Page 133 - Introduction to Paleobiology and The Fossil Record

120 INTRODUCTION TO PALEOBIOLOGY AND THE FOSSIL RECORD

Box 5.2 The foolishness of intelligent design

Since the earliest days, philosophers have sought to understand the world and where it came from.
At one time, many scholars argued that the Earth was flat, while others argued that the Earth was

static in space and the sun and planets rotated around the Earth. These views were famously dis-
proved and rejected some 500 years ago.
Most religions have also espoused so-called “creation myths” (see p. 184), often fanciful stories
about how the Earth was created, and how it was populated with life. One of the most famous cre-
ation myths is the Bible story in Genesis of how God created the first man, Adam, and then the fi rst

woman, Eve. For some time, religious fundamentalists – people who believe in the literal truth of
every word of the Bible, the Koran or any other religious text – have conducted a campaign against
evolution, and often against science and the modern world in general. At present, we see a rise in
Christian and Islamic fundamentalism in different parts of the world, and enthusiasts from both
religions try to use the political system and the press, and sometimes even violence, to impose their
view on others.
Creationism is a belief that the Earth and life were created perhaps 7000 years ago, and that all
the areas of science that refer to long time scales (e.g. geology, astronomy, cosmology) and to evolu-
tion (all biological and medical sciences) are wrong, and has been particularly prevalent in the United
States. After years of ridicule by scientists, creationism has been restyled as intelligent design (ID),
the view that organisms are so complex that they must have been created by an intelligent being.
Proponents of intelligent design range in their beliefs from the hard line (everything you see around
you is exactly as it was created, and creation was only a few thousand years ago) to the liberal (the
key large groups of plants and animals were created, but perhaps a very long time ago, and perhaps
there is some evolution between species). The different branches of creationism, including ID, lack
testable hypotheses and they lack evidence, so they are not credible alternatives to evolution.

As an example, many supporters of ID use the flagellum of bacteria as evidence. The fl agellum
(plural, flagella) is a thin structure that beats in a whip-like way to drive the bacterium through the

fluid in which it lives. The flagellum is composed of several components, and it is normally driven

by a proton pump, the flow of hydrogen ions across a concentration gradient. Supporters of ID have
chosen the flagellum as a key piece of evidence that biological structures are so complex they could

not have evolved, but must have been created whole. They argue that the flagellum is a good example

of irreducible complexity, meaning that it can only function as a whole, and if any part is removed
it fails to function. In fact this is not true, as has been shown repeatedly, and each component of

the flagellum has other functions. So, irreducible complexity, the keystone of ID, has not been dem-
onstrated, and it probably reflects a failure of imagination on the part of the investigator.

Read more about evolution in Darwin (1859), Ridley (1996), Futuyma (2005), Barton et al.
(2007) and at http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/paleobiology/, and National Academies Press
(2008) for a clear statement about evolution and the lack of evidence for intelligent design.

is enormous, and much of it appears to be
EVOLUTION AND THE FOSSIL RECORD
associated with geographic distribution. There
Speciation has also been variation through time, with
subspecies of Homo sapiens, like H. s. nean-
Species consist of many highly variable indi- derthalensis, the Neandertals, being stocky
viduals, often divided into geographically and heavily built, possible adaptations to the
restricted populations and races. All human cold Ice Age conditions of Europe 30,000 years
beings belong to a single species, Homo sapiens, ago (see p. 473). All species show geographic
and yet every person is different. The range of variation and, where the fossil record is good
genetic and physical variation among humans enough, variation in time as well.