintentionally, but often deliberately and maliciously). They either cannot understand the scientific meaning of many fields from genetics to paleontology to geochronology, or their bias filters out all but tiny bits of a research subject that seems to comfort them, and they ignore all the rest.

Another common tactic of creationists is credential mongering. They love to flaunt their Ph.D.’s on their book covers, giving the uninitiated the impression that they are all-purpose experts in every topic. As anyone who has earned a Ph.D. knows, the opposite is true: the doctoral degree forces you to focus on one narrow research problem for a long time, so you tend to lose your breadth of training in other sciences. Nevertheless, they flaunt their doctorates in hydrology or biochemistry, then talk about paleontology or geochronology, subjects they have zero qualification to discuss. Their Ph.D. is only relevant in the field where they have specialized training. It’s comparable to asking a Ph.D. to fix your car or write a symphony—they may be smart, but they don’t have the appropriate specialized training to do a competent job based on their Ph.D. alone.

Stephen Meyer’s first demonstration of these biases was his atrociously incompetent book Signature in the Cell (2009, HarperOne), which was universally lambasted by molecular biologists as an amateurish effort by someone with no firsthand training or research experience in molecular biology. (Meyer’s Ph.D. is in history of science, and his undergrad degree is in geophysics, which give him absolutely no background to talk about molecular evolution). Undaunted by this debacle, Meyer now blunders into another field in which he has no research experience or advanced training: my own profession, paleontology. I can now report that he’s just as incompetent in my field as he was in molecular biology. Almost every page of this book is riddled by errors of fact or interpretation that could only result from someone writing in a subject way over his head, abetted by the creationist tendency to pluck facts out of context and get their meaning completely backwards. But as one of the few people in the entire creationist movement who has actually taken a few geology classes (but apparently no paleontology classes), he is their “expert” in this area, and is happy to mislead the creationist audience that knows no science at all with his slick but completely false understanding of the subject.


Let’s take the central subject of the book: the “Cambrian explosion”, or the apparently rapid diversification of life during the Cambrian Period, starting about 543 million years ago. When Darwin wrote about it in 1859, it was indeed a puzzle, since so little was known about the fossil record then. But as paleontologists have worked hard on the topic and learned a lot since about 1945 (as I discuss in detail in my 2007 book, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters). As a result, we now know that the “explosion” now takes place over an 80 m.y. time framework. Paleontologists are gradually abandoning the misleading and outdated term “Cambrian explosion” for a more accurate one, “Cambrian slow fuse” or “Cambrian diversification.” The entire diversification of life is now known to have gone through a number of distinct steps, from the first fossils of simple bacterial life 3.5 billion years old, to the first multicellular animals 700 m.y. ago (the Ediacara fauna), to the first evidence of skeletonized fossils (tiny fragments of small shells, nicknamed the “little shellies”) at the beginning of the Cambrian, 543 m.y. ago (the Nemakit-Daldynian and Tommotian stages of the Cambrian), to the third stage of the Cambrian (Atdabanian, 520-515 m.y. ago), when you find the first fossils of the larger animals with hard shells, such as trilobites. But does Meyer reflect this modern understanding of the subject? No! His figures (e.g., Figs. 2.5, 2.6, 3.8) portray the “explosion” as if it happened all at once, showing that he has paid no attention to the past 70 years of discoveries. He dismisses the Ediacara fauna as not clearly related to living phyla (a point that is still debated among paleontologists), but its very existence is fatal to the creationist falsehood that multicellular animals appeared all at once in the fossil record with no predecessors. Even more damning, Meyer completely ignores the existence of the first two stages of the Cambrian (nowhere are they even mentioned in the book, or the index) and talks about the Atdabanian stage as if it were the entire Cambrian all by itself. His misleading figures (e.g., Fig. 2.5, 2.6, 3.8) imply that there were no modern phyla in existence until the trilobites diversified in the Atdabanian. Sorry, but that’s a flat-out lie. Even a casual glance at any modern diagram of life’s diversification demonstrates that probable arthropods, cnidarians, and echinoderms are present in the Ediacara fauna, mollusks and sponges are well documented from the Nemakit-Daldynian Stage, and brachiopods and archaeocyathids appear in the Tommotian Stage—all millions of years before Meyer’s incorrectly defined “Cambrian explosion” in the Atdabanian. The phyla that he lists in Fig. 2.6 as “explosively” appearing in the Atdabanian stages all actually appeared much earlier—or they are soft-bodied phyla from the Chinese Chengjiang fauna, whose first appearance artificially inflates the count. Meyer deliberately and dishonestly distorts the story by implying that these soft-bodied animals appeared all at once, when he knows that this is an artifact of preservation. It’s just an accident that there are no extraordinary soft-bodied faunas preserved before Chengjiang, so we simply have no fossils demonstrating their true first appearance, which occurred much earlier based on molecular evidence.

The details of the Cambrian diversification event, showing how different groups appear in different stages of the Precambrian and Cambrian. Meyer completely ignores the existence of the first two stages of the Cambrian, falsely giving the impression that it is abrupt and rapid.
The details of the Cambrian diversification event, showing how different groups appear in different stages of the Precambrian and Cambrian. Meyer completely ignores the existence of the first two stages of the Cambrian, falsely giving the impression that it is abrupt and rapid.

Meyer’s distorted and false view of conflating the entire Early Cambrian (543-515 m.y. ago) as consisting of only the third stage of the Early Cambrian (520-515 m.y. ago) creates a fundamental lie that falsifies everything else he says in the ensuing chapters. He even attacks me (p. 73) by claiming that during our 2009 debate, it was I who was improperly redefining the Cambrian! Even a cursory glance at any recent paleontology book on the topic, or even the Wikipedia site for “Cambrian explosion”, shows that it is Meyer who has cherry-picked and distorted the record, completely ignoring the 23 million years of the first two stages of the Cambrian because their existence shoots down his entire false interpretation of the fossil record. Sorry, Steve, but you don’t get to contradict every paleontologist in the world, ignore the evidence from the first two stages of the Cambrian, and redefine the Early Cambrian as the just the Atdabanian Stage just to fit your fairy tale!

Even if we grant the premise that a lot of phyla appear in the Atdabanian (solely because there are no soft-bodied faunas older than Chengjiang in the earliest Cambrian), Meyer claims the 5-6 million years of the Atdabanian are too fast for evolution to produce all the phyla of animals. Wrong again! Lieberman (2003) showed that rates of evolution during the “Cambrian explosion” are typical of any adaptive radiation in life’s history, whether you look at the Paleocene diversification of the mammals after the non-avian dinosaurs vanished, or even the diversification of humans from their common ancestor with apes 6 m.y. ago. As distinguished Harvard paleontologist Andrew Knoll put it in his 2003 book, Life on a Young Planet:


Was there really a Cambrian Explosion? Some have treated the issue as semantic—anything that plays out over tens of millions of years cannot be “explosive,” and if the Cambrian animals didn’t “explode,” perhaps they did nothing at all out of the ordinary. Cambrian evolution was certainly not cartoonishly fast … Do we need to posit some unique but poorly understood evolutionary process to explain the emergence of modern animals? I don’t think so. The Cambrian Period contains plenty of time to accomplish what the Proterozoic didn’t without invoking processes unknown to population geneticists—20 million years is a long time for organisms that produce a new generation every year or two. (Knoll, 2003, p. 193)

(It’s interesting that Meyer talks about millions of years like an ordinary geologist might. I’ll bet his Young-Earth Creationist readers, who refuse to concede the earth is older than 10,000 years old, are not to happy with him for this. This might explain why the book, which was artificially pushed up the best-seller list by a huge creationist publicity effort before it was published, has now dropped out of the best-seller list like a stone, once people see it’s not supporting Young-Earth Creationism).

The mistakes and deliberate misunderstandings and misinterpretations go on and on, page after page. Meyer takes the normal scientific debates about the early conflicts about the molecular vs. morphological trees of life as evidence scientists know nothing, completely ignoring the recent consensus between these data sets. Like all creationists, he completely misinterprets the Eldredge and Gould punctuated equilibrium model and claims that they are arguing that evolution doesn’t occur—when both Gould and Eldredge have clearly explained many times (which he never cites) why their ideas are compatible with Neo-Darwinism and not any kind of support for any form of creationism. He repeats many of the other classic creationist myths, all long debunked, including the post hoc argument from probability (you can’t make the argument that something is unlikely after the fact), knowing that his math-phobic audience is easily bamboozled by the misuse of big numbers. He wastes a full chapter on the empty concept of “information” as the ID creationists define it. He butchers the subject of systematic biology, using the normal debate between competing hypotheses to argue that scientists can’t make up their minds—when that is the ordinary way in which scientific questions are argued until consensus has been reached. He confuses crown-groups with stem-groups, botches the arguments about recognition of ancestors in the fossil record, and can’t tell a cladogram from a family tree. He blunders through the fields of epigenetics and evo-devo and genetic drift as if they completely falsified Neo-Darwinism, rather than as scientists view them, as supplements to our understanding of it. (Even if they did somehow shoot down some aspects of Neo-Darwinism, they are providing additional possible mechanisms for evolution, something he supposedly does not believe in!). In short, he runs the full gamut of topics in modern evolutionary biology, managing to distort or confuse every one of them, and only demonstrating that he is completely incapable of understanding these topics.

In several places in the book, he shows his pictures of the Cambrian sections in China, or talks in the final chapter about visiting the Burgess Shale in Canada (a Middle Cambrian locality, millions of years after the “Cambrian explosion” was long over), as if to establish his street-cred that he at least got away from his office and computer once in a while. Visiting these famous places like a tourist doesn’t qualify you to write a guidebook of the complexity of the fossils that were recovered there. If he had actually done the hard work of learning about paleontology and doing the research in the field himself (as real scientists have), we might take him seriously. As it is, this book only demonstrates that Meyer can completely misunderstand, misinterpret and misread subjects like paleontology just as badly as he botched his interpretation of molecular biology. (For a good account by real paleontologists who know what they’re doing, see the excellent recent book by Valentine and Erwin, 2013, which gives an accurate view of the “Cambrian diversification”).

Finally, one might wonder: what’s all the fuss about the “Cambrian explosion”? Why should it matter whether evolution was fast or slow during the third stage of the Cambrian? Some scientists might find this puzzling, but you must understand the minds of creationists. They operate by a “god of the gaps” argument: anything that is currently not easily explained by science is automatically attributed to supernatural causes. Even though ID creationists say that this supernatural designer could be any deity or even extraterrestrials, it is well documented that they are thinking of the Judeo-Christian god when they point to the complexity and “design” of life. They argue that if scientists haven’t completely explained every possible event of the Early Cambrian, science has failed and we must consider supernatural causes.

Of course, this is a lie. For one thing, Meyer’s description of the “Cambrian explosion” is distorted and false, since he deliberately ignores the events of the first two stages of the Cambrian. Secondly, this “god of the gaps” approach is guaranteed to fail, because scientists have explained most of the events of the Early Cambrian and find nothing out of the ordinary that defies scientific explanation. Only a few details remain to be worked out. As our fossil record of that time interval improves and we understand it even better, there will be nothing left for the creationists to point to that might require supernatural intervention. This is a losing strategy for them in every possible way.

In short, Meyer has shown that his first disastrous book was not a fluke: he is capable of going into any field in which he has no training or research experience and botching it just as badly as he did molecular biology. As I’ve written before, if you are a complete amateur and don’t understand a subject, don’t demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect by writing a book about it and proving your ignorance to everyone else! Some people with creationist leanings or little understanding of paleontology might find this long-winded, confusingly written book convincing, but anyone with a decent background in paleontology can easily see through his distortions and deliberate misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Even though Amazon.com persists in listing this book in their “Paleontology” subsection, I’ve seen a number of bookstores already which have it properly placed in their “Religion” section—or even more appropriately, in “Fiction.”

Postscript: When I first wrote this book review, I posted it on the book’s Amazon.com site. Naturally, it got a huge reaction out of the creationists, and there was a string over over 1900 comments on my review. Surprisingly, the scientists and paleontologists managed to overwhelm the usual comments of the creationists, and about 70% of the commenters marked my harsh review as “helpful”. The creationist comments were mostly personal attacks on me, or claims that I didn’t read the book, not substantive comments about my points about Meyer’s ignorance of paleontology.

Unsurprisingly, it also got a harsh attack from the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Meyer’s home institution. Their spokesman Casey Luskin (a lawyer, not a paleontologist) criticized my review by using all the classic creationist tactics. Mostly he quote-mines Erwin and Valentine’s new book to make it appear that these distinguished paleontologists are creationists! (When I pointed this out to my good friend Doug Erwin, he found it laughable and made it clear to me that in no way does his book support creationism or Meyer’s misinterpretations—not that Luskin would care if Erwin himself wrote a detailed refutation of every bit of misquotation the DI post used). The rest of Luskin’s ridiculous post claims I didn’t read the book, or really read the chapters where Meyer made specific arguments. (I sure did read them—but no matter how many times you read it, Meyer’s arguments and statements are completely wrong, and Meyer does not understand the key issues but grossly misinterprets them). In short, it’s the usual pack of lies and distortions and quote-mines and diversionary tactics designed to mislead the casual reader who does not understand what I wrote, not addressing the key points of contention in my review. In no place does Luskin acknowledge or even mention the central point of this review: that Meyer has deliberately and dishonestly ignored the first two stages of the Cambrian to give the false impression that it was inexplicably rapid.

Finally, I should note an interesting phenomenon. The creationist community gave the book a huge buildup in their circles, and got their acolytes to pre-order the book in huge numbers, so it was #7 on the New York Times Best Seller List when it was released. Since its release, however, it has plummeted in sales, probably because once the Young-Earth Creationists read it, they’ll realize it is full of ideas they don’t support, like “millions of years.” I watched its sales ranking on Amazon.com go from near the top, to (currently) around #11,000 or lower on the ranking of best sellers—in just over a month! The most satisfying thing, however, is that initially Amazon.com put it in their “Paleontology” category. But just a week ago, they removed it and moved it to “Religion & Science.” Apparently, the huge negative backlash from REAL paleontologists made them reassess it. Now if they could only move it over to “Fiction”, where it truly belongs

http://www.skepticblog.org/2013/08/28/stephen-meyers-fumbling-bumbling-amateur-cambrian-follies/

[Vangelovski]

Victor, I've asked you before but you didn't answer, maybe you missed it. I've never seen in evolutionary literature an evolutionist claim there is no need for new information - they've always tried to explain how new information could have come about but have failed to do so. You also tried to do that in the beginning of this thread and then claimed that new information is not necessary - that somehow a single celled organism contained all the information necessary to form all living things we have today (and for some reason, we must assume, hadn't already grown all these living things).

My question is, is this something you just invented or is there a larger following to this "no new information is needed" claim?

[George S.]

God designed the animals each after his kind.You have species and subspecies they still point to one species.God made them.God designed them Each one has uniques features and talents.Only god could do it.He gives life to everything he touches.The THEORY of evolution is just another theory of man.Once again are we ignoring the existence of a god???Scientists tell us how many light years is the universe.!4 to 15 billion light years??Galaxies in their millions ,billions??THe vast distances could it be that god built the universe for a reason??What is man going to do in such an immense universe ???

[Philosopher]

Do mutations produce new genes? If the answer is yes, then there you go -- you have new genes that causes animals to evolve into other animals. If the answer is no, do you know much about genetics?

Mutations produce new genes but these mutations do not produce new animals. The genes produced from mutations are very limited within the realm of micro-evolution.

To produce new animals requires new information -- new genes and proteins. And to produce one novel gene and protein by chance is virtually impossible even over a span of hundreds of millions of years.