Paul McBride’s review of the Disco ‘Tute’s “Science and Human Origins”
“Science and Human Origins” (Amazon; Barnes&Noble) is a slim book recently published by the Disco ‘Tute’s house press. It’s by Ann Gauger and Douglas Axe, members of the Disco Tute’s Biologic Institute, along with Casey Luskin. The book is blurbed thusly:
In this provocative book, three scientists challenge the claim that undirected natural selection is capable of building a human being, critically assess fossil and genetic evidence that human beings share a common ancestor with apes, and debunk recent claims that the human race could not have started from an original couple.
In other words, down with common descent, and while we’re at it, a literal Adam and Eve could have been the ancestors of the whole human species.
And by three scientists? Ah, yes, I momentarily forgot that Casey Luskin got a Master’s in Earth Science before he went off to law school and then got a job with the Disco ‘Tute, where he is now listed as “Research Coordinator” (and is there called an attorney rather than a scientist). Once again, one detects a touch of inflationary credentialism.
Fortunately for me, I’m spared the chore of reading and critiquing the book. Paul McBride, a Ph.D. candidate in vertebrate macroecology/evolution in New Zealand who writes Still Monkeys, bit the bullet and did a chapter by chapter (all five chapters) review of the book. The book doesn’t come out looking good (is anyone surprised?). I’m going to shamelessly piggyback on McBride’s review. I’ll link to his individual chapter reviews, adding some commentary, below the fold.
Here are McBride’s individual chapter reviews:
Chapter 1, in which Ann Gauger
… questions the certainty that evolutionary biologists have in the notion of common descent, with the broad claim that it is merely similarity, rather than relatedness, that we observe. She tells us that certainly humans and chimpanzees share a number of common features, but so do (and this is her example) Ford Tauruses and Mustangs. Yet the latter are designed, indicating that similarity cannot rule out design.
McBride has some fun with that specious analogy, as well as with her ‘random changes in computer programs break the programs’ claim. Someone over at the Disco ‘Tute should tell Gauger to read up on genetic programming.
Chapter 2, in which Douglas Axe expands on Gauger’s Chapter 1, elaborating some arguments and finishing with the claim that unless we can identify each and every mutation between humans and our common ancestor with chimps, there’s room for a Designer. I dealt with that argument some time ago.
Chapter 3, in which Casey Luskin argues that the hominin fossil record is too fragmentary to infer the descent of H. saps like himself from a common ancestor of him and chimps. (Notice how I restrained myself? :)) Like all creationists, Casey has to draw the line between ancient humans (Homo) and earlier fossil (allegedly non-ancestral to humans) apes somewhere, and he draws it between H. habilis and H. erectus. (Recall that there’s considerable disagreement among creationists about just where that line ought to go. Casey is quite a bit deeper in the past than most.)
In an update to that post, McBride draws attention to a recent paper plotting brain volume against age of hominin fossils, essentially duplicating material in two posts on that topic by Nick Matzke here and here nearly six years ago.
In a recent post on Evolution News, Casey asserts
Hominin fossils generally fall into one of two groups: ape-like species and human-like species, with a large, unbridged gap between them. Despite the hype promoted by many evolutionary paleoanthropologists, the fragmented hominin fossil record does not document the evolution of humans from ape-like precursors.
Look at the graphs in McBride’s post and in Nick’s Thumb posts for data relevant to that claim. Nevertheless, Casey promises that he will be discussing the issue in coming weeks.
Chapter 4, on junk DNA by (earth scientist and lawyer) Casey again, gets a two-part review, a prelude which makes pre-reading predictions about what Chapter 4 will claim, and then the review proper. Casey comes through, fulfilling several of McBride’s predictions, including conflating “junk” DNA and non-coding DNA, a pervasive ID creationist habit. I rather like McBride’s conclusion to this chapter review:
Luskin here has continued in the tradition of the other chapters in this book by ignoring all of the best arguments that run contrary to his, while making previously refuted arguments with biased evidence, pretty much in line with what I predicted before reading the chapter. He presents no positive case for a pervasively functional genome, and has only set out to cast doubt on the concept of junk DNA. Even in this, he has comprehensively failed. The book is called Science and Human Origins, but the science is threadbare, and treated unevenly and unfairly.
Finally, Chapter 5, by Gauger again, is the culmination of the book, and can be seen as a rationale for accepting a literal Adam and Eve, a two-person effective breeding population sometime in our ancestry. McBride writes
To convince us of the possiblity of a literal Adam and Eve, Ann Gauger presents to us doubt over whether a single published paper from the 1990s truly supports a large human population since speciation.
McBride has a good critique, and one thing he mentions is kind of funny. In this chapter, Gauger accepts that two human haplotypes are ancient, in the 4-6mya range. But, of course, up there in Chapter 3 Casey argued that the boundary between us (non-descended from apes) humans and those apes’ ancestors is between H. erectus and H. habilis, a split that occurred around 1.8mya. Gauger accepts a ‘human’ trait as originating with critters that are more ancient than Casey is willing to admit as ancestral to humans (or maybe Gauger’s Adam and Eve weren’t humans (tee hee)).
In his conclusion McBride wrote:
I have been left wondering why the Discovery Institute, or intelligent design advocates in general, or biblical literalists feel a need to try and accommodate science when they have a belief in a supernatural entity capable of breaking natural laws. In the case of this book, it has left them needing to make all kinds of awkward criticisms of fields in which the authors clearly lack expertise. A lawyer is not the right guy to challenge the world’s palaeoanthropologists, nor the world’s geneticists. Certainly, he shouldn’t be trying to take them all on at once. It will end with him trying to smear the reputation of scientists rather than engaging with their ideas. Accusations that the entire field of palaeoanthropology is driven by personal disputes and that Francis Collins is a bad Christian are simply not compelling reading in a book that is putatively about scientific argument.
And the last paragraph:
Science and Human Origins has to be described first and foremost as being anti-evolution rather than pro-intelligent-design, or pro-science. If it offers solace to those seeking evidence against evolution for their faith, the solace should be as incomplete as the arguments made in the book.
Read all of McBride’s posts on this. He’s an articulate and knowledgeable guy.
Categories:
- Assault on Science,
- Book Reviews
Tags:
- Axe,
- Gauger,
- Luskin,
- Paul McBride,
- Science and Human Origins,
- Still Monkeys
113 Comments
Just to remind everyone of the scientific “credentials” of Luskin, take a look at this post from PT from 2008:
pandasthumb.org/archives/200[…]skin-ab.html
OK, what in a 1968 Mustang engine is a precursor to today’s silicon chip engine controls?
That’s right, nothing.
Similarity per se doesn’t show evolution without design, it’s the evidence of relatedness found in actual life that indicates relatedness. That’s why they always deal only generally with similarities, because they have no explanation for homologies, particularly the design-unpromising homologies found throughout life (why do vertebrate wings derive from terrestrial forelimbs of their ancestors in every case?), that “design” fails to explain at all.
So it’s the same old junk as ever, avoidance of the predictions of non-teleological evolution with which life is suffused, to attack the same worthless strawman and thus to avoid the fact that ID explains nothing while evolution explains the specific derivative patterns existing throughout life.
Glen Davidson
Yeah, Casey’s a classic case of inflationary credentialism.
And dammit, I threw trackbacks at McBride’s posts and got error messages on ‘em. Shucks.
I’ve always suspected that Casey ain’t no kin to no monkey. If he were, he would be able to reason better than he does.
You mean to say that they didn’t do an exhaustive literature review? Really? I wonder why? Why concentrate on a paper from 1990 when a much more recent paper has addressed the issue? Here is the reference:
Venema (2010) Genesis and the Genome: Genomic Evidence for Human-ape Common Ancestry and Ancestral Population Sizes. Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith. 62(3)166-178.
The paper was recently discussed here on PT, thanks to whoever provided me with the reference. It used evidence from modern comparative genomics to estimate the size of populations in early human history. No evidence for Adam and Eve was found.
And of course they also ignored all of the SINE insertion data, the chromosomal fusion data, the broken gene data, etc. Maybe that’s why they only found evidence for similarity, they ignored all of the evidence for common ancestry. Once again, I wonder why?
Why bother trying to fool those who are already convinced? Why not at least try to fool those who already know better? What? Oh … Never mind.
PS Robert still hasn’t answered questions about this paper from the last time he did a late night drive by. If he can’t be banned, he should be ignored, at least until he has provided evidence that he has read the paper.
Science has already shown the existence of a couple from whom all living humans are descended – think of Mitochondrial Eve’s parents. The problem for the IDists seems to be that they were far from the only two humans alive at the time. It does rather give the game away (again!) about their not-so-very-well-hidden agenda.
So much dishonesty or stupidity.
I’ll just comment on the obscene “toddler making random changes in a computer program” argument.
Let’s create a correct analogy.
First, the program has to have a great deal of redundancy.
Second, the toddler isn’t deliberately inserting random changes in the only copy of the program. The toddler is actually trying to copy out the binary digits correctly, but an occasional imperfection occurs with each copying.
The toddler is then taking each new copy and running it on a separate machine. Some of the new copies don’t run, many run the same way (although actually containing slight sequence changes), and a few run in a way which may be better, under certain particular circumstances.
I know this was alluded to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming, I just had to elaborate.
The exact number of paid members of the Biologic Institute is unclear www.biologicinstitute.org/people/ (Luskin is paid by the DI). Most of the people on the list are actually employed elsewhere. I’d love to know the budget - I’ve heard it quoted as anything from several hundred thousand to in the low millions per year. There seem to be relatively few paid employees, there seems to be remarkably little work being done even for the number of employees, and a strikingly high budget with all that considered. The tiny amount of work required to do things like put up a post on the web site and crank out recycled creationist pablum like this once every few years is obvious. Looks like Wingnut Welfare at its finest. I’m going to cynically assume that by far the biggest budget item is salaries.
I just provided Amazon with my “review” - “Any publication that claims that Adam and Eve literally existed - and then claims to be about science, not religion - is obviously bogus. But considering the source (the Dishonesty Institute) we already knew that.” Now to see if they publish it.
Thank you. I may hold my nose and do an Amazon review. Meanwhile let me vent here about the HYPOCRISY
This book, to the extent that it is anything other than an uninspired make work project by a group of crafty toadying lickspittles, to make their doddering multi-millionaire donors think they actually do something with the money, is pure YEC code.
A bunch of simpleton “logical arguments against evolution” that a clever fourth grader could see through (deliberately vandalizing something isn’t the same as making a good but imperfect copy of it; the fact that beehives look similar to other beehives via common design is not an argument that all similarities in the universe are the result of deign by bees; the “they’re only similarities” we see are exactly the similarities that the theory of evolution predicts and we see them in molecular biology, biochemistry, cell biology, paleontology, etc), and then it’s straight on to “Adam and Eve are possible”.
But of course, you won’t find the words “6000 years old” or “Noah’s ark” anywhere in this book. That would violate the “always use very thinly veiled code because of Edwards v. Aguillard” standard, and violating that standard is not acceptable en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biolog[…]nvestigation (technically Weber even tried to use the code and was basically humiliated for having spoken at all).
However, the only possible person who would actually read this book for any reason other than to rebut it is a YEC. Yes, the majority of sales will be bulk purchases by right wing think tanks, and yes, those boxes will probably go straight from the receiving dock to the recycling area - they may not even open the boxes, let alone the books, at the Heritage Foundation - but if any reader is targeted, it’s an education-deprived YEC.
The whole point is to serve up YEC with a ridiculously small fig leaf of “plausible deniability”. Absurd.
I’d better not violate the “no unexplained satire on the internet” rule. This part of my comment was satirical in nature. Although I have heard credible, but not definitively confirmed, rumors about unopened boxes of mass-ordered books at right wing think tanks, that rumor was about Ann Coulter books, and I don’t have strong confirmation of it.
Your review is on the Amazon site. I gave it a “helpful” nod, but we’ll see how long it lasts. The previous 1-star review disappeared no doubt the result of a squeaky Gerbil.
Paul McBride has a super detailed review up on Amazon now.
Re Luskin’s quoted comment that:
The best counterexamples to Luskin’s claim are the Dmanisi fossils. Their skulls resemble both the smaller Homo erectus skulls and the larger habilis skulls, and their brain sizes straddle the lower end of the erectus range and the upper end of the habiline range, they were bipedal, and they made primitive stone tools.
Luskin tried to explain them away a few years ago, but had to misrepresent the evidence outrageously to do it, as I documented here.
I note with interest Paul’s comment that Casey will be revisiting the issue of human evolution again in the next few weeks. Can’t wait to see whether he recycles his old misrepresentations, or comes up with some new ones. (It is, of course, mathematically possible that he will come up with some honest arguments, in the same way that it is mathematically possible to break the bank at Monte Carlo.)
And he [McBride] has a lovely response to Ann Gauger on Uncommon Descent.