Western Book Tours

Paleontologist Takes on Creationists with Fossil Evidence in “Evolution”

By Jenny Shank, 11-02-07

Thursday night at the Boulder Book Store, Donald Prothero discussed his new book, “Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters,” in which he lays out the fossil evidence for evolution in passionate and concrete terms.  Prothero considers evolution to be the first front in what he sees as religious fundamentalists’ attack on all science.  Prothero said that in the past when his colleagues have addressed the arguments of creationists, they’ve done so with “kid gloves.” “In the age of the blogosphere,” he said, “you’ve got to go at it with bare knuckles and lots of mud throwing,” because the creationists “play dirty.”

Prothero began his presentation by suggesting, as Stephen J. Gould had before, that “science and religion are non-overlapping ways of looking at the world, and should not conflict or interfere with each other.” He gave a brief chronology of battles against evolution, which began right when Darwin first proposed the theory in 1859.  Most educated westerners accepted evolution by the time of Dawin’s death in 1882. 

In the United States, the first backlash against evolution came in the 1920’s, culminating in the Scopes Monkey Trial.  Since then, there have been periodic legal challenges to the teaching of evolution, but the courts have rebuffed these efforts, and “legally speaking, it’s dead.” But creationism is alive and flourishing in America, and Prothero said that depending on the study, 40 to 50 percent of Americans say they believe in creationism.

In recent years, creationists have begun to make an argument they call “intelligent design,” which Prothero said is basically the same argument with different wording, “an attempt to sound scientific without obvious parallels to Genesis.” William Paley first put forth the idea that became “intelligent design” in his 1802 book, “Natural Theology,” in which he wrote that if a person were to find a watch on the beach, its “intricate contrivances” would argue for a designer or watchmaker.

Prothero said that one of the main weaknesses of this argument is that there are many bad designs in nature.  He cited humans, whose backs and feet are not meant for bipedalism, and whose genome is “full of non-functioning DNA.” “What is the design implication,” he asked, “for male nipples?”

The bulk of Prothero’s book consists of presenting fossil lines as they evolve from one phylum to another.  Creationists, he said, frequently claim that there are no “transitional forms,” but Prothero presented several modern examples, such as the Neopilina, which has qualities of both mollusks and segmented worms, and Onychophora, which has wormlike and insect-like features. 

“But creationists don’t care about invertebrates,” he said, so he gave the example of Amphioxus, which has a notochord (a feature all chordates, or vertebrates, share during their embryonic stage).  He pointed to the “recent discovery of soft bodied impressions of vertebrates from the lower Cambrian of China,” which proves the phylum to which humans belong (chordata) is as old as others, going back to the Cambrian explosion.

Prothero discussed last year’s discovery of a fossil called Tiktaalik, known popularly as the “fishibian,” which has some amphibian features, such as its head, and some fish features, such as its gills.  Archaeopteryx, the fossil depicted on the cover of the book, is the best-known transitional form, with the feathers of a bird, yet the long tail and discrete hand bones of a reptile.  One of the best fossil sequences supporting evolution, according to Prothero, is that of land mammals’ evolution into whales, which includes several transitional species, such as Ambulocetus Natans, whose name means “walking swimming whale.”

One audience member asked what the weakest sequence in the fossil record was, and Prothero replied, “We would love to have better early bat fossils.” He explained that because the bat is a delicate creature with parts that don’t preserve well, there are gaps in the record that creationists jump on, and say “bats appear with completely modern parts,” an assertion Prothero says isn’t true.  Still, “paleontologists would be orgasmic about it if they could have better early bat fossils.”

Judging from the questions, there were no creationists in the audience at the Boulder Book Store, but Prothero argued that it’s still important to wage a fight against inroads creationists have made into the educational system.  American scientific literacy is already among the worst in the world, he said, citing studies that measure American students as behind much of Asia and Western Europe in scientific knowledge. 

He blames “bad textbooks, poor teaching, and the culture as a whole” for the nation’s scientific illiteracy problem.  The media is partly to blame, he said, because they insist on presenting two dissenting viewpoints even on issues about which there is next to no debate in the scientific community.  News programs always “pull in some crank from way out on the fringes.” He cited the idea that dinosaurs evolved into birds, which is accepted by almost all paleontologists, but whenever a news program does a story on this, they always feature “the same two or three dissenters.”

So in the interest of promoting scientific literacy, I’ll conclude without mentioning opposing theories to evolution, such as the belief that humans can arrive on earth fully formed, conveyed by UFOs.  Sorry, as a member of the media, I couldn’t help myself.

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