DarwinTalk.com

Project CREATION exists as an educational and resource ministry to help Christians educate and empower themselves to oppose the humanist/evolutionist establishment and philosophy.

Sean Meek, Executive Director of Project CREATION, travels nationally speaking on such topics as: Creation is the Foundation, The Curse of Compromise, Including Creation in the Curriculum and God’s Revelation in Science and the Bible. Mr. Meek is available to speak at church services, Sunday school classes and other groups on the Biblical and scientific aspects of creation.

For more info visit http://www.projectcreation.org .

 

A small apprehension often lurks in the back of the mind of any Skeptic who has ever given an interview for later publication or broadcast; “What if the interviewer wants to show me, or the Skeptics, in a bad light?” With the technology now available to the media it would not be at all difficult to rearrange the words one has used to change one’s meaning completely.

Perhaps we should mention here a little about the technicalities of the TV interview. In any news or current affairs type interviews, pre-recorded outside a studio, a small technical deception is not uncommon. Normally only one video camera is used, and that camera is usually focused on the interviewee, but if the interview is played like that, with disembodied questions coming from `off camera’, it tends to make the subjects look like they are talking to a wall. So, at the end of the interview, the camera changes places to focus on the interviewer, who then asks some of the questions again, or gives their reactions to something the interviewee has said. These are known as “reaction shots” (or “noddies” in the vernacular) and are designed to include the interviewer in the final product. This is technically a deception, but it is a harmless one used to make the segment more viewable. In documentaries, however, this quite often does not apply, and it is usual for the people speaking to be seen expounding their views without the intervention of interviewers.

Of course, in all such cases there must be an element of trust between the interviewee and the interviewer. It would be quite simple, technically, for the interviewer or the tape editor, to record a totally different set of questions and splice them together with the interviewee’s answers, thus making the interviewee look like a complete idiot. However, to do so would be a gross breach of a journalist’s professional ethics, and it doesn’t happen often. Personally speaking, I have usually found that those ethical rules are scrupulously observed. I don’t believe I have ever been misquoted, nor taken out of context, in the many interviews I have given, although I might sometimes feel that my main point has not received the prominence it deserves. That is only personal opinion, however, and usually good editing has often made my answers sound more coherent and less prolix than I am sure they deserved, and they have always retained the sense of what I said.

Some exception to the rule may be made in the case of comedy programmes, where some prominent identity is seen as giving answers to some question the host throws up, for example, his genuine answer to a complex economic question might be seen as a response to a query about his sex life (Clive James uses this to good effect in his late night talk show). This is all good clean fun and is hardly likely to cause the respondent any serious heartburn, because it can clearly be seen to be a deliberate manipulation of data for comic effect. That this is not always the case is exemplified by a recent experience of Richard Dawkins.

Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He is one of the world’s leading evolutionary biologists, the author of several highly regarded books on evolution through natural selection, including The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker (to my mind, the very best explanation of evolution for the lay person), The Extended Phenotype, River out of Eden and Climbing Mount Improbable, and is constantly in demand as a public speaker, and by the media as an advocate for good science.

Given his position and his professional expertise, it is hardly surprising, then, that he is also a cogent and trenchant critic of the anti-scientific dogma that masquerades under the title “creation science”.

The Background

In June this year, Professor Dawkins contacted the Skeptic office, seeking assistance in locating an Australian TV production company. His story will demonstrate the depths to which the creationist movement will stoop in order to try to discredit its critics.

Recently Professor Dawkins had been made aware of a video tape being circulated in creationist circles, in which he appears, and on the cover of which is his photograph. Titled From a Frog to a Prince, it is distributed in the Australia by Answers in Genesis, of Acacia Ridge, Queensland and in the USA by American Portrait Films, Cleveland, Ohio. Copyright is held by “A.I.G. - I.C.R. - Keziah” and it was produced by “Keziah”.

AIG, as regular readers will recognise, refers to Answers in Genesis, the new trading name of the Queensland based Creation Science Foundation; ICR is the Institute of Creation Research, a prominent US creationist outfit, and the source for much of what passes for information in such circles; Keziah was then unfamiliar to us.

Prof Dawkins was puzzled, and not a little perplexed, to be informed by a Christian contact in the USA that his appearance on the tape included a question being posed to him, whereupon he pauses for 11 seconds, and then answers an entirely different question. His contact, having viewed the tape, and having noticed the long pause and seeming evasion of what was a pretty simple question about evolution, was convinced that it had been a set-up.

As he hadn’t then seen the tape, it was difficult for Richard to comprehend the full details, but he was suspicious of the circumstances, and sought our assistance in tracking down Keziah, which he thought was an Australian company. We had no information about Keziah, though we did recall a request from a woman purporting to represent American Portrait Films, for an interview with Richard while he was in Australia as our special guest at the 1996 Australian Skeptics annual convention in Melbourne. Subsequently, we managed to track down Keziah Productions to Peregian in Queensland.

The set-up

Prof Dawkins then acquired a copy of the tape and became even more incensed as the details of what had been done to him became clearer. In correspondence to me (published here with his permission) he recounts what had happened:

As a preamble, I should explain that, following the advice of my colleague Stephen Jay Gould, I have a policy of not granting interviews to creationists or flat earthers. This is not because I cannot answer their arguments, but because I have better things to do with my time and I do not want to give them the oxygen of publicity.

On September 16, 1997, Keziah Video Productions, in the persons of Gillian Brown and Geoffrey Smith, came to my house in Oxford to film an interview with me. I had agreed to see them, on the misapprehension (as it later turned out) that they were from a respectable Australian broadcasting company. I had no idea they were a creationist front and I would not have granted them an interview had I known this, because of my policy as mentioned above.

The interview began. I have considerable experience of television work, and I was initially surprised at the amateurishness of their filming technique, but I carried on without voicing my surprise. As the interview proceeded, I became increasingly puzzled at the tone of the questions. Puzzlement gave way to suspicion that Keziah was, in fact, a creationist front which had gained admittance to my house under false pretences.

The suspicion increased sharply when I was challenged to produce an example of an evolutionary process which increases the information content of the genome. It is a question that nobody except a creationist would ask. A real biologist finds it an easy question to answer (the answer is that natural selection increases the information content of the genome all the time - that is precisely what natural selection means), but, from an evolutionary point of view, it is not an interesting way to put it. It would only be phrased that way by somebody who doubts that evolution happened.

Now I was faced with a dilemma. I was almost certain that these people had gained admittance to my house under false pretences - in other words, I had been set up. On the other hand, I am a naturally courteous person, especially in my own house, and these were guests from overseas. What should I do? I paused for a long time, trying to decide whether to throw them out, and, I have to admit, struggling not to lose my temper. Finally, I decided that I would ask them to leave, but I would do it in a polite way, explaining to them why. I then asked them to stop the tape, which they did.

The tape having stopped, I explained to them my suspicions, and asked them to leave my house. Gillian Brown pleaded with me, saying that she had flown all the way from Australia especially to interview me. She begged me not to send her home empty handed, after they had travelled such a long way. She assured me that they were not creationists, but were taking a balanced view of all sides in the debate. Like a fool, I took pity on her, and agreed to continue. I remember that, having had quite an acrimonious argument with her, when I finally agreed to resume the interview I made a conscious effort to be extra polite and friendly.

Now perhaps it could be argued that Prof Dawkins’ memories of the events might have deteriorated with the passage of time since the interview, so let us consider the general plausibility of what the tape purported to show. A question was asked relating to “evolutionary process which increases the information content of the genome”. This question was not asked of just anyone, but of a biologist whose speciality is precisely in that field, who has been teaching biology at Oxford University for 27 years, and who is very experienced in answering the far more complex questions of some of the best students in the world. It beggars belief that someone of Richard Dawkins’ stature in the field would have been stumped by such a simple question or would have evaded it.

Anyone who has ever been interviewed will recognise that 11 seconds of silence is an inordinately long hiatus in any interview. Even if one is not an expert in the field, or is unfamiliar with the question being asked, the normal human reaction is to say, “Well, I don’t know much about that …” or “That’s an interesting question …” or to generally waffle on a bit, while arranging one’s thoughts. What one does not do is just sit there saying nothing. Even in the case of a total media neophyte, stricken by “mike fright”, they might react that way, briefly, but it is highly unlikely that anyone would remain mute for such a length of time. However, Richard Dawkins is far from being a media neophyte, having been the subject of hundreds of media interviews, and he was not asked a question he couldn’t answer, merely a question he regarded as being put in an ill-informed way.

Richard puts it into better context in his letter:

As it happens, my forthcoming book, Unweaving the Rainbow, has an entire chapter (`The Genetic Book of the Dead’) devoted to a much more interesting version of the idea that natural selection gathers up information from the environment, and builds it into the genome. At the time of the interview, the book was almost finished (it is to be published in November, 1998). That chapter would have been in the forefront of my mind, and it is therefore especially ludicrous to suggest that I would have evaded the question by talking about fish and amphibians.

If I’d wanted to turn the question into more congenial channels, all I had to do was talk about `The Genetic Book of the Dead’. It is a chapter I am particularly pleased with. I’d have welcomed the opportunity to expound it. Why on earth, when faced with such an opportunity, would I have kept totally silent? Unless, once again, I was actually thinking about something quite different while struggling to keep my temper?

If it had been left at that, it might merely have been evidence of professional incompetence on the part of the producer and editor of the tape. Further evidence of incompetence includes the tape showing the male “interviewer” in a completely different room from the Dawkins’ drawing room where the interview took place, and with entirely different lighting. Moreover, the person who interviewed Prof Dawkins was named as Geoffrey Smith, while the “interviewer” shown in this clip is identified as Chris Nicholls, the narrator of the entire tape. However this, of itself, is not evidence of malice. While it is doubtful if any professional video producer would inadvertently leave a silence of that length in a tape, the fact that the long silence ends with an answer to an entirely different question, one about fishes, amphibians, and common ancestry, speaks strongly of malicious intent.

This becomes even more apparent when one views the tape, particularly if one has had the pleasure of spending any time in the company of Richard Dawkins, as I did as his Sydney host during his Australia in 1996.

Throughout this tape, Richard Dawkins speaks about his field of expertise in his usual polite and informative way. Then, suddenly, we see the interpolation of an “interviewer”, quite obviously inserted at some later stage of production, posing a question directly to Richard [see box on previous page]. The tape then cuts directly to Richard and holds on him for 11 seconds, while he is shown looking uncomfortable, then cuts back to the “interviewer” briefly, while Richard begins to (seemingly) answer an entirely different question, during which the tape cuts back to him.

There are several clues pointing to deceptive intent here. Nowhere else in the tape is an interviewer shown directly asking a question of any of the other four people who speak, nor is an interviewer seen posing any questions to Richard in his previous pieces. Richard does not react as one would expect him to, had he merely been asked a difficult question; his reaction is much more believably one of someone who has just realised he has been conned into giving an interview he would not normally have given, ie he doesn’t look nonplussed, he looks angry. To compound this, there is another brief insert of the “interviewer” with Richard’s voice coming from off camera, before returning to Richard, looking as urbane and polite as ever. Such is the dramatic change in Richard’s demeanour between the two segments, that it is utterly inconceivable that the second piece of tape followed immediately after the first.

Quite clearly, this tape has been manipulated, and rather ineptly done at that. But by now it is asking too much to blame it all on simple incompetence; it begins to reek of deceitful intent.

Stronger evidence of this has subsequently come to light. In an advertisement in Creation magazine, the official mouthpiece of Answers in Genesis, the tape From a Frog to a Prince, is touted as a “brilliant new documentary” and contains the following excerpt:

.. Then the documentary shows a question put to the highly fluent evolutionist Dawkins, which is really the crucial question: can he point to any example today in which a mutation has actually added information? (If there is such an example, surely an Oxford zoology professor, promoting neoDarwinism around the world, would know of it!) This is actually the dramatic high point of the whole presentation.

We think that the Dawkins response on screen (we won’t spoil it for potential viewers) makes a more powerful point against evolution than volumes written by Creationists! Even a ten year old watching it in our Brisbane office, got the point.

And we also get the point. Because their volumes of unscientific dogma are having no effect in the scientific debate, they resort to trickery in order to denigrate their critics, and to mislead unsophisticated minds.

The nature of the plot

It was mentioned earlier that some comedy programmes use the interposed question for comic effect, but the Keziah tape is not being sold as a comedy tape; it purports to be a serious discussion of a scientific issue; it purports to show that there is no biological evidence for evolution. By selectively editing this tape, the producer clearly seeks to show:

a) that Richard Dawkins, an eminent biologist, was unable to answer a question he was asked about biology; and

b) that he then evaded the question by answering a completely different one.

This tape seeks to denigrate Professor Dawkins’ professional reputation, and it is difficult to believe that it was not deliberately done.

It begins to look, then, that this is a piece of crude propaganda (see note below), deliberately manipulated to give the false impression that the fact of evolution is seriously under scientific question, and that the fanciful notions of creation `scientists’ are contributing to that debate.

There is further evidence that this is the line being pursued in creationist circles. In recent times, both the Australian Skeptics web site and at the Skeptic office, we have fielded questions from a number of individuals who have posed questions couched in the terms, “Can you give one example of new information being added to the genome by mutation today?” We have no way of telling whether the callers are asking this question because they have seen (and been misled by) this deceitful video tape, or because creationists have been otherwise spreading the word that it is “a question evolutionists cannot answer”. It does, however, seem too much of a coincidence that it should all be happening in such a short space of time.

From our experience of answering such questioners, it becomes clear that they have little knowledge of biology, and when asked to clarify what it is they are asking, they invariably flounder around the point. Clearly this has not been a question that just popped into a selection of enquiring minds all at once; it seems obvious it is something they have been told will “baffle the evolutionists”.

Historical precedents

Certainly this is by no means the first occasion on which the creation `science’ movement has sought to misrepresent the words of eminent scientists to bolster their own inept grasp of scientific matters, and to mislead their own unfortunate followers.

In the early 1980s, the Creation Science Foundation published and sold a pamphlet entitled The Quote Book. This publication contained some 120 quotations from prominent scientists (among others) whose words were considered (by the CSF) to call evolution into question. When one academic, Dr Ken Smith a mathematician at the University of Queensland, and a member in good standing of the Baptist Church, took the trouble to track down the sources the quotations used (he could find only 80 of the 120, such was the poor level of scholarship used in the compilation of the magazine) he found that only one of the 80 could be considered to be a completely accurate reflection of the original statements. Much of this book consisted of quotations taken out of context, or so badly mangled as to entirely misrepresent the positions of those quoted.

In that case, adverse publicity forced the CSF to withdraw the item from sale, and to produce a substantially revised version; one that paid somewhat more attention to truth, and which thereby lost much of its propaganda value. Even there the organisation was less than honest, in that copies of the discredited book were still being sold at a discount, with no warning that it was inaccurate, some time after it had supposedly been withdrawn.

Professor Dawkins has taken steps to reduce the harm done by the Keziah tape, both to his reputation and to the public understanding of science. On July 2, he wrote to the Institute for Creation Research in California, pointing out in detail how the tape had dishonestly misrepresented his position, and requesting that the Institute investigate his complaint and immediately withdraw the tape from circulation. At the date of publication, he has not even received an acknowledgement from the ICR. Nor can we be entirely surprised by this. As the titles roll at the end of the tape, we see that Dr John Morris and Dr Carl Wieland, chief executives respectively of the Institute for Creation Research and Answers in Genesis, are shown as “consultants”.

So much for the supposed impartiality of Gillian Brown, the producer of the tape, or for her protestations of “balanced view”, of which she assured Professor Dawkins when seeking to continue taping in his home.

What does it mean?

So what is one to infer from this exercise? This tape, From a Frog to a Prince, purports to be a serious discussion of a scientific issue, but how is a scientific issue addressed by what clearly appears to be a deliberate misrepresentation of the position of one of the protagonists? That is not the way science works, and anyone who makes any pretence of being engaged in scientific discourse should be well aware of that. But then, science has very little to do with what creation `scientists’ are about.

This is, sadly, typical of the less-than-honest political propagandist approach creationists use in their “mission”. Unlike genuine scientists they conduct little, if any, scientific research in support of their contention that the natural processes of the world are as a direct result of a supernatural creation event within the past 6-10,000 years, and of a global flood some 3,000 years ago. What they do seek to do is to attack the credibility of evolutionary (and other) theories that show up their claims for the poorly thought-out and simple-minded religious dogma they really are. Because they are not engaged in scientific research, and thus cannot hope to succeed on the scientific level, they resort to ad hominem attacks on the genuine scientists who have exposed their myths.

What are the effects?

What effects will the dissemination of this particularly egregious example of that tactic have in the real world? What effect would it have, for example, on Richard Dawkins’ professional reputation among his scientific peers? We would suspect practically none, because no professional biologist, nor any other competent scientist, would be hoodwinked for a moment into thinking that Prof Dawkins had been baffled by such a crudely easy question.

But that misses the point of the tape. This propaganda is not aimed at professional scientists who would not be fooled by the implied message. Richard Dawkins’ academic chair deals with the “Public Understanding of Science” and, as such, he is among those academics who are sometimes referred to as “public intellectuals”, those scientists, and others, who make their expertise and knowledge available and comprehensible to the public.

So what of his public reputation? Less scientifically literate members of the public, who have the misfortune to be subjected to this propaganda, may be led to believe that he had been stumped by a simple question and, as a consequence, they might be misled into believing that creationists are actually engaged in scientific debate. Nothing could be further from the truth - their purpose, pure and simple, is political.

There is yet another consequence - in some ways more serious. There are many people whose strongly held religious beliefs make them prime targets for creationist propaganda. Should these people see this video tape, and, by it be encouraged to believe that creation `science’ has found a fatal flaw in the theory of evolution, then they have been cruelly deceived by people they have been led to believe they can trust.

Most scientifically literate people, and even many of those whose understanding of it is slight, have long recognised creation `science’ for the infantile religious dogma that it is, so this crude propaganda is unlikely to have a great deal of lasting effect on them. But those who have little understanding of science, and particularly those who have trusted the creationists’ claim that they are engaged in science, have had their trust betrayed. The nature of the calls we have received from people who have seemingly swallowed this line leave us in no doubt that that is precisely what has happened.

This is not the way of science - it is the way of political propaganda - yet another blatant example of “telling lies for God”.

Note

The etymology of the word “propaganda” is interesting. Now generally used to mean “the organised dissemination of information, allegations, etc to assist or damage the cause of a government, movement, etc” (Collins English Dictionary), the word derives from the 18th Century Italian use of the Latin title Sacre Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, (Congregation for Propagating the Faith), a 17th Century congress of cardinals set up by the Roman Catholic Church to propagate their faith overseas through missionary activity. That this word evolved from a purely religious beginning into its present wide use in a political context seems to make it particularly apposite in this case.

 

Call it an unfinished story, but with a plot that’s a grabber. It’s the tale of an ancient land mammal making its way back to the sea, becoming the forerunner of today’s whales. In doing so, it lost its legs, and all of its vital systems became adapted to a marine existence — the reverse of what happened millions of years previously, when the first animals crawled out of the sea onto land.

Some details remain fuzzy and under investigation. But we know for certain that this back-to-the-water evolution did occur, thanks to a profusion of intermediate fossils that have been uncovered over the past two decades.

In 1978, paleontologist Phil Gingerich discovered a 52-million-year-old skull in Pakistan that resembled fossils of creodonts — wolf-sized carnivores that lived between 60 and 37 million years ago, in the early Eocene epoch. But the skull also had characteristics in common with the Archaeocetes, the oldest known whales. The new bones, dubbed Pakicetus, proved to have key features that were transitional between terrestrial mammals and the earliest true whales. One of the most interesting was the ear region of the skull. In whales, it is extensively modified for directional hearing underwater. In Pakicetus, the ear region is intermediate between that of terrestrial and fully aquatic animals.

Another, slightly more recent form, called Ambulocetus, was an amphibious animal. Its forelimbs were equipped with fingers and small hooves. The hind feet of Ambulocetus, however, were clearly adapted for swimming. Functional analysis of its skeleton shows that it could get around effectively on land and could swim by pushing back with its hind feet and undulating its tail, as otters do today.

Rhodocetus shows evidence of an increasingly marine lifestyle. Its neck vertebrae are shorter, giving it a less flexible, more stable neck — an adaptation for swimming also seen in other aquatic animals such as sea cows, and in an extreme form in modern whales. The ear region of its skull is more specialized for underwater hearing. And its legs are disengaged from its pelvis, symbolizing the severance of the connection to land locomotion.

By 40 million years ago, Basilosaurus — clearly an animal fully adapted to an aquatic environment — was swimming the ancient seas, propelled by its sturdy flippers and long, flexible body. Yet Basilosaurus still retained small, weak hind legs — baggage from its evolutionary past — even though it could not walk on land.

None of these animals is necessarily a direct ancestor of the whales we know today; they may be side branches of the family tree. But the important thing is that each fossil whale shares new, whale-like features with the whales we know today, and in the fossil record, we can observe the gradual accumulation of these aquatic adaptations in the lineage that led to modern whales.

As evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin points out, “In one sense, evolution didn’t invent anything new with whales. It was just tinkering with land mammals. It’s using the old to make the new.”

I thought eSkeptic readers might appreciate some of the more amusing (and nasty) letters I have received (appended below), plus one very revealing letter about Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s “UFO sighting” on the way to the moon, recounted by him on the show (revealing UFOlogist Stanton Friedman to be an incompetent researcher). Unfortunately it took Buzz a long time to get to the point of the story — which was that the UFO turned out to be one of the panels from the Apollo rocket booster — so I fear that it might have been missed by viewers that he was, in fact, a UFO skeptic.

Please note as well that former Arizona governor Fife Symington described what he saw during the “Phoenix Lights” event as “otherworldly.” I spoke at length with Fife before and after the show and found him to be a most thoughtful, intelligent, and warm individual with no special propensity toward gullibility (any more than the rest of us normally express), so after the show I asked him, “How do you know what you saw was ‘otherworldly,’ when none of us has any experience whatsoever with other worlds? Yet we have vast experience with strange and unusual secret military aircraft from this world that we find out about years later.” His response to me in private was similar to what he said on the show: it is possible that it was some secret military experimental aircraft, but he was so awed by what he saw that the military aircraft explanation just seemed too unlikely. I noted both on the show and in private that in science it’s okay to just say “I don’t know” and leave it at that.

Overall I find such shows to be a frustrating experience, which is why I brought along the little toy aliens to break up the gravitas of the conversation, plus to make the point that whatever actual aliens from another planet will look like, it most definitely will not be that they are bilaterally symmetrical bipedal primates, which only happened once on this planet in two billion years of biological evolution and hundreds of billions of different species.

—Michael Shermer

 

Here is a graph of the general public’s acceptance of evolution as  polled in 2005. Countries that accept it most are Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, France, United Kingdom. Last on the list is the United States and Turkey, the countries that accept evolution the least.

Perspectives On Medical Research
Volume 2, 1990

Baby Fae: The Unlearned Lesson

Kenneth P. Stoller, MD.

On October 26, 1984, Dr. Leonard L Bailey placed the heart of a baboon into the chest of Baby Fae, an infant born with a severe heart defect known as left hypoplastic heart. Baby Fae seemed to do well for a few days; then her body mounted a massive immunological attack on the foreign tissue and rejected the graft. Baby Fae’s death came as no surprise to scientists and physicians familiar with the human immune system and with the scientific realities that preclude successful cross-species transplants.

Before the Baby Fae incident, Bailey, a surgeon at Loma Linda University Medical Center, spent almost a decade vainly pursuing research grants. His work in xenografts, largely unknown and unrcviewed by other professionals, had not appeared in journals and was funded by Bailey himself and his colleagues.1,2 During the seven years preceding the Baby Fae baboon transplant, he performed some 160 cross-species transplants, mostly on sheep and goats, none of whom survived more than 6 months. Although warned by a colleague at a medical conference that his research was too incomplete to risk using human subjects,3 Bailey went ahead.

Baby Fae was not the first human to receive a primate xenograft. In a review of xenografts,4 the Council of Scientific Affairs of the American Medical Association noted a rapid rejection of all baboon transplants to humans. Nevertheless, Bailey claimed that the problems of rejection could be overcome by the “immature” state of an infant’s immune system. After the operation, immunologists from around the world pointed out that the part of the immune system that rejects unmatched transplants is fully mature at birth, Furthermore, there is no way to match baboon hearts to human recipients, because baboons have no antigens in common with human tissue.5 Bailey has always maintained that Baby Fae’s death was unrelated to the species of the organ “donor.” An editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association called Bailey’s claim “wishful thinking.”5

Bailey’s use of baboons was somewhat surprising, given their relatively distant evolutionary relationship to humans compared to other primates. The reason came to light when the Times of London published an interview between Bailey and an Australian radio crew. The reporters had been forbidden to ask direct questions about the operation, so they queried Bailey on the issue of why he had chosen a baboon in view of the baboon’s evolutionary distance from humans. Bailey replied, “Er, I find that difficult to answer. You see, I don’t believe in evolution.”6 It is shocking that Bailey ignored basic biological concepts in formulating a life-threatening human experiment.

Often, ambitious surgeons wish to perform new, perhaps dangerous, experimental operations. In an effort to safeguard patients, institutional review boards must first give permission for any human experiment. In an unconscionable lapse of ethics, the review board of Loma Linda Medical Center failed to live up to its obligations — they gave Bailey permission for five baboon-to-human transplant experiments, having no reports documenting that even heart allotransplantation in infancy is successful.5 Furthermore, highly experimental procedures on children, such as a xenograft, require special permission from the Secretary of Health and Human Services.7

In addition to these institutional and federal safeguards that should have protected Baby Fae, California’s Protection of Human Subjects in Medical Experimentation Act (PHSMEA) requires that if informed consent is given in behalf of another person, the experimental procedure must meet certain criteria. California’s Health and Safety Code ~24175, subsection (e) states, “Informed consent given by a person other than the human subject shall only be for medical experiments related to maintaining or improving the health of the human subject or related to obtaining information about a pathological condition of the human subject.”

Because Bailey did not look for a human heart donor and did not refer Baby Fae elsewhere for attempted surgical repair, the highly experimental transplant was both unethical and unlawful. Dr. William Norwood at the Children’s Hospital in Boston has been repairing left hypoplastic hearts since 1979. The survival rate of the Norwood procedure is now as high as 75 percent Nevertheless, Baby Fae’s consent form read, “Temporizing operation to extend the lives of babies like yours by a few months have generally been unsuccessful. We believe heart transplantation may offer hope of life for your baby. Laboratory research at Loma Linda University over the past seven years, including over 150 heart transplants in newborn animals, suggest that long term survival with appropriate growth and development may be possible following heart transplantation during the first week of life.”

Following considerable controversy over the Baby Fae transplant, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) appointed a special committee charged with reviewing the procedures used by the university to assure that Baby Fae’s relatives gave proper informed consent. The committee did not deal with the scientific basis for transplanting a baboon heart into a human. The committee found several weaknesses in the consent procedure. Specifically, the committee concluded that possibility of “long term survival” had been overstated and the protocol did not include searching for or transplanting a human heart. The committee’s report did not address why Loma Linda had not sought permission for this unprecedented experiment from the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Furthermore, it did not address the California law that should have prevented the experiment. (Perhaps the NIH committee was unaware of PHSMEA.)

Why hasn’t Bailey been prosecuted? The San Bernandino District Attorney’s office has officially stated that there are insufficient facts to support a felony prosecution. Unofficially, I was told that the highly technical nature of the case would likely overwhelm the court with conflicting medical opinions and therefore make a conviction unlikely. Furthermore, Bailey is considered a local hero. The office of the California State Attorney General, John K. Van de Kamp, has also maintained that Sufficient facts are available to establish that a crime occurred.

The facts, however, suggest that Baby Fae was sacrificed to Leonard Bailey’s career. Given the state of current medical knowledge, there was no doubt that Baby Fae would reject the baboon heart. Rules and laws designed to protect her were violated by those entrusted to uphold them. Professional ethics were considered to be of less importance than widespread publicity. The institutional review boards and law enforcement agencies responsible for protecting human subjects have virtually no accountability to the public, much less to the experimental subjects themselves.

References

1. Anon: Next please. PCRM Update, July-August, 1985.

2. Roe BR, Glaser RH: The lessons of the Baby Fae Case (letter). The Wall Street Journal Dec 24, 1984.

3. Mathews J: Colleague warned doctor before Baby Fae implant. Washington Post, 1984.

4. American Medical Association Council on Scientific Affairs: Xenografts: Review of the literature and curreut status. JAMA l985;254:3353-3357,

5. Jonasson O, Hardy MA: The case of Baby Fae (letter). JAMA 1985;254:3358-3359.

6. Gould SJ: The heart of erminology What has an abstruse debate over evolutionary logic got to do with Baby Fat? Natural History 1988;97:24.

7. Department of Health and Human Services: Final regulations amending basic HIHS policy for the protection of human research subject. Federal Register 1981;465:8366-8392.

Well, I did it. I survived another hour and a half of Hovind… without melting any circuits or going into seizures (although I came close a couple of times). Here’s the skinny:

This time, the crowd had more than doubled since the last showing. With 22 people in attendance, not including the pastor, the Q and A period at the conclusion promised to be lively. Nothing quite like a bunch of YEC’s whipped into a rabid frenzy of cheap rhetoric by a complete moron. It really has a way of getting the blood flowing. The pastor welcomed me back (probably really happy to see me as I brought no less than four additional skeptics along for the ride) but since I arrived right at 6:30 this time, we had no time to chat. The show started probably five minutes after my arrival, beginning with a short prayer by the pastor.

Hovind began his lecture with a series of Bible verses, mostly from Genesis 1 and a couple from the New Testament that seemed to back up his reading of Genesis. Then came a reminder that death is the result of sin. Not sure what that had to do with anything but as I soon discovered, the guy likes to fill empty space with both humor and totally unrelated topics.

His jumping-off point started with an explanation of the genealogies of Genesis, starting with Adam. These, he asserts, can be added up to point toward a 6000 year old earth. Okay; so far, so good. Then his strawman came to life. Apparently evolution says that you start with rocks, then it rains on the rocks to form soup and from that soup springs life. Once again we see the inclusion of abiogenesis into his version of evolution and, once again, I am reminded that evolution only deals with what happens after life begins. The beginning itself is another animal altogether. He finished off his strawman with, and I quote, “was your great, great, great, great, great-grandpa soup?” It is beginning to seem, in the opinion of this writer, that he likes to appeal to pride. A dirty tactic, but an effective one if correctly employed. I see the same appeals on nearly every creationism website. Usually something like: “did you come from a fish?” or “are you just an animal?” To that I ask: does it really matter? Aren’t you, well, YOU? If you can’t answer that, then all the help in the world will be for nothing. I’m a firm believer that a person is not special simply because they are a person, but rather because they are individual. Thinking that being a human is all it takes to be special and unique invites laziness. If you want to be special, do something to make yourself that way. A little black book can no more make you special than a blade of grass in your neighbor’s yard. Oh, and I almost forgot during the course of my little rant, that once again he explained to the audience that evolution means “from rock to dog”. I think I’m gonna hurl…

He seems to have a problem with understanding reproductive methods as well, not that I’m surprised (Planned Parenthood is the devil, you know). He asks: “the first life forms apparently found something to marry, and to eat”. Given that the first life forms were likely similar to certain plankton, this is not a problem. Asexual reproduction is a fact of life for most single-celled life, and water plus sunlight makes a decent meal for plant life. No problems here.

Moving on, he answers the question of “who did Adam’s kids marry?” Apparently, incest is the answer. This was okay back then, he explains, because there were no divine laws against it until the time of Moses. He explains, when confronted with the genetic problems of inbreeding, that if the parents have no genetic flaws, the kids won’t either. Fine, but that’s not how mutations work. Combining half of the genetic material from one parent and half from the other in sexual reproduction always carries the risk of a bad mix- a collision, if you will. Even if that were not the case, where did all those pesky mutations come from? Using his logic, if inbreeding was okay until Moses, that means Noah and his spectacular seven were flaw-free. That means we should still be, since his family is the only one that survived THE FLOOD. If his group had perfect DNA, where did the flaws come from? Let me guess: could it be… Satan?

Next, he gives us three options when faced with the world and the Bible. Either Jesus is lying, He’s ignorant, or He’s right. Fine by me, but remember that this is his version of Jesus. Plenty of people have other versions, and Jesus isn’t exactly here in the flesh to tell us which one is right. What’s at stake in this debate, he says, is the credibility of Genesis which leads of course to the credibility of the entire Bible. Okay, but would that be Genesis 1, or 2? And would you like fries with that?

Finally, he dives into the actual “science” behind creation “science”. According to our illustrious Dr. Dino, science does in fact point to a young earth. Here, he digs out his population graph and shows that, if you extrapolate backward in time given current growth rates, you come to 8 people at around 2600 BC. A couple of problems here: the first, I’ll leave to TalkOrigins since they have a good population growth calculator. The second: if we use the same type of growth chart as Hovind, we find that fruit flies came into existence about three years ago. What about the bacteria living in our intestines that aid digestion? Were they created last week? Not possible, since humans are the same as they were during the creation, according to fellows like Hovind. So why aren’t we up to the stratosphere in E. Coli?

Moving on in the population department, he claims that the world isn’t becoming overpopulated and that overpopulation is a myth started by the evil atheist conspiracy. His supportive evidence is that the entire world population could fit into Jacksonville, Florida twice. Of course, this assumes that people only take up one square foot of space. I wonder if he’s looked at the people in this country lately? And what about sumo wrestlers? He claims, that if you think we’re overcrowded, all you have to do is drive through Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, etc. I wonder where he thinks we should grow the food for everyone once we populate every available space in the world. Farmland is not what I’d call “wasted space”. Every year the population goes up, so we cut down more forest for farmland, and the population goes up, so we cut down even more, ad infinitum. There is a limit here- one we’ll likely see within my lifetime.

He also claims that, if humans had really been here for 3 million years, we would have 150,000 humans per square inch today. I guess those pesky wars and plagues are good for something after all. Oh, and I almost forgot: the Devil started population control ideas as evidenced by King Herrod’s killing of the male children during the time of Jesus’ birth. If the Devil is the one responsible for the idea, what category does THE FLOOD fit into, I wonder? Somewhere in here he also managed to imply that vaccines are unnecessary and also part of the conspiracy. If you really want to hash that one out, go talk to Orac. He’ll be happy to explain things…

Now we come to the cosmological evidence for a young earth. Apparently, he thinks that since the stars in the hub of a spiral galaxy revolve faster than those at the edge, spiral galaxies would have fallen apart if the universe was billions of years old. Repeat after me: GRAVITY. Go watch a spiral galaxy through a telescope one of these nights and tell me how fast it spins. I’d bet not nearly fast enough for his scenario to be true. There’s also the pesky problem of cluster galaxies and others. Not all of them look just like ours. Apparently some other creationists think that the galaxies would wind tighter. That contradicts Hovind, and it is treated here.

He also claims that there aren’t enough supernovae remnants for an old universe. Once again, we’ll refer to TalkOrigins for the rebuttal. And while we’re at it, visit also for an answer to his claim that Sirius was a red star a couple of thousand years ago and now it’s a white dwarf. Actually, since this is getting rather long, visit the Index to Creationist Claims for answers to Jupiter being too hot, instability of Saturn’s rings, moon recession, earth’s rotation slowing, leap seconds,earth’s magnetic field decay, short period comets and the Oort Cloud (which, incidentally, he claims is based on a mathematical “goof”- I wonder where he gets the idea that he has the skills to question even fourth-grade math?).

He goes on to claim that there are over 200 anti-Hovind websites on the net as we speak. Not surprising, but I wonder if he counts Answers in Genesis among those. If the shoe fits…

Once again, as he did in the last video, he repeats his offer to debate with half his brain tied behind his back. He is also quick to point out that he doesn’t have time for email debates. I wonder if the real reason is that his favored tactic of spewing lies in machine-gun style and forcing his opponents onto the defensive doesn’t work so well when the debate is written? He also claims to not be a skilled typist. Does that mean everything written by him on his site is actually dictation?

The next part, and incidentally my favorite in this video, is where he explains that evolutionists use a tactic known as “shifting the burden of proof”. For the uninitiated in the debate world, this means that you make a claim without supporting material and force your opponent to prove you wrong. As I looked around the church, many of the people in attendance seemed to have that “a-ha!” look on their faces. Resisting the urge to point out that Hovind’s entire work consisted of exactly that tactic used up almost my entire pool of self-control. He is an effective debater only because this tactic allows him to make dozens of dubious and unsupported claims within minutes and each claim takes a rather large amount of time to rebut. A debate judge will base his assessment of victory upon whether each participant can rebut the claims of the other. If you run out of time and only sink one or two claims out of twenty, you lose.

Next, he explains that the word “musing” means “to think”. I almost laughed out loud when he said that the word only shows up twice in the entire Bible. I’m not quite certain what his point was, but I’ll hazard a guess that thinking must be bad, since it rarely happens in the Bible. What a surprise.

Moving on, we have the assertion that Africa had to be shrunk by 40% for Pangaea to work and that Central America had to be removed entirely. That’s news to me, and probably every paleo-geologist alive today. Then he claims that the largest and oldest desert is only about 4000 years old. I think he forgot about Antarctica, but what do you expect. I suppose he thinks that an ice field can’t be a desert since ice is water. Somebody please send this guy back to grade school. Please? Of course, the age of the deserts is nicely predicted by the Bible, don’t you agree? Right about here he jumped into contrasting his version of evolutionist’s beliefs with his own. Here I quote: “My theory is that, about 6000 years ago, God created the earth and everything in it. About 4400 years ago was The Flood (say it as “Da Flooood”- kind of like John Goodman saying “Da Bears” and you’ll have it just about right)”. He repeated this line probably eight or so times in twenty minutes- enough to make me really start to dislike the guy on a personal level.

Right about this point he explained that oil fields should have equalized in pressure in 10,000 years. This means that all of the oil would have leaked off. I’ll, once again, refer to the archives for that one. He claimed that a Australian company was able to make oil from sewage in a thirty minute process. I’ll look into that later, but it seems a ripe fruit for the Skeptic’s Circle.

Moving on, we come to the claim that annual rings in Greenland ice cores are not actually annual rings. This was supported by the story of the “Lost Squadron”. No mention whatsoever about the fact that the cores were taken from a stable ice field and the planes were buried in a moving glacier. He claims that Scientific American, who published material on ice core dating, is either ignorant of the facts, or lying. At least, he says, ignorance can be cured. Watching these videos, I’m beginning to really wonder about that. At this point, my head was starting to really hurt. In one video he had covered a generous amount of the material in the Index to Creationist Claims. Truly stunning.

Next we come to polystrate tree fossils, the Mississippi Delta, the oldest living bristlecone pine tree, the Great barrier Reef, Niagara Falls, Ocean Salinity, stalactite and flowstone growth and flat continents due to erosion. What, no polystrate whale fossil? Damn!

According to the illustrious Hovind, the oldest languages are only about 5000 years old. Also, why does the Chinese and Hebrew calendar start around the time of The Flood? No mention that they start at different enough dates that one or both have to be wrong. Just curious, but how did those several civilizations possessed of a written language and alive at the time of The Flood happen to miss a global catastrophe? In addition, how did they pick up right where they left off after everything had been destroyed? Wait… how did everything survive everything being destroyed in the first place?

To conclude this video, Hovind stated that 75% of Christian kids lose their faith after one year of college. What does that say about the strength of their faith in the first place? And does this mean education and critical thinking are the antithesis of religion? Must be. He claimed that kids will believe in evolution if they spend their years in public school learning about it. Funny, but I was pretty sure that nearly 50% still believed in his version of the world. Something in the numbers is fishy here… To conclude my rant, how does he figure kids are being brainwashed in biology class when they spend only a few hours a week and 9 months out of the year in that particular class, but spend every Sunday learning creation in church and every day from birth learning it at home. I think the “indoctrination” door does, in fact, swing both ways.

After the video ended came the comments from the crowd. Only one deserves comment here simply for the sheer ignorance displayed by the commenter. An older gentleman said: “I’ve seen some of Hovind’s work, but until now I had no idea just how much evidence points to a young earth”. Wow. So, if I say, like, snakes really do eat dust, then that amounts to evidence? Good to know that. Bald assertion works, folks.

Charles Robert Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist who proposed and provided evidence for the scientific theory that all species have evolved over time from one or a few common ancestors through the process of natural selection. This theory became widely accepted by the scientific community in the 1930s, and now forms the basis of modern evolutionary theory. In modified form, Darwin’s theory remains a cornerstone of biology, as it provides a unifying explanation for the diversity of life.

Darwin developed his interest in natural history at Edinburgh University while studying first medicine, then theology. His five-year voyage on the Beagle established him as a geologist whose observations and theories supported Charles Lyell’s uniformitarian ideas, and publication of his journal of the voyage made him famous as a popular author. Puzzled by the geographical distribution of wildlife and fossils he collected on the voyage, Darwin investigated the transmutation of species and conceived his theory of natural selection in 1838. Having seen others attacked as heretics for such ideas, he confided only in his closest friends and continued his extensive research to meet anticipated objections. In 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay describing a similar theory, causing the two to publish their theories early in a joint publication.

His 1859 book On the Origin of Species established evolution by common descent as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature. He examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, followed by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. His research on plants was published in a series of books, and in his final book, he examined earthworms and their effect on soil.

In recognition of Darwin’s pre-eminence, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to John Herschel and Isaac Newton.

February 17, 2007 - A duckling was born with a rare mutation of four nearly full grown legs. The duckling was born about 95 miles southwest of London, England.