David M. Payne

Can't help you out there DF, but it looks like you have your day planned out. Have fun with the letter, and if I can be of any help to you, let me know. It looks like you are on the right track now. I just sent in the "Story of Bob", Hope they have the guts to publish it. Catch you later.

David

TooBad

After a quick search, the nearest thing I can find of any relevance is the "Solar Neutrino Problem", documented in some detail
<a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-solar.html" target="_blank">here</a>. Probably not worth pursuing now if you've already started writing your piece, but what he presumably meant to say was "not enough solar neutrinos for the age of the sun". It turns out that the problem has more or less been solved anyway, in a way that requires no revision of the standard solar model.

Darwin's Finch

Thanks for the link, TooBad. Let me see if I have the YEC argument straight. Because scientists detected fewer neutrinos from the sun than expected, the creationists claimed that there could not be enough fusion reactions taking place in the sun to have sustained it for billions of years. Is that about right?

Of course, the argument falls apart in light of the neutrino shortage problem being solved. I'm going to enjoy informing my opponent of this development.

Mageth

Here's a link from <a href="http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/4180.asp" target="_blank">AiG</a> where Jonathan Sarfari touches on the solar neutrino problem. Note that he references a paper by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein, and James Riordon in The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News 586, 24 April 2002, and admits that the solar neutrino problem "...cannot be used as a young-age indicator — nor an old-age indicator for that matter."

Clutch

Hey, I can see the guy's point. If there's *no* helium in a neutrino, then there isn't *enough* helium in a neutrino to do... er... well, anything that would require helium.

In the same vein, I've often thought there isn't enough chocolate cake in diesel fuel.

Who could argue with that?

TooBad

I think that's about the size of it. The essence of the solution is that the detection experiments were only measuring electron-neutrinos, and that some of the electron-neutrinos emitted by the sun had transformed into tau-neutrinos or muon-neutrinos by the time they got to the Earth, and thus weren't being detected. So it's our model of the neutrino that needs revising, not our model of the sun.

That's just a summary of a summary, based on my severely limited understanding of these things. I'm open to correction by any qualified particle physicist.

TooBad

I've always been of the opinion that there isn't enough chocolate cake in chocolate cake...

nogods4me

Well then I guess I am the minimalist of the group, I think there is simply not enough chocolate cake.

Darwin's Finch

I finished the piece and have submitted it to the newspaper. I earlier spoke with the editor, and it looks like they are serious about the 500-word limit. This is a problem because I chose to respond to each of the points the guy made. Unfortunately, I also had to explain several of his points just to have my rebuttals make any sense for the reader, and this led to the piece becoming much longer than it would have been if he had explained those points himself. I think the piece holds together fairly well, and I fear what will happen to it if they decide they have to delete parts for space. I have also decided that if they don't publish it, I will rewrite it as a letter and send it to the guy.

Anyway, here it is (thank you, Talkorigins!). Let me know what you think.


I am writing in regard to Mr. xxx xxxx's July 3 letter entitled "Foolishness." Though ostensibly a reaction to the recent Pledge of Allegiance ruling, Mr. xxxx's letter quickly develops into a diatribe against the teaching of evolution. He makes a number of mistaken and unsubstantiated claims regarding evolutionary theory that must not go unchallenged.

It will be evident from some of the points raised that Mr. xxxx is a young-Earth creationist (YEC). YECs believe in a literal reading of the Genesis creation stories, think that the Earth is thousands, not billions, of years old and believe that their views should be given equal time in our public school science classrooms.

I will rebut each of the points Mr. xxxx raised with regard to evolution:

1) Mr. xxxx writes, ***quotes his definition of thermodynamics***

This is a subtle misstatement of the 2nd Law. It may more accurately be given as, "No process is possible in which the sole result is the transfer of energy from a cooler to a hotter body." (Atkins, 1984, The Second Law) An equivalent expression of the 2nd Law might be, "The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease." When creationists claim that evolution violates the 2nd Law, they overlook the fact that organisms are not closed energy systems. There is nothing in thermodynamics that precludes increasing degrees of order or complexity in open systems. As such, evolution does not violate the 2nd Law. This is an entirely uncontroversial view in the scientific community.

2) Mr. xxxx makes the oft-repeated claim that the fossil record does not provide evidence of evolutionary change above the species level. This is simply untrue. I refer the interested reader to any up-to-date college level textbook on paleontology and paleo-anthropology, where he or she will be presented with scores of the very fossils Mr. xxxx believes don't exist.

3) Mr. xxxx writes, ***quotes section beginning "The atmosphere and the biosphere" and ending with "the chicken or the egg problem"***

Of course, it is trivially true that a biosphere must develop within a habitable atmosphere. If I understand his point, Mr. xxxx seems to be saying that life could not have developed unless the atmosphere, as we presently know it, was already in place. If I have not misread his intent, his claim is simply wrong. We know that the atmosphere was not always oxygen-rich, and we also know that earliest life forms were anaerobic (many still are). This poses no problem for evolution.

Incidentally, thanks to evolutionary theory we can now correctly answer the famous chicken-egg question: It was the egg, by many millions of years.

4) Mr. xxxx alludes to a frequently used YEC argument that goes like this: Helium-4 is created by radioactive decay and is constantly being added to the atmosphere. Since helium is not light enough to escape the atmosphere, and given the rate at which it is being added, the current level of helium would have accumulated in less than two-hundred thousand years. Therefore, the Earth is considerably younger than standard models suggest.

What this argument overlooks are known mechanisms -- such as the polar wind as well as occasional interaction of the solar wind with the upper atmosphere -- that do cause helium to escape the atmosphere. In fact, the rate at which helium escapes has been calculated to be nearly identical to the rate of production.

5) He also writes, "Not enough helium in a neutrino for the age of the earth."

On the face of it, this is a rather puzzling sentence. I assume Mr. xxxx is alluding to the following YEC argument: Fusion reactions are the only known source of energy that can keep the sun burning for billions of years. Neutrinos are a byproduct of fusion reactions and are constantly streaming to Earth from the sun. When scientists were finally able to detect neutrinos coming to Earth, they were surprised to find that they detected far fewer such particles than had been predicted. Therefore, creationists claimed, there was considerably less fusion taking place in the sun's core than standard solar models had predicted, far too little fusion to have supported the sun for billions of years. Thus, the solar system was much younger than had been previously thought.

Happily, this problem has been recently solved, and the solution supports the standard solar model (as well as an ancient age for the sun). I refer the interested reader to UniSci, an online daily science news source which has a good article on this topic that any layperson can understand.

6) He continues, "Too little salt in the ocean for the age of the earth."

This is an allusion to another standard YEC argument, first put forth by Henry Morris in his 1977 book The Scientific Case for Creation. It goes like this: Given the rate at which salt is added to the oceans and given the levels of salt we find in the oceans, the Earth must be considerably younger than scientists claim, else the oceans would be far saltier than they are.

Morris makes a number of unwarranted assumptions in reaching this conclusion, most notably that the rate at which salt is added has always been uniform. By the same logic, given the rate at which aluminum is added to the oceans and given the present level of aluminum in the oceans, the Earth is about 100 years old! Of course, this is silly. No one calculates the age of the Earth based on ocean mineral levels. This is a creationist strawman.

7) Mr. xxxx notes, "So many biologists saying evolution is impossible."

One of the creationists' favorite tactic is to use scientists' words against them. This usually involves quoting outdated material, quoting out of context, or sometimes even deliberately misquoting a scientist to make it appear that he or she is saying one thing when, in fact, the scientist is making an entirely different point. A little research into the actual context of most of these quotes quickly reveals what the creationist is up to.

A word should be said about so-called "creation scientists" such as members of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). Their credibility is seriously undermined by the ICR's requirement that all members sign an affirmation that they believe in a literal intrepretation of the Genesis creation stories and will conduct their "research" based on those assumptions. In other words, that they will distort the facts to fit with their preconceptions. This is not how science is done.

8) Finally, I take issue with Mr. xxxx's claim that Charles Darwin recanted his theories on his deathbed. This urban legend has its roots in a 1915 article written by a certain Lady Hope for the American Baptist journal, the Watchman Examiner, in which she claimed to have been present at Darwin's deathbed and to have converted him to Christianity. That it is a complete fiction has not prevented people from spreading it as the truth, even eighy years after Darwin's daughter publicly denied that Lady Hope was even present at Darwin's deathbed, much less that her father recanted his life's work. Even Answers In Genesis, one of the better known creationist organizations, recognizes that this is a baseless tale and encourages its adherents not to use it in debates.

Science and the methodologies that make it possible are the most powerful means humanity has yet developed to learn about the world and about ourselves. And evolutionary theory is indisputably one of the crown jewels of scientific aceivement. It is an endlessly fascinating subject and is something we all can take pride in. I hope this article will dipel some of the misinformation that is too often presented as a reasonable alternative.

TooBad

Bravo, sir.