Should Creationism be taught in classrooms?

[otseng]

Should Creationism be taught in classrooms (as science)?
More specifically, should it be taught in public schools?
If so, how should it be taught as a science?

[The Happy Humanist]

Here's what I think we should teach in our schools:

That has to be one of the best first posts I've seen in a long time. Yes, you're a Creationist, but you've managed to express it in novel ways, which around here is downright exciting, and furthermore, done in it in a way very conducive to debate. Further, you actually seem like you might listen to the answers!

Congratulations, and welcome! (I'll have more to say, but I'm in a hurry right now).

[Jose]

Thank you, Thinian, and welcome.

I humbly offer a couple of comments on what you've said:

For all we've learned we still have a very fragmented understanding of how DNA works.

This is true. What we are learning now--like about siRNA--comes from comparing genomes and looking at what is evolutionarily conserved and what is not. The ideas gleaned from these comparisons are then tested in specific experiments. From this, we've learned some new things. There is no reason to imagine that this would work if there were not common descent.

Recently they succeeded in mapping the chimp DNA and the papers were full of comparisons with humans. 99% of the DNA is the same. If they were talking about the portion of the DNA that is replicated (and I think they were) then that’s about 300,000 base pairs that are different spread over 200,000 sites. Whether this is close enough together to expect that it is reasonable for proto-primate (the common ancestor) to become chimps and humans in the time allotted (I’m not sure how long this is meant to be) is Very much an open question.

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. All of the DNA is replicated at every cell division. Perhaps you mean transcribed? I'm not sure that even that is the way to look at it. The genes themselves are extremely highly conserved. Regulatory sequences are also highly conserved. "Spacer" DNA (in between various coding elements) is not. Many of the genes that exhibit differences code for transcription factors--proteins that control expression of other genes, and that typically play a role in development. Since all of the "nuts and bolts" in humans and chimps are essentially the same, what differs has to be the "relative proportions" of the parts, and that depends on the control of development. This indicates that the most significant differences are in the control of the relative proportions of various complex structures--things that can easily be changed by mutation, and that can have significant effects on morphology in a fairly short time.

The second law of thermodynamics is not called a ‘law’ for no reason. The basic forces of this universe seem to actively discourage complexity.

That may be, but life on earth is not a closed system. There's lots of energy pouring in from the sun. Plants use this to create complexity--easily turning simple compounds into complex plant parts. This observation alone proves that the 2nd law argument is irrelevant. If it were valid, then it wouldn't be evolution that would be impossible, but life itself.

Complexity means two things for a strand of DNA. First it takes you longer to reproduce yourself and second it means you require more energy to do it. Simplicity rules.

Unless there's energy input. Overall, energy is lost by living things--so the 2nd law is accurately adhered to. But since there's so much energy input, it's easy to replicate DNA. If your DNA replication argument were valid, there would need to be a correlation between "evolutionary complexity" and "amount of DNA per cell." There isn't. Lungfish and potatoes have more DNA than we do.

Why don’t the bacteria wipe us out? They are millions and millions of times more flexible and adaptable than we are. The stock answer to this is that it is not in their interest to do so, we are hosts to them.

..except that this isn't the stock answer. The vast majority of biomass and of biological diversity on earth is bacteria. The vast majority of these species have no interest in us whatsoever.

I don’t mean this point to be an ‘Ah Hah!’ more just a good way to expose the whole issue of complexity verses simplicity and why one can not disregard ‘the second law’ when it comes to life.

As noted above, the energy loss indicates that teh 2nd law is met. However, the energy input indicates why it's so easy to build complexity.

How do you put something as flexible as the simple life forms under the right kind of ecological pressure to make it have to resort to complexity to solve the problem of survival.

You don't. This is a standard misconception--that things evolve only when they face some kind of problem and must evolve "in order to survive." It doesn't work that way. Can you "evolve" into a taller person and become a basketball star? No? Why not?

If certain cell-cell associations occur, creating a multicellular entity, then this entity may have advantages that single-celled entities lack. Maybe it's taller, and can get more food out of the water. There was no "problem" it had to solve. Rather, it happened to be able to do something, and that something was advantageous. It had a lot of offspring, all of whom could do this same thing...and eventually one of its descendents happened to be able to do something slightly more complicated.

OR why not get simpler? No one ever discusses this possibility.

Sure we do. Try reading Full House for example. the fact is, getting simpler is common, and happens perfectly well. The reason we tend to think of evolution as some kind of march from simple to complex is that it started at zero and had nowhere to go but up. If you introduce a species to an island, and follow its evolution, it may become more complex, or it may become less complex. If you start in the middle, rather than at the bottom, you find that both directions are pretty much equally likely.

It is vital to stress at this point that observing that we are in fact here and that it seems the biosphere got more complex over time does NOT mean that mutation and natural selection must be the motivating force behind this process. In fact I think it can just as easily be argued that those things discourage order, and that the biosphere has found a number of ingenious ways to prevent mutation and encourage a capacity for adaptation within a species.

...except that we can measure mutation, and demonstrate that it happens a lot. In fact, mutation is one of those processes that tends to decrease order. DNA acquires mutations; over time, as more and more accumulate, we expect it to become random sequence. The fact that it does not is due to selection. DNA sequence changes that screw things up are weeded out because the individuals with those changes don't make it. Changes that are neutral or helpful are kept. The helpful ones--few, but there are some--are the ones that produce additional complexity (or in some cases, less complexity) if that happens to make the individuals with these changes more successful.

The real question is what promotes order?

Once you have a self-replicating entity, it promotes its own order. Mutations happen. Changes that make it disordered, and less able to reproduce, don't get passed on. Changes that make it more ordered, and better able to reproduce tend to take over the population. If there's any kind of competition, there will be selection for things that work better.

Why would life ever bother to form in the first place?

Well, why did any of us bother to come into the world? It happened because it was possible. We didn't choose it. Life arose because it could. Once it did, there was no choice but evolution, because the self-reproduction mechanism isn't perfect. Mutations happen.

And once its there why should it grow into outlandishly complex forms, unless something encourages it to do so?

What encouraged it was competition. What enabled it to "do better" in the competition was mutation. Of course we are the descendents of the life forms that did better; the ones that did worse, or stayed the same, were out-competed.

It is worth pointing out that consciousness is the only known force in the universe that does actually promote order. This is readily observable and teachable and no well-taught science class should leave out this point.

As noted above, this is not actually so. Photosynthesis promotes one heck of a lot of order, and does so without thinking. We might note that gravity also promotes order; that's why the various geological strata are parallel (ordered). They settled into their ordered pattern because gravity pointed in the same direction. It's fun to think of consciousness this way, but I think it's a red herring in the evolution department.

Extrapolating up (or out or back or whatever) from consciousness to a purposeful connected God is an exercise that can be left to the world’s churches and does not belong in science. But I freely admit that the above described points leave the door wide open.

I suggest that the caveats I've added make the case less compelling--but only in the sense that there is no direct evidence for gods, and perfectly fine explanations for most things that do not require a god's constant attention. That is, what is taught in science classrooms should, indeed, be science. The impact of religion on our lives should be considered elsewhere. This does not mean that there is anything in science that argues against god. There is nothing that does so. Rather, science and religion are alternate ways of knowing the world, that examine different realms. One examines the physical world using rather limited techniques; the other seeks to know the spiritual world that is inaccessible to science.

[The Happy Humanist]

2. According to the very (very) scarce fossil record there has been an evolution of form from simpler creatures to complex creatures. Again the stress here should be on the scarcity of data. There are about 300,000 fossils in the record out of a conservative estimate of 5,000,000,000 species that may have existed. Imagine trying to decide what picture your computer is displaying when only about 1 out of every 100,000 pixels is lit.

That's a terrific analogy...but I think I might have a better one.

Imagine a jigsaw puzzle with about that ratio of pieces missing (and I'm taking your numbers as accurate, though I don't know for certain). What pieces we do have very definitely seem to be forming a large uppercase E for Evolution.

Now, what Creationists are trying to do is force pieces together in order to form a crude uppercase C for Creationism. You know how some jigsaw puzzle pieces will seem to drop into place, but the fit is not quite seamless, and you just know it doesn't belong there - but it's still possible to leave it there and try to see what you come up with. You might come up with something interesting, but you won't come up with the right answer.

As an example, in our Koala discussion, it was asked how the koala made it to Australia from the ark, without starving to death (no eucalyptus leaves in Turkey). In order to "make" Creationism work, someone offered that the koala's dependence on eucalyptus may have only recently evolved. Well, y-e-e-e-e-s, MAYBE.....but the size of the jackhammer needed to pound this puzzle piece into place renders the exercise laughable. Starting with the improbability of the Flood, the improbability of the Ark, the improbability of animals flash-evolving in 6000 years...and the needlessness of the whole thing, since we already have an answer that satisfies the data without a jackhammer. The piece simply "fits" better under the evolution scenario.

[Thinian]

The first draft of my response was over six pages long (single spaced, font size 10, A4). Somewhere in the middle I actually used the phrase "Brevity is wit." It wasn't until I reread it that the irony settled in.

Evolution V. Creation for dummies:

Evolution:

"Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparent purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all." (We all know who said this.)

Creation:

The only battle in the universe of interest is consciousness versus entropy. Even hyperbole fails to grasp just how many eyes the watchmaker has.


The latter of the two points of view is the only one that is meaningful or useful (a requirement of any scientific theory). This point of view will win but it may take a generation. Anyone who refuses to see its truth or value of it will simply be thought of as the flat-earthers (or young-earthers) of our time.

I could defend the above assertion. It’s easy to do (but hard to do briefly), but you are all clever enough to defend it yourselves, so off you go.

I mean this in the kindest possible way : Grow up science. We go nowhere good without consciousness.

[QED]

The only battle in the universe of interest is consciousness versus entropy. Even hyperbole fails to grasp just how many eyes the watchmaker has.

So you are saying that entropy is constantly working to pull things towards thermal equilibrium therefore it takes a magic hand from outside the system to constantly put things back together. I can tell that this is highly compelling for you but unfortunately it is totally unjustified. The meaning of the second law of thermodynamics is non-negotiable. The concept of entropy is frequently mistaken leading to the kind of misconception you have just demonstrated. The story of entropy is bound up with the the history of the cosmos and the distribution of energy within it. There is nothing at all preventing things such as stars pumping readily usable energy into local pockets of low-entropy such as our planet. No outside hand is required to constantly re-order things. Sorry.

[Thinian]

What I'm saying is that consciousness is the magic hand. I'm not saying what I think consciousness is. That is a topic for a diffferent forum.

[QED]

What I'm saying is that consciousness is the magic hand. I'm not saying what I think consciousness is. That is a topic for a diffferent forum.

Very good. I've started a new topic for us to explore some of your interesting points. I hope you'll join me there.