Fine tuning, the constant, unchanging laws of physics and Christian Creationists

Fine tuning,

the constant, unchanging laws of physics

and the Christian Creationists who don't understand what those words mean.

PZ Myers looked recently at a Tweet by AiG's Ken Ham that was quoted in a Kentucky newspaper.

Reporting on Ken Ham's tweet about hurricanes.
"Devastating Hurricanes-reminder we live in a fallen groaning world as a result of our sin against a Holy God-it's our fault not God's fault" 


So the clear problem is, as described in Myer's response (the first link); "What causes hurricanes? If you asked me that question, I’d mumble something about rising water vapor in equatorial waters condensing and releasing latent heat, pumping energy into the air. A hurricane starts as hot, moist air rising into the atmosphere."

The physics of weather is well-understood. It sure looks like Ham is saying that before Eve bit the apple, the physics of the world was entirely different.

Ham, and other creationists, make a similar claim in saying that rainbows did not exist before Noah's Ark. So before these events, temperature related changes between liquid phase and gas phase did not occur? Winds were not generated by temperature changes in oceans? And gases in our atmosphere did not reflect and refract light the way they do now?

Remember, a common Creationist claim is about fine-tuning. If we changed one little thing about the laws of physics, the world would not be possible. But changing how light works is not trivial. Changing how temperature affects atoms and molecules to create weather is not trivial. According to the fine-tuning argument, if the laws of physics cannot be changed even a little then sin cannot be the cause of hurricanes. If sin is the cause of hurricanes, then the laws of physics are hugely malleable.

I'll finish with a pair of comments from the Myer's blog post:

Ken Ham on Humans and "Survival of the Fittest"

In a post titled, Did Humans Domesticate Ourselves, AiG's Ken Ham demonstrates why I started this blog in the first place.

So it’s survival of the fittest, except when, according to a different study, it’s survival of the prettiest, survival of the most moral, or the survival of the least aggressive (according to these studies). It’s a constantly changing story because it’s just that—a story.

Survival of the Fittest. The phrase that Darwin didn't really like and which can appear a tautology is a shorthand for how natural selection works. Honestly, it is such a shorthand, like a too-long acronym, that it is only understood if you study the subject long enough.

One would think that Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis, would have spent that long, and more, studying evolution and its jargon. Apparently AiG started in 2007 but Ham has been involved in promoting creationism since the late seventies. Nearly forty years and he still doesn't understand the terms he attacks. Or, more sinisterly, he does but also understands the rubes do not.

So survival of the fittest: Google Search has this definition open in a window on the results page: "the continued existence of organisms that are best adapted to their environment, with the extinction of others, as a concept in the Darwinian theory of evolution."

Hmm. Collins Dictionary has a usage close to what Ham seems to think it means:

You can use the survival of the fittest to refer to a situation in which only the strongest people or things continue to live or be successful, while the others die or fail.

The thing is, 'fit' does not mean most physically fit, nor does it mean strongest or the best fighter.  Rabbits are overwhelming Australia but fights between them and kangaroos would involve the latter kicking the former into space. Clearly physical power is not the only measure here. For rabbits, it would be the ability to burrow and hide and the large litters they produce.

'Fitness' in humans can indeed be measured in ability to cooperate and a group that cooperates will more likely survive than a similar number of individuals.

...why are there still so many bullies? If “those who got along, got ahead,” how do you explain the many brutal dictators (such as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini) and others throughout history who got ahead by killing people? Human history is not a story of increasing peace and harmony as we have supposedly learned to get along. It’s a story littered with evil and bullies...

Statistically, humans do get along better than in the past. Human history is indeed a story of increasing peace and harmony - Ham gets this wrong. Basically all forms of violence around the world have declined. Again, this is statistical, there are horrible acts of violence in many places and on many occasions, but the total number and number of victims is declining. See The Better Angels for details and many, many graphs.

Perhaps the most horrifying sentence:

This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.

So it is not merely Ham's poor understanding but that of the entire organization.

Added later: At The Sensuous Curmudgeon, a commenter reminded me that AiG staff are required to believe this stuff. THey've signed a statement that they will do so.

AiG's Dr Boyd on birds

Via the Sensuous Curmudgeon, I learned that AiG has worked to clarify its position on kinds. To be maximally sympathetic to creationists, lots of mainstream classification terms are ambiguous or difficult to rigorously pin down. Are lions and tigers two different species? Dogs, wolves and coyotes comprise one, two or three species?  When we look at modern extant animals, it is pretty easy to see different orders or classes. Mammals are clearly different from birds.  Songbirds are clearly not raptors. Rabbits are ....not all the clearly different from rodents ? It's definitely messy.

The YEC term, 'kind', is even messier. Humans are the only member of our kind. Some creationists limit 'kind' to mean species, or very nearly that and almost never reaching the level of genus.  AiG accepts 'family' as kind. They accept all felines -house cats to sabre tooth tigers and all in between - as one kind.

This is probably a good time for a refresher on Linnaeus's classification chart. Image from desire to learn (and shrunk slightly. To see it full size, follow the link):

Wikipedia lists the orders of birds here.

Now let's dig into Dr Boyd's article: Bird Speciation from the Flood to the present.

In Genesis 6:1–20 we read that Noah was commanded to take two of every animal kind into the Ark. Verse 20 makes clear that those animals would include two of every kind of bird. Later, God clarified that seven individuals of the clean animals, including some birds, would be on the Ark (Genesis 7:2–3). Does that mean that Noah had two (or seven) of all 10,380 extant bird species (more if you count extinct species)? If a biblical kind and a species were equivalent, then yes. But they are not the same; many species are categorized under each biblical kind.

Already we run into trouble. He does introduce the concept Kind is Bigger than Species, but he apparently misquotes the Bible. Hmmm. A bit of Googling tells me this is a messy translation problem.  Some translations specify seven pairs, others just seven but add "male and his female". It isn't relevant to this discussion but God didn't say seven individuals of clean animals, but seven pairs. Boyd links to NKJV which states, "You shall take with you seven each of every dclean animal, a male and his female" which is terrible math.  My partial apologies to Dr Boyd; some copies of the Bible agree with his quote.

...where did all these different species of terrestrial animals that we see today come from? For our consideration here, we are going to narrow the question to, where did all these bird species that we see today come from?

I often claim that Creationists try to use big sweeping statements to hide local flaws so I am grateful for his attempt to narrow things down.

Boyd graciously links to an article detailing the current evolutionary position, that birds evolved and radiated from South America.  The full text of this article available online. I might discuss it in a later post.

Scientists who accept the biblical account of creation and the worldwide Flood compile evidence from Scripture, genetics, the fossil record, hybridization data, and morphological characteristics to suggest that God created many kinds of birds that began radiating and diversifying over the world after the worldwide Flood destroyed the earth about 4,500 years ago. These birds included both flying and non-flying birds. The two answers given by evolutionary scientists and creation scientists are so far apart from one another that it seems almost impossible to think that they are looking at the same data.

I continue to admire his clarity and respect for the evolutionary position.

A scientist with a materialistic worldview has to account for the first bird; it would have to be the ancestor of all birds. Models of speciation and radiation for events like that would need millions of years.

A scientist with a biblical worldview has to account for the different species of birds found today in each created bird kind from the Flood to the present. Models of speciation and radiation for those events would only need thousands of years.

Boyd links to  AiG's Dr Jean Lightner's study on avian kinds.  I plan to read it but have not yet.(I have now read it and the article consists only of conclusions- "There are the 196 kinds" without much detail)  Boyd describes Lightner's work as suggesting just under two hundred kinds leading to the current 10,000+ species of bird. Such a number could be reached, he works out, if each of the two hundred original species doubled every 750 years and this happened six times (200-400-800-1600-3200-6400-12800).  He then points out an obvious problem. There are only four species of Anhinga but 1,470 species of what he calls "sparrow/finch" kind (or Passeroidea). Clearly, there are challenges even with his suggested rate of new species every 750 years. Also, 750 X six is forty-five hundred years, which I think is a little long for him. (Huh. This link to AiG says that the Flood occurred around that time, giving an estimate of about 4400 years ago.)

He discusses the problems with the term 'species' and we agree.

Robins produce more robins. Bluebirds produce bluebirds. Could a male robin and a female bluebird produce a hybrid like a bluebin? No, they are different biological species. Some birds like the mallard duck and the American black duck are considered different species, but they can mate and produce offspring (unoriginally, they are called the mallard X American black duck hybrid). Does that mean that they are just one species and not two? Not really (though it does depend on who you ask), because the hybrid duck is rare, and most often a mallard mates with a mallard to get more mallards. (When a bird watcher sees a hybrid, he might get either a little too excited or just confused because what he sees does not quite match any pictures in his bird guide.)

He uses bluebirds as an example and finishes with:

However, the ranges of these two species of bluebirds overlap only in a narrow band from West Texas northward—the hybrid zone. Most eastern bluebirds would never even come in contact with a western bluebird because their habitats don’t overlap very much. Because they are from the same bird kind and are obviously very similar (in both appearance and genetics) we can see that they are in the final stages of speciation. Most people believe that they are different enough to call them two separate species. If we include the western bluebird, which also can hybridize with these two species,10 it means that one species is in the final process of a triplet speciation event.

The introduction is over and now we get into the problem  (I've decided to add bolding as I go):

To some people, what I just described sounds too much like evolution. The evolutionary process definitely includes the idea of speciation, but the formation of species in response to geographic (or habitat) differences is consistent with a biblical worldview. Having over 10,000 different species of birds (not to mention mammals, reptiles, and amphibians), especially two of every kind and seven of the clean animals (many of the birds), would have been too much for Noah and his family to care for—not to mention house. The efforts of those involved with the Ark Encounter are providing us with realistic figures about the number of animals on the Ark. Having two of every bird kind and seven of every clean bird kind fits nicely.11

I would suggest, he add "as well as the evolutionary view" to my bolded part.
I note he leaves out dinosaurs from his list. A quick Googling doesn't offer a good (and simple enough for my purposes) list of orders or families for dinosaurs but there were a lot of them.
His solution:

When the birds were released from the Ark, they faced a new environment with quickly developing habitats. Birds could migrate quickly from the location of the Ark in all directions. As they were faced with different environments, their inbuilt genetic variability allowed them to diversify and adapt to these environments, forming different populations of the same bird kind.

I don't know if he solves this problem later in his article, but he is currently leaving out the problems with kiwis here. They are small, flightless birds that currently survive only because they live on an island that historically didn't have predatory mammals on it.  As an evolution proponent I accept that a bird flew to New Zealand millions of years ago and evolved into the kiwi, but that sure looks like a big change of Biblical kind to me.  This simple discussion of kiwi evolution didn't clear things up for me.  Anyway, we are also looking at penguins.  They and ratites like the ostrich and the before mentioned kiwis, only live in the southern hemisphere. This is hard to explain if the original members of the kind began in the northern hemisphere.

The end came suddenly.  Here is an excerpt from the final paragraph:

Evolutionary scientists argue for one ancestor to all flying birds—a descendant of the dinosaurs (that means if you are consistent with the evolutionary worldview, by the way, that birds are reptiles). Creation scientists argue for many different bird kinds that could fly from their creation on Day Four, as Genesis 1 clearly describes.

It sure appears that he ran away from the Passeroidea problem. If we look at a single species of the passeroidea kind and double it until we get to around 1400 species, we need

Boyd offered 750 years, as an average but seems to have pointed out that some kinds would need to evolve faster.  The problem is, we've seen most or all of these birds and known of them for four hundred plus years.  The biggest problem with AiG's conception of micro-evolution is the outlandishly high speed they need. This means that when creationists ask, "Why don't we see evolution happening today?" they are sabotaging their own position. To defend their point here, they paradoxically need to show new species of birds that have evolved and appeared since the 1600s.

Misconceptions? About evolution? About Creationism?

Jim Stump names and corrects 10 misconceptions about evolution here.  At AIG, Avery Foley tries -and mostly fails, to correct those corrections.

Most glaring, is Foley's counter regarding the second law of thermodynamics.  After correctly discussing open- and closed- systems, Foley quotes astronomer Dr Danny Faulkner (with my bolding):

However, merely being an open system does not automatically mean that entropy decreases. Life depends upon a huge number of complex biochemical reac-tions continually operating. These biochemical reactions operate opposite to the direction that they would naturally proceed. That is, living things synthesize simpler molecules into more complex ones. The inputs are matter and energy (required to bond the more complex molecules), which is why living things are open systems. However, these inputs are insufficient in themselves to circumvent the second law of thermodynamics. The di-rection of the chemical reactions normally is decay from the more complex to simpler molecules, the opposite of what living things require to exist. Given this, the appeal to an open system to rescue the day for evolution is not demonstrated and amounts to hand-waving and gross extrapolation.

I don't understand what Faulkner is saying.  Is he saying that all living things break the second law of thermodynamics.  It sure looks as if he -an astronomer so knowledgeable about physics in general, but not necessarily about biology - is saying that.  Let me help him.
For humans, or plants, or fungae, or archaea, or other animals, synthesizing complex molecules happens all the time  Plants take in water and carbon dioxide and produce sugar.  We use sugar and other organic compounds and make hemoglobin and more.  Yes, plants are also using the sun's energy so they are clearly benefiting from an open system but what about us?  Well, as a newborn, I was around 3 kg.  I feel I was at a physical peak at around age twenty-five.  I don't know when my mental peak was but I sure forget a lot of stuff now so I think I have passed it.  Let's stick with twenty-five.  At that time, I weighed 76kg. Ah, those were the days.
...Anyway, during those twenty-five years, I ate food.  A lot of food.  Far more than 73 kg of food.  From age fifteen to twenty-five, I ate more than 151 kg per year. What did I do with that food?  I was a serious athletes in those days and used the food as energy burned while swimming twelve hours a week, and as the building blocks for muscles of great power and endurance.
I excreted and exhaled most of that mass.  I made the air around me, with my exhalations, warmer and wetter and spread carbon dioxide far and wide, so that it dispersed and settled at the global average concentrations. While concentrating complex molecules in my body, I increased global and universal entropy.  I radiated heat. I released liquids.  I released gases.  And I did so to a greater extent than I locally decreased entropy in my body.  Again, in that last year, I ate 150+ kgs of food, but gained less than 5 kg of mass.

Foley is also concerned with Stump's explanation for how new information can be added to DNA.

He argues that genetic mutations and gene duplication can create new information, but they don’t. All they do is work on already existing information.

Again, I am not sure what Foley is saying.  If I rearrange a word, have I created a new word or not?  'From' and 'Form' are two different words which change the information content of a sentence.

Let's dig in.  Duplication mutations have been observed copying an entire gene.  More localized mutations have been observed changing parts of that gene. The new gene has been observed to have new functions.  How is this not new information?
From Sci Am 1, 2.  From Talk Origins. From Stump's original article.

Is evolution a theory in crisis?

...the vast majority of scientists are evolutionists (although some do doubt evolutionary ideas) ...have been indoctrinated to think that way. They interpret the evidence through the lens of evolutionary ideas because they have an evolutionary worldview. What we do point out are the huge problems with evolutionary ideas that should make it a theory in crisis! The evidence is much better explained through the lens of God’s Word and is consistent with a biblical worldview.

I don't think evolution is a theory in crisis, but I am not about to argue a philosophical point.  I do want to point out that to my knowledge, no evolutionary scientist has had to sign a form promising to only view evidence according to a specific worldview or lose their job.  Foley has.  Everyone at AIG has.  Here is that statement.  There is no such oath for evolution proponents.  Creationists are not automatically guilty of deliberate misrepresentation of the facts but are automatically more highly suspected of such misrepresentation.

On the fossil record and transitionals:

A fully formed and functional creature is discovered, and it’s labeled a “transitional” or “intermediate” creature because it’s interpreted that way based on assumptions about how life formed and how old the fossil is. A biblical creationist will go and look at the exact same fossil and reach an entirely different con-clusion, that this is a fully formed organism that belonged to one of the original kinds God creat-ed, because we have an entirely different starting point—the true history revealed in God’s Word.

Here is another example of creationists and evolutionists looking at the same evidence - only the evolutionist looks at all the evidence.  When we find a 'fully formed organism' or fossils thereof, we also note that it is only found among a set of specific other animals, looking for all the world as if some animals had roamed the earth and gone extinct and new animals appeared and gone extinct then the fossil in question appeared and gone extinct then we appeared in the fossil record. This does not in any way resemble a 6-day Creation story.
About the fossils themselves - we have a beautiful set of seven transitions from fish to amphibian.  One such fossil was found by making predictions based on an ancient Earth and evolution principles.  Tiktaalik is a big problem for creationists like Foley.

Via the Sensuous Curmudgeon.

AIG: All cats are one kind

At AIG, they've partially answered a question I've had for a long time.  Some time ago, Ken Ham stated that kinds could be similar to the modern genus or even family level of relationship (His statement is highlighted at that link and also mentions the information below.  I only found it after the quoting below so I'm leaving this post alone - it now has internal confirmation).  And yet, I'd never seen an example to be studied and considered.

In an article mostly about errors in illustrating Bibles, Bodie Hodge states:

Putting too many individuals of a kind on the Ark: We often see lions and tigers and other cats entering or exiting Noah’s Ark.1 There is only one cat kind (cats can interbreed with each other), so Noah only took two cats on the Ark. Of course, they had the genetic information which can account for the cat variations we see today (as a result of various selection processes over time). The same with dogs—there is only one dog kind, so Noah only needed two dogs on the Ark, no dingoes, wolves, coyotes, and so on. The same goes for the bear kind, ceratopsian kind, sauropod kind, elephant kind, horse kind (zebras are part of the horse kind—they are a variation of the horse that is post-Flood), and so on. Learn more about kinds.

"There is only one cat kind

(cats can interbreed with each other),

so Noah only took two cats on the Ark."

Wikipedia tells me that there are 41 species of Felidae known today.  From massive saber toothed tigers (which aren't tigers, if it needed to be said) to pack-hunting lions to the solitary short-tailed lynx of North America, all are one Biblical kind.  That's a lot of variety for one kind, for 'micro' evolution to accomplish.  And even more to accomplish in a few thousand years.

How long did Cats have to evolve to this variety?  If the flood occurred four thousand years ago, that sets an upper boundary, but we can shrink it immediately to three thousand, six hundred because settlers in North America learned about local cats and the Native Americans did not note in oral legends any new species appearing recently.

Neither did European, Indian or Asian written records.  This puts a reasonable but negotiable upper limit at fifteen hundred years, plus or minus a little. What about the cats in North America?  It's hard to say but once the continents separated, it is unlikely for later transfer of species.

We are looking at 41 species to evolve and some to die out in under 2,000 years.  And none to evovle since then.

This is the problem with Creationist kinds.  They require evolution to occur at rates far faster than ever observed and also for evolution to stop even while we see it occurring today at rates historic records tell us are reasonable.