Opening Statement for the Affirmative
(Saladin, 45 minutes)
[Section and subsection titles are for clarification to the reader and to correspond to the outline of this transcript. They were not spoken in the debate itself.]
I. INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS
[SLIDE 1: Title slide, "Evolution vs. Creationism"] In 1982, Science magazine published an article by Ron Numbers called "Creationism in 20th-Century America" {1}. Dr. Numbers interviewed someone he called "the bumptious Gish" about the many debates he’s done. [SLIDE 2: Cover, From Fish to Gish {2}] Dr Gish said his strategy is to "go for the jugular vein," and one of his colleagues remarked that Gish "hits the floor running." We’re off and running now, and if I could offer Dr. Gish one bit of advice tonight it would be, deny everything you’ve written, and watch out for your jugular veins.
There’s an awful lot of confusion about what evolutionary theory is. [SLIDE 3: Ecuadorian children and woolly monkey] People think it means humans came from monkeys; [SLIDE 4: ICR slide #39, evolutionary "improvement" {3}] that it always involves "progress" toward greater complexity; [SLIDE 5: Cover of The Truth: God or Evolution? {4}] or that it forces you to choose between God and evolution.
II. PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
[SLIDE 6: ICR slide #3, Comparison of Two Scientific Models] Regardless of what the ICR may say, it is not a debate between two scientific models. If it were, we’d be lucky to have 50 people here. Most people attend these things because they think evolution touches on the validity of their religious beliefs. This is a debate between a religious opinion and a scientific one. To help make that point clear, I think we need to begin with a consideration of what it takes to make something scientific, and why creationism doesn’t qualify.
A. CHARACTERISTICS OF SCIENCE
1. NATURALISM
[SLIDE 7: Criteria of Science] One generally agreed characteristic of science is that it is naturalistic. It deals only with natural, cause-and-effect relationships and it cannot deal with anything supernatural. Creationism is a supernatural doctrine, therefore it is inadmissible in the court of scientific opinion. Many scientists believe in a personal Lord and Creator, but they know where to draw the line between their religious concerns and their scientific ones.
2. EMPIRICISM
Secondly, science is empirical. That means it’s based entirely on things that can be observed. Science is not based on revealed truth or idle speculation. Now when I say "things that can be observed," I include the visible effects of things like electrons that cannot be observed directly. No one would say that physics is unscientific just because no one ever has or ever will see an electron. Dr. Gish spent his scientific career studying proteins as an industrial chemist, and yet he has never seen a single protein molecule in his life. That doesn’t mean his work back then wasn’t scientific.
The same reasoning applies to the historical sciences. We can see the effects of past astronomical, geological, and biological events, and we can make sound inferences from those past events, about those events. But another reason evolution is an empirical science is that it’s not just a thing of the past. It is something that’s going on today, all around us. We can create evolutionary events in the laboratory. We can cite new species that have come into existence within recorded human history, even within the twentieth century.
[SLIDE 8: Peppered moth] In any college biology textbook you can read the story of the peppered moth, which made a visible evolutionary change in a few decades under the influence of pollution and predators. That’s what evolution is: the ability of a population to adjust genetically to environmental changes. [SLIDE 9: Criteria of science, repeated]
3. FALSIFIABILITY
Next, any scientific theory must be potentially falsifiable. We must be able to state what evidence it would take to prove something wrong. For example, if we found a completely random array of fossils throughout the geological strata of rock, and there were puppy dogs and kitty cats and little green apples all the way back into Precambrian rock, I’d have to say that evolution was in trouble.
4. PREDICTIVE POWER
Another characteristic of a good scientific theory is that it must have predictive power. I don’t mean it has to predict the future. I mean a theory is a predictive summary of things we have already factually established, and its function is to guide us in further discovery and predict what we should see. Theory doesn’t mean a guess or hypothesis. The theory of evolution has every bit as much factual evidence as the theory of gravitation or the germ theory of disease. We don’t doubt gravity and microbes just because we call these theories.
[SLIDE 10: Lamprey eel] Here’s an example of evolutionary prediction. The earliest vertebrates were fishlike forms with no movable jaws and seven gill arches, adjacent to the seven gill openings you can see here. A few of their descendants still show these characteristics, like this lamprey. [SLIDE 11: Great white shark] In sharks, two gill arches have migrated forward and become the mandible and the hyoid bone. This leaves only five arches, corresponding to the five gill slits. And incidentally the embryonic development of vertebrates retraces this history. We all start out with seven arches and the anterior two become the mandible and hyoid. We often find the same evolutionary story reflected in both the fossil record and in embryonic development.
In the 1800s, the German anatomist Gegenbauer predicted that if the first vertebrates had seven arches and the sharks have five, somewhere we ought to find an intermediate with six. This hypothetical intermediate remained a missing link until long after his death, but in the 1970s the prediction was borne out by Richard Lund. He found a group of Paleozoic sharks in Montana exactly fitting the prediction, with six gill arches {5}. Besides fulfilling the prediction, this also discredits Dr. Gish’s tedious claim that nobody has found any transitional fossils — unless Dr. Gish now insists that someone show him a shark with six and half gill arches.
5. OPEN-MINDEDNESS
[SLIDE 13: Darwin in 1881] Finally, if science must always be open-minded and willing to revise or discard a theory if the evidence requires it. The fact that Darwinism is open to criticism and revision is clear enough in the current controversy over the theory of punctuated equilibrium. Over the past 130 years we have built on Darwin’s theory and superabundantly substantiated it with all kinds of evidence he would never have dreamed of. Yet at the same time we have had to reject some of his conclusions, such as his mistaken concept of heredity. Nobody has been dogmatic about Darwinisn or considered it a sacred cow immune from attack. People build their scientific reputations around finding novel interpretations of nature; no one has ever become famous for doggedly defending old biological ideas.
B. CHARACTERISTICS OF CREATIONISM
[SLIDE 14: Cover of Evolution? The Fossils Say No! {7}] Now let’s go back over these characteristics and see how creationism measures up.
1. SUPERNATURALISM
First naturalism. Creationism is based on belief in a divine Creator who does not work through natural laws. Dr. Gish writes in this book [SLIDE 15: Fossils Say No p. 42]:
God used processes which are not now operating anywhere in the natural universe. This is why we refer to divine creation as special creation. We cannot discover by scientific investigation anything about the creative processes used by God.
Well if that’s true, then why is he so adamant about trying to have this taught in the science curriculum? The American Heritage Dictionary defines religion as "the expression of man’s belief in and reverence for a superhuman power recognized as the creator and governor of the universe." To have creationism you have to have a Creator. When you have a Creator you have religion.
2. REVELATION VS. EMPIRICISM
While science depends on empiricism, creationism depends on biblical revelation. Creationists are so committed to the unquestionable truth of this revelation that they emphatically reject the empirical approach. If the Bible says one thing and empirical science says something else, then they assume the empirical observations have to be wrong somehow. [SLIDE 16: Cover of Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth {8}] For example in this book Henry Morris contrasts biblical and empirical findings and makes it clear which side creationists must take [SLIDE 17: Remarkable, p. 89]. He says:
We are forced to the conclusion, as Bible believing Christians, that the earth is really quite young after all, regardless of the contrary views of evolutionary geologists. This means that all the uranium-lead measurements, the potassium-argon measurements, and all similar measurements which have shown greater ages have somehow been misinterpreted.
When empiricism and biblical revelation disagree, then empiricism is the wrong course of action to take, according to Morris. Morris seems to consider science to be entirely unnecessary. He writes [SLIDE 18: Remarkable, p. 94]
The only way we can determine the true age of the earth is for God to tell us what it is. And since he has hold us, very plainly, in the Holy Scriptures that it is several thousand years of age, and no more, that ought to settle all basic questions of terrestrial chronology.
3. UNFALSIFIABILITY
[SLIDE 19: religious painting, God and Creation {9}] Now falsifiability. Matters pertaining to an omnipotent God are unfalsifiable. Suppose I assert that all of you here are just five minutes old. I saw God create you all five minutes ago. Now presumably you’d think that was ridiculous, but all I’d have to do is say, if God is all-powerful, why couldn’t he have created you with a false appearance of being a lot older than you really are? Why couldn’t he have created you with a preprogrammed memory of things that never really happened? If you accept the existence of an omnipotent deity, you could never prove this wrong. Creationism is inherently incapable of logical falsification and therefore cannot qualify as science {10}.
4. DOGMATISM AND BIBLICAL LITERALISM
The open-mindedness of science is another important point of contrast, because they very essence of creationism is just the opposite. It is dogma. We’ve already seen examples of this in my recent quotes from Henry Morris — it’s the very epitome of dogma to say that if radioactive dating techniques show the earth is billions of years old, they must be wrong simply because the Bible says so. Remember that Morris said "we are forced to the conclusion … that the earth is really quite young." Dr. Gish thinks there’s evidence that the earth is just ten or twenty thousand years old! I’m not forced to believe anything. My beliefs are shaped by the evidence, but Dr. Gish’s beliefs are shaped by revelation and dogma.
In fact Dr. Gish has the choice either to believe this dogma or lose his job. Anyone joining the ICR has to sign an oath that says members must believe the Bible is historically and scientifically true in every detail, that every basic type of living creature was made directly by God during the Genesis creation week, and that there was a worldwide flood that created most fossils and major geological features of the planet.
It’s really interesting to see where this dogmatism leads the creationists. If Dr. Gish believes the Bible is scientifically true in every detail, as the oath requires, then he has to believe some pretty strange things. [SLIDE 20: List of "scientific" precepts in the Bible] According to the passages of the Bible cited up here, he would have to believe the earth is either square or disk-shaped; it doesn’t move; it either floats in a sea or it’s supported on pillars; it’s covered by a solid dome with a sea up above it and little windows in it; and it rains because somebody opens those windows and lets a little of that water fall through. In biology, he must believe that bats are birds, badgers chew cud, and insects have only four legs. I know you may not be able to read these citations from the back of the room, so I have photocopies of this up front. We’ll have a literature table where you can pick them up and check these references for yourself {11}.
Now either Dr. Gish believes some pretty strange things, or, if he should protest that he doesn’t believe these things, then that amounts to an admission that the Bible is not an infallible authority in science, and he perjured himself when he signed the ICR’s membership oath.
C. IS CREATIONISM SCIENTIFIC?
It’s interesting to read the ICR literature to see, see if they think creationism is a science. In May 1981, Stephen Jay Gould published an article in Discover called "Evolution as fact and theory," {12} and he pointed out that creationism calls itself a scientific theory. This upset Dr. Gish, who wrote a letter published by the editor that July. He said, "Stephen Jay Gould states that creationists claim that creation is a scientific theory. This is a false accusation."
That’s interesting. Dr. Gish is accusing Stephen Jay Gould of lying. So let’s get to the bottom of it. Now I don’t know anyone better qualified to speak for the ICR’s position than its president, so let’s take another look at Henry Morris’s Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth, where he says [SLIDE 21: Remarkable Birth, p. iv], "Creation, on the other hand, is a scientific theory…." And the ICR’s most widely known book is titled Scientific Creationism {13}. [SLIDE 22: Cover of Scientific Creationism} was Dr. Gould lying as Gish said? Just who is the liar here?
Yet the creationists are not very consistent on this subject. [SLIDE 23: ICR slide no. 13, Chalkboard graphic] The ICR itself made this slide, and here they deny that creationism is a scientific theory. [SLIDE 24: Fossils Say No, p. 21]. In Evolution? The Fossils Say No, Dr. Gish writes:
Creation is of course unproven and unprovable by the methods of experimental science. Neither can it qualify, as a scientific theory, since creation would have been [SLIDE 25: Continuation of quote on p. 22] unobservable and would as a theory be non-falsifiable.
I fully agree with that. [SLIDE 26: Cover of Scientific Creationism] "Scientific creationism" is a contradiction in terms, like "jumbo shrimp." Now since Dr. Gish and I agree, the rest of the debate seems rather superfluous!
III. Evidence of Evolution
[SLIDE 27: Table of categories of evidence] As I contemplate giving you the evidence behind evolutionary theory I almost feel defeated from the start — not because I can’t think of very much but because I can think of too much. It’s frustrating that I can give you so little of such a large and fascinating body of evidence.
A. THE AGE OF THE COSMOS
[SLIDE 28: The Milky Way, from Sagan’s Cosmos, p. 8] First let’s consider how much time has been available for evolution, because as I pointed out to you Dr. Gish suggests the universe is only ten or twenty thousand years old {14}, and Henry Morris rather dogmatically defends this very young age. If that were true it certainly would cast doubt on evolution.
Astronomers have determined, for example, that the Andromeda Galaxy is two million light years away. This means the light takes two million years to get here. For all we know the galaxy might not even be there any more, but if it blew up today we’d have to wait around another two million years for the news to get here. [SLIDE 29: Remote galaxy] Now here’s a galaxy, way up there in the corner, that’s been measured at 12 billion light years away, so by the same token we have to assume the universe is at least 12 billion years old.
What do the creationists make of this? How do they explain how we can see these galaxies if the universe is so young? Henry Morris has a brilliant solution on page 62 of The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth, which he arrives at on the basis of no fewer than 22 Bible quotes. [SLIDE 30: Remarkable, p. 62] In one of these he points out that God made light on Day One, but he didn’t make the lights until Day Four. So Morris thinks God made the light rays from these galaxies in space, already on the way here, three days before he created the sources of the light! If we see a supernova, an exploding star, Morris says the explosion never really happened! He says God created these light rays "carrying information descriptive of historical physical events (such as supernova) which never actually occurred." God just programmed that event into these light rays to fool us and make the universe look older than it really is — just like my satirical hypothesis that he made all of you this evening with a false appearance of age {15}.
[SLIDE 31: ICR slide 22, same illustration as cover of Scientific Creationism] He gets even more extravagant. On page 66 he says the asteroid belts, the scars on the moon, and the rings of Saturn are space debris created by a primeval battle between Michael and Satan. He says, and I quote, "The stars associated with the solar system would be particularly likely to be involved, in view of the heavy concentration of angels … around the planet Earth." You see this is why I put a lot of my time and energy into fighting creationist politics, because I don’t want people like this having much say in what my children learn in high school astronomy.
B. THE ORIGIN OF LIFE
[SLIDE 32: Earth from Apollo] Now given that the universe has been around for billions of years, let’s consider how long life has been around. Is it possible that life could have arisen on the earth by completely natural processes, with no supernatural intervention? The creationists say this would be impossible, so we should take a look at each of the steps that would be necessary to the spontaneous origin of cells and see if it is impossible. The answer, in short, is that scientists so far haven’t found a single insurmountable obstacle to the naturalistic origin of cells.
The first thing you’d have to have would be the basic building blocks for complex organic molecules. For proteins these would be amino acids, and for the hereditary molecules like RNA it would be nucleotides. [SLIDE 33: Earth scenario 4 billion years ago, from Starr & Taggart, Biology.] Geologists can make rational inferences about the atmospheric conditions on earth four billion years ago, [SLIDE 34: Stanley Miller] and every student knows by now that Stanley Miller created a simulation of such conditions in the laboratory. [SLIDE 35: Miller apparatus in action, from Sagan’s Cosmos] The result was that amino acids — the "alphabet" of which proteins are composed — arose from inorganic gases exposed to electrical discharge.
[SLIDE 36: Another scientist with similar apparatus] Many other scientists have now repeated this, and just in case Miller’s assumptions about the composition of the early atmosphere were wrong, they’ve tried many other gas mixtures and other sources of energy. They’ve found that such systems produce nearly every one of the 20 amino acid proteins are made of, all five of the bases that DNA and RNA are made of, and many other organics {16}. What has really impressed the chemists is how easily these organics form {17}, so easily their spontaneous formation on the primeval earth seems almost inevitable. They even form in interstellar dust and have been found in meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites. Even high school students have successfully repeated the Miller-type of experiment for science fair projects.
[SLIDE 37: Flow chart of protobiogenesis] I won’t have time to go into details, but I want to point out that every single step that would be required for the naturalistic origin of cells has been shown experimentally to be not just possible, but probable, in complete contradiction to the wishful thinking of creationists that one or more of these steps would prove impossible. The basic building blocks like amino acids and nucleotides polymerize spontaneously to form short peptides, proteins, and nucleic acids {18}.
We used to be faced with an old chicken-and-egg sort of conundrum in origin-of-life theory. To make an enzyme you’d need a genetic code like RNA, and to make the RNA you would need the enzyme, so which same first? The problem would be solved if proteins can behave genetically and direct their own synthesis, or if nucleic acids can behave enzymatically. Well, we now know that RNA can behave as a catalyst {19} and proteins can act as templates for their own synthesis {20}. So both these molecules possess both the necessary properties and the chicken-egg problem is solved.
[SLIDE 38: Microspheres by LM and TEM] Now can we get from one of these primitive proteins to anything resembling a cell? Yes, we can. They organize themselves into microspheres which do have many of the metabolic properties of living cells {21}. Furthermore, when examined with the electron microscope they show a striking similarity to some of the most primitive unicellular fossils found by paleontologists. [SLIDE 39: Fossil cells resembling protenoid microspheres] Has life been created in the laboratory? The answer depends mainly on your definition of life. I’m not going to say unequivocally yes, but if Dr. Gish says unequivocally no, then I challenge him to come up with a good definition of life that reasonably excludes these. Aristotle said, "Nature makes so gradual a transition from the inanimate to the animate kingdom that the boundary lines which separate them are indistinct and doubtful." Thirteen hundred years later, Isaac Asimov said these microspheres, "while a long way from the completely alive side of the boundary zone, are at least a small way past the nonalive side" {22}.
C. FOSSIL STRATIFICATION
Let’s turn now to the fossil record, because that’s Dr. Gish’s favorite subject. [SLIDE 40: Cover of "Have You Been Brainwashed?" {23}]
Here’s a little comic book that he wrote [SLIDE 41: Page from "Brainwashed"], and the guy who looks like Clark Kent there is supposed to be Duane Gish, and he says "the earliest fossils to be found are in the Cambrian rock strata." Just below where he’s pointing it says "Precambrian, void of fossils." [SLIDE 42: Next Page from "Brainwashed"] On the next page he continues, "Not a single, indisputable, multicellular fossil has been found anywhere in the world in a rock supposedly older than Cambrian rocks." Could that be true? {54}
[SLIDE 43: Chronology of life] Well the Cambrian began 570 million years ago, which is about at the middle of this table, and yet unequivocal multicellular fossils have been found 130 million years older than that. The oldest sedimentary rocks still preserved date from 3.8 billion years old and the oldest fossil bacteria to 3.5 billion. So life had been around for at least 3.5 billion years, and 3 billion of that, or 85% of this time, had already passed by the Cambrian, when Dr. Gish thinks it all began! [SLIDE 44: Burgess Shale specimens {25}] To make matters worse for Dr. Gish, several of those Precambrian life forms were already multicellular. Yet even if these didn’t exist, even if there, even if he were right about the lack of fossils before the Cambrian, it wouldn’t help his case any. Let me show you why.
[SLIDE 45: Fossils Say No p. 42] Here in his book, he defines creationism in terms of "sudden, or fiat, creation described in the first two chapters of Genesis." That is, the basic forms of life all come into existence at once. [SLIDE 46: Fossils Say No p. 42, farther down the page] Moreover, Gish says that no new kinds of animals have come into existence since then, because the Bible says it was a finished creation. But if we look at the fossil record just from the Cambrian until now, we find even it does not support such a claim.
[SLIDE 47: Stratified sedimentary rock] As we examine successive layers of sedimentary rock, we find the jawed fish didn’t appear until 170 million years after the start of the Cambrian, in the Silurian; it was, uh, ferns and amphibians appear 20 million years later in the Devonian: it was another 170 million years before mammals appeared, in the Jurassic; still another 90 million years until the appearance of flowering plants in the Cretaceous; and we don’t see anything in the record we could even remotely call human until just 3 or 4 million years ago. The creation of life, whether by evolutionary or divine means or both, has been a continual process ever since the Cambrian.
All the creationists can do about this is hope to convince people that this is just a false appearance of successive ages, that things are buried in this order for some other reason. [SLIDE 48: Cover of The Genesis Flood] Their usual explanation is to try to blame it on Noah’s flood. [SLIDE 49: Cover of Biology: A Search for Order in Complexity] Here’s a high school textbook they wrote. On page 415 they address this problem and admit that the fossils are indeed arranged as I said. They write [SLIDE 50: Ibid., p. 415]:
This could be explained by the fact most fossil material was laid down by the Flood in Noah’s time. As the flood waters rose, less complex forms, being less able to escape, would be buried first. More complex and more mobile forms could move to higher ground.
Well that’s a very amusing hypothesis. Worms and sponges got buried in Precambrian rock because they couldn’t run up to the mountaintops quickly enough; turtles were a little faster, so they got buried in shallower Triassic rock; and humans got buried last of all because they could escape the flood waters the longest.
But there are a lot of things I don’t understand about this and maybe Dr. Gish can clarify them for us. For example, since people usually built their cities along seacoasts and river valleys, why weren’t they buried first? Even if the inhabitants escaped for a while, it seems like the Precambrian rock should contain most of the buildings and roads, cemeteries full of human remains, clay pots and bronze tools. I’m really baffled, Duane, and I hope you’ll help me understand.
[SLIDE 51: Plant stratigraphy] I also have some questions about why plants are stratified the way they are. No flowering plants are found deeper than Cretaceous rock, but ferns go all the way back to the Carboniferous and algae far into the Precambrian. [SLIDE 52: Plants running from flood water {26}] Here’s what one of my students thought must have happened, according to the creationist hypothesis. [Audience laughter] The flowering plants, like this oak tree, ran uphill to escape the flood, while the gymnosperms like this pine lagged a little behind and got buried in Triassic rock. The flood waters are already lapping at the heels of this fern, and evidently the mosses have already had it. I told him I was sure he must be wrong and I’d get Gish to explain this when I saw him here tonight, so I hope he has a good answer. {27}
D. TRANSITIONAL FOSSILS
[SLIDE 53: Horse phylogeny] Now another significant thing about the fossil record is that it contains abundant evidence of common ancestry between what are now very different kinds of animals. Dr. Gish builds most of his case against evolution on his disbelief in these fossil transitions. Apparently he doesn’t believe there are any. [SLIDE 54: Archaeopteryx fossil] Here’s one for starters. He’ll say Archaeopteryx isn’t a good transition because it had feathers, and that makes it "one hundred percent bird." If I were equally superficial, I could just as well turn it around and say because it had that long jointed tail it was one hundred percent reptile.
[SLIDE 55: Tabulation of Archaeopteryx traits {28}] Here’s a table of 23 anatomical features of Archaeopteryx. Only three of these features, including the feathers, resemble the anatomy of birds. Sixteen of them are reptilian, and four are intermediate between the typical condition in birds and reptiles. [SLIDE 56: Archaeopteryx in tree] If I were to use Dr. Gish’s type of language, I’d have to say this makes Archaeopteryx 13% bird, 70% reptile, and 17% somewhere in between. [SLIDE 57: Flying Archaeopteryx in forest] It’s practically a flying dinosaur.
Now we have a town character in Milledgeville who likes to keep wild animals penned up in tiny little cages in front of his roller rink. One day a colleague of mine visited town with his young son. As I was driving them around we went by the roller rink [SLIDE 58: Grizzly bear], and the owner was out walking his bear down the side of the road on a chain. (Not that bear!) The little boy gazed at this sight as he went by, and continued gazing at the man and his bear through the rear window until they were out of sight. Then he turned around to us and said, "Daddy, that man’s dog looked just like a bear!" [Audience laughter] But that was a perspicacious observation, because bears and dogs are closely related and have a lot of similarity between them. I had a friend with a dog named Bear, and that dog lived up to it.
[SLIDE 59: Cladogram of Carnivora with skulls from Romer] Now if we trace the ancestry of dogs through the fossil record — I’m sorry I can’t point to the screen [which was too far from the podium] to clarify this — but we can find such representatives as Cynodesmus up at the far left dot at B and eventually the record leads us back to the genus Hemicyon at C. I’ve left out a lot of other fossils along the way. Now if we start with the modern bears, we have for example the Ice Age bear Arctodus at D, a succession of others, but again leading back to Hemicyon. What’s this? The same animal is an ancestor of bears and dogs? Exactly. You can see the similarities from the skulls there, and in the next slide we have one of these Miocene animals reconstructed. [SLIDE 60: Miocene bear-dog, from Romer] In fact they’re called "bear-dogs" because they have characteristics of both. In this species the skull is very bear-like except that it was adapted to a more carnivorous diet than modern bears; but the rest of the skeleton, the postcranial portion, is more dog-like. This was essentially an ancient, purely carnivorous bear which chased down its prey like a wolf {29}.
I could multiply examples almost endlessly. There are fossils ances–, fossils ancestral to both snakes and lizards, for example {30}. [SLIDE 61: Jaws of reptile-mammal series] There are so many fossils linking the therapsid reptiles to the mammals that Olson said in 1959 it’s merely an academic question where you choose to draw the line between reptile and mammal. Back at my literature table I have an article by Gene Kritsky, or rather at the table that I’ll have up right after the debate, that describes transitional forms between many orders of insects, published in our journal, Creation/Evolution No. 20 {31}. We have 50 or 60 copies of that issue here today if you want one. I also have an article by Roger Cuffey {32} that includes more than 170 literature citations on transitions between one species and another, from genus to genus, between family and family, and between orders. Ironically, it was written for the Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, an organization which describes itself as "an affiliation of Christian men and women of science." Henry Morris joined the ASA when he first became a creationist, but he broke away because they weren’t dogmatic enough for him. They were too willing to look at evidence and Henry Morris cannot stand the thought of evidence. The ASA has come to feel little doubt that evolution occurs, but they look upon it as God’s method of ongoing creation. [SLIDE 62: The Truth: God or Evolution?] Just goes to show you, you don’t have to be an atheist to accept evolution.
E. DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY
A particularly nice thing about evolutionary theory is that it would remain no less real even if there were no fossils at all. Even if some geological phenomenon assured that dead organisms were never preserved as fossils, there remains so much information to be gotten from living organisms evolution would still be obvious. In fact Darwin’s famous book, The Origin of Species, built the case for evolution almost entirely from evidence found in living organisms, not in the fossils. Out of 479 pages in that book, only 11 percent deal with the fossil evidence. One area of evidence from living species is developmental biology.
[SLIDE 63: Elephants] For example, elephants have two tusks growing from the maxilla or upper jaw. But during the development of an elephant fetus, it grows not only these two but a pair in the lower jaw or mandible. The mandibular tusks are resorbed before birth and only the maxillary tusks remain. Why? I challenge Dr. Gish to come up with a good creationist explanation for that one.
My explanation is this: the ancestors of modern elephants had four tusks and modern elephants still have these residual genes, which are temporarily expressed during embryonic development. [SLIDE 64: Proboscidean Phylogeny] Elephants have left an excellent fossil record, full of transitions Gish says are not existent, so I can predict that if we examine it we’ll find some ancestors with four tusks. [SLIDE 65: Eocene to Oligocene proboscideans] Well, right here in the Eocene to Oligocene, they did have four {33}. Just as I told you in relation to shark jaws, we have here another case where embryonic development and fossil evidence confirm one another.
There are many cases where it has been proven or observed that animals possess ancestral genes which no longer serve a useful function. Sometimes these genes are expressed as evolutionary throwbacks or atavisms. [SLIDE 66: Horse polydactyly] Thus horses have only one toe on each foot although they’re sometimes born with extra toes {34}, and whales don’t normally have hindlimbs although some have been caught with hind legs as much as four feet long {35}. We’ve experimentally found that modern birds still have genes for teeth {34}. The normal embryology of the baleen whales shows they do too, even though the teeth are resorbed before birth like the lower tusks of elephant fetuses {36}.
IV. CREATIONIST BUFFONERY AND CHICANERY
I’ll close now by showing you a few things, mostly out of Dr. Gish’s literature and past debates, that I think are pretty revealing.
A. GISH’S FIRE-BREATHING DINOSAURS
[SLIDE 67: Cover of Gish’s Dinosaurs: Those Terrible Lizards {37}] We’ll warm up with a relatively innocuous case or two. [Holding book up] Now here’s a fine work of scientific comedy by Dr. Gish you might like to look at this evening. One chapter is titled "Dragons and Bombardier Beetles." He starts out by analyzing a passage in the Book of Job and convincing himself there must have been fire-breathing dragons in Biblical time. The only thing he can imagine these to be were certain semi-aquatic dinosaurs with crests on their heads. [SLIDE 68: Gish’s fire-breathing dinosaur] So here’s his conclusion . Presumably there’s propane in this kind of pilot somewhere. [Audience laughter] Kinda shows dinosaurs weren’t as cold-blooded as we thought. Now the caliber of scientific intellect behind this just fills me with awe.
B. MORRIS’ NON-LIVING PLANTS
I never cease to be amazed at what the creationists can extract from the bible and label science! Gish’s fire-breathing dinosaur reminds me of one of Henry Morris’s exercises in Biblical exegesis, where he analyzes a whole bunch of Bible passages and comes to the conclusion that plants are not living organisms. [SLIDE 69: Remarkable, p. 38] After all, he points out that plants were created on Day 3, prior to the creation of "living creatures" on Day 5. So Morris concludes that plants are "merely extremely complex replicating systems of organic chemicals." [SLIDE 70: ICR slide No. 7, man staring at trees] This is another one of those slides the ICR made. In case you’re wondering why their staff botanist is so puzzled, he just read Morris’s book and figured out he’ll have to transfer to the chemistry department. [Audience laughter]
C. LACK OF SCHOLARLY PRODUCTIVITY
These armchair speculations take us back to the point that creationism isn’t a science. This is far cry from empiricism. We’ve looked in vain to see if creationists carry out and publish any real research. My colleagues Eugenie Scott and John Cole did a computer search to look for publications by the ICR scientists. They searched 2.2 million scientific articles published in 3000 different journals over a period of 45 months, and found the creationists had published virtually zip, not even in their own fields of specialization like aerodynamics and so on {38}. Maybe they spend too much of their time dreaming up nonliving plants and fire-breathing dinosaurs.
Now Dr. Gish pretends he’s an expert on fossils, but he’s never contributed a thing to any professional journal of paleontology and I doubt he’s ever done any original research on the subject or even tried to publish. Yet he acts as if he knows more about it than Simpson, Dobzhansky, Gould, and Darwin all rolled into one!
D. THE THEOLOGY OF RADIOACTIVITY
If they don’t publish in the established scientific journals, you’d think they’d at least try to publish a journal of their own, but I haven’t been able to find any in these last eight years or so. I thought I had stumbled on one when I got a sample copy of the Creation Research Society Quarterly. It looked pretty slick and technical at first glance, so I started reading an article on radioactivity in the March 1982 issue {39}. On page 226 I found the following explanation of radioactive decay:
When God the Son squeezed energy into atoms, he squeezed and held the atom so tightly that there were no unstable elements and therefore no radioactivity. At the fall [of Adam and Eve], He relaxed His grip slightly … which affected every atom and allowed some to become unstable, i.e., radioactivity!
[SLIDE 7: Tabloid with Adam and Eve story (Weekly World News 4/12/88)] So much for the CRS Quarterly as a scientific journal. You might as well read this as read the creationist literature. [Strong audience laughter] You can get about the same amount of reliable scientific information from either one.
E. GISH THE CLOSET EVOLUTIONIST
One of the most surprising things about Dr. Gish is how much evolution he believes in. Let me explain. He speaks in Evolution? The Fossils Say No! of something called a "basic kind" or "Genesis kind," based on the first chapter of Genesis. His attempt at a biological definition is this [SLIDE 72: Fossils Say No, p. 34]:
A basic animal or plant kind would include all animals or plants which were truly derived from a single stock. In present-day terms, it would be said that they have shared a common gene pool.
Organisms that share a common gene pool are what biologists define as a species. So whatever Dr. Gish calls a "basic kind" of organism is a group that arose from a common ancestor.
[SLIDE 73: Phylogeny of dog breeds] Gish speaks of the dogs as one of these "basic kinds," and I did some checking into the family Canidae and I found that Gish apparently believes 35 species in 14 genera came from one ancestor. And that’s only the living species, not counting extinct ones.
[SLIDE 74: Frog-eating bat eating frog] Similarly he refers to bats as a "basic kind." That means counting only the living species, he believes one ancestor gave rise to the 850 species alive today, comprising 18 families and 180 genera. So he also believes in evolution from one family to another. [SLIDE 75: Table of "worm-kind"] Most surprisingly, he considers worms to be a single "basic kind"! There are so many different kinds of worms I had to put them on two different slides. [SLIDE 76: "Worm-kind" continued] They add up to more than 28,000 species in 18 phyla, which is a little over half of all phyla in the animal kingdom. So Dr. Gish accepts evolution even from one phylum to another. Once again, I’m led to wonder why we’re even having this debate. It seems we don’t agree that much — [I mean] disagree that much.
F. CREATIONIST "ARKEOLOGY"
Well, enough of that. I’d like to share with you a story about two of Dr. Gish’s previous debates and the quest for Noah’s Ark. Now it’s no real concern to me if they want to go looking for Noah’s Ark. I think it’s a little like going off in search of the golden fleece or the lost city of Atlantis, but I’d rather have the ICR spending money on that than screwing up American textbooks, and I’d rather have the creationists over in Turkey than here. I really wish they’d all go look for the Ark, and stay a long time. [Audience laughter] But what interests me is Dr. Gish’s denials of ICR sponsorship behind these expeditions.
[SLIDE 77: Creation/Evolution sample cover] On May 30, 1985, I was in Los Angeles with Fred Edwords, the editor of our journal Creation/Evolution, and some other colleagues, and Edwords debated Dr. Gish on late night radio. I’d like to play you a segment of that debate, beginning with a listener who’s just phoned in asking about the Ark. [The indented portions below were played by holding a microcassette recorder to the podium microphone.]
[Radio moderator, Ray Bream] …a listener on the phone and Cindy you have a question.
[Caller:] Yes! Um, well, I wondered if Dr. Gish believed that that Ark had been found, or any portion of it?
[Gish:] No, I don’t believe it has, Cindy, I …
He goes on for a while saying he thinks it’s all hearsay evidence, and nobody has found any trace of the Ark, and then we hear Mr. Edwords:
[Edwords:] it is true that the Institute for Creation Research finances expeditions there….
[Gish, interrupting:] No, that is not, no, you’re mistaken Mr. Edwords. The Institute for Creation Research does not, and has never, financed any expeditions.
Okay so Dr. Gish strongly denies any ICR sponsorship of these expeditions.
[SLIDE 78: Creation/Evolution Newsletter sample cover] The next day, I drove down to San Diego to visit the ICR with Karl Fezer, who edits our newsletter. We got there pretty late at night, but there was a secretary working overtime. She opened the ICR’s little museum for us, and then she went home and asked us if we’d lock up when we were through. [SLIDE 79: Karl Fezer at ICR] So here we were, two inveterate anti-creationists wandering around the ICR in the middle of the night, and we came upon a little exhibit on Noah’s Ark. It had one of [SLIDE 80: Ark exhibit at ICR] those machines that plays a tape cassette and shows slides. We turned it on, and after many pictures of wooden models of Noah’s Ark and scenery at Mt. Ararat, slide number 64 said:
The Institute for Creation Research has sponsored expeditions to Mt. Ararat in Turkey where the Ark may still be preserved in the icy glaciers.
Concluding the program, the sound track said,
We at ICR are looking forward to the time when we will be able to send in a complete team of researchers … and scientists to find the Ark….
Well we didn’t have a recorder with us then, but we backed it up and took down a verbatim transcript of it and published this in our newsletter.
Then on February 6, 1986, Dr. Gish came to Georgia to debate my colleague David Schwimmer. In the question/answer period I confronted Dr. Gish with the contradiction between his denial and ICR’s enthusiastic affirmation of sponsorship. He accused me of making this stuff up. Let’s listen to a recorded excerpt from the Gish-Schwimmer debate. I had just asked Dr. Gish to account for the discrepancy, and here’s his reply:
[Gish, on tape:] Dr. John Morris, who is now with our Institute, has gone over to Turkey, beginning in 1972, to search for what he believes may be, for some evidence for the existence of the Ark. Right from the beginning, the regulations, the rules of our Institute, he would not use any money from our Institute. … If there’s any statement to the contrary it’s erroneous, I know, I’m the vice president of the Institute for Creation Research, and believe me I know where the money goes. [Audience applause]
[Saladin:] Just what does your tape cassette mean when it says the ICR sponsors these expeditions? [Applause] That’s the exact wording….
[Gish, interrupting:] We don’t. We don’t sponsor these expeditions.
[Saladin, interrupting:] Well that’s what your slide show ….
[Gish, interrupting:] well I’m sorry, that’s erroneous.
Okay does the ICR sponsor expeditions to Ararat or doesn’t it? One of us isn’t telling the truth. Maybe this will help clear the matter up. [SLIDE 81: Cover of November 1986 Acts & Facts] This is the ICR’s monthly newsletter, Acts & Facts. [SLIDE 82: Page 3 of September 1983 issue] And here in September 1983 issue we have an article on page 3 titled, "ICR Expedition Leaves for Mount Ararat." It says "The Ararat project is a special research project of the ICR…." [SLIDE 83: Page 2, October 1984] Then in the October 1984 issue, an article called "Mt. Ararat Trip 1984." This one goes on at some length about their failures to find the Ark and the mistaken reports that had appeared in the newspapers. It talks repeatedly about "the ICR group" on Ararat. [SLIDE 84: Page 5 of November 1986 Acts & Facts] Finally in November 1986 is an article called "ICR Field Research, 1986." On page 5 it says:
The ICR has long been involved in the search for Noah’s Ark on Mt. Ararat, under the leadership of Dr. John Morris. Although no ICR personnel were on the mountain this summer, ICR did sponsor a group of Turkish climbers who spent many days on Ararat….
Now Duane, you accused me of lying about this the last time I saw you. Which side of your mouth are you going to talk out of tonight?
G. MISQUOTING AND MISREPRESENTING THE LITERATURE
Dr. Gish has a nasty habit of taking quotes from various scientists and coyly leaving out key passages just to make them look as if they said something entirely different. [SLIDE 85: Eocene bat] For example I have here an ICR tract, on my table, called "The origin of mammals," by Dr. Gish. He quotes A.S. Romer’s textbook, Vertebrate Paleontology, page 338, as follows: "Bats appear full fledged in both hemispheres in the Middle Eocene." Dr. Gish clearly adheres, intends that the reader take this to mean bats first appeared then and were already fully developed, with no trace of flightless ancestors.
What Dr. Gish doesn’t tell you is that several pages earlier, Romer has a whole chapter on bats and insectivores, and on page 212 Romer points out there are fossil bats or ancestors of them before the Eocene. True, bats are fully developed by the middle Eocene, but they have an evolutionary history going back 10 or 15 million years before that, where they become indistinguishable from some mammals in the order insectivora. Romer says:
It is possible that some of the known insectivorous genera of the Paleocene were bats or at least types ancestral to them. But so close are some of the bats to the insectivores in dental characters that we cannot confirm or reject such suggestions.
So bats and insectivores were so similar in the Paleocene to early Eocene they can’t even be told apart with any certainty {40}.
[SLIDE 86: Illustrations of homology and analogy] Here’s another example. Evolution bases its argument in part on the homologous structures of various animals, and Gish usually tries to discredit this by quoting a paper by Gavin De Beer titled "Homology, an Unsolved Problem" {41}. When I debated him in 1984, Dr. Gish had this to say about the De Beer paper: "The evidence does not indicate that these things have been inherited from a common ancestor." Well there is no statement even remotely similar to that in this paper, either in language or in implication. What does de Beer actually say? On page 7 he discusses the evolution of the mammalian inner ear bones from certain bones of the jaw joint of reptiles, and he says,
This is one of the most demonstrative examples of how comparative anatomy can determine the homology of structures inherited from common ancestors in evolu—-, evolution.
There is—- And on page 8 he writes:
There is no doubt whatever that the forelimb in the newt and the lizard and the arm of man are strictly homologous, inherited with modification from the pectoral fin of fishes 500 million years ago.
Again, Dr. Gish is caught in a flagrant lie about what other authors have written.
A good many of my colleagues are sick and tired of Dr. Gish taking their literature and carefully leaving out certain words to make it look as if they said something completely different. Stephen Gould, Isaac Asimov, Richard Lewontin, Derek Ager, and several other scientists Dr. Gish has quoted in order to try to make his position look better have been furious at the way Dr. Gish has left out crucial words and sentences to reverse their meaning, as you see with my examples from De Beer and Romer {42}.
[SLIDE 87: Noah’s Ark cartoon, "All aboard!"] Dr. Gish, I believe you owe this audience some explanations, so I’ll turn the floor over to you. By And how are your jugular veins? [Applause]
[Moderator:] Thank you Dr. Saladin. We will now hear the affirmation of the theory of special creation, by Dr. Gish.
ANNOTATIONS
These annotations give supportive references and further elaborate on some of the points made in my opening statement.
1. Ronald L. Numbers. 1982. Creationism in 20th-century America. Science 218:538-544.
2. Marvin L. Lubenow. 1983. From Fish to Gish. San Diego: CLP Publishers. A Colorado pastor’s adulatory account of Gish’s and Morris’s debates.
3. The ICR-produced slides used in my presentation were from: Anon. 1977. "Creation and evolution: a comparison of two scientific models" (76 slides and audio cassette). San Diego: Institute for Creation Research.
4. Marshall & Sandra Hall. 1974. The Truth: God or Evolution? Nutley, NJ: Craig Press.
5. Dr. William P. Wall, a vertebrate paleontologist in my department, provided this example from a mid-1970s journal, but we did not locate the original paper by Lund before this debate.
6. E. O. Wilson, F. M. Carpenter, and W.L. Brown. 1967. The first Mesozoic ants, with the description of a new subfamily. Psyche 74: 1-19.
7. Duane T. Gish. 1979. Evolution? The Fossils Say No!, 3rd ed. San Diego: Creation-Life Publishers.
8. Henry M. Morris. 1972. The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth. San Diego: Creation-Life Publishers.
9. A painting by Robert Mottar (16th century), from: F. Clark Howell. 1965. Early Man (Life Natural Library). New York: Time, Inc.
10. I do not wish to go so far as to say nothing about "creation-science" is unfalsifiable. If it were, an anticreationist debater would be stymied, since much of the debate is a matter of showing evidence that falsifies particular aspects of the creationist paradigm (e.g., a 10,000-year-old- universe or simultaneous creation of all life). But in debate, Gish studiously avoids these stipulations of his model and can scarcely, if at all, be goaded into defending the views he has published. His public debate premise is only, "In the beginning, God created". This, if one assumes an omnipotent deity, is unfalsifiable.
11. The premises and supportive Biblical citations given were as follows: the earth does not move (Ps. 93:1, 104:5); the sun revolves around the earth (Josh. 10:12-14); stars exist for the purpose of illuminating the earth (Gen. 1:14-18); the earth is disk-shaped (1 Thess. 4:16; Rev 1:7); the earth has four corners (Rev. 7:1); the earth has four ends (Is. 40:28); the earth floats in a sea (Ps. 24:1-2; 136:6); the earth is supported on pillars (Job 9:6; Ps. 75:3); the sky is a solid dome (Gen. 1:6-8; Job 37:18; Ps. 104:2); it rains through windows in this dome (Gen. 7:11; Ps. 78:23); pi equals exactly 3.000… rather than 3.1415… (I Kings 7:23); insects have only four legs (Lev. 11:20); badgers and hares chew cud (Lev. 11:5-6; Deut. 14:7); bats are birds (Lev. 11:13-19; Deut. 14:11-18). I derive these examples from my own readings of the Bible and by sharing such examples with others who come across them, and would welcome new examples from others. The point of this is not criticism of the Bible but to point out that it was written from the standpoint of the cosmological and biological knowledge prevalent in its time, and therefore cannot be used as a literal scientific authority today. In reference to this see also the religious leaders quoted in my closing statement.
12. Stephen Jay Gould. 1981. Evolution as fact and theory. Discover. May, p. 34-37.
13. Henry M. Morris, ed. 1974. Scientific Creationism . San Diego: Creation-Life Publishers.
14. Duane T. Gish and Richard B. Bliss. 1981. Summary of scientific evidence for creation. Impact Nos. 95-96 (May-June), p. vi.
15. This is well-known as the "omphalos argument" after Omphalos by Philip Gosse (1857). In its original form the argument was over whether Adam would have had a navel (omphalos is Greek for navel). In contemporary form the issue is whether God would have created things to have an appearance of being older than they really are. Creationists widely accept this view of a deliberately deceptive God. (And there is arguable biblical support for such divine dishonesty at II Thess. 2:11.) For further discussion see: Robert Price. 1980. The return of the navel, the "omphalos" argument in contemporary creationism. Creation/Evolution. 11:27.
16. A good review of these experiments is: L.S. Dillon. 1978. The Genetic Mechanism and the Origin of Life. New York: Plenum. Chapter 1 is an impressive overview of the great number of such experiments that have been done, the wide variety of biological molecules that form in such experiments, and the ease with which they form (see note 17 below). The book gives hundreds of references to the primary research literature on the evolutionary subject. For other reviews see: (1) Sidney W. Fox. 1984. Creationism and evolutionary protobiogenesis. Pp. 194-239 in Science and Creationism (Ashley Montagu, ed.). New York: Oxford. (2) Sidney W. Fox. 1984. Proteinoid experiments and evolutionary theory. Pp. 15-60 in Beyond Neo-Darwinism (M. Ho and P.T. Sanders, ed.). New York: Academic Press. (3) Sidney W. Fox and Kenneth Dose. 1977. Molecular Evolution and the Origin of Life. New York: Marcel Dekker. (4) Duane L. Rohlfind and A.I. Oparin. 1972. Molecular Evolution: Prebiological and Biological. New York: Plenum.
17. Creationists sometimes assert that the only conditions under which such organics form are unrealistically high temperatures or other extreme conditions. This is now amply shown to be untrue. In Dillon (note 16 above), for example, we read of a number of cases where amino acids form from carbohydrates, peptides from amino acids, etc., in solutions no warmer than bathwater and with sunlight as the only necessary source of energy. Fox (reference 1 under note 16) specifically cites the creationist works in which this and other misunderstandings are stated, and provides literature citations which refute the creationist claims including this one that extremely high temperatures are necessary.
18. My mention of these abiogenesis experiments was intentionally sketchy because I had hoped Gish would rise to the bait and we would come back to the subject in the rebuttal period. When I mentioned these findings in our 1984 debate, he said, "Well, I can hardly believe my ears here tonight, to hear some of these statements that you have just been exposed to. Totally unscientifically, totally unscientific, and totally untrue. Miller, Stanley Miller, or no one else has ever formed a protein in any sort of origin of life experiment, it’s never been done, and no one has ever come close to it." And later in the debate he added, "That is absolute, absurd nonsense! They don’t — you cannot form a protein by any such process. Look, protein chemistry is my field, I’m a protein chemist. … Nothing like that happens. That is pure outright nonsense. Nothing like that happens." In 1984 I did not have the literature with me to expose Gish’s lack of knowledge of contemporary protein chemistry, but this time I had brought hundreds of literature citations with me to document my point. Gish took only a disappointingly timid nibble at my "Gish-bait" this time, however. Perhaps by this time he had read some of the review literature cited in my Note 16. Since so much of the primary research literature had been published many years before, however, it was inexcusable for Gish to make such claims in 1984, especially citing his "expertise" in protein chemistry to lend them spurious credibility.
19. The self-catalytic activity of RNA was reported by Kelly Kruger et al. in Cell, 31:147-157 (1982) and summarized at length by Roger Lewin in Science, 26 November 1982, p. 278.
20. The ability of protein to act as a template for the synthesis of duplicate protein molecules — that is, in a primitive way, to act as its own "genetic code" — is discussed in the Dillon reference in Note 16 above and in: Hanfred Elgen et al. 1981. The origin of genetic information. Scientific American. 244(4):88-118.
21. For the ability of abiogenic proteinoids to self-organize into protocells see the two Fox 1984 references cited in Note 16. These also point out the numerous metabolic, electrophysiological, and other characteristics of living cells possessed by these primitive microspheres.
22. Isaac Asimov. 1967. Is Anyone There? New York: Avon Books, p. 86. Cited by Fox in Montagu (see Note 16).
23. Duane T. Gish. 1974. Have You Been Brainwashed? Seattle: Life Messengers.
24. Although Gish’s Have You Been Brainwashed? is now 14 years old, and Gish did admit in this debate to multicellular Precambrian fauna, it was inexcusable even in 1974 for any self-professed expert on the fossil record to make such a claim. These Precambrian (Prephanerozoic) fossils had already been known for many years by that time. See for example discussion and references in: Lynn Margulis. 1981. Symbiosis and Cell Evolution. San Fransisco: W.H. Freeman.
25. I picked this "milieu-setting: slide somewhat hastily and did not mean to imply a Precambrian age for the Burgess shales, which are about 550 million years old (mid-Cambrian). This slide was made from: David Attenborough. 1979. Life on Earth. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., page 52. For discussion of the Precambrian metazoans see: Preston Cloud and Martin F. Glaessner. 1982. The Ediacaran period and system: Metazoa inherit the earth. Science, 27 August.
26. The cartoon used for this slide was drawn by Georgia College art and biology student Scott Fuss in 1984 for the first Saladin-Gish debate and has since been used by some other debaters. It depicts Noah’s ark, the rising flood waters, and a hill emerging from the water. An anthropomorphic oak tree is shown running up the hill, followed by a pine, followed by a nervous-looking fern with the flood water lapping at its heels (or its rhizomes).
27. The creationists do attempt some explanations of stratigraphy besides what some of us call their "upward mobility hypothesis," described by me in the debate. Henry Morris tends to favor the "hydraulic selection hypothesis" and Duane Gish the "ecological zonation hypothesis," both of which can easily be made to look just as silly as the upward mobility hypothesis. I had hoped Gish would rise to this bait as he rather indignantly did in 1984. Perhaps he sensed the trap; in any event, I was deprived of the pleasure of setting the hook.
28. The table of traits which I produced for this slide was based on information compiled by Frank Awbrey and William Thwaites of San Diego State University and printed in: F. Awbrey and W. Thwaites. 1981. Evolution vs. Creation. San Diego State University: Aztec Lecture Notes, pages 23-27.
29. For discussion of bear and dog phylogeny and the Miocene bear-dogs (source of my slide), see: Alfred S. Romer. 1966. Vertebrate Paleontology, 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pages 236-238.
30. For discussion of the common ancestry of snakes and lizards see Romer (op. cit.), page 314.
31. Gene Kritzsky. 1987. Fossil insects: pests of creation. Creation/Evolution XX:13-19.
32. Roger J. Cuffey. 1972. Paleontologic evidence and organic creation. Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation. Reprinted in the Montagu book cited in Note 16. Cuffey has compiled an impressive tabular synopsis and bibliography of transitional fossils bridging species to species as well as higher taxa to each other. As a less doctrinaire creationist than Duane Gish, Cuffey has given a resounding refutation of Gish’s adamant claims about the lack of fossil transitions.
33. I am indebted for the example of elephant mandibular tusks to David J. Cotter, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Biology at Georgia College. The slide of proboscidean phylogeny used here was given to me by Kenneth Miller of Brown University, and the slide of Eocene to Oligocene proboscideans was photographed by me from Romer’s Vertebrate Paleontology. I would appreciate any reader who can provide a good literature citation on the fetal development of the mandibular tusks.
34. Stephen Jay Gould. 1983. Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes. New York: W.W. Norton.
35. Ernest C. Conrad. 1983. True vestigial structures in whales and dolphins. Creation/Evolution X:8-13.
36. Frederick Edwords. 1983. Those amazing animals: the whales and dolphins. Creation/Evolution X:1-7.
37. Duane T. Gish. 1977. Dinosaurs: Those Terrible Lizards. San Diego: Creation-Life Publishers. Gish justifies his belief in fire-breathing dinosaurs not only on the basis of the Book of Job, but also by comparison to the bombardier beetle, which defends itself with a puff of steaming hydroquinone solution. Gish seems to see no distinction between flames shooting from the nostrils of a dinosaur, and a little puff of steam from the abdomen of a beetle. For related discussion of Gish’s misunderstanding of the bombardier beetle see: Christopher Gregory Weber. 1980. The bombardier beetle myth exploded. Creation/Evolution 111:1-5. Creationist Robert Kofahl and Chris Weber further debated this matter in Issue V of the journal.
38. Henry P. Cole and Eugenie C. Scott. 1982. Creation-science and scientific research. Phi Delta Kappan. April, pages 557-558. I erroneously attributed it to John Cole in the debate. Their study was reprinted in the March 1983 issue of Memorandum to Committees of Correspondence, a bulletin now known as Creation/Evolution Newsletter.
39. Everett H. Peterson. 1982. Creation, why and how? Creation Research Society Quarterly. 18:223-226, 243. This journal has a slick and superficially scientific appearance, but as one begins reading any issue of it, it gives the impression of a bunch of amateurs trying to play scientist.
40. For further discussion of bat evolution see Gish’s opening statement and my footnote to that reply.
41. Gavin de Beer. 1971. Homology: An Unsolved Problem. New York: Oxford University Press, 16 pp. (Oxford Biology Readers, No. 11). For further discussion of Gish’s misrepresentation of the De Beer paper see: William Thwaites. 1980. Another favorite creationist argument: "the genes for homologous structures are not homologous." Creation/Evolution 11:43-45.
42. John R. Cole. 1981. Misquoted scientists respond. Creation/Evolution VI: 34-44. Short replies by Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldridge, Stephen Gould, David Raup, Laurie Godfrey, Isaac Asimov, and Ashley Montagu to the misquotations and misrepresentations of their work by Gish and other creationists.