Part 3 - Darwins Dilemma, Creationist Propaganda and Corrupt Christians

The previous post is available here.

Having ‘proved’ that fossils predating the Cambrian radiation are non-existent, and that all modern animal phyla appeared out of nowhere - in what the narrator describes as a “burst of creativity” - Darwin’s Dilemma the movie, then proceeds to ridicule Darwin the scientist. In their distorted reasoning, the creationist filmmakers think that if they can discredit a scientist that lived 150 years ago in Victorian England, somehow the audience will be convinced that the whole of modern science is erroneous. To initiate the strike against their biology bent Beelzebub, another carefully cropped quote is thrown to screen;

“Nothing distressed him more than the Cambrian explosion…” - Stephen J. Gould

For some unknown reason, creationists love Stephen Gould. Their infatuation may have something to do with a distorted view of Gould’s ‘punctuated equilibrium’ model; perhaps somehow the idea of a long stasis followed accelerated change translates to divine creation in the minds of simpletons? At any rate, Stephen Meyer or some other failed scientist from the Discovery Institute must have gotten this Gouldian morsel shorthand in a text message. They certainly didn’t get it from the page 238 of The Panda’s Thumb, the book in which Gould uses it to illustrate the lack of discrepancy between long past Darwinian predictions and modern paleontology.

It is certainly true that Darwin struggled with the lack of fossils predating the Cambrian radiation, speaking to intermediate fossils in Chapter 10 of the Origin of Species he wrote;

“Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against my theory.”

Of course, as with the Richard Dawkins quote yesterday and the Gould quote above, Darwin is here using the presupposition of a question as a lead to his explanation. And although the film in question is in the habitat of mining only the presumptive portions of these literary tools, the authors’ answers usually follow. In the case of Darwin’s true dilemma alluded to in the Origin of Species quote, he explains later in chapter 10 that,

“The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record…. we continually overrate the perfection of the geological record, and falsely infer, because certain genera or families have not been found beneath a certain stage, that they did not exist before that stage. In all cases positive paleontological evidence may be implicitly trusted; negative evidence is worthless, as experience has so often shown…
Those who believe that the geological record is in any degree perfect, will undoubtedly at once reject my theory. For my part, following out Lyell's metaphor, I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept and written in a changing dialect. Of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved, and of each page, only here and there a few lines. Each word of the slowly-changing language, more or less different in the successive chapters, may represent the forms of life, which are entombed in our consecutive formations, and which falsely appear to have been abruptly introduced. On this view the difficulties above discussed are greatly diminished or even disappear.”

Basically stated, what Darwin was implying was that, due to erosional processes, fossils are rare in the first place, and the oldest of all-the-fossils on Earth are rarer still. And he further predicts that despite these natural conditions, predecessor fossils are there and will be found as time proceeds and paleontological excavations are made. Darwin was right on-target with this prediction. In the 150 years since publication of the Origin of Species, numerous fossils have been unearthed, including those of the Ediacara biota, some from the Doushantuo formation and even the fascinating Markuelia fossil embryos – all predating the radiation vent! But, alas I guess these fine fossils don’t count… After all, as Paul Chien the head of the Discovery Institute’s paleontology section tells us in the film,

“to the paleontologist, the lack of intermediate fossils is well known.”

And Paul Chien should know, because he’s Chinese! As he later explains, “the Chinese community is honest about these problems and tries to explain them outside of Darwin.”

In addition to having an Asian heritage on his side, Paul Chien is a fellow of the Discovery Institute where he helps ‘spread the good word’ by translating Christian pseudo-science into the Chinese language. The worst part of Chien’s resume is that he’s also a biology professor at the University of San Francisco – tsk tsk San Fran.

Chien’s appearance marks a second transition point in the film’s diabolical plot. Leaving the fossils in the past, the modern sciences of evolutionary development and molecular genetics take center stage. In concert with this changeover is implementation of a new strategy – drawn the audience with science-ish jargon and convince them of life’s irreducible complexity. Leading this new front is Steven Meyer himself; holstered at his side is information theory. Brandishing this weapon he aims to shoot down “Neo-Darwinist storytelling” – by showing that modern genetics has nothing to do with evolution…


CONCLUDED - IN PART 4



Condon, D. (2005). U-Pb Ages from the Neoproterozoic Doushantuo Formation, China Science, 308 (5718), 95-98 DOI: 10.1126/science.1107765


Dong, X., Donoghue, P., Cunningham, J., Liu, J., & Cheng, H. (2005). The anatomy, affinity, and phylogenetic significance of Markuelia Evolution Development, 7 (5), 468-482 DOI: 10.1111/j.1525-142X.2005.05050.x

Morris, SC (1995). Ecology in deep time Trends in Ecology & Evolution , 10 (7), 290-294

Part 2 - Darwins Dilemma, Creationist Propaganda and Corrupt Christians

Before picking up with the Richard Dawkins quote used to close yesterday’s post (Part 1 Available Here), I’d like to provide a little more background on some of the nefarious figures that contributed to bringing the fundamentalist film Darwin’s Dilemma to my living room.

The movie was produced by the Discovery Institute’s associate organization ‘Illustra Media.’ In this instance I use the phrase ‘associate organization’ very loosely because for all practical purposes Illustra Media is synonymous with the group known as ‘Discovery Media.’ Both media groups, Illustra and Discovery, receive the bulk of their funding from the Discovery Institute and both have Stephen Meyer as a lead consultant. Meyer is one of the Discovery Institutes original founders, and a key organizer of the intelligent design faction. For those readers unfamiliar with the Discovery Institute itself, I’d strongly encourage you to view Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, which details a 2004 federal court case in Dover, Pennsylvania. The NOVA documentary is provided free online by the Public Broadcast Service and very accurately summarizes the Discovery Institute’s deceitful and underhanded attacks on science education. To provide a little insight as to the Institute’s shameless objectives, consider that their mission statement outright states that the “point of view Discovery brings to its work includes a belief in God-given reason;” and that Discovery Media includes in its mission “to utilize every form of available media to present the reality of God's existence through compelling scientific evidence and academic research". Irrespective of one’s personal religious beliefs, sound scientifically minded inquiry can not be born of blatant biases and preconceived notions of causation. This is simply not how science works. To say that the Discovery Institute may be susceptible to high rates of confirmation bias is giving them too much credit. Speaking of biases, yesterday I reported that my in-home showing of Darwin’s Dilemma was courtesy of the Trinity Broadcast Network (TBN). Although you might be inclined to think that TBN suffers from the same religious biases as the Discovery Institute, that doesn’t appear to be the case; TBN has an altogether different bias – one that favors cold hard cash.

The Trinity Broadcast Network is the largest Christian television network provider in the United States and has media holdings in more than 70 other countries. I can sum up TBN credentials in six words- “It was founded by Jim Bakker.” Yes, Jim Bakker the televangelist, Jim Bakker the accused rapist, and yes Jim Bakker the convicted felon. If more evidence of the TBN’s ill repute is needed ponder that they are proud proponents of the religious practice known as the ‘prosperity gospel.’ Basically, the prosperity gospel teaches that a sinner can be forgiven for her/his wrongs if she/he donates money to the network. Yes, TBN is selling admission into heaven! I’m not sure what the price is though… And unfortunately, I can’t tell you how much income TBN makes from selling moral amnesty, because they refuse to disclose financial information for public inspection, or for that matter to Christian watchdog groups. So, in addition to dumbing-down its adherents with fake-science, TBN also steals their cash. In the science community this is referred to as a positive feedback cycle; the more dumberest you become, the more money you lose.

Getting back to the science…

Yesterday, I described how the high production quality of Darwin’s Dilemma allows for a visually exciting and even captivating viewing experience. As scary as this may be to admit, it’s absolutely true. The film is by far the ‘best’ anti-science propaganda film I’ve ever seen. The animation, narration and scene transitions are smooth and coherent; pseudo-science and misinformation aside, the film is good enough to rival most any that would appear on National Geographic or the History Channel. In regards to the science content presented in the film, at least up to the Richard Dawkins quote, a skeptic with some understanding of evolution and paleontology will see it for what it is – creationism; however, if seen through an uncritical eye it would appear wholly informative. Indeed, even those with a general understanding of science may at first be drawn to accepting the film’s premise; this in large part due to the awe and wonder inherent to the Cambrian Radiation itself. However, at about forty minutes into the feature the film takes a creationist turn; this happens right around the Dawkins quote. After Simon Conway Morris’s critique of the pre-radiation fossil record, the screen gives itself to the quote;


“It is as though they were just planted there without any evolutionary history”

-Richard Dawkins


In my assessment, this snippet is the first serious indicator of the film’s underlying evil purpose. Not only does the above Dawkins line – while out of context - seem to suggest the existence of a ‘planter’ and a shortfall in evolutionary knowledge, but it also happens to be one of the most frequently ‘abused’ evolution quotes in existence. It has been used and reused by creationists and fundamentalists the world over. This assertion can be verified by simply copying and pasting the whole sentence into a Google search engine; undertaking this exercise, I got back more than 10,000 hits. Incidentally, the quote itself has been clipped from page 229 of Dawkins’s 1996 book The Blind Watchmaker; when in context the quote is used in explaining that both he (Dawkins) and Stephen Gould agree that one, the pre-radiation fossils are few, and two, that the thin fossil record is no way indicative of divine intervention. Far from an admission of divine creation, the quote is used in The Blind Watchmaker to affirm that even biologists with differing perspectives on evolutionary mechanisms (see the citation below for an independent assessment of their incompatibilities) wholeheartedly endorse evolutionary agents as instigators of the Cambrian Explosion. At any rate, in Darwin’s Dilemma the Dawkins quote is used simply as a cap to Simon Conway Morris’s testimony, from there the film moves on to Creationism’s most hated of scientists – Charles Darwin. There we learn about the origins of Darwin's 'dilemma.'


ONCE AGAIN, CONTINUED - HERE's Part 3


Reference:
Shanahan, T. (2001). Methodological and contextual factors in the Dawkins/Gould dispute over evolutionary progress Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 32 (1), 127-151 DOI: 10.1016/S1369-8486(00)00025-X

Darwin’s Dilemma, Creationist Propaganda and Corrupt Christians

Earlier this week the Trinity Broadcasting Network aired the Discovery Institute’s film ‘Darwin’s Dilemma: the mystery of the Cambrian fossil record.’ The feature length, allegedly-documentary movie has been promoted as an exploration “of the Cambrian explosion and the scientific controversy that still surrounds it.” Because of the evolutionary and science-based subject matter dealt with by the film, I thought that a private screening was in order, so when Saturday afternoon rolled around, I parked myself on the couch with a couple slices of cold pizza and hit play on my DVR’s remote…

Wow, the film really blew me away! To set the stage, let me first explain that being an enthusiast of science and nature documentaries, my DVR is pre-programmed to search and record all shows that include certain key words in their descriptions or titles. Occasionally, these key words, like ‘evolution’ or ‘fossils’ for example, result in the unintentional recording of creationist crap, and more often than not, this crap comes from the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN). About twice a week, the TBN broadcasts ‘science education’ programs with devious names like “Teaching Origins Objectively;’ but these shows don’t usually pose much of an inconvenience. They’re not a problem because I’ve conditioned myself to delete these recordings the very second that a party line or half-truth is identified – thus I rarely need to endure more than five minutes of these mostly low quality, poorly produced and obviously disingenuous shows.

Getting back to ‘Darwin’s Dilemma,’ as I started to watch, I was instantly caught off guard by the film’s production quality! The imagery was great; at the opening there was a well-animated Anomalocaris swimming happily in the Cambrian sea, and then after failing to out-swim an undersea avalanche, he was vividly buried and fossilized. Anomalocaris was an ancient animal that resembled a cross between a trilobite and a modern shrimp; it inhabited the world’s oceans about 520 million years ago. Comforting me through the Anomalocaris’s life and death drama was a spirited music score and a narrator that spoke with clarity and ease, like a wise grandfather detailing a long forgotten tale. As I continued to watch the paleontological spectacle unfold, I listened carefully to my knowledgeable patriarch, waiting for mention of a god, intelligent design or other clue to the movie’s shifty agenda – but it didn’t come.

I continued to watch...

Then a quote appeared on the screen;

"The Cambrian Explosion was the most remarkable and puzzling event in the history of life…” -Stephen Jay Gould

At first glance I thought that the creationist gig was up; but then, after a moment’s thought, I found myself in agreement with statement. The Cambrian Explosion was a pretty significant event, and although Stephen Gould’s quotes are often mined and used out-of-context by religious evil-doers, this wasn’t the case in this situation… The Cambrian Radiation was – and is – puzzling. I kept watching.

The story line moved from the demise of the introductory Anomalocaris to the history of the famous Burgess Shale. The narrator, while seamlessly transitioning between historic black and white photographs, elaborated on the rarity of unearthing quality fossils from geologic strata, he then verbally underlined the scientific value of those recovered from Canada’s Burgess Shale. He discussed Charles Walcott’s field seasons and the paleontological digs key to uncovering the mysteries of the Cambrian metazoans.

Then the film flashes to Cambridge University where we meet evolutionary biologist and renowned Cambrian expert Dr. Simon Conway Morris, whom promptly describes the Burgess fossils as “miraculous.”

I cringed.

I’d be willing to wager that Morris didn’t intend the word “miraculous” in the same sense that it is frequently used by the religious minded, but non-the-less I felt a deepening sickness come over me. Simon Conway Morris is a widely respected scientist, and he has openly explained that he participated in the ‘Darwin’s Dilemma’ film while unaware that it was to be torqued and twisted into pseudo-science. Unfortunately, had I not known about Morris’s plight, his cropped dialogue in the film would seem nothing short of fully endorsing the Intelligent Design scheme - truly a shame.

As the Cambridge interview proceeded, Simon Conway Morris went on to congenially list many of the questions and difficulties surrounding the study of the Cambrian Radiation Event. As I listened to his enthusiastic detailing of a lacking pre-Cambrian fossil record, poorly understood Proterozoic ecology and complications arising from the embryological development of animal body designs, I became aware that although Morris has hundreds of published articles to his credit - most of which offer answers to the very questions he lists in the film - none of his studies or findings are being mentioned. As one example of many, I recall a 1998 piece in which he specifically criticized “blanket assertions” about the Cambrian radiation. In the film Morris was being portrayed as an expert with no answers; furthermore, in the process of describing the past blockades to science’s Cambrian comprehension, he was actively shooting down out-dated notions about the radiation event. The end result of the exchange was a sneaky, almost imperceptible ‘time shift’ during which Morris’s critiques of science-past are superimposed on science-current. His onscreen persona is presented as asserting that modern biology has no way of explaining what happened during the Cambrian Radiation. In primary support of this false-claim is a reported lack of fossils predating the Cambrian diversification – a lack of intermediate fossils between pre-Cambrian protozoa and the rise of the Cambrian’s multicellular animals.

Just as Morris’s on-film character convinces the audience that the Cambrian fossils are “miraculous” and without predecessors, a new quote takes the screen;

“It is as though they were just planted there without any evolutionary history…” -Richard Dawkins


CONTINUED IN PART 2 - HERE


Morris, S. (1998). The evolution of diversity in ancient ecosystems: a review Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 353 (1366), 327-345 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.1998.0213