Bird-hipped dinosaurs (image: Natural History Museum, London)
Did God or evolution drive the emergence of life in all its resplendent variety?
This blog, the US education system, and even American politics have to a degree all become dominated by the debate at various times, which goes to the heart of our world view and our ideas of where we, and all other forms of life, came from.
But I’ve just come across an intriguing piece of research that may, to coin a phrase, put an evolutionary cat among the believing flock of creation scientists, many of whom believe in the literal account of Genesis.
One scientist has decided to use creation science to test the validity of evolution.
Because, he says, if it turns out that creation science proves evolution, then by its own logic, it will have to reject its own canon of research that previously denied it.
It’s a clever idea, because it once again puts evidence, rather than faith, at the centre of the debate.
Science cannot prove that God doesn’t exist, or that God may have once put in place all known physical laws and processes that shaped the universe and everything in it.
Science cannot challenge faith, which by its very nature, does not require evidence (many scientists are religious people who see no contradiction between their faith and work and many people of faith see no contradiction with what science can explain).
But science does require evidence, and this evidence allows us to explain, with increasing accuracy, how the world around us works.
Noah's Ark, oil on canvas painting by Edward Hicks, 1846
Such research is then published in journals such as Journal of Creation and Creation Research Society Quarterly, and these technical reports are then cited in a vast, growing body of populist creationist literature that conflicts with, and undermines the teaching of evolution.
Today, more than 20% of the British public and the majority of US citizens, either tentatively or explicitly reject evolution, according to surveys published in the journal Science.
So it’s crucial that the debate is had, and that it is the evidence that is debated, rather than any faith-based position, which cannot be argued.
Which brings me back to the use of creation science to test the validity of evolution.
Biologist Phil Senter of the Fayette State University in North Carolina, US, has published the second of two papers that uses creation science techniques to examine the fossil record.
In the first, published in 2010, he used a technique called classic multidimensional scaling (CMDS) to evaluate the appearance of coelurosaurian dinosaurs over geological time.
That long, detailed paper was published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, and you can read the abstract.
CMDS is derived from a branch of creation science called baraminology, which classifies organisms according to a creationist framework. Animals fall into types, or baramins, which were created independently, but have diversified since.
Artist's impression of Archaeopteryx (image: John Sibbick / NHMPL)
Baraminologists trawl the fossil record for evidence that this is true. They identify “morphological gaps” in the record (for example, whether fossils of cats exist, but not cat-like animals) and use those to argue that such animal types (cats) are unique and created separately, from say dogs.
CMDS mathematically maps the occurrence of these morphological gaps, and baraminologists have used it to point out there are significant morphological gaps between modern and extinct whales, between arthropods and the worm-like annelids and arthropods and molluscs. And that, they say, is evidence that each group was created independently, and could not have evolved into the other.
Dr Senter has no real issue with the methodology – as he points out in the 2010 paper, mathematics has no creed.
But he argues that if CMDS shows that dinosaurs do show transitional forms, and are in fact genetically related to each other, then creationists are in a bit of a bind.
Either they must accept that to be true, and therefore contradict their own position that these groups appeared without evolution. Or they must throw out the assertion, but also reject their own methodology, which they have used to validate their creationist claims.
Dr Senter’s 2010 study did, of course, show that coelurosaurian dinosaurs are related, in particular that tyrannosaurs (to which T. rex belongs) form a continuous group with other dinosaurs belonging to a group called the Compsognathidae.
It also showed that one of the most famous animal fossils of all, Archaeopteryx, which has the appearance of a transitional form between birds and reptiles, is also morphologically closely related to other dinosaurs.Continued
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