Why Darwin Matters_ The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer [41]
The icons of evolution are fallacies, fakes, or frauds.
Creationists of yore used to bleat about how the history of evolutionary science is nothing more than a catalogue of mistaken theories and overthrown ideas. Nebraska Man, Piltdown Man, Calaveras Man, and Hesperopithecus—all once claimed by scientists to be proof of human evolution—have all been shown to be mistakes or frauds. Clearly science cannot be trusted.
Intelligent Design theorists have modernized this argument through Jonathan Wells’s book Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution Is Wrong.52 Wells identifies ten “icons” of evolution, presented regularly in textbooks, that he says are mistakes, myths, or frauds:
1. The Miller-Urey Experiment, which demonstrates the chemical origins of the building blocks of life.
2. Darwin’s Tree of Life, which shows that all living organisms come from a common ancestor.
3. Homology in Vertebrate Limbs, such as the similar bone structure of the forelimb of humans, bats, and whales, as examples of common ancestry and descent with modification of basic body plans.
4. Haeckel’s Embryo Drawings, or “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” showing how in their embryological development (ontogeny) organisms go through similar stages in evolutionary (phylogeny) development.
5. Archaeopteryx, one of the best transitional fossils between dinosaurs and modern birds that demonstrates the evolution of flight.
6. Peppered Moths, which demonstrate how natural selection works by eliminating solid-colored moths that stand out on mottled tree bark, allowing the camouflaged peppered moths to survive and reproduce.
7. Darwin’s Finches, which serve as examples of how speciation happens in nature.
8. Four-Winged Fruit Flies, which demonstrate how a change in a single gene can produce dramatic morphological and physical changes.
9. Fossil Horses and Directed Evolution, as examples of well-documented evolutionary pathways from simple to complex.
10. From Ape to Human, demonstrating the “missing links” between apes and humans.
When these are presented as examples of evolution, Wells argues, “students and the public are being systematically misinformed about the evidence for evolution.” None of them is true, says Wells, and by easily refuting them, Intelligent Design creationists hope to bring down the entire evolutionary edifice.
First, the old creationists’ saw that mistakes in science are a sign of weakness is a gross misunderstanding of the nature of science, which is constantly building upon both the mistakes and the successes of the past. Science does not just change, it builds cumulatively on the past. Scientists make mistakes aplenty, and in fact this is how science progresses. The self-correcting feature of the scientific method is one of its most powerful assets. Hoaxes like Piltdown Man and honest mistakes like Nebraska Man, Calaveras Man, and Hesperopithecus are in time exposed. In fact, it was not creationists who exposed these errors, it was scientists who did so. Creationists simply read about the scientific exposés of these errors, and then duplicitously advanced them as their own.
Intelligent Design theorists do the same thing, trolling through scientific journals and books in search of exposures by scientists of errors by other scientists and claiming them as the results of Intelligent Design research. This is what happened in the case of Wells’s “punctured” icons of the peppered moths and Haeckel’s embryo drawings. In the 1950s, the British evolutionary biologist Bernard Kettlewell correlated the evolution of darker forms of certain moths in England with industrial pollution—darker moths were better camouflaged on darker trees—and noted the reverse with the lightening of trees after clean air acts were passed (lighter moths were better camouflaged on lighter trees). But as later scientists noted, peppered moths do not rest on trees; although Kettlewell’s recording of the changing coloration of peppered moths was accurate, his placing of them on trees was staged for photographic