Undeniable (3 page)

Speaking of the ark itself, I pointed out that very skilled shipwrights in New England built the
Wyoming
, a six-masted wooden tall ship. The boat is huge by wooden ship standards, over 100 meters (300 feet) long. The creationists' imagined ark is said to have been 500 feet long and able to hold 14,000 animals and 8 people. The real ship, the
Wyoming
, had a crew of 14. Although it was built by the best shipbuilders in the world in 1909, they could not manage the inherent elasticity of wooden timbers and strakes. The
Wyoming
twisted in rough seas, opening uncontrollable leaks in the hull. She foundered and sank, with the loss of all hands. If the best in the modern world couldn't build a large seaworthy ship, what reason would anyone have to think that 8 unskilled ancient people could?

I pointed out the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., has about 400 species on 66 hectares (163 acres) of land. Zookeepers work around the clock to maintain the health of those wonderful creatures. How could 8 unskilled people keep 14,000 animals alive and well? Doesn't seem to me that they could.

I pointed out the spectacular boulders one can see along highways in the Pacific Northwest region of the U.S. They were washed there by ancient floods, when ice dams periodically gave way in what is now Montana. If there had been a worldwide flood, and the heavier rocks sank to the bottom as Mr. Ham et al. assert, what are these boulders doing there on top of the ground and not under the soil? Well, they wouldn't be there, but they are. So, the creationists are wrong about the natural history of their world.

I mentioned also the key feature of any scientific theory, whether it's about evolution or anything else: One should be able to use it to make predictions. I briefly mentioned the remarkable story of
Tiktaalik
, the “fishapod” (transition between fish and tetrapod, or land animal with four legs), whose fossil was predicted to exist in certain types of swamps from the Devonian Period. Scientists led by the tireless Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago found exactly such a fossil swamp in northeastern Canada, and went there and found
Tiktaalik
. Think about it, an ancient animal was surmised to have once existed. Researchers figured out where it would have lived. They went there and proved it. Amazing.

I also used the reproductive strategies of modern Mexican topminnows as another example of a scientific theory being used to make a prediction. Topminnows reproduce asexually when they have to. In those episodes, their offspring are more susceptible to infection by the blackspot parasitic worm, because they have a less varied mix of genes. That sexual strategy is exactly what is predicted by adjunct theories of evolution, notably one called the Theory of the Red Queen, which just charms me. In the fictional land of the Red Queen, Lewis Carroll's Alice has to run all the time. Evolution is thought to work the same way: If you stop running, stop mixing up your genes, you'll fall off the treadmill of life. The queen will leave you behind. I've devoted a whole chapter to this idea farther in.

Because I personally met astronomer and Nobel laureate Robert Wilson, I very much enjoyed reminding the audience of his discovery, in conjunction with Arno Penzias, of cosmic microwave background radiation. In the 1960s, the two of them found that the whole sky is glowing, which is exactly what cosmologists who worked on the theory of the Big Bang had predicted. I asked also how we could observe stars that are farther away than 6,000 light-years, if Earth is only 6,000 years old. One would expect to see no light at all from such places, unless natural laws are overthrown for a while. So why do we see far more distant stars and galaxies in all directions? If there were a superpower, why would it (she or he) mess with us that way?

For his part, Ken Ham avoided responding to any of these issues and repeated that he had “a book,” and his interpretation of said book supersedes anything we can observe in nature. I pointed out that his interpretation of his book is just not reasonable to anyone who examines the world with an open mind and curiosity. This foreshortened worldview is not at all consistent with the views of many of the world's religious leaders. Finally, to tie it to my main concern, I reminded the audience of Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution. One of the duties of Congress is “to promote the progress of Science and the Useful Arts…”

One of the duties of all of us—parents, scientists, everyone—is to help educate the next generation, so they can succeed in their lives and help make the world a better place. Watching some of Mr. Ham's videos in preparation for the event, I could not help but notice his kvetching about young people, specifically that they're leaving his ministry. After hearing him out for more than an hour of his monologues, I gathered that they have trouble taking what he says to heart.

The creationists press on, looking for ways to isolate their kids as much as possible and to indoctrinate them so thoroughly that no matter what the world throws at them, the children will grow up to do their best to accept a 6,000-year-old Earth. All the while, the whole lot of them have no issue embracing modern information technology, medicine, and food systems that enable them to conduct their extraordinary business. As I often remark, it wouldn't matter, if it weren't for the kids.

The essence of the evening was captured by a question from the audience. Someone asked: “What would it take to change your worldview?” My answer was simple: Any single piece of evidence. If we found a fossilized animal trying to swim between the layers of rock in the Grand Canyon, if we found a process by which a new huge fraction of a radioactive material's neutrons could become protons in some heretofore fantastically short period of time, if we found a way to create eleven species a day, if there were some way for starlight to get here without going the speed of light, that would force me and every other scientist to look at the world in a new way. However, no such contradictory evidence has ever been found—not any, not ever.

Mr. Ham responded that
nothing
would change his mind. He has a book that he believes provides all the answers to any natural science question that could ever be posed. No piece of evidence would change his mind—not any, not ever. Imagine this man or some of his followers on a jury. If their minds were made up, there would be nothing for the defense or prosecuting attorneys to do. No evidence would sway these jurors. They would refuse to use their intellect to assess the quality of evidence. They would not employ even the most rudimentary critical thinking skill. They would sit very politely, I imagine, but evidence would not matter at all. That is a very troubling prospect indeed. The rule of law would be ignored. They would be, well they are, excluding themselves from our society. They do not want to participate. I hope all of us will consider the potential consequences of this sort of thinking—or nonthinking. If there were a test of competency for voters, how well would they fare?

At some level, as an altruistic human (a consequence of my evolutionary heritage), I feel bad for the creationists. They have been left out of the wonderful process of science and its ability to reveal so much about nature. I'm heartbroken for their kids. On top of that, I feel bad for all of us. How did we let an ideological resistance to inquiry become such a prominent part of our society? How did we exclude so many people from the knowledge won with great sacrifice by our ancestors? Perhaps in the coming decades we can turn this around and include everyone—people in nonscientific fields and professions as well as the professional scientist, engineer, and educator. Perhaps by celebrating evolution, we can open minds and unlock more of our vast human potential.

Despite the resistance from part of my audience (not to mention from a large portion of the American public), I suspect everyone there can reason along the lines I described in my half-hour presentation. Certainly I suspect that Ken Ham can. It's just that when it comes to evolution, and especially to the related realization that we are all pretty small bits of the universe, it seems as though Ham and his followers just can't handle the truth. They throw aside their common sense and cling to the hope that there's something that makes it okay to
not
think for themselves. The irony is, in the process they are walking away from our ability to understand who we are, where we came from, and how we fit into a cosmos of astounding dimensions. If there is something divine in our nature, something that sets humans apart from all other creatures, surely our ability to reason is a key part of it.

Ken Ham, his followers, myself, and everyone else—we are all in this together. We're all a product of the same evolutionary processes. Here's hoping we can work together to bring the children of the creationists' preachers' flocks to a more enlightened, boundless way of thinking about the world around us.

 

3

CREATIONISM AND THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS

It's not just Ken Ham and his Answers in Genesis ministry. Over the years, I've heard a lot of arguments against evolution from people who find it objectionable on religious or emotional or philosophical grounds. Often these disputes boil down to the simple, dead-end argument from incredulity: “It cannot be true, because I find it so hard to believe that it's true.” But sometimes creationists take a more interesting, science-inspired line of attack and insist that evolution is not physically possible, because no system can naturally become more complex over time. More specifically, they cite evolution for violating one of the most well-established principles in science, the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

In commonsense terms, the Second Law is this: Given the chance, balls roll downhill; they never roll uphill on their own. Put another way, energy tends to spread out: Heat spreads out, and lakes never spontaneously freeze on a warm summer day. Creationists seem to think that the human species has likewise been running downhill since The Fall, since our ancestors Adam and Eve screwed up. Creationists hear the Second Law of Thermodynamics and say, “Ah, hah! See, our whole world is a machine winding down—death to everyone.”

By the way, rest assured that there is a First and Third Law of Thermodynamics; there's even a Zeroth Law. While these are cool (sorry) in their own way, they don't come up in creationists' diatribes.

To be sure, the Second Law of Thermodynamics really does contribute to a general winding down of the world around us. It explains why no one can build a perpetual motion machine. Somewhere, someplace in any machine, you're going to lose some energy to heat. When it comes to making something go or happen, there's no free lunch. The following quotation is irresistible; it's from the renowned twentieth-century astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington:

“The law that entropy always increases—the Second Law of Thermodynamics—holds, I think, the supreme position among the Laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations—then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation—well, these experimentalists bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.”

You don't have to know or care about Maxwell's equations to get a sense of what he means. (But just so you know, they are the equations that describe the nature of light, electricity, and magnetism.) The key idea is that the Second Law of Thermodynamics mathematically describes any system's loss of energy to its surroundings. It is fundamental to the way the natural world works. Since energy is constantly and continuously spreading out, everything should be winding down to a dead stop. Perhaps you can see why creationists figure that the Second Law means there's no way for evolution to add complexity to life. How could any living system get organized, if all its driving forces were continually diluted, spread out into the vast blackness of the universe?

As a mechanical engineer who took a lot of physics, I am fascinated by this particular creationist argument, because it is both scientifically subtle and completely misinformed. Here's the most important thing to know: The Second Law applies only to closed systems, like a cylinder in a car engine, and Earth is not even remotely a closed system. Transfers of matter and energy are constantly taking place. Life here is nothing like a perpetual motion machine, but neither is it like a ball rolling inexorably downhill.

There are three main sources of energy for life on Earth: the Sun, the heat from fissioning atoms deep inside Earth, and the primordial spin of Earth itself. These sources provide energy throughout the day. The Sun provides the most energy. It's a fusion reactor releasing 10
26
Watts every second (10
26
Joules). Earth's core also provides energy in the form of heat. The spinning of our planet keeps shifting the energy inputs and adds acceleration to the wind and the waves. So as you can see, the world we live on is not even remotely a closed system. All of our world's ecosystems ultimately run on a continual external source of light and heat. Energy has been pouring in from the Sun for over four and a half billion years. Living things ranging from amoebas to sequoias have to find ways to make the best use of all that energy, lest they be outcompeted by other living things that use it more efficiently.

The Second Law sets the boundaries; it's the rule we all have to play by. Starting with energy to study evolution is a great way to understand life. What do living things do with all this energy? We use it to drive chemical systems that obey the Second Law. But the Second Law comes into play everywhere in your life. When you pedal a bicycle, there's a little bit of friction in the chain joints and the bearings that hold the pedal and cranks. The motion makes a little bit of heat. Where does that heat go? It goes into the universe. Really. It dissipates into the environment of the whole world and eventually radiates into space, and there's no way to recover it. The tendency for energy to spread out in natural systems might also explain how a kid's room becomes such a mess.