Fire and Knowledge

PZ Myers responds to four bad arguments against evolution. I wish I would have read something like this in high school — it would have saved me from many stupid debates.

An ancient fossil of a snake has been found with two hind legs. We’ve known that snakes used to have legs for a while now (most Pythons, for instance, have vestigial pelvises), but it’s always interesting when more evidence is found.

Just because Intelligent Design theorists cannot think of how nature could have created something through evolution, that does not mean that scientists will not be able to do so either. Intelligent Design is a remarkably uncreative theory that abandons the search for understanding at the very point where it is most needed. If Intelligent Design is really a science, then the burden is on its scientists to discover the mechanisms used by the Intelligent Designer. And if those mechanisms turn out to be natural forces, then no supernatural force is necessary, and they can simply change their name to evolutionary scientists and get to work.

—Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design (Times Books, 2006), p. 80.

Most humans have twelve sets of ribs, but 8 percent of us have a thirteen set, just like chimpanzees and gorillas. This is a remnant of our primate ancestry: We share common ancestors with chimps and gorillas, and the thirteen set of ribs has been retained from when our lineage branched off six million years ago.

—Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design (Times Books, 2006), p. 18.

No one seems to think that a religious person engaged in the study of history must find a way that God rigged human events in order to cause the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, or the Holocaust. Yet curiously, that is exactly what many expect of a religious person engaged in the study of natural history—they want to know how God could have ensured the success of mammals, the rise of flowering plants, and most especially, the ascent of man.

–Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (orig. 1999; Harper Perennial, 2002), pp. 237-8

We say, then, that it pleased the designer to design only microorganisms for nearly 2 billion years of earth’s history. He then began to tinker with multicellular organisms, producing a bewildering variety of organisms that survived only briefly. In the Cambrian era, roughly 530 million years ago, the designer produced an extraordinary variety of microorganisms, many of which were the first representatives of what we now regard as the animal phyla, the major groups into which animals are classified. Even in the Cambrian, he was not yet interested in designing a vertebrate, an animal that, like us, is built around the backbone. That came later.

Then, as we have seen, the designer produced one organism after another in places and in sequences that would later be misinterpreted as evolution by one of his creatures. And just to compound that misunderstanding, he would ensure that the very first limbs he designed looked just like modified fins, and that the first jaws he designed looked like modified gill arches. He would further ensure that the first tetrapods had tail fins, like fish, and that the first birds had teeth, like reptiles. So thoughtful was this designer that after having designed mammals to live exclusively on the land, he would redesign a few, like whales and dolphins, to live in water—but not before he designed creatures that were literally halfway between land and swimming mammals. In working his magic, this designer chose to create forms truly intermediate between walking and swimming mammals….

Is the designer being deceptive? Is there a reason he can’t get it right the first time? Is the designer, despite all his powers, a slow learner? He must be clever enough to design an African elephant, but apparently not so clever that he can do it the first time. Therefore we find fossils of a couple dozen extinct almost-elephants over the last few million years. What are these failed experiments, and why does this master designer need to drive so many of his masterpieces to extinction?

–Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (orig. 1999; Harper Perennial, 2002), p. 127

To adopt the explanation of design, we are forced to attribute a host of flaws and imperfections to the designer. Our appendix, for example, seems to serve only to make us sick; our feet are poorly constructed to take the full force of walking and running; and even our eyes are prone to optical errors and lose their ability for close focus as we age. Speaking of eyes, we would have to wonder why an intelligent designer placed the neural wiring of the retina on the side facing incoming light. This arrangement scatters the light, making our vision less detailed than it might be, and even produces a blind spot at the point that the wiring is pulled through the light-sensitive retina to produce the optic nerve that carries visual messages to the brain.

–Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (orig. 1999; Harper Perennial, 2002), p. 101

The many imperfections of the human backbone which, regrettably, become increasingly apparent as we age, can hardly be attributed to intelligent design. They are easy to understand if we appreciate the fact that our upright posture is a recent evolutionary development. Evolution has taken a spinal column well adapted for horizontal, four-footed locomotion and pressed it into vertical, bi-pedal service. It works pretty well, but every now and then the stresses and strains of this new orientation are too much for the old structure. Intelligent design could have produced a trouble-free support for upright posture, but evolution was constrained by a structure that was already there. Chiropractors, of course, continue to reap the benefits.

–Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (orig. 1999; Harper Perennial, 2002), p. 101