Why Darwin Matters_ The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer [42]
Next: Make that nine icons of evolution. The first icon Wells lists deals with the chemical origins of life, which is not generally considered a part of evolutionary theory. In any case, the science of life’s origin has come a long way since Miller and Urey’s experiments in the 1950s, so it is doubly disingenuous to focus on these primitive incipient research protocols.
Further, despite the high improbability of finding fossils, we have now a reasonably rich record of the history of life from the earliest bacteria fossils of 3.8 billion years ago, to the simple single-celled bacteria 3.5 billion years ago, to fossil archaebacteria 2.9 billion years ago, to the first eukaryotic cells about 2.5 billion years ago, to multicellular eukaryotic fossils 1.7 billion years ago, to fossils of higher algae forms 1.2 billion years ago, to the Ediacaran fauna 650 million years ago, all of which led to the so-called Cambrian “explosion” of about 550 to 500 million years ago. In highlighting this “explosion” as lacking any ancestral history (and therefore claiming it as proof that an Intelligent Designer miraculously sparked the creation of life), Intelligent Design advocates conveniently ignore three billion years of evidence of life’s gradual evolution.
For each of these icons, Intelligent Design theorists also fail to provide an alternative theory to account for the data. For example, homology in vertebrate limbs has a perfectly sound evolutionary explanation: The skeletal structure of humans, bats, and whales is similar because we have similar ancestry—evolution created one basic architectural design from which natural selection shaped the wide variety of types. But even if this is wrong, as Wells says, what is the Intelligent Design explanation for homologies? Why would an Intelligent Designer design a whale’s flipper to have precisely the same set of bones as a human arm and a bat’s wing? And why would the ID make a bat’s wing different from a bird’s wing and an insect’s wing? Evolution’s answer is that a bat is a mammal with a different evolutionary lineage than birds and insects. What answer do Wells and the other Intelligent Design advocates offer?
Finally, there is the underlying assumption that the theory of evolution is founded on these ten icons, and thus that debunking them refutes the theory at large. Not so. The theory of evolution is proved through the convergence of evidence from thousands of lines of inquiry from diverse fields of study quite apart from this list. The vast bulk of data supporting evolution dwarfs these ten examples.
That’s the best science the Intelligent Design movement has to offer—lots of miracles, a handful of equations, and ten straw examples set against thousands of compelling lines of inquiry. But as often as not, science is not under debate; it is under attack. For example, in my debate at the University of California, Irvine, the Young Earth creationist Kent Hovind announced as his opening statement, “I am here to win you over to Christ. And I’m here to win Michael Shermer over to Christ.”
With that statement, Hovind lost the debate. He was not there to debate evolution versus creation or natural versus supernatural design. He was there to witness for the Lord. Everything he said from there on was irrelevant or wrong: Dogs come only from dogs. Variations do not lead to new species. Design implies a Designer. There is an afterlife. The Bible is literally true in everything it says. Humans used to live nine hundred years. There is no right and wrong without God. Noah’s flood explains geological formations and species distribution. Dinosaurs and humans lived simultaneously, dinosaurs on the Ark were very young and small, and dinosaurs that were large (“behemoth” and “leviathan” in the Bible) drowned