Worst…anti-evolution argument…ever

June 11, 2005

Guest Post by Morbo

Of all the dumb things Christian fundamentalists say about evolution — and they say many dumb things about it — perhaps the dumbest is a line like this: “We didn’t come from monkeys!”

When anti-evolutionists say this, it proves they have no understanding of what the theory of evolution teaches. It is next to impossible to take their criticisms seriously, when it’s obvious they don’t understand the thing they are criticizing.

Let’s be clear: Monkeys did not turn into people. Evolution does not say they did. Evolution says that apes and humans shared a common ancestor. At some point in the distant past — about six to eight million years ago — there was a split, one branch leading to today’s apes, the other to human beings.

The close relationship between apes and humans is beyond dispute. Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives. They share 95 percent of our DNA. Chimps are more closely related to humans than they are to some other apes.

In Utah, state Sen. Chris Buttars, a Republican from West Jordan, is skeptical of evolution. He wants children in that state to learn “divine design” instead. That’s his name for the neo-creationist “intelligent design” that’s all the rage among the evolution deniers these days.

“The divine design is a counter to the kids’ belief that we all come from monkeys,” Buttars told the Salt Lake Tribune. “Because we didn’t.”

That’s right, we didn’t. Yet Buttars seems to think that evolution teaches that we did. If that’s what biology teachers in Utah are telling kids, they need to go back and re-take freshman Biology.

Buttars insists that “divine design” is not religious. “The only people who will be upset about this are atheists,” he said.

Let’s back up. “Divine design” is not religious. It’s just divine, and it invokes a designer. And it annoys atheists. But it’s not religious.

See, this is why I’ll never make it as a mild-mannered civil servant. I lack the “mild” part, and the “servant” stuff can be a problem too. If I were working in the Utah Department of Education, and some reporter called me up and asked me to comment on Sen. Buttars’ proposal, I’d say something like, “Is the man a compete idiot? Has he been lobotomized? We’re not letting this loon’s ideas anywhere near the children of this state!”

Instead, Brett Moulding, curriculum director for the Utah Board of Education, said something much calmer and better, mainly, “We don’t teach religion in school. We don’t believe this law would be in the best interest of public education.”

Alas, Buttars seems determined to press the issue. He is backed by the Eagle Forum, a group formed by right-wing harridan Phyllis Schlafly in the 1970s to combat feminism. Schlafly had the bright idea to leave her home and children and travel around the country lecturing women on why they should stay home with their children. The group long ago slipped into irrelevance but for some reason maintains a strong presence in Utah.

So Utah will fight over “divine design.” Kansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Georgia welcome the Beehive State to the club.

As for Sen. Buttars, I’ll leave you with another absolute gem of a quote from him. In this one, he tries to explain his belief that there may be some limited forms of evolution that apparently only operate on certain animals under certain conditions. Once again he makes absolutely no sense.

“We get different types of dogs and different types of cats,” he said, “but have you ever seen a ‘dat’?”

What a dolt! It’s amazing to me that people like this are allowed to drive cars, let alone opine.

Your “common ancestor” point is an excellent one with which to nail this idiocy. Consider your hand. You have five fingers made up of a bunch of bones. That skeletal structure is shared, in various ways, by monkeys, sea turtles (flippers have five bones), bats (wings have the same five bones), horses (the hoof is an evolved middle fingernail – the rest is vestigial and hardly developed), birds (wings have five bones, like the bat), fish (side fins have five bones). Why? Any first-year engineer could do a better job of *designing* any of those body parts to perform their function. Either the “intelligent” or “divine” designer Butlar has in mind is unbelievably stupid or those things are evolved from a common ancestor adapting to differing environments and opportunities.

Why do you have an appendix? Monkeys and apes use it to digest bark. All it causes us is pain and sometimes death. Is that “intelligent design”? All human embryos, shortly after formation, develoop a complete set of gills along what will become their necks. They also develop a blood-flow system to serve those gills. It looks as though we’re preparing to become fish, extracting oxygen from water through those gills. In nearly all cases the gills close up and disappear, eacept for the uppermost which turn into ears. Once in a while a kid is actually born with throat slits which have to be surgically closed. I know one woman whose first pregnancy led to a sudden tissue growth in her neck. At first they thought it was cancerous (which would have meant chemo and termination, among other things). Turns out it was just one of those gills becoming active for no good reason (quick simple surgery took care of it; the threatened fetus is now a wonderful woman).

“Intelligent design”? Hah! Ask anyone who has ever had appendicitis, or a back ache. On the other hand, all you need to do to refute this idiocy is look at someone like Utah state Sen. Chris Buttars. Could anything intelligent or divine have been responsible for that?

  • You’d think that if we were intelligently designed, our bodies might not have a 100 percent failure rate.

  • Buttars insists that “divine design” is not religious. “The only people who will be upset about this are atheists,” he said.

    You have got to be joking me! Well! As an atheist, I’m upset!! And I’m glad I don’t live in Utah. Divine design my ass! You ever just get this urge to just strangle people?!?!? You know reasoning with them won’t work, so what’s left? Strangling them. I tell ya, it would save me alot of headaches!

    If people wish to teach their children about religion, they can do so. And there are churches, and there are religious school they can send them to. But public schools are off-limits. Bottom line – they keep their hands out of public schools. That is not a difficult concept to understand.

    Divine design. Oh please! Does he think we are idiots here?

  • “You ever just get this urge to just strangle people?!?!? You know reasoning with them won’t work, so what’s left? Strangling them. I tell ya, it would save me alot of headaches!”

    Angie,

    Of course we have, all of us progressives have, wanted to strangle a LOT of Rethugs and the idiots that support them. That thought is all that keeps me going some days!! 🙂

  • If I were the type to put icons on the back of my car, one would be an Ichtys (Christian fish) and the other would be the Darwin walking fish. Teilhard de Chardin was a Catholic theologian scientist who let evolution inform his theology. (Of course, his thought was suppressed for a time, then welcomed, and now hopefully will not be suppressed again in the conservative swing of Catholicism).

    Another thing I’d like to put on the back of my car is a bumper sticker: Gravity is only a theory.

    Have these guys never heard of Galileo? This has all been hashed out already, fergoshsakes.

  • Ed, Sorry to nit-pick with such a nice post, but we don’t develop gills or gill slits as embryos – we start to develop them, but we only get as far as the pharyngeal pouch stage (bulges and closed indentations along the throat, which go on to open up and become gills and gill slits in fish and tadpoles), before they become resorbed. This is important because creationists love to rely on confusion between gill pouches and actual gills and gill slits to claim falsely that evolutionists routinely lie about human embryos developing gills and gill slits.

  • What a dolt! It’s amazing to me that people like this are allowed to drive cars, let alone opine.

    Opining is bad enough, but these sorts of dolts are actually in charge of our state and federal gummints. Ye gods!

    Another terrific post, Morbo. You and Carpetbagger form one hell of a tag team. As for the topic at hand, please count me as yet another upset atheist. Doesn’t it just kill you when you hear the wingnut Xtians bitching about how persecuted and misunderstood they are? They should try being an atheist in America. If it were up to them, we’d probably be all burned at the stake in the name of Jeebus. I don’t know whether to laugh or run.

  • The reason the fundies like to say, “we did not come from monkeys” is that it fires up thier racist base.

  • “Any first-year engineer could do a better job of *designing* any of those body parts to perform their function” (Ed Stephan).
    I’d have to disagree with that. Be it evolution or creation, man has largely done a poor job of improving on nature. To date, there is not a man made robot on earth that can perform a task as simple as me getting up from this chair, walking outside my house into my garden, picking out a amoryllis, bringing it into my kitchen, putting it in a vase with water and putting it on my table.
    Here’s another thought. Within a few more years, we may be able to one day walk on Mars. Suppose while surveying the Martian landscape, an astronaut comes across something that resembles a wristwatch- with a metal casing, symmetrical design, incrementally moving parts, etc. Would we say that somehow over time the various metallic molecules in the soil, exposed to a range of sources of thermal energy, seismic shifts, and chemical reations, over billions or years, somehow developed into a wristwatch? Perhaps. but our scientists would also not offhand dismiss the possibility of some type of intellegent creature making this object either.
    I say expose the children to both theories in our education system, and any other that may be feasible. Let the fact-finding and test of time play them out.

  • I forget exactly how large the percentage is, but I do know that humans and flies have a suprisingly high percentage of DNA which is the same, just to bicker with your one observation that humans and apes share 95% of their DNA. Such numbers really mean nothing in isolation.

  • I say expose the children to both theories in our education system, and any other that may be feasible. Let the fact-finding and test of time play them out.

    Hmmm…. we seem to differ on what exactly a “feasible” theory means. I suppose you have no problem teaching the Chinese creation myth about the ten children of Di Jun (minor suns who got bored and scorched the Earth until all but one were destroyed by the Divine Archer), the Inuit story of Sedna (a giant goddess who’s fingers changed to the sea creatures of the north when chopped of and who is responsible for the northern ice sheets), or maybe the Hindu myth about how the god Vishnu commanded his servant Brahma (who was born inside of a lotus flower that grew in Vishnu’s navel, by the way) to create the world.

    All of these are just as plausible as the Christian creation story, which ID is a direct derivative of. So if you want to teach “divine creation” is science classrooms I demand the right to teach the big bang theory during your theology lessons.

  • In regards to the “We didn’t come from monkeys!” assertion bandies about by the anti-evolutionists, I would make an exception for the Buttars of the world.

    As Ed pointed out, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” More or less correct, but the guy who first uttered this truism was Ernst Haeckel, a recent (1859) convert to Darwin’s newly elucidated “Theory of Evolution.” Haeckel himself birucated from mainstream evolutionary thought when he claimed there was a “law of recapitulation” which has since been proven wrong. He also stated that politics was a form of applied biology. As I understand it, Haeckel was brilliant, but readily fudged the numbers when his ideas lacked the persuation of legitimate data. Aside from Lemarck and Lysenko, he is THE perfect historical role model for the ID folks.

    Haeckel was adored by the German people, and a few years after his death a few of his ideas were “selected” by the newly formed National Socialist Party as the philosophical basis for their views on racism and nationalism. We know how that turned out.

    So the danger we face from the intelligent design people goes beyond proving them wrong, we have to employ our own form of the nuclear option. We can leave them no space to catch their breath. Otherwise, they will created a powerful and persuasive argument that…demonstratably wrong…but one which feeds into the narrative our religious/rightwing leadership has created about patriotism, Iraq, civil rights, social security, and liberal. They borrow first to gain political advantage, and then later as a philosophical basis for repression.

  • If I were working in the Utah Department of Education, and some reporter called me up and asked me to comment on Sen. Buttars’ proposal, I’d say something like, “Is the man a compete idiot? Has he been lobotomized? We’re not letting this loon’s ideas anywhere near the children of this state!”

    Why I’d never make a civil servant:
    I’d say something like: “This man is clearly a tosser of the highest order. He, quite clearly, doesn’t even begin to grasp the basic tennants of evolutionary biology and his brain is probably quite small – much like his genitalia I’ll wager.
    For someone so stupid to even hold power is, to mind, proof that evolution did occur in our species and quite clearly the people who voted for this cretin are not too far removed from our chimpanzee cousins. While the chimps throw their faeces, the people who voted for this man are quite clearly engaging in the same activity save for the fact that they use a pen to put a mark next to this guys name on the ballot slip.”

  • I say expose the children to both theories in our education system, and any other that may be feasible. Let the fact-finding and test of time play them out.

    The problem is that one set of statements, Darwinian theory, is testable, falsifiable – there are conceivable observations capable of proving the statements wrong. The other set of statements, the ID argument, is not … anymore than the other creation myths Dustin mentioned.

    I wonder how orderly the universe looks to all the species which go extinct every year. I doubt it looks very orderly to the thousands of baby bacteria you wiped out this morning with your deodorant spray.

    I just remembered a great New Yorker cartoon from a billion years ago. Monkey sitting in his cage the zoo puzzling: “Am I my keeper’s brother?”

  • I’m stealing this from a friend, because it’s too relevant, and I have to share it.

    So, let’s consider the Creationist approach.

    We’re descended from Adam and Eve. They had two boys, Cain and Abel.

    No girls. No other women around… except Eve.

    Who did Cain and Abel breed with?

    Maybe it’s just my opinion, but I’d rather be descended from monkeys than from a couple of motherfuckers.

  • One thing that hasn’t been brought out is that this guy was elected by a majority of people who probably agree with him, or don’t disagree with him strongly enough. The danger of ID and other wacky pseudo-scientific ideas (no global warming, blatocysts are people, or the bible “proves” that Christ arose from the dead) is not the leaders that espouse them, but the majority of people throughout the country, not just in Utah, that share these ideas.

    And while I’m at it, Force Majure’s hypothetical “Suppose while surveying the Martian landscape, an astronaut comes across something that resembles a wristwatch- with a metal casing, symmetrical design, incrementally moving parts, etc. Would we say that somehow over time the various metallic molecules in the soil, exposed to a range of sources of thermal energy, seismic shifts, and chemical reations, over billions or years, somehow developed into a wristwatch?” is so flawed I don’t know where to begin. A little slicing with Occam’s Razor would be the first obvious repudiation of this little scenario. Now if we found millions of metal parts in different stgages of development of a watch on Mars, buried in different strata and showing a consistent story of phylogeny from small metallic groupings leading through increasing complexity up to a Rolex, maybe I would think there was a an evolutionary process for watches. Without that kind of evidence for a growth of complexity, I would think ET dropped his watch during a visit and didn’t remember where he had lost it.

  • As regards fundies, allow me to just say, on behalf of monkeys everywhere, “Whew!”

    (Why those people think it is more noble to trace their lineage back to a pile of dirt than to a common promate ancestor is beyond me.)

  • Chimpanzee’s, (Pan Satyrus) = Conservatives

    Bonobo’s, (Pan Paniscus) = Progressives

    Check this, http://songweaver.com/info/bonobos.html out to find out why.

    Homo Sapiens has blown it’s mandate, (or monkeydate as it were). Bonobo’s are having much more fun than we are. Matriarchal leadership, Sex with meals. I’m not sure if we’ve evolved at all.

    There are no watches on Mars and no leap of faith will make me believe there is. I.D. is ca-ca. Flying squirrel’s evolved, they weren’t “designed!!

    The hummingbird at my hummingbird feeder is a jewel beyond comprehension. But it’s amazing in itself. I don’t need a god to give it legitimacy or to make it more stunning than it already is.

  • Republican’s! Right wing Fundamentalist Truth Seeker’s!

    I Exhort You!!

    Embrace Your Inner Bonobo. Be Not Afraid Of Freedom.

    Make Love Not War!

  • Chalker- If your going to use a logical criticism of my hypo, Occam’s Razor would not be your first tool of choice. Occam (also spelled “Ockham”) was a Fransican friar of the 14th century who opined that in examining a phenomenon or problem, one should begin with the most simple answers first- which is a good underlying principle of scientific method. But your using the observation of one who, as a Fransician Friar obviously believed in a goodly portion of the Christian doctrine that so many here criticize, only shows that your own examination doesn’t have as firm a set of roots as you assert.
    In a universe that only throws more questions at us as soon as we resolve a previous one, and given the existing flaws or shortcoming we find from our limited human perspective in both the various theories of our beginnings, I simply refuse to call anyone an idiot who believes in a theory of pure evolution, pure divine creation, pure intellegent creation, or some sort of hybrid theory. In my experience, albeit with limitations, I have encountered many highly educated and intellegent people who can posit pretty good arguments for a wide range of theories on this matter. Both Einstein and Hawking refuse to discard the possibility of an intellegent creator. In the face of such brilliant scientists, I for one dare not throw my weight too far in any corner on this issue.

  • Ed- in regards to your comment in number 15. Yes, Darwinian theory is testible and “falsifiable.” But I think ID is as well- albeit more difficult and abstract. Also, absolute “order” is not a sine que non requirement of an ID theory, as far as I can observe. We humans, regardless of our origins, are creative beings. I think that it can be said and accepted without any elaboration neccesary. Yet despite all our creative efforts, we still are continually beset with disorder (or flaw, etc.) within our own creations. Were it not so we would not continually continually attempt to improve upon our creations as we do.

  • What kind of intelligent design results in everything having to eat everything else to survive ? Is this really the type of sadistic being one want’s to worship ?

  • The premise of this post is rather weak. I know we homo sapiens did not come straight from modern-day monkeys, but we did evolve from a common ancestor that sure looks like some kind of monkey. So, if your attempt to discredit the ID folks is based on what is, more or less, a technicality, it won’t convince anybody. To discredit the simplistic arguments of the ID folks, you need to dig much deeper, and that can be counter-productive when you confront the gullible people that only follow a debate where the arguments on both sides appeal to their lack of intellect.

  • The “teach both sides” argument appears frequently. Yet I have never seen a post that looks beyond to the next obstacle. I am a high school science teacher (not really) and a strong advocate of evolutionary theory. I cannot, in good conscience, teach ID as scientific theory. It doesn’t even rise to the level of a serious opinion. In fact, I would use the ID time allotment to teach remedial science and critical thinking. Unless I miss my guess, this is decidedly NOT what the ID crowd envisions. So I would enjoy hearing from them how they believe this will play out. Will good science teachers, teaching in public schools at taxpayer expense, loose their jobs because they can’t (or won’t) teach dogma?

  • Señor Majure floats common absurdities of I.D. along with his usual veneer of reasonableness, yet the vacuousness of his position is evident to anybody who follows this ridiculous debate (what century are we in again?). The wristwatch on Mars thing is just a variation on the tornado in a junkyard building a 747. It’s a moronic illustration which depicts natural selection as completely random, a clear indication that the person employing it either doesn’t understand the entire concept of natural selection or, just as likely, doesn’t mind floating spurious arguments to persuade the moron contingent.

    I say expose the children to both theories in our education system
    Fine, Force, except for the fact that ID is nowhere close to being a theory in any commonly accepted sense of the word. But I guess that’s another science concept that you have trouble grasping. And as for soon walking on Mars, that day would certainly not come to pass if irrational dolts who discard scientific rationalism in favor of faith in primitive creation stories are in charge of NASA. Don’t hold your breath.

    Why, by the way, mention that Occam is also spelled Ockham? If you want to work on spelling, try spelling Franciscan. Two different tries and you still didn’t hit it.

    I simply refuse to call anyone an idiot who believes in a theory of pure evolution, pure divine creation, pure intellegent creation, or some sort of hybrid theory.

    I guess I’m not as circumscribed as you in this regard. I don’t have much trouble calling an idiot an idiot. Pure divine creation? Yeah, that’d probably qualify. Pure evolution? What the hell is that? Pure intelligent creation? Hey, I’ll tell you what: if you think the design is so intelligent, think about that the next time you get kicked in the nuts.

    And one last point: Anybody who figures we should just leave it up to those highly rational and sophisticated biology teachers scattered throughout the hinterlands to present a scientifically rational exposition of natural selection vs ID is being disingenuous at best. You know damn well that a hell of a lot of science teachers in grade school and high school (Mr. Buttars, the gym teacher and football coach, who also teaches the science class…) have no clue about the true nature of natural selection in a heck of a lot of unfortunate science classrooms, and would gladly spout their creationist nonsense to their class while vilifying that Darwin fella if you give them half a chance.

    Look, FM, don’t pretend to be Mr. Evenhanded. If you want to teach science, teach science, not bullshit. Yeah, I’m sure Hawking and Einstein were closet creationists. Gimme a friggin’ break. Either you’re being wishy washy to the point of insipidness, or you’re masquerading as a reasonable intellectual who is open to all sorts of wonderful “theories” that aren’t theories at all. In either case, don’t you feel a bit like a fish out of water here? I mean, most of these folks seem to sound a little too scientific. Your original comments, and your refutations of the resulting criticism of same, are almost too mundane and hollow to bother commenting on. But damn, I just couldn’t help myself.

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