Chapter 2. 'Dem Bones

Troubles in Paradise-Downard 81 Chapter 2. ‘Dem Bones The Cambrian Explosion – p.86 The Bermuda Triangle Defense – p.95 Archaeopteryx and bird evolution – p. 111 The Reptile-Mammal Transition – p. 128 In science and scholarship expertise may be thought of as the knack of when to ask relevant questions, and then being able to tell whether you’ve got a good answer. When logic is involved, this relates to how you validate the assumptions of a deductive chain, or the conclusions of inductive reasoning, along with gauging how cogent all the logical links are. Socrates was someone who apparently had a lot of fun with that (though it eventually got him in trouble when he started asking too many theologically “wrong” questions). But viewed more as a methodological exercise, all questions and answers become diagnostic, for they reveal the mindset of the person asking or answering them. Pose enough of the right questions and no array of screens can long obscure the truth. In 1994 PBS aired a documentary by Randall Balmer called “In the Beginning: The Creationist Controversy.” It investigated the social and political context of the creation/evolution debate, and so devoted very little time to the actual scientific merits of either side, although Balmer clearly favored the evolutionary interpretation. Concerning the hot-button topic of whether evolution should be overtly excluded in public school science education, and to what extent creationism ought to be actively included, Balmer interviewed the bane of textbook publishers, Mel and Norma Gabler of Texas. Partly through their dedicated effort, Texas had steadfastly resisted any science textbook that contained evolutionary references. Since no publisher was willing to field a volume that would not sell in the giant Texas market, the Gablers’ opposition enacted a de facto veto for the entire nation.1 Through the years the Gablers have taken on the role of textbook fact checker, diligently rooting out the perceived inaccuracies in history texts, such as the evident boner when one mistakenly attributed the end of the Korean War to Truman dropping an atomic bomb on North Korea. As someone with a dusty history baccalaureate tucked away in his own past, I entirely sympathize with their fury at incompetent authorship. But the Gablers are not just apolitical scholarly nitpickers—they decide what constitutes outrageous error based on their conservative ideology. So it was that they opposed the MACOS (Man: A Course of Study) project published in 1970, which endeavored to introduce 5th and 6th graders to the general concepts of modern evolutionary and social science thinking. Their success in derailing this foray into cultural relativism was abetted in no small measure by the overweening arrogance of its planners, still blissfully unaware of the depths of conservative Christian unease over modern liberalism.2 Now the Gablers do not favor banning the teaching of evolution. They advocate the “middle way” of requiring texts to characterize evolution as “only a theory,” not factually verified (or even verifiable). In the PBS program, Norma Gabler clearly stressed that “we’ve never asked for creation in the classroom. We’ve always asked that it be taught fairly.” Phillip Johnson has affirmed this rosy view more generally when he stated that “creation scientists emphasized that they wanted to present only the scientific arguments in the schools; the Bible itself was not to be taught.”3 But what creationists mean by “fairly” translates into including in the science curriculum certain information they believe constitutes strong evidence against evolution. When Balmer asked for some examples, Mel Gabler replied with two. First, that “suddenly—I mean suddenly—here appear practically every life form at almost the same time, whether it’s a fish or algae or tree or whatever.” Then he said that the astronauts landing on the moon encountered much less lunar dust than the thick layer they were expecting, which meant the moon couldn’t possibly be all those billions of years old the scientists believed it was. With one simple question and two short answers, the Gablers’ laudable goal of expunging falsehood and distortion from school texts had just slammed into a very large brick wall. For the Troubles in Paradise-Downard 82 plain truth was both of Mel Gabler’s examples were incontrovertibly false, and therefore any “science” text that included them as statements of “fact” would be as grossly in error as that history book was with Truman’s Korean A-bomb. That the Gablers were entirely unaware of this condition tells volumes about the nature of their scholarship, and suggests how potentially dangerous the political manifestation of creationism can be when wielded by scientific illiterates. Gabler’s first example was an allusion to the “Cambrian Explosion,” where a bevy of early multicellular life made a very splashy appearance about 540 million years ago. As we’ll see, it is a common creationist conviction that this circumstance bodes ill for “evolution.” How they arrive at this conclusion will trace a path of paleontological misrepresentation that is replayed age after period after epoch all through their review of the fossil record. To discover how Mel Gabler could come to believe fish and algae and trees appeared at “almost the same time” is to observe again the fruits of relying on limited reading material—the pernicious scholarly affectation that propels all ideological and pseudoscientific investigation. But Gabler hadn’t stopped with fossil conundrums. By offering the lunar dust argument as a premier example of antievolutionary evidence Gabler slips us firmly onto the thin ice of Creation Science. Because Intelligent Design isn’t trying to lasso the history of the solar system to a Bishop Ussher chronology, this little gem doesn’t come up in their literature. But that does nothing to lessen the disquieting significance of the Gabler version of antievolutionism seriously endeavoring to insert this young earth subject matter directly into high school science courses. The assorted claims for a young earth and universe are the subject of the next chapter, but at this juncture it is worthwhile following Gabler’s lunar dust tale to its apotheosis. It is a characteristic creationist example of what happens when you rely on people who only tell half the story. Unlike the NASA Joshua computer myth, this time we know exactly where to trace the source: Henry Morris. Although he has sprinkled various versions of it through his books over the years, the most authoritative statement may be gleaned from the account in Scientific Creationism, since that work purports to serve as a preliminary textbook for the teaching of Creation Science in public schools. Here is the entire section on the “Influx of meteoric material from space” in that work: It is known that there is essentially a constant rate of cosmic dust particles entering the earth’s atmosphere from space and then gradually settling to the earth’s surface. The best measurements of this influx have been made by Hans Pettersson, who obtained the figure of 14 million tons per year. This amounts to 14 x 1019 pounds in 5 billion years. If we assume the density of the compacted dust is, say, 140 pounds per cubic foot, this corresponds to a volume of 1018 cubic feet. Since the earth has a surface area of approximately 5.5 x 1015 square feet, this seems to mean that there should have accumulated during the 5-billion- year age of the earth, a layer of meteoric dust approximately 182 feet thick all over the world! There is not the slightest sign of such a dust layer anywhere of course. On the moon’s surface it should be at least as thick, but the astronauts found no sign of it (before the moon landings, there had been considerable fear that the men should sink into the dust when they arrived on the moon). Lest anyone say that erosional and mixing processes account for the absence of the 182-foot meteoric dust layer, it should be noted that the composition of such material is quite distinctive, especially in its content of nickel and iron. Nickel, for example, is a very rare element in the earth’s crust and especially in the ocean. Pettersson estimated the average nickel content of meteoric dust to be 2.5 per cent, approximately 300 times as great as in the earth’s crust. Thus, if all the meteoric dust layer had been dispersed by uniform mixing through the earth’s crust, the thickness of crust involved (assuming no original nickel in the crust at all) would be 182 x 300 feet, or about 10 miles! Since the earth’s crust (down to the mantle) averages only about 12 miles thick, this tells us that practically all the nickel in the crust of the earth would Troubles in Paradise-Downard 83 have been derived from meteoric dust influx in the supposed (5 x 109) year age of the earth! Another interesting calculation can be made by noting that river water carries about 0.75 billion pounds of nickel each year to the ocean and the ocean contains about 7000 billion pounds. Thus the nickel dissolved in the ocean’s waters could have accumulated from river flows in slightly over 9000 years. Consequently the absence of the appropriate percentage of nickel arriving on the earth’s surface from meteoric infall cannot be attributed to erosion and transportation to the ocean. The only possible way of accounting for the small amount of nickel found in the earth’s crust and ocean seems to be in terms of an age for the earth of only a few thousand years.4 Just as “interesting” is to compare this with what Morris had to say in another book, The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth.

Load more