The power of subconscious theories











The misconceptions about how evolution works are of the same kind. They are created deep in the minds of people at an early age, often by well meaning, science-supporting adults who tell their children that ‘we evolved from monkeys’ and by some of the visual images that we have of the process of evolution, such as the one that draws it as fish→amphibian→monkey→human (with the drawing of each showing what a current typical specimen looks like).



Next: The role that deep misconceptions play in evolution

POST SCRIPT: How not to stalk off an interview

It is not uncommon for guests on TV or radio to get miffed about something, throw a fit, and stalk off the set. Some may even do it deliberately as a strategy, knowing it will get them publicity. But it sometimes doesn’t work out well, with some forgetting to take off either the earpiece or the mike and getting yanked, resulting in a less-than-impressive exit.

But the award for the worst interview termination must surely go to Carrie Prejean. Remember her? Here are some keywords to jog your memory: Miss California who was stripped of her title, supporter of ‘opposite marriage’, breast implants, topless photos, Donald Trump, lawsuit against Miss USA pageant, sex video.


The key steps in adopting evolution


Making a Gestalt-type switch is often aided by nudges from outside sources, and in the case of evolution, two such factors came into play: the age of the Earth and concerns about the effects of human population growth.

Darwin was fortunate that he lived in a time when advances in knowledge in other areas, such as the idea of uniformitarianism in geology, were coming along at the same time that he was pondering all the things he was observing on his voyage on the Beagle. The first edition of the first volume of Charles Lyell’s highly influential book The Principles of Geology was published in 1830 and was given to Darwin to read on his voyage on the Beagle that began in 1831. Its argument that small changes (such as erosion) can accumulate over long periods of time to produce major geological features such as mountains and gorges had an impact on him.

By measuring the rates of erosion and sedimentation that were occurring in his own time and calculating how long it would take at that rate to produce the existing rivers and canyons, Lyell concluded that the Earth must be hundreds of millions of years old. Furthermore, Lyell’s books discussed some of the fossil evidence that existed at that time because he used them as aids in arriving at the ages of rocks, although Lyell himself believed in special creation.

The fact that the Earth was now possibly hundreds of millions of years old, rather than merely thousands, created an intellectual environment that was more open to acceptance of the idea that new species can gradually evolve from old ones, because that needed long time spans too.

Darwin (and also Wallace) had a Gestalt-type switch when he was struggling to find the mechanism that causes species to evolve in a way that seemed to indicate directionality. The trigger was Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) that argued that populations would grow exponentially, except for the fact that they encounter limited resources that restricts growth because of starvation and premature death. This gave Darwin the idea that natural selection could serve as the mechanism he was looking for. In The autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882 (Nora Barlow (ed), 1958, page 120), he describes his epiphany in ways that suggest a Gestalt-type switch:


Darwin and Wallace saw that if there are variations, then it makes sense that some variations are more likely to survive to adulthood and produce more offspring than others. If this advantageous property is heritable and passed on to its offspring then, over time, that particular variation will dominate the population. And by a very long series of such small changes, new species would emerge.

Once Darwin saw the world in this new way, there was no going back. And the rest, as they say, is history.

I have argued that the kinds of switches in viewing the world that Darwin and Wallace experienced are like Gestalt switches in perception. When one changes one’s perspective, suddenly things fall into place and new patterns emerge. What seemed inexplicable, mysterious, and even impossible before suddenly seems clear and even obvious. And once the new way of seeing things is pointed out to others, they immediately see it as obvious too. As Thomas Huxley said after learning how the theory of evolution worked, “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!” As a result, the new view spreads like wildfire.

But even when told what to look for, not everyone makes the switch. There are some people who never see the new pattern, either because of a rigidity of attitude or, as we will see in the next posting in the case of evolution, because they do not want to see the new pattern because they cannot bear to give up the old one. For them the duck remains a duck and they never see a rabbit.

Next: The mental block of creationists

POST SCRIPT: Well, that didn’t take long!

On Tuesday, I wrote about the atheist billboard campaign in Ohio, putting up three billboards near Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati. Some godly people in the Cincinnati area have already taken offense and threatened violence, requiring the billboard to be moved to another location.

See here for more details.

Gestalt switches in evolution











Next: The key steps in ‘seeing’ evolution

POST SCRIPT: Jon Stewart parodies Glenn Beck


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Perception changes in physics


In an earlier post, I suggested (following Thomas Kuhn) that Gestalt-type switches can play an important role in the creation and adoption of new theories in science. Today I want to look at specific examples of such changes.

Take the case of a simple pendulum, made by hanging a small weight from a fixed point by a string and setting it in motion by pulling it back and releasing it. What had been observed from time immemorial is the weight swinging back and forth with decreasing amplitude before finally coming to rest at the lowest point in its trajectory. People used to interpret this motion as the pendulum weight, when released, ‘seeking’ (to use anthropomorphic language) to get to its final resting place at the lowest point in its trajectory, but initially overshooting the mark, trying again to get to the lowest point, overshooting again by a smaller amount, and so on, until it finally reaches its destination and stays there.
[Read more…]

Atheist billboard campaign comes to Ohio



In our region it will be on I-480.



Similar billboards will appear in Columbus and Cincinatti.









POST SCRIPT: The indefensible history of the Catholic church





You can see the debate below.

Gestalt switches in science


In the history of science, we have often seen a theory being accepted and used over a long period and then replaced with a new one, with the transition occurring over a relatively short time. Sometimes the new theory is fairly simple and we marvel as to why people did not think of it before. For example, the Copernican heliocentric model is not a complicated idea when compared to the previous geocentric model. Similarly Newtonian mechanics can be formulated in terms of laws that are very simple mathematically and easy to understand. The essential ideas of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection can also be stated in a few simple sentences.
[Read more…]

Ray Comfort’s shamelessness


You may recall the series of posts where I critiqued Ray Comfort’s introduction to his reissue of Charles Darwin’s classic work On the Origin of Species (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5). I said that the first part consisted of a brief biography followed by a timeline of Darwin’s life. These sections seemed straightforward and so I did not say anything, apart from making fun of him for using the euphemism “went to meet his Maker” instead of the simpler “died”. (The original document disappeared for a while and has reappeared in a slightly revised form. One of the changes is that “went to meet his Maker” has now been replaced by “died”. I don’t think my comments had anything to do with it.)

It was only the rest of the introduction, dealing with his laughably inane arguments against evolution and his final come-to-Jesus plea that I strongly critiqued. At that time, I thought that Comfort was merely ignorant and stupid, which are no crimes, but I now realize that he is also willfully deceptive and totally shameless. Eugenie Scott, head of the National Center for Science Education, called him out on the fact that his reissue left out four chapters of Darwin’s book: chapter 9 where Darwin looks at transitional fossils, chapters 11 and 12 where he examines the powerful arguments from biogeography which he found so persuasive, and chapter 13 where he examines the morphological arguments (i.e., arguments based on the similarities in body structures of organisms). In response, instead of squirming with embarrassment at being caught, Comfort merely says that the second printing would contain the missing chapters, as if this were some minor issue and not a gross attempt at deception.

But the horrors do not end there. It now emerges that the reason his brief biography of Darwin was so inoffensive was that most of the words were not his own. Comfort seems to have cut and pasted large chunks of it from a handout prepared for Darwin Day by biologist Dr. Stan Guffey at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville without any attribution whatsoever. And even the timeline that followed the biography was lifted in its entirety from a press release from Britain’s Natural History Museum, with only a footnote as to the source, rather than accompanied by the customary statement or other indication (such as indented text or quotation marks) that it was being used verbatim.

To judge how blatant is Comfort’s appropriation of Guffey’s work, I reproduce Guffey’s text in its entirety below, with the bold portion being exactly the same words that appeared in Comfort’s introduction. As for the rest, Comfort has paraphrased Guffey’s text. The length of ‘Comfort’s biography’ (I put ironic quotes since he cannot claim credit for it) is almost the same as Guffey’s, so you can see how similar the two documents must be. (Comfort spells Guffey’s “Downe” as “Down” and I have ignored that difference.)

Charles Robert Darwin was born February 12, 1809 in Shrewsbury, England. His family was of the newly emerged, newly wealthy, provincial professional class. Early in his youth he demonstrated predilections for hunting, natural history, and scientific experimentation. In 1825, after public school education, he enrolled at Edinburgh University. His intention was to follow his father in the practice of medicine, but he soon found such studies rather distasteful.

Two years later Darwin enrolled at Christ’s College, Cambridge to study theology—a subject which he didn’t enjoy either, with the intention of a career in the Church of England. As at Edinburgh, he often neglected his studies. In spite of this, he managed to pass his examinations in 1831 and left Cambridge.

While pondering his future and whiling away the time hunting and exploring local natural history and geology, he was presented with an opportunity that would change the course of his life. John Henslow, Professor of Botany at Cambridge, had recommended him for a position on a British Navy survey vessel. The HMS Beagle was outfitting to sail on a two year coastal survey expedition to South America, and her captain was anxious to have a naturalist and gentleman companion on board. The voyage ended up lasting [nearly] five years, during which time Darwin was able to explore extensively in South America and numerous islands in the Pacific Ocean, including the Galapagos.


Shortly after his return England Darwin had begun the first of his “species transmutation” notebooks. On his great adventure as the Beagle’s naturalist Darwin had noted and begun to ponder certain aspects of the morphology and biogeography of the many species of plants and animals that he had observed. In particular, he had begun to explore the possibility, and eventually concluded, that species exhibited varying degrees of similarity because they are to varying degrees related. It appears that by 1838 his concept of descent with modification by the mechanism of natural selection was largely formed. And then he mostly, but not entirely, abandoned the enterprise for the time being.

However, in 1858 Darwin learned that a naturalist working in south Asia, Alfred Russell Wallace, was developing ideas about the evolution of species similar to his own. At the urging of friends he prepared a brief paper which was read before the Royal Society along with the paper Wallace had written. He then published in 1859 On the Origin of Species, which he considered an abstract of a larger future work.

During the remainder of his life Darwin continued his research, publishing three additional books on explicitly evolutionary topics, and other books on topics including climbing plants, insect-orchid mutualisms, and earthworms. The gentle and unassuming Charles Darwin, loving and devoted spouse and parent, dedicated scholar, intellectual giant, died at Downe House on April 19, 1882 with his wife Emma by his side.

In his previous efforts to discuss evolution, Ray Comfort has shown that he is ignorant and stupid and a spreader of misery and fear. In this latest episode, this alleged man of god shows that he is totally shameless. Does he not realize that this kind of behavior discredits the very god that he wants to praise?

In the link to his introduction given above, Comfort also supposedly has the full text of On the Origin of Species. No one should trust Comfort to have reproduced it faithfully. He has shown that he is willing to modify that text to serve his purposes. If anyone is interested in reading Darwin’s classic works which are all available freely online, I suggest that you go to a trustworthy source.

POST SCRIPT: The Daily Show on the vacuity of TV punditry

This was broadcast on election night Tuesday before the results were out.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Indecision 2009 – Reindecision 2008 And Beyond
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Introducing the ‘Unapologetic Atheist’










POST SCRIPT: Jon Stewart on how Fox ‘News’ works

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Why Ussher’s calculations undermine the credibility of the Bible


Bishop James Ussher actually did quite an impressive feat of calculation, careful and thorough, to arrive at his creation date of 4004 BCE. Once he had got the year of creation fixed, Ussher was able to provide precise dates for other key events in the Bible:

2348 BC – Noah’s Flood
1921 BC – God’s call to Abraham
1491 BC – The Exodus from Egypt
1012 BC – Founding of the Temple in Jerusalem
586 BC – Destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon and the beginning of the Babylonian Captivity

Although creationists take Ussher’s work as correct, this causes problems for them. For example, since Noah’s flood in 2348 BCE supposedly wiped out everything (except those living things that could swim or float or were saved in the Ark), according to Biblical literalists, all history must be compressed within the last 4,500 years, even less time than the commonly used figure of 6,000 years.

Since there is convincing evidence that agriculture began around 10,000 years ago and that Egyptians have records of kings dating back to around 3,000 BCE, that already contradicts Ussher’s chronology. There is also evidence that Egyptian cultures (and even the pyramids) existed further back than 4,500 years ago, before the flood. There are even trees whose root systems date back to nearly 10,000 years. But if you are determined to believe that the Bible is literally true, you can always make up something to overcome any problem.

More sophisticated religious believers tend to treat as myth the pre-Abraham story and thus discount the idea of a 6,000 year old Earth. They are quite comfortable with a 4.7 billion year old Earth and the evolution of life. But they tend to think that the post-Abrahamic story is largely true, just embellished with some miracles that can be explained away.

But we should only take seriously those things for which there is independent evidence, such as alternative source material establishing dates and events and people, or archeological discoveries of artifacts that can be scientifically dated that can provide corroborating evidence. Almost none of these things exist for almost everything in the Old Testament. In fact, the more science uncovers things, the less credible ancient Bible history gets.

The fact that we now know that Ussher’s result has no relationship to reality should not take away from his accomplishment. So why did I state earlier that Ussher’s calculations, which are taken as strictly true by so many Christians now, is actually evidence in favor of treating the Bible as fiction?

The point is that even for someone like Ussher who undoubtedly believed that the Bible was literally true, the earliest event that he could historically verify and date from other sources was the death of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 562 BCE. This means that even a true believer could not independently verify the historicity of any earlier event. The events in the Bible pretty much end around 425 BCE, which is when the last book of the Old Testament was written by the minor prophet Malachi. So the whole text is pretty much useless except as fiction, except for the interval of about 150 years from about 575 BCE to 425 BCE, when it might have been recording contemporaneous events.

It is easy to overlook how quickly events fade into myth if not recorded contemporaneously by multiple independent sources. I recently read T. H. White’s The Once and Future King and The Book of Merlin, which recount the story of Camelot, with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Queen Guinevere, Sir Lancelot, the Holy Grail, the works. The books were fun to read. I had always assumed that the Camelot story was entirely fiction but discovered that scholars still debate its historicity, with some thinking that elements of this story are true and that someone like King Arthur actually existed around the 5th and 6th centuries CE. Other scholars think that the Arthur legend was created as a romantic and fanciful tale centuries later.

You would think that we would know with some confidence who the kings of England were during that period and could say definitively whether King Arthur existed or not. But we can’t. What we know is mixture of fact and legend, which are hard to disentangle.

Historical fact fades into myth as we go back in time, much more rapidly than we imagine, except for those rare civilizations that kept careful records which were not destroyed by wars and other calamities. By even as late as 1,000 CE, things start to get highly murky. So to take the events in the Old Testament, which occurred about 1,000 BCE and earlier and are uncorroborated, as actual history is to stretch credulity. This is why we need the kinds of corroborating evidence that only modern science can provide, using multiple sources, archeology, and all the tools of radiometry that are now available.

The Old Testament should be treated as literature composed by many authors over a long period and designed to serve varying purposes over time. It is definitely not history. If we cannot believe the stories that a mighty and famous king like Arthur ever existed, why should we believe stories of kings David and Solomon who existed 1500 years before Arthur and for whom there is little or no supporting evidence?

POST SCRIPT: Radio interview about my book

UPDATE: I have been bumped to accommodate the big serial killer story so will not be on the radio tomorrow after all. Will let you know the rescheduled date.

On Thursday, November 5, I will be interviewed on the Cleveland NPR affiliate station WCPN 90.3 from 9:00-10:00 am on its program The Sound of Ideas. The topic will be my latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom. You can listen online live on its webcast or listen to the podcast after the show.

You can all in during the program: Local 216-578-0903 or toll-free 866-578-0903.

Ussher’s calculation methods


Bishop James Ussher arrived at his creation year of 4004 BCE by going backwards, starting by first fixing the date of the earliest event in the Bible that could be corroborated with other historical sources. This occurred after the capture and taking into exile of king Jehoiachin of Judah by Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 597 BCE. The death of Nebuchadnezzar in 562 BCE (the date of which was known from other sources) is reported in the Bible to have coincided with the 37th year of exile of Jehoiachin, as stated in the Bible in 2 Kings 25:27. (Note that the dates are sometimes off by a year or two because of the differences in the calendars in use at that time.)

From that fixed reference point he worked backwards using the Bible alone, first by adding up the years that the successive kings ruled the divided kingdoms, the southern one of Judah and the northern one of Israel, and then going further back using the famous ‘begats’ in the Bible which gives a genealogy that goes back to Adam. For example, Genesis 5 gives the chronology from Adam to Noah, and then after a lot of stuff about the flood, Genesis 11 gives the genealogy from Noah to Abraham.

It is interesting that in addition to saying how long each person lived, it gives the crucial information as to the age of the person when his eldest son was born, without which Ussher’s calculation cannot be done. I am intrigued as to why the authors of the Bible put in that gratuitous piece of extra information, which is not an obvious thing to do, unless they wanted to create a timeline.

It is interesting that from Adam to Abraham, there is an unbroken line of males. The youngest age at which any of them had their first son was 65 but Noah is the clear record holder for the oldest father, his oldest son being born when he was 500! The oldest man ever was Methuselah who lived to the age of 969, though he had his first son when he was a mere child of 187. Oddly enough, after Noah, although the men still lived for hundreds of years, the age at which they became fathers for the first time drops suddenly to the early thirties, until it gets to the father of Abraham who was 70.

Although the genealogies say that sons and daughters were born, only males are named. As far as I can tell, after Eve, all the women who are born are nameless until we get to Sarah, Abraham’s wife, about 1,800 years later.

Ussher’s choice of the Hebrew Bible to obtain his chronology may have been influenced by the fact that this particular Bible gives a nice round date of 4000 BCE for the year of creation. The then current belief was that the world would last only 6,000 years, this being the interpretation of the six days of creation in Genesis combined with the statement in Psalms 90: 4 that “For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night” and the New Testament statement (2 Peter 3:8) that “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.” Thus according to his chronology, Jesus was born 4,000 years after the creation and the world would end in 2,000 CE (also called the Anno Domini or AD calendar), which provided a nice symmetry, no doubt showing that god was a careful planner.

However, that rounding of dates had to be adjusted because the creator of the CE calendar had made a mistake. When corrected, it was noted that King Herod had begun his reign in 37 BCE and died in 4 BCE, so Jesus had to have been born sometime during that period because the New Testament says Jesus was born during Herod’s reign. Ussher fixed Jesus’s birth year as 4 BCE and this required the shifting of all the dates by 4 years, moving the year of creation to 4004 BCE.

Wikipedia has an summary of how Ussher managed to pin point the very day when god created the world.

The season in which Creation occurred was the subject of considerable theological debate in Ussher’s time. Many scholars proposed it had taken place in the spring, the start of the Babylonian, Chaldean and other cultures’ chronologies. Others, including Ussher, thought it more likely that it had occurred in the autumn, largely because that season marked the beginning of the Jewish year.


Ussher stated his time of Creation (nightfall preceding October 23) on the first page of Annales in Latin and on the first page of its English translation Annals of the World (1658).

You can read the first page of his book (a revised edition with the English updated to be easily intelligible to the modern reader) here. Sometimes one hears that he fixed the time of creation as 9:00 am but that claim was made by someone else before Ussher and has been mistakenly attributed to him.

I have to admit that I kind of like Ussher’s calculations. The fact that it is totally wrong and that to take it seriously now is to live in an alternative reality does not diminish his achievement.

POST SCRIPT: How to choose your religion

Looking for a religion but not sure which to pick from the wide variety of choices? GrrlScientist has put together a nifty little flowchart to help you out. (via Pharyngula)