Wallace’s scientific heresy was first delivered in the April, 1869 issue of The Quarterly Review, in which he outlined what he saw as the failure of natural selection to explain the enlarged human brain (compared to apes), as well as the organs of speech, the hand, and the external form of the body:

In the brain of the lowest savages and, as far as we know, of the prehistoric races, we have an organ…little inferior in size and complexity to that of the highest types…. But the mental requirements of the lowest savages, such as the Australians or the Andaman Islanders, are very little above those of many animals. How then was an organ developed far beyond the needs of its possessor? Natural Selection could only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one but very little inferior to that of the average members of our learned societies.

(Please note the language that, were we to judge the man solely by his descriptors for indigenous peoples, would lead us to label Wallace a racist even though he was in his own time what we would today call a progressive liberal.)

Since natural selection was the only law of nature Wallace knew of to explain the development of these structures, and since he determined that it could not adequately do so, he concluded that “an Overruling Intelligence has watched over the action of those laws, so directing variations and so determining their accumulation, as finally to produce an organization sufficiently perfect to admit of, and even to aid in, the indefinite advancement of our mental and moral nature.”

Natural selection is not prescient—it does not select for needs in the future. Nature did not know we would one day need a big brain in order to contemplate the heavens or compute complex mathematical problems; she merely selected amongst our ancestors those who were best able to survive and leave behind offspring. But since we are capable of such sublime and lofty mental functions, Wallace deduced, clearly natural selection could not have been the originator of a brain big enough to handle them. Thus the need to invoke an “Overruling Intelligence” for this apparent gap in the theory.

Why did Wallace retreat from his own theory of natural selection when it came to the human mind? The answer, in a word, is hyper-selectionism (or adaptationism), in which the current adaptive purpose of a structure or function must be explained by natural selection applied to the past. Birds presently use wings to fly, so if we cannot conceive of how natural selection could incrementally select for fractional wings that were fully functional at each partial stage (called “the problem of incipient stages”) then some other force must have been at work. Darwin answered this criticism by demonstrating how present structures serve a purpose different from the one for which they were originally selected. Partial wings, for example, were not poorly designed flying structures but well designed thermoregulators. Stephen Jay Gould calls this process “exaptation” (ex-adaptation) and uses the Panda’s thumb as his type specimen: it is not a poorly designed thumb but a radial sesamoid (wrist) bone modified by natural selection for stripping leaves off bamboo shoots.

Wallace’s hyperselectionism and adaptationism were outlined more formally in an 1870 paper, “The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man,” in which he admitted up front the danger of proffering a force that is beyond those known to science: “I must confess that this theory has the disadvantage of requiring the intervention of some distinct individual intelligence…. It therefore implies that the great laws which govern the material universe were insufficient for this production, unless we consider…that the controlling action of such higher intelligences is a necessary part of those laws….”

After an extensive analysis of brain size differences between humans and non-human primates, Wallace then considers such abstractions as law, government, science, and even such games as chess (a favorite pastime of his), noting that “savages” lack all such advances. Even more, “Any considerable development of these would, in fact, be useless or even hurtful to him, since they would to some extent interfere with the supremacy of those perceptive and animal faculties on which his very existence often depends, in the severe struggle he has to carry on against nature and his fellow-man. Yet the rudiments of all these powers and feelings undoubtedly exist in him, since one or other of them frequently manifest themselves in exceptional cases, or when some special circumstances call them forth.”

Therefore, he concludes, “the general, moral, and intellectual development of the savage is not less removed from that of civilised man than has been shown to be the case in the one department of mathematics; and from the fact that all the moral and intellectual faculties do occasionally manifest themselves, we may fairly conclude that they are always latent, and that the large brain of the savage man is much beyond his actual requirements in the savage state.” Thus, “A brain one-half larger than that of the gorilla would, according to the evidence before us, fully have sufficed for the limited mental development of the savage; and we must therefore admit that the large brain he actually possesses could never have been solely developed by any of those laws of evolution…. The brain of prehistoric and of savage man seems to me to prove the existence of some power distinct from that which has guided the development of the lower animals through their ever-varying forms of being.”

The middle sections of this lengthy paper review additional human features that Wallace could not conceive of being evolved by natural selection: the distribution of body hair, naked skin, feet and hands, the voice box and speech, the ability to sing, artistic notions of form, color, and composition, mathematical reasoning and geometrical spatial abilities, morality and ethical systems, and especially such concepts as space and time, eternity and infinity. “How were all or any of these faculties first developed, when they could have been of no possible use to man in his early stages of barbarism? How could natural selection, or survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence, at all favour the development of mental powers so entirely removed from the material necessities of savage men, and which even now, with our comparatively high civilisation, are, in their farthest developments, in advance of the age, and appear to have relation rather to the future of the race than to its actual status?”

Modern Intelligent Design creationists generally (with few exceptions) believe that the designer is God. Nowhere in this paper does Wallace invoke God as the overarching intelligence. In a footnote in the second edition of the volume in which this paper was published, in fact, Wallace upbraids those who accused him of such speculations:

Some of my critics seem quite to have misunderstood my meaning in this part of the argument. They have accused me of unnecessarily and unphilosophically appealing to “first causes” in order to get over a difficulty—of believing that “our brains are made by God and our lungs by natural selection;” and that, in point of fact, “man is God’s domestic animal.” … Now, in referring to the origin of man, and its possible determining causes, I have used the words “some other power”—“some intelligent power”—“a superior intelligence”—“a controlling intelligence,” and only in reference to the origin of universal forces and laws have I spoken of the will or power of “one Supreme Intelligence.” These are the only expressions I have used in alluding to the power which I believe has acted in the case of man, and they were purposely chosen to show that I reject the hypothesis of “first causes” for any and every special effect in the universe, except in the same sense that the action of man or of any other intelligent being is a first cause. In using such terms I wished to show plainly that I contemplated the possibility that the development of the essentially human portions of man’s structure and intellect may have been determined by the directing influence of some higher intelligent beings, acting through natural and universal laws.

Clearly Wallace’s heresy had nothing to do with God or any other supernatural force, as these “natural and universal laws” could be fully incorporated into the type of empirical science he practiced. It was not spiritualism, but scientism at work in Wallace’s world-view: “These speculations are usually held to be far beyond the bounds of science; but they appear to me to be more legitimate deductions from the facts of science than those which consist in reducing the whole universe…to matter conceived and defined so as to be philosophically inconceivable.”

In Wallace’s science there is no supernatural. There is only the natural and unexplained phenomenon yet to be incorporated into the natural sciences. That he left no room in his evolutionary theory for exaptations of early structures for later use is no reflection on his ambitions and abilities as a scientist. It was, in fact, one of Wallace’s career goals to be the scientist who brought more of the apparent supernatural into the realm of the natural, and the remainder of his life was devoted to fleshing out the details of a scientism that encompassed so many different issues and controversies that made him a heretic-scientist.

If modern Intelligent Design theorists restricted their visage to only natural causes they would, perchance, be taken more seriously by the scientific community, who at present (myself included) sees this movement as nothing more than another species of the genus Homo creationopithicus.

Consider the graph above (from the website Calamities of Nature). It shows the relationship between the acceptance of evolution (here defined as “humans beings, as we know them, evolved from earlier species of animals”, a reasonably good metric of true acceptance of evolution) in various countries around the world versus their relative wealth (as measured by GDP adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity). The main trend of countries form a well defined cloud with a reasonable curvilinear fit. At the top are a well-defined cluster of northern and western European nations (plus Japan), with the southern European nations just behind them. Near the bottom are the former Soviet bloc countries of eastern Europe, which still suffer the effects of decades of backward Soviet educational and economic policies. (China, South Korea, and Singapore are not shown, but on other surveys, they all rate high on the acceptance of evolution scale. so they would plot high on the ordinate or Y axis, no matter what their GDP).

The same relationship could be shown if you consider any of the recent surveys that measure science literacy on an international scale. The northern and western European nations (especially Germany and the Scandinavian countries plus Iceland) nearly always come out near the top, along with Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and sometimes China. The exact order differs from survey to survey, but they only shuffle within the top 10 or top 15. In other words, the acceptance of evolution in these countries is a very strong predictor of overall science literacy.

Now look at the position of the U.S. It is a striking outlier on the graph shown here, because its low rate of acceptance of evolution relative to its national wealth (and the same would be true if you plotted it against the money spent on education per student). It falls down near the bottom of the curve on evolution acceptance along with Islamic nations like Turkey, which spend much less per student. What is this telling us?

We’ve heard all sorts of arguments about why our U.S. students are so illiterate in science despite all the money spent on their education. Teachers point out that they are forced to focus on memorization of numerous out-of-context factoids for multiple choice tests, not the hands-on active learning method of doing science that is proven to really reach students. Others point to our pop culture, which stereotypes scientists as nerds or “mad geniuses” in white lab coats, plotting to destroy the world. Compared to other rich industrialized countries, scientists and engineers in the U.S. don’t have nearly the prestige that they have in Japan or Germany, for example—nor are they paid as well as others, such as sports stars, movie stars, and investment bankers. In the U.S., the most popular public figures are jocks and entertainers, not exactly role models for the intellectual improvement of our country. Mooney and Kirshenbaum (2009) put some of the blame on the poor scientific communication skills and lack of PR efforts by scientists to make their work more accessible and better known to the public.

No doubt all of these things are true to some extent, but they’re all missing the elephant in the room that is apparent in these data: the stultifying influence of creationism in U.S. science education. Most of the examples of science illiteracy revealed in common survey questions, such as the mistaken notions about the age of the earth and Big Bang, or whether humans lived with dinosaurs, or whether we share a lot of DNA with chimps, are clearly so out of line with reality because they are part of the creationist dogma. No matter what kids learn in school about these subjects, their religious training at home overcomes the best efforts of their teachers—and their ideas rarely change as they become scientifically illiterate adults.

The single biggest predictor of national success in science literacy is the degree to which a country is not dominated by dogmatic religious beliefs, whether it be fundamentalist Christianity or conservative Islam. As Jon Miller documented, most of these industrialized European and Asian countries have no such strong forces of religious dogmatism in their politics and culture, and their schools teach evolution and other scientific topics with almost no interference by religious zealots.

The accommodationists say that scientists must not offend the religious community in the U.S., because they are too numerous and powerful, and we need allies among the Catholics and the more moderate Protestants and Jews, wherever we can get them. As someone who grew up in a religious family and tries not offend them, I can understand this laissez faire attitude. But if these data are correct, appeasing the religious and trying to make evolution and astronomy and anthropology sound more palatable and less threatening to our religious notions really doesn’t help. Only the decline in dogmatic religious beliefs seems to predict a greater science literacy rate. As Greg Paul and Phil Zuckerman (2008) and many people have noted, the least religious of these European countries also have a very high standard of living and better sense of well being. They share another thing in common: they are countries with strong social safety nets (guaranteed health care, job security, good retirement and vacation benefits, good child care). In these countries (especially in Scandinavia and Germany), most people no longer worry much about these mundane matters of survival, and no longer feel the need to pray to a deity to protect them against the lack of health coverage, few benefits or job security, scanty retirement savings, and lack of child care that plagues many middle and lower class people in the U.S. Yet their economies are thriving, their standards of living are very high, and they have relatively few people who are poor.

Certainly, the issue of why Americans are so ignorant of science is a complex one that doesn’t have a simple single-factor answer. It is probably a nexus of causes, from media dominated by junk entertainment and little real science, to the problems with educating students, to the raging hormones of teenagers, to the big problem of dogmatic religion actively opposing science and reason in this country. Whatever the cause, the consequences are severe.

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I have written frequently in these blogposts about the numerous forms of denial of science and reality that are out there, from global warming denialism, to AIDS denialism, anti-vaxxers, and creationism. They all have a lot in common, from their insular exclusionary attitude that refuses to accept evidence that doesn’t fit their world view, to the various strategies they use to reduce cognitive dissonance and fight against reality, all borrowed from the Holocaust deniers. These include: quoting out of context (“quote-mining”) to dishonestly suggest that the quoted person agrees with them, cherry-picking data to show the exact opposite of what the data really show, making phony lists of “experts” who agree with them, picking on the small differences within the scientific community as evidence that the “science is not settled”, picking on one small factoid (usually misinterpreted and out of context) as evidence that the whole of science is false, and so on. Usually, these obvious strategies to deny an overwhelming body of evidence are so transparently self-delusional that we can laugh at them.

But then I ran into something that staggered even my sense of how low these people can go. We are all familiar with how creationists use ad hoc explanations and special pleading to rescue the absurdities of their world view, from trying to cram all of the animals into Noah’s ark and dismissing the huge numbers problem through their non-biological concept of “created kinds”, to doing all sorts of violence to the geologic record to justify the Noah’s flood story, to even insisting that men have one less rib than do women (the last one is easy to check, but they don’t). As I have discussed in several previous posts, the more extreme Biblical literalists also believe in a flat earth and reject the heliocentric solar system. But I was flabbergasted to read of a whole group of extreme creationists who deny that dinosaurs existed! Usually, the creationists not only come to terms with the evidence of dinosaurs, but many have even tried to co-opt their popularity with kids under 10 by making them a prominent part of their propaganda (as does Ken Ham of the “Answers in Genesis” ministry and the “Creation Museum” in Petersburg, Kentucky). With something as widely accepted and exciting and popular as dinosaurs, which anyone can see for themselves in their local museum, how could any person in the 21st century argue they are not real?

Yet that is exactly the position of this bizarre creationist subcult, which would be unknown and invisible to most of us were it not for their web presence (and their web design is not as garishly bad as most crackpot websites). You can scan their website linked above and see just far off the deep end of batshit crazy they have plunged.  A representative quote for how these paranoid people argue that paleontologists are creating fraudulent dinosaur fossils is as follows:

What would be the motivation for such a deceptive endeavor? Obvious motivations include trying to prove evolution, trying to disprove or cast doubt on the Christian Bible and the existence of the Christian God, and trying to disprove the “young-earth theory”. Yes, there are major political and religious ramifications.

The dinosaur concept could imply that if God exists, he may have tinkered with his idea of dinosaurs for awhile, then perhaps discarded or became tired of this creation and then went on to create man. The presented dinosaur historical timeline could suggest an imperfect God who came up with the idea of man as an afterthought, thus demoting the biblical idea that God created man in His own image. Dinosaurs are not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible.

Highly rewarding financial and economic benefits to museums, educational and research organizations, university departments of paleontology, discoverers and owners of dinosaur bones, and the book, television, movie and media industries may cause sufficient motivation for ridiculing of open questioning and for suppression of honest investigation. [That's a real laugher! Most paleontologists are poorly paid and cannot even get a job in paleontology!]

So, based on the premise that dinosaurs are a fiction designed to disprove creationism and drive us away from God, the writers of this website go into extremely bizarre thinking about dinosaurs and paleontology. There is a long section, using quotes out of context from the Berkeley evolution website, that claims that scientists dreamed up the whole thing as a big scam to undermine religion. Never mind the fact that all the early dinosaur discoveries were made by religious people such as Gideon Mantell, Rev. William Buckland, Mary Anning, and Richard Owen, and many later paleontologists (like Edward D. Cope) were also quite religious. This writer knows how to clip little bits of simplistic web histories out of context, but doesn’t know enough history to know the difference.

The next section on the website is another long, bizarre example of quote mining, where the author  clearly knows nothing whatsoever about fossils and  how they are found. The author jumps from one paranoid speculation to another, all in an attempt to suggest that dinosaur bones are forgeries planted in the outcrop by crooked paleontologists, and there is no way they could have gotten there without fraud. The list of mistakes and lies and misconceptions about fossils and geology is so long that I don’t have space to even begin listing them all. Because fossil skeletons are incomplete in the field, it is common practice to mold replicas to complete the skeleton for display. But the author of this website then jumps to the absurd conclusion that all the bones in every dinosaur skeleton on display are faked!

From there, this crazy site goes into the old shopworn (and long debunked) creationist attacks on radiometric dating and geology, using the classic tactic of quoting out of context to show the opposite of what the text really intended. Then the author savages other crazy creationists, including those who use the great size of dinosaurs to justify an expanding earth with stronger gravity today than in the past, and others who quote the passages about the “Behemoth” in the Book of Job as evidence that the Bible talks about dinosaurs.

Then the site jumps into other crackpot ideas, like Tom Gold’s abiogenic origin of petroleum (long ago falsified), and presents a list of 19th century naturalists who talked about dinosaurs because they allegedly made up their discoveries in order to promote evolution! Once again, this doofus is so ignorant of history that he has no idea that half that list consisted of devout individuals who were “creationists” and most of them worked on dinosaurs in a religious context. Not only that, but they were not trying to “prove evolution”—their work was done decades before Darwin’s book came out in 1859. Give this guy an “F” in history….

Finally, he trots out the laughable idea that paleontologists concocted this whole forgery to get rich, but clearly he knows nothing about real paleontology. Most of my colleagues have turned down more lucrative careers in law or medicine or business to work on fossils at a mere fraction of the salary that they could be getting elsewhere. Nor do professional paleontologists get rich from selling their fossils, either—only the commercial collectors who are not professionally trained or doing research. but simply in it for the money do so.

So how can anyone become so delusional and get so many things wrong that are easy to check? As we discussed in my Nov. 16 post, many creationist communities are highly insular and not only avoid secular media, but only hear and read what their church leaders tell them to. If you read only creationist crap for a long time, and surf websites looking for things that you can quote out of context, you too can become the kind of crackpot who can manage to get every fact in the article 100% wrong! As long as your faith in Biblical literalism is more important than checking the facts out for yourself, you can twist anything to suit this delusional world view.

So read this website if you dare. You need a strong stomach for lies and self-deception, and hopefully you will not be shocked by the low view of humanity that emerges from reading it….

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People love to touch old objects and feel a connection to the past, whether it be the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, ancient ruins in China or India or Egypt or Europe, pieces of fossil bone on display in a museum, or the oldest objects known, the 4.6 billion-year-old meteorites. Each time I travel to do research in historic old museum collections, it feels a bit like time travel. In my field, the original specimens first described by the founders of my profession, 19th-century paleontologists like Edward Drinker Cope, O.C. Marsh, and Joseph Leidy, are still essential parts of our research. We must examine these “type specimens” to determine whether fossil species these people named and described over 100 years ago are still valid today, when we have much better and more complete and abundant specimens. When I visit the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, I can examine type specimens first named by Leidy in the 1850s. At Yale, nearly every specimen I looked at was first studied by Marsh in the 1870s and 1880s. At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, I worked not only on fossils first studied by Cope in the 1870s and 1880s, but the Osborn Research Library in the Department of Paleontology even has Cope’s  geology pick where any visiting scientist can touch it, or one can sit down at Cope’s original desk. Cope’s skull (donated to science, along with his entire skeleton) has floated around various museums, and many paleontologists have handled it as well (with lots of jokes about the odd situation).

Vertebrate paleontology is also such a small profession with so few practitioners in its mere 150 years of existence that we’re all connected by our graduate advisors to just a handful of men who founded the profession over a century ago. When I was a student, I shook the hand of Ned Colbert, who was Henry Fairfield Osborn’s assistant in the 1920s, and Osborn bragged that he had shaken both Darwin’s and Huxley’s hand when he did post-graduate study in Europe. So I’m only 3 degrees of separation from Darwin himself. (I also have a friend who was in the cast of the original “Footloose”, so I’m 2 degrees from Kevin Bacon).

When I visited the American Museum this fall to continue my research on fossil peccaries or javelinas (American pig-like creatures only distantly related to Old World pigs), I was keeping a close watch for one specimen in particular. Everyone who has fought in the evolution-creation wars has heard of it, and I wanted to finally see and touch the specimen for myself. It is the tooth that caused a sensation in the 1920s, and has since become something that creationists harp on excessively, even though their version of the story is full of lies and myths. It is the tooth known as Hesperopithecus haroldcooki (“Harold Cook’s western ape”).

As described in a column by Stephen Jay Gould, An Essay on a Pig Roast (1991) and even in more detail by Wolf and Mellett (1985), the true story is quite interesting. Harold Cook was the son of the famous rancher James Cook who lived near what is now Agate Springs National Monument (and who also befriended Indians such as Red Cloud who still roamed the area in the 1880s). Harold, however, took an interest in the fossils that came from his family ranch, since the rich deposits of the Agate bone beds were being excavated by the University of Nebraska and the Carnegie Museum just a few feet from the family homestead when he was growing up. Cook was not a very well-trained paleontologist, but he had a good eye for finding fossils in the incredible bone beds of western Nebraska.

In 1917 he found an odd-looking isolated tooth in what is now known as the late Hemphillian (latest Miocene) Snake Creek Formation of western Nebraska. He sent it to Henry Fairfield Osborn, the President of the American Museum at that time, and the most powerful and influential paleontologist in the world as well. (Today, most of Osborn’s work is not held in high regard by paleontologists, since he was an excessive splitter who named a new species on nearly every specimen  he studied, was too strongly influenced by his weird philosophical notions like “aristogenesis” and “racial senescence”, and did not have a real talent for anatomy compared to some of his peers like William Diller Matthew). Osborn got very excited and thought it might be the tooth of an anthropoid ape, but was cautious at first since it was such a crummy specimen: a single cheek tooth with the crown all worn away and only two roots present. Nonetheless, he was a great believer in the idea that humans and apes originated in Asia, not Africa, and might have migrated to North America along with so many other Miocene mammals that were close relatives of Asian forms. In 1922, despite all the doubts that he and all his colleagues had, he published the specimen as Hesperopithecus haroldcooki.

Image of the Hesperopithecus tooth (middle column) compared to two equally worn chimpanzee teeth (left and right columns). Click image to enlarge it

The remaining story is quite simple. Although Osborn had his doubts, and only said it might be the tooth of an anthropoid ape, the press (in this case, the Illustrated London News) jumped way past  his original cautious interpretation, and coined the term “Nebraska Man” and even published a famous “reconstruction” that was actually based on the “Java Man” specimens of Homo erectus. Meanwhile, many paleontologists got to work, excavating more specimens from near the Hesperopithecus site and uncovering a lot more fossils that gave us our first good picture of mammalian evolution in the late Hemphillian. Sure enough, they began to find specimens of peccaries such as the genus Prosthennops (which I am working on revising right now) and began to realize that these animals had teeth which could easily be mistaken for primates.

The ‘reconstruction’ of ‘Nebraska man’ by the Illustrated London News (actually based on Homo erectus, ‘Java man,’ not the Nebraska tooth, which no scientist claimed looked like an advanced species of Homo).

After a few years of excavation in the region and the discovery of many more fossils, it was clear to the much more competent anatomist (and primate specialist) William King Gregory (to whom Osborn had entrusted the analysis) that Hesperopithecus was not a primate at all, but a peccary. In 1927 Gregory wrote a paper that quietly corrected the mistake, and the story was over as far as paleontologists are concerned. If it hadn’t been trumpeted by the press and creationists so much, the fossil would be among the hundreds of specimens given species names by Cope, Marsh, Leidy, Osborn, and others, which are too incomplete to be the basis of any presently recognized species. They are usually consigned to the taxonomic trash heap of nomina dubia (“doubtful names”) and are forgotten to all but the specialists.

But the story is a favorite of creationists, who usually tell a false version of it and conclude with the laugh line “and it turned out to be the tooth of an extinct pig!” To the creationists, any mistake about interpreting fossil human ancestors is prima facie evidence that there are no valid hominid fossils, and therefore humans didn’t evolve. Both the Talkorigins.org and other sites, as well as the references below, correct most of these creationist lies:

1. The mistake was an honest one by a not-too-competent Osborn, who only suggested that it might be an anthropoid ape, NOT a  hominid. It was the tabloid media who called it “Nebraska man” and reconstructed it like Homo erectus. Osborn actually rejected the efforts of the media to overhype the specimen.
2. Contrary to myth, Osborn did not go around trumpeting his find to embarrass William Jennings Bryan, and the specimen was never mentioned at the Scopes Monkey Trial. He did write a book The Earth Speaks to Bryan to point out that The Great Commoner was out of touch with science with his embrace of creationism. Osborn must have been tickled that the specimen was found in Bryan’s home state of Nebraska but it never figured in the Scopes trial.
3. Contrary to creationist lies, Osborn was no atheist or Marxist,  but a political conservative and a devout Episcopalian who was raised as a Presbyterian and attended church regularly. In fact, Clarence Darrow planned to have Osborn testify at the Scopes Trial, precisely because he was a devout Christian and a famous evolutionist. (The judge did not allow Darrow to call any of his scientific witnesses who were also Christians to testify, ruling their testimony as irrelevant, which prompted Darrow’s famous cross-examination of Bryan instead).
4. It’s an easy mistake to make, because primates, pigs, peccaries, and even bears and raccoons have highly similar cheek teeth: the crowns are simple squares or rectangles with four bulbous cusps on each corner. This is a classic bunodont dentition that nearly all omnivorous mammals evolve, because it is generalized and suitable for chewing up both meat and vegetation. I’ve shown a peccary tooth and a primate tooth side-by-side to creationists many times, and they can’t see the difference—yet they laugh at Osborn’s innocent mistake.
5. The specimen is from a peccary (Family Tayassuidae, an American group), not a pig (Family Suidae, restricted to the Old World)! Over and over again, creationists make this mistake, showing their complete incompetence in basic biology. The two are completely different families which are only distantly related to one another, and would never be mistaken for one another by anyone with even rudimentary experience in field biology or mammalogy. Heck, even my youngest son could tell a pig from a peccary since he was 3 years old!
6. Finally, the most crucial point of all: the mistake was corrected by scientists (not by creationists who can’t tell one tooth from another) soon after it was made. This is the way science is supposed to operate. Science is always tentative, subject to revision as better ideas or evidence comes along, never final.  Scientists are human, after all, and we all make mistakes. But peer review and further scrutiny by the scientific community usually fixes them. This is in stark contrast to creationists who believe in a final truth that cannot change, and never admit their own mistakes, but create huge webs of ad hoc lies and storytelling to salvage their ideas that have been shot to pieces. (Just look at their bizarre notion of “created kinds” or “baraminology” to salvage the idea that Noah’s ark contained two of every living creature).

These are all points that I discussed in my evolution book and have lectured about again and again. After all these years, I was eager to see the real fossil. However, once I found the right cabinet and drawer, it was a bit of a disappointment. The tooth is extremely tiny and featureless without any anatomical detail on its completely worn crown. Today we have hundreds of such specimens which are usually tossed into the “unidentified” tray because there is nothing one can do with them. Only its square shape and two roots would even suggest that it might be a primate, but no competent paleontologist would go that far today—as Osborn should not have done even then.

Instead, we have a creationist lie that keeps on going and going since they copy each other without ever checking the facts or asking whether the legend is accurate. What it reveals more than anything else is the intellectual and scientific bankruptcy of creationists, who endlessly recycle myths (both of Nebraska Man and of Genesis) without ever bothering to seek the truth.

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In my October 26 post, I discussed the efforts of creationists to run “stealth” field trips at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver in 2010. There were no such attempts at the Minneapolis meeting on Oct. 9-12 that I attended last month, but instead they did something  they often do at professional meetings like GSA: stealth abstracts. I saw a bunch of posters from people at Cedarville University, a fundamentalist Baptist institution in Ohio. These posters pretended to be legitimate research about the deposition of the Permian dune sand unit, the Coconino Sandstone. This famous unit in the upper part of the Grand Canyon is clearly formed in wind-blown dunes and not a deposit of  Noah’s flood (or of any kind of fluid other than wind). Since their dogma insists that the entire sequence in the Grand Canyon is laid down by Noah’s flood, the Coconino is a particular problem for them, and they focus their attention on it. (See the evidence and discussion in Chapter 3 in my book Evolution).

The posters were stuck in a session with a bunch of other posters presenting more conventional research into sandstones, and they looked professional enough that no one would notice. Other than their Cedarville affiliation, there was no clue about their creationist agenda, and there was no mention at the end of the abstract, or the conclusions section of the poster, that they were shilling for anti-scientific creationist views. I repeatedly walked past both posters during the day they were up, but never once found the authors defending it, even during the time that the GSA demands that “Authors will be present”.

Both posters were authored by Cedarville faculty member John H. Whitmore, with other “sock puppet” students as coauthors or senior authors so he could get more than one poster into the program. (There is a limit of one senior-authored presentation per meeting). So far as I can tell, Whitmore came and put up both posters, and none of his “sock-puppet” student co-authors made the trip. Whitmore is the only full-time “geology” faculty member at Cedarville, which recently bragged about instituting a new geology program and being the only Christian college in the country with a creationist geology department. They have two other creationist adjuncts in this tiny department. One is Steve Austin, a long-time ICR member who claims to be doing “flood geology.” Their website also takes pride in their fundamentalist literalist doctrines and how every faculty member is sworn to follow them (shades of the ICR).

Whitmore himself got his B.A. in 1985 at Kent State University. I talked to one of his former professors, paleontologist Dr. Rodney Feldmann, about him. Rod  told me that Whitmore hid his creationist leanings until the day before the defense of his senior thesis, then “came out” in private to Feldmann. Whitmore then defended his thesis the next day, lying about his attitudes toward evolution and geologic time, and the committee had no clue as to his true motives. He then got his “advanced degrees” from the Institute of Creation “Research” (M.A.) and his “doctorate” from Loma Linda (run by the creationist Seventh-Day Adventists, so there is no room for conventional geology there). All of his “publications” are in creationist media and journals, with not one that passed peer review in a legitimate scientific journal. Many are co-authored with other familiar faces of the creationist anti-science crusade, including Kurt Wise (who learned legitimate paleontology from Stephen Jay Gould but never gave up his creationism), John Woodmorappe of the ICR, and of course, Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis. Whitmore brags that he organized the first “Creationist Geology Conference” at Cedarville in 2007 (where he gave at least 5 talks himself, almost a quarter of the program). The program for this annual conference (the fifth of which was held in Rapid City, SD, in July 2011) is the usual bizarre special pleading of all creationist attempts to shoehorn Genesis into science, given by just a handful of the usual suspects from ICR and other creationist institutions over and over again, preaching to the converted.

So how do creationists sneak their pseudoscientific ideas into a legitimate science meeting? Their strategy is a common one of pseudoscientists: question one little piece of the scientific orthodoxy on the premise that if this little factoid is wrong, the entire edifice of science will come tumbling down. All of their posters were subtly trying to question the clearcut evidence for dune deposition of the Coconino, usually by pointing to something they think is inconsistent with the dune deposition model. Then they leave the question as an “unsolved mystery”, as many scientists do when new research challenges some old assumption or idea. Nothing in the poster identified their true motive—trying to explain every rock on earth as a flood deposit.

In one poster, Whitmore made a big fuss about the angles of cross-bedding (formed at the sheltered back side of a dune due to avalanching sand) in the Coconino. He claimed that the angles are too shallow to be caused by wind deposition. I studied this poster closely, and its flaws were immediately apparent: he only used a small sample of modern dunes for comparison, and in the real world, sand dunes have an enormous range of dip angles that he conveniently ignored. He tried to rule out compaction for the flattening of the dip angle, but there again he fails to take into account that in real dune sand, the volume is largely air, and you would not see any of the usual compaction indicators from deep burial and high pressures in a rock that had just settled a bit from its original state.

The other poster was just as bizarrely unbalanced and illogical. He had some outcrop photos from Coconino that seemed to show soft-sediment deformation folds and a few other structures that are not typically formed in dunes. His subtle point behind this is that they appeared to be water-laid to his eyes, and therefore all the unit is water-laid. But this is a geological non sequitur. Soft-sediment folding and other features are known to occur on avalanching dune faces. Even if these structures were water-laid (which is possible, since real dune deposits are often interbedded with deposits from adjacent playa lake beds and other aqueous environments), it does not follow that all the formation is laid down in water. Most real rock formations are a mix of several sedimentary facies which change over time and space and not a single homogeneous type of rock. The presence of possibly water-laid deposits in one part of the Coconino is not proof of Noah’s flood. If these deposits are indeed water-laid, it is only evidence about part of the formation, and irrelevant to the sand-dune explanation for the giant cross-beds of the bulk of the Coconino.

My good friend Dr. Samantha Hopkins of the University of Oregon managed to catch the authors at the posters, and she found out just how slimy and frustrating arguing with these pseudoscientists can be. She described her encounters with them in an email as follows:

It was interesting, because even when you pressed them about what made the structures, they would continue to fabricate data about structures indicative of water, but then they wouldn’t actually make the inference that it was Noah’s flood. They kept retreating to “we don’t know what it is…what do you think?” and “we’re trying to find out.” They didn’t, of course, actually want to find out.  This is also where they seem to depart science. They’re constructing data to fit an inference, but refusing to make the inference themselves.  They want us to say it, so they can say “famous geologist says it’s deposited in water”.

Throughout both posters is the same strategy: question or challenge one tiny problem in a conventional geologic explanation of something, then leave the reader hanging with no solution offered, nor even a suggestion as to a better explanation. Of course, they dare not give their answer to the mystery, because then they’d have to come out of the creationist closet, and real geologists would have a field day tearing them apart. Instead, as P.Z. Myers pointed out, they are liars and cowards. They attend legitimate professional meetings to brag to their creationist followers and the uninformed church members that they are doing real research and their ideas are accepted by mainstream science. But their actual presence in the meeting is purely through stealth without mentioning their true motives, because they are afraid of being revealed as the scientific frauds they are when scientists who do know some geology scrutinize their ideas (as happens if they submitted papers to peer review). Because abstracts are not reviewed (see my previous SkepticBlog post) and there is almost no rejection of abstracts (especially since they don’t reveal their creationist motives), it’s easy to get on the program and pretend to be a real scientist.

As I studied the posters, two thoughts struck me. One was that right next to Whitmore’s cross-bedding poster was one by Dr. David Loope of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, one of the world’s experts on ancient sand dune deposits. I was dying to catch up with him and find out what he thought of his neighbor’s poster, but I never did see  him at that busy meeting. He’d tear it to shreds if Whitmore had shown up and had faced him (unless he decided it was a waste of his time battling creationism, as I  have come to realize).

The other thought was more disturbing. Here is a creationist submitting two tiny posters on two tiny mysteries about one formation among thousands of formations. This is during a meeting of 6000 real geologists presenting at least 4000 other posters and talks that largely falsify every aspect of creationist “flood geology”. How does he deal with the cognitive dissonance? How does he manage to miss the forest for the trees? As I discussed in Chapter 3 of my evolution book, this is a particular problem of “flood geology”—they focus on the Grand Canyon and a few other examples, and ignore the other 99% of geology that can’t be so easily twisted and misinterpreted to fit their preconceptions. I’m sure he’s convinced that he is on God’s mission, and that all other 6000 geologists at the meeting are deluded by the Devil (despite the fact that many are actually quite religious; they just don’t fit the real world into the myths of illiterate Bronze Age shepherds). But surely he must notice that all of these eager, excited scientists are working hard to discover the real truth about the world, and not one of them has found that the real geologic record leads to “flood geology”? Surely it must strike him that his opinion is so contrary to every line of evidence presented at that meeting that there might be something wrong with it? After all, he is conscious enough of its unscientific nature to hide his own motives and resort to stealth tactics, so he knows exactly what he is doing. But how can he live with that lie? As I argued in my 2007 evolution book, this is a point about creationists in general: they deliberately and knowingly lie and deceive people to push their agenda, yet they can somehow live with this decidedly immoral and un-Biblical behavior and still think of themselves as honest people. How they manage this level of cognitive dissonance is a mystery to me….

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The Geological Society of America (GSA) is one of the largest organizations of geologists in the world (over 24,000 members). It holds not only an annual meeting every fall in a different city, but also five regional meetings around the U.S. regions (Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Rocky Mountains, and Cordilleran) throughout the year. Although 97 different countries contribute members, it is composed mostly of U.S., Canadian, and some Central American geologists. The GSA focuses on the cutting-edge and pure research aspects of geology, performed mostly by academics and government geologists. Thus, it is very different from meetings of petroleum geologists or mining geologists or engineering geologists, who tend to be employed in for-profit enterprises and focus on purely practical local problems. The annual GSA meeting routinely draws 6000 or more people for a four-day session, so there are over 2000 talks and posters in at least 30 different sessions with talks every 15 minutes in at least 30 different rooms scattered around some  huge convention center. There SO much to see and hear for a broadly trained and wide-ranging geologist/ paleontologist like myself that I can’t even catch a fraction of what I want to see and hear. For me, it is crucial to make the annual meeting each year to keep up with the latest developments, as well as see old friends that I see only at the meetings, and also to keep up with my geology textbooks and my other books sold in the gigantic exhibits area. I attended my first meeting in 1978 in Toronto, and I have not missed a national GSA since then. I just returned from this fall’s meeting in Minneapolis October 9-12, which was my 33rd in a row.

Most of the time when I attend the meetings, there are plenty of controversial topics and great debates going on within the geological community, so the profession does not suppress unorthodox opinions or play political games. This is the way it should be in any genuine scientific discipline. I’ve seen amazingly confrontational knock-down-drag-out sessions about particularly hotly debated ideas, but always conducted in a spirit of honest scientific exchange and always hewing to rules of science and naturalism. To get on the meeting program, scientists must propose to organize sessions around particular themes, along with field trips to geologically interesting sites within driving distance of the convention city, and the GSA host committee reads and approves these proposals. But every once in a while, I see a poster title and abstract with something suspicious about it. When I check the authors, they turn out to be Young-Earth Creationists (YEC) who claim the earth is only 6000 years old and all of geology can be explained by Noah’s flood. When I visit the poster session, it’s usually mobbed by real geologists giving the YECs a real grilling, even though the poster is ostensibly about some reasonable geologic topic, like polystrate trees in Yellowstone, and there is no overt mention of Noah’s flood in the poster. But the 2010 meeting last year in Denver took the cake: there was a whole field trip run by YECs who did not identify their agenda, and pretended that they were doing conventional geology—until you read between the lines.

I never even spotted them on the field trip on the program. I was teaching a heavy load last fall, and had no spare time for pre- or post-meeting trips (four days away from classes is hard enough to arrange), so I didn’t look the trips over closely. But my colleague Steve Newton did notice the suspicious list of leaders, including Institute of Creation “Research” (ICR) “geologist” Steve Austin, Marcus Ross of Jerry Falwell’s fundamentalist Liberty University, and two others from the ICR and another Christian college. He reported on it here, and according to him, it was an eye-opening experience. Through the entire trip, the leaders never identified themselves as YECs or openly advocated Noah’s flood or a 6000-year-old earth. Instead, the entire trip was filled with stops at outcrops where the leaders emphasized the possible evidence for sudden deposition of the strata at Garden of the Gods near Colorado Springs, without stating explicitly that they believed this sudden deposition was Noah’s flood in action. (There are LOTS of instances of local rapid and sudden deposition of strata in real geology, but they are local and clearly cannot be linked to any global flood). As Newton described it:

Furthermore, the field trip leaders were careful not to make overt creationist references. If the 50 or so field trip participants did not know the subtext and weren’t familiar with the field trip leaders, it’s quite possible that they never realized that the leaders endorsed geologic interpretations completely at odds with the scientific community. Even the GSA Sedimentary Geology Division had initially signed on as a sponsor of the trip (though they backed out once they learned the views of the trip leaders).

But the leaders’ Young-Earth Creationist views were apparent in rhetorical subtleties. For example, when Austin referred to Cambrian outcrops, he described them as rocks that are “called Cambrian.” It’s an odd phrasing, allowing use of the proper geologic term while subtly denying its implications. In one instance, when Austin was asked by a trip attendee about the age of a rock unit, he responded somewhat cryptically, “Wherever you want to go there.” Such phrasing was telling, if you knew what to listen for.

Subtext about the age of formations was a big part of the Young-Earth Creationist rhetoric on the trip. As we moved on to each field trip stop, a narrative began to emerge: the creationist concept of Noah’s Flood as explanation for the outcrops. Although no one uttered the words “Noachian Flood,” the guides’ descriptions of the geology were revealing and rather coy. For example, at the first stop—a trail off Highway 24 near Manitou Spring—Austin stated that the configuration of the units was “the same over North America,” and had been formed by a massive marine transgression. “Whatever submerged the continent,” Austin went on, it must have been huge in scale.

Apparently, most of the participants on the field trip who weren’t familiar with YEC assumptions and terminology never caught on to the scam that was being perpetrated by the field trip leaders—and none were converted to the YEC viewpoint by a single weird field trip. But conversion and witnessing to unbelievers is not the goal here. The purpose is to get YEC “research” presented at respectable mainstream scientific meetings so they can claim they are doing legitimate “scientific research”—even if they lie about or conceal their motives to do so, and mislead the GSA and the geological community by hiding their real agenda. During the poster sessions at that same meeting, there were no less than four posters by students from fundamentalist Cedarville University challenging the idea that the classic Permian sand dune deposits of the Coconino Sandstone below the rim of the Grand Canyon were laid down in in the wind and not water—because that’s a major dilemma for the YEC in trying to shoehorn the entire Grand Canyon into “flood geology” (see my book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters, Chapter 3, for a detailed critique of the idiocy of “flood geology”).

Even more bizarre was one of the presentations given by Marcus Ross of Liberty University, who did conventional research on Cretaceous mosasaurs (huge marine monitor lizards) and ammonites for his legitimate Ph.D. at the University of Rhode Island. As Newton described it:

“Millions of years” was a phrase that also appeared in Ross’ talk on Late Cretaceous marine stratigraphy; many of his slides used normal geologic time, with millions of years clearly labeled on axes. Nothing in his 15-minute talk hinted at nonstandard geologic thinking. Because most of the audience probably did not know Ross’ background, it must have been puzzling to them when the first question following Ross’ talk challenged him on how he could “harmonize this work with [his] belief in a 6,000-year-old Earth.” (This question came from University of Florida geology professor Joe Meert, who blogged about the exchange.)

Ross answered the question by saying that for a scientific meeting such as GSA, he thought in a “framework” of standard science; but for a creationist audience, he said, he used a creationist framework. Judging from the reaction of the audience, this answer caused more confusion than enlightenment. Ross pointed out that nothing in his presentation involved Young-Earth Creationism. But he then volunteered that he was indeed a Young-Earth Creationist.

It was a strange moment for the audience. It was the last talk of the session, and as everyone migrated into the hallway, several people asked me what had just happened, as if they had misheard the exchange.

What to do about this situation? Steven Newton argues (rightly in my opinion) that at professional meetings YEC should be allowed to give presentations as long as they are clearly following the rules of science (at least in their abstracts). They deserve to be debated and confronted but we don’t want to get in the game of censoring or rejecting them as non-scientists as long as their abstracts approach their topics in a scientific and professional manner. If we reject them beforehand,  they can legitimately claim that they are being victimized and unfairly censored by conventional scientists who won’t give them a fair hearing. However, in a peer-reviewed paper, the reviewers should take them to task if they are using non-scientific methods or assumptions. I know of only a few YEC papers in conventional journals that survived peer-review—and only by doing completely conventional research and making no mention of their YEC assumptions or goals.

Sadly, the real problem here is that YEC “geologists” come back from this meeting falsely braggingthat their “research” was enthusiastically received, and that they “converted” a lot of people to their unscientific views. As Newton pointed out, they will crow in their publicity that they are attending regular professional meetings and presenting their research successfully. For those who don’t know any better, it sounds to the YEC audience like they are conventional geologists doing real research and that they deserve to be taken seriously as geologists—even though every aspect of their geology is patently false (see Chapter 3 in my 2007 Evolution book). And so, once more the dishonesty of the YEC takes advantage of the openness and freedom of the scientific community to exploit it to their own ends, and abuse the privilege of open communication to push anti-scientific nonsense on the general population that doesn’t know the difference.

P.Z. Myers said it best on his recent blog“The Fundamental Cowardice of Creationists”:

I’m sure that the creationists will cry that he had to do this, because science defends a dogmatic orthodoxy and won’t let them speak otherwise. This is totally false. If someone wants to defend heterodox ideas, they should state them openly, not hide them and present theories they do not believe so they can acquire false authority in a field, as Ross tries to do, or so that they can lie and pretend that they had convinced an audience, as Austin did.

And that’s all Marcus Ross is trying to do. He’s trying to build up credibility by presenting all of the data and interpreting it in a rational framework (he learned something at URI!) at scientific meetings, only so he can turn around and spend that reputation to endorse laughable absurdities at creationist meetings. It is contemptible.

Addendum: I checked the program of our October meeting just held in Minneapolis, and they were not on the field trip schedule (whew!).

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I’ve posted frequently (see my July 24 post) on the religious kooks who insist that Galileo and Copernicus and all later astronomers were wrong  and that the earth, not the sun, is the center of the solar system. They base this weird notion on their own version of biblical literalism, since there are many passages in the Bible (e.g., Isaiah 11: 12, 40:22, 44:24; Joshua 10:12-14) which clearly present a geocentric world viewpoint (as was widely held in almost all ancient cultures and not overturned until the 1500s). Many are actually renegade Catholics who not only insist that Galileo was wrong and that the Church was right, but what the Inquisition did to Galileo was justified. Naturally, the Catholic Church is not too happy about these revisionists, since it has long come to terms with Galileo and scientific reality, and even apologized for its treatment of him. They don’t spend a lot of unnecessary time trying to repudiate or excommunicate these renegades who want to drag us back to the 14th century. I guess the Church is busy with other problems….

Recently, the Los Angeles Times ran an article on the latest version of the Catholic geocentrist movement. The article says:

“I have no idea who these people are,” said Brother Guy Consolmagno, curator of meteorites and spokesman for the Vatican Observatory. “Are they sincere, or is this a clever bit of theater?”

Those promoting geocentrism argue that heliocentrism, or the centuries-old consensus among scientists that Earth revolves around the sun, is a conspiracy to squelch the church’s influence.

“Heliocentrism becomes dangerous if it is being propped up as the true system when, in fact, it is a false system,” said Robert Sungenis, leader of a budding movement to get scientists to reconsider. “False information leads to false ideas, and false ideas lead to illicit and immoral actions — thus the state of the world today.… Prior to Galileo, the church was in full command of the world, and governments and academia were subservient to her.”

Sungenis is no Don Quixote. Hundreds of curiosity seekers, skeptics and supporters attended a conference last fall titled “Galileo Was Wrong. The Church Was Right” near the University of Notre Dame campus inSouth Bend, Ind.

Astrophysicists at Notre Dame didn’t appreciate the group hitching its wagon to America’s flagship Catholic university and resurrecting a concept that’s extinct for a reason.

“It’s an idea whose time has come and gone,” astrophysics professor Peter Garnavich said. “There are some people who want to move the world back to the 1950s when it seemed like a better time. These are people who want to move the world back to the 1250s.”

After consulting with the neo-geocentrists and the Vatican observatory, the reporter next went to a logical additional source associated with biblical literalism: the loudest and more prominent creationist in the U.S., Ken  Ham, of the Answers in Genesis organization and the creation “museum” in Petersburg, Kentucky. This is the same guy who insists that every word of the Bible must be interpreted literally or faith is meaningless, and who spends huge numbers of hours and dollars pushing biblical literalism and excoriating anyone who suggests that the Genesis creation story is metaphor or myth, not literally true.

And what do you think he said? Did he stick to his principles and defend geocentrism, which is found in many places in the Bible? No, he turned out to be a cafeteria Christian after all. As the Times reported:

“There’s a big difference between looking at the origin of the planets, the solar system and the universe and looking at presently how they move and how they are interrelated,” Ham said. “The Bible is neither geocentric or heliocentric. It does not give any specific information about the structure of the solar system.”

Ummm… sorry, Ken, but the Bible is actually MORE specific and detailed in its support of geocentrism than it is of your creation myth. What’s the matter, Ken? You can’t accept any deviation from literalism except when you decide the Bible isn’t clear or it’s metaphorical?

So what explains this inconsistency and flip-flopping in a man who insists on inerrancy, and won’t let anyone interpret the Bible metaphorically? Could it be that if he preached geocentrism, even his loyal fundie followers would laugh at him? If we pressed Pat Robertson or Oral Roberts or Mike Huckabee or the GOP presidential candidates who promote creationism, would they also agree with geocentrism? Somehow, I think not. The geocentrism vs. heliocentrism debate was over more 500 years ago, and only kooks and cranks are still waging it (along with creationists who insist the earth is flat, another idea found in the Bible). By contrast, over 150 years since Darwin’s book was published, a substantial percentage of people in the U.S. (but NOT in most European industrialized countries, nor in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, China, or other developed Asian countries) have still not rejected the equally outdated notions of creationism and come to terms with evolution. Apparently, 500 years is more than enough to get cultures to reject crazy religious notions, but 150 years are not enough (at least in the U.S.).

So, does this mean we still need to wait up to 350 years for creationism to finally die its long overdue death in the U.S.?

The terrifying fortress headquarters of the "Evil Empire"

After finishing my research on the fossils, I  had a bit of spare time, so on invitation from Steve Newton and Josh Rosenau (who attended my Bay Area Skeptics talk), I decided to pay a visit to another cultural landmark: the headquarters of the National Center for Science Education. This is the chief non-profit organization in the U.S. that helps local school boards and scientists and teachers when creationism threatens their classrooms. If you read the creationists’ literature and the posts on the ID creationist Discovery Institute’s (DI) website, the NCSE is this monstrous organization which exerts mind-control over every scientist in the country, and forces them to robotically chant “I accept evolution.” According to the creationists, the NCSE is pure evil, suppressing the creationism message with its enormous staff and budget and power over all of U.S. science. In Ben Stein’s crappy little creationist propaganda film Expelled, Ben pays a visit to the gleaming  headquarters of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, which occupies a vast amount of floor space in a brand-new office building downtown, and has a huge staff. Over and over again the DI staffers complain about how they scientific establishment is against them, and how the NCSE has so much more power, money, and influence than they do.

So it’s surprising to actually visit the headquarters of the NCSE and get an abrupt reality check. This bête noire of creationism occupies a small, rundown, poorly ventilated commercial space in a rough part of Oakland, surrounded by fundamentalist churches. Their tiny staff is paid a pittance compared to most academic or business salaries, and they occupy cramped cubicles cluttered with piles of work. About the only way you could tell it was not any other kind of typical non-profit organization was the decoration: creationist and evolutionary posters and “timelines of creation”, casts of famous hominid fossils and prehistoric animal models,  dolls and posters and bobble-heads of Charles Darwin, clever signs from many different school board protests, and over the staff calendar and status board, “You  are not in Kansas any more.”

The minions of the NCSE plot to overthrow creationism in these dungeon-like offices

Their “archive” is the garage next door, where they have stored the records of nearly every creationist outbreak of the past 40 years, as well as thousands of cassettes and VHS tapes of debates and creationist propaganda films, and copies of many classic works of creationism. They have file drawer after file drawer of nearly every major “outbreak” of the creationism flu over the years, so when another one occurs, they have the old records and the local contact information of the activists who fought the battle last time. I even got to see a copy of “Dr. Dino” Kent Hovind’s legendary “doctoral dissertation” (bought from a diploma mill), which was written at barely high school level. The highlight of the whole place is the one tiny bathroom that they all share: its walls are lined with hilarious (mostly misspelled and incoherent) creationist hate mail and kooky and creepy things from creationist cranks that arrive by the boxload every year.

So this is the headquarters of the “Evil Empire,” the “Mordor” that creationists fear above all others? This tiny organization is allegedly brainwashing the entire scientific community, and is capable of suppression and censorship on a massive scale? This tiny office is the monster that the DI people in Ben Stein’s movie feared most? If so, then the NCSE is a David against a Goliath of creationist organizations. According to their tax forms, the budget of the DI in Seattle is nearly five times the budget of the NCSE. The DI is a huge organization which is one of the loudest and most powerful in the creationist community, along with Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis megachurch and “museum” in Kentucky—both are many times richer and more powerful than the threadbare NCSE. The budgets of most of the fundamentalist megachurches and schools like Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University or the Seventh-Day Adventist schools dwarf even these. Yet all these mighty, rich organizations, with their TV shows on cable, and gigantic base of followers, fear the NCSE? The NCSE must be doing something right!

The stairway to the upper level of Mordor, um, the attic offices. It is decorated with an inflatable globe, a phylogeny poster, a geologic time scale running upstairs, and classic creationist posters.

What the NCSE demonstrates so beautifully is how a little well-targeted effort to spread the truth goes a long way. They don’t have the giant staff or budget to tackle every single creationist infection themselves, so they serve as a coordination center and clearinghouse, contacting the local scientists and teachers and activists and helping them organize, providing them with important information about the political aspects of fighting each particular battle, and helping them with arguments or documents which they can distribute to school boards or to citizens who get up to speak at a board meeting. Their staff is familiar with every political and scientific aspect of the evolution-creation wars. Their coordinators, like Josh Rosenau, are expert at getting the the local community to organize effectively, recruit allies, and make sure that they use their resources strategically in keeping school boards from making big mistakes. And they are led by the indefatigable Road Warrior, Dr. Eugenie Scott, who makes hundreds of appearances each year talking about creationism and science, and testifying before many different groups, all with her unshakably friendly, non-threatening, grandmotherly manner that gets people to listen and drop their hostility.

Despite the polls showing that about 40% of Americans agree with the major tenets of creationism, and the fact that there are many creationist organizations which are larger and more powerful, the NCSE has two key weapons: the law and reality. Fundamentalist ministers may be able to bamboozle their flocks with lies about evolution, but in the marketplace of scientific ideas, there is no longer any doubt that evolution is the way the world actually works.  Creationists may try to gussy up their ideas as “intelligent design” or hide behind the “teach the controversy” tactic, but the myths of illiterate Bronze Age shepherds are still a narrow religious dogma believed by only a minority of Americans. And that’s the ultimate line of defense: no matter what a local school board or state government does, if they leave ANY trail of their religious motivations for their acts (which is why the NCSE archive is crucial for detecting this), they run up against the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution, and ultimately the law is (at least in this case) on the side of scientific reality.

But it’s a never-ending struggle in this country. Creationists may not do any real science, or never learn any new arguments, or never concede that their old arguments were long ago debunked, but they are dedicated and well-funded and never give up. So the job of the NCSE never seems to end, and these hardworking underpaid staffers will never see  an empty “hot board map” showing no towns with current infections. Back in 1982, I was one of the original members of the Committees of Correspondence, Stanley Weinberg’s first effort to combat creationism in the Midwest, which evolved into the current NCSE. I’ve debated Gish and Meyer and Sternberg and a bunch of guys from ICR and DI, and written a book debunking their ideas about evolution and fossils. So I do what I can, but I don’t have the patience or time to do the job that the NCSE does. For that, I’m very grateful that they are there, fighting the good fight in the trenches, and manning the barricades that few scientists or teachers have time to deal with. We members of the skeptical and scientific community should all honor them for doing an essential job in trying to preserve the scientific integrity of our educational system, and fighting back against the untiring never-ending hordes of the forces of darkness, all while showing the patience of Job. And if you’re not already a member of NCSE, you should join, because they are doing this important job for all of us!

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The continuing problem of creationists and their efforts to hamper science education and research in this country never seems to abate. Some people throw up their hands in resignation and say, “We can never change their minds, so let’s just ignore them.” As I pointed out in my book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters, we cannot afford to ignore the creationist threat to science. Not only do they undermine the proper teaching of biology in our schools, but they have made no secret that their goal is to suppress any science that is not consistent with their literalistic view of the Bible. Good bye, astronomy and cosmology. Good bye, physical anthropology and human paleontology. Good bye, geology (and forget finding oil or coal or gas ever again). Good bye molecular biology, and its evidence for evolution. And forget all the benefits that these sciences provide us, or the richer perspective on life that we gain by understanding our true place in the universe, rather than the version handed down by some Bronze Age shepherds.

But a bigger problem is the fact that in some cases, denial of evolution is dangerous or even deadly. Evolution keeps happening all the time, whether creationists want to believe it or not. Yet if we deny the fact that evolution is happening in viruses and bacteria and in other pathogens and pests, it only makes the problem worse when they evolve resistance to whatever we throw at them. If creationists ran the labs that produce these protective chemicals, do you think we would have a chance when the next deadly pest hits us?

Many insects and weeds have evolved resistance to pesticides and herbicides, all within a few decades, causing enormous economic damage to people all over the world. Every modern housefly now carries the genes that make it resistant not only to DDT, but also pyrethroids, dieldrin, organophosphates and carbamates, so there are few poisons left that can suppress them. The mosquitoes that evolved resistance to DDT and other organophosphate insecticides apparently evolved in Africa during the 1960s, spread on to Asia, then reached California by 1984, Italy in 1985, and France in 1986. As entomologist Martin Taylor describes it (in Weiner, 1994, p. 255):

It always seems amazing to me that evolutionists pay so little attention to this kind of thing, and that cotton growers are having to deal with these pests in the very states whose legislatures are so hostile to the theory of evolution. Because it is the evolution itself they are struggling against in their fields every season. These people are trying to ban the teaching of evolution while their own cotton crops are failing because of evolution. How can you be a creationist farmer any more?

But the most egregious example of evolution denial didn’t just hurt people, but actually killed a baby. In 1984, when a surgeon at Loma Linda University in California attempted to replace the defective heart of “Baby Fae” with the heart of a baboon. Not surprisingly, the poor baby died a few days later due to immune rejection. An Australian radio crew interviewed the surgeon, Dr. Leonard Bailey, and asked him why he didn’t use a more closely related primate, such as a chimpanzee, and avoid the possibility of immune rejection, given the baboon’s great evolutionary distance from humans. Bailey said, “Er, I find that difficult to answer. You see, I don’t believe in evolution.” If Bailey had performed the same experiment in any other medical institution except Loma Linda (which is run by the creationist Seventh-Day Adventist Church), his experiments would be labeled dangerous and unethical, and he would have been sued for malpractice and his medical license revoked. But under the cover of religion, his unscientific beliefs caused an innocent baby to die of immune rejection, when other alternatives might have been available. And Bailey still continues on at Loma Linda, treating kids with no regrets about his unethical experiment.

So just think about that the next time you hear someone say, “Oh, creationism is not hurting anyone.”

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Whenever I read about the conventions held by creationists, it is always staggering to see so much ignorance of science and scholarship on display. If you read through one of their programs or peruse the abstracts, your mind is boggled at the bizarre thinking and intellectual contortions these people must attempt, from weird ideas of how to fit all living thing into Noah’s ark to odd explanations of where the flood waters came from and where they went, to even weirder ideas of why the universe appears to be 13.7 billion years old (but is only really 6000 years old), or why radiometric dating doesn’t work or how to explain the complex geologic history of the earth with Bronze Age myths of superstitious shepherds. One paper after another is replete with special pleading, ad hoc and supernatural “explanations”, none of which would pass muster in even an introductory physics or geology class. As I discussed in my book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, these people are profoundly ignorant of real science and proud of it, because their faith comes first. Sadly, they have about 40% or so of the American public believing their anti-scientific view of the world.

No matter how weird their ideas seem to the outsider, we can at least understand their motivation. To the fundamentalist creationist, a literal interpretation of their version of the Bible is a life-or-death, salvation-or-damnation matter, which is why they invest so much energy confusing people with their distorted ideas about sciences like evolution, geology, anthropology, and astronomy.  If one truly believes that Darwinism will lead you to hell’s door, we can see what makes them think this way, no matter how wrong it seems to us. But, as we smugly assert, they are just fringe religious fanatics, and they are only fighting the most recent scientific battle over evolution (that still rages 152 years later). Surely, the great victories of science, such as the Copernican system of astronomy and the Einsteinian revolution in physics, are no longer disputed and even religious fanatics accept them. Right?

There you would be wrong. Literal interpretation of the Bible is not only inconsistent with evolution, but it also extends to other claims about the world as well. Google the term “Flat Earth Society” and you’ll find websites describing small but sincere groups of believers who are convinced that the earth is not a sphere but a flat disk. When confronted with photographs of the earth from space, they always claim that these images are fraudulent or doctored in some way. When the topic of the Moon landings is brought, up they claim it was all a NASA hoax filmed in a sound stage. Their insistence on a flat earth and a geocentric view of the world (with the earth, not the sun, at the center of the solar system) is based on biblical literalism. There are many verses in the Bible (e.g., Isaiah 11: 12, 40:22, 44:24) that say so, and they believe the Bible must be literally true. Most people find these people and their ideas amusing and silly, but their belief system is just as strongly held as the beliefs of many of their audience. Nevertheless, if you read their screeds, you find they are deadly serious and fanatical about their dogmas. The passage below from the Sept. 1988 issue of their journal (complete with their own bad grammar and spellings, and odd use of ALL CAPS) is typical:

“IN USA today, as in Russia in ’20s and NAZI Germany in ’40s full scale campaign to create USA ALSO A BEAST NATION… no God… no right no wrong no up no down 2 added to 2 is whatever scientists say it is… Adults today either jailed or shot down… at own homes for even teaching their own children… GOD EXISTS and Right and Wrong exists (State of Utah)… bells have been tolling for so long… for the helpless pitiful innocent ‘animals’ as they are tortured to death by priests of the State Religion ‘GREASE BALL SCIENCE’… now … 1988 … no use, too late… to send to see for whom the bell tolls… THE BELL TOLLS FOR THEE!”

Likewise, there is an entire group of religious fanatics who still believe that Copernicus and Galileo (and every astronomer since then) was wrong and the Church was right in insisting the earth was the center of the universe. They held a conference in November 2010, with dozens of speakers with impressive-sounding credentials (but none with any true scientific training in astronomy). If you look at the list of talk titles, they are a mix of weird science, paranoid conspiracy theories that claim the shots of earth from space are hoaxed, and apologists for the literal interpretation of the Bible (which does indeed claim the earth is the center of the universe, as all ancient cultures believed). Ironically, the Catholic Church has long ago apologized for its persecution of Galileo by the Inquisition, and for its long rejection of the heliocentric system, so clearly they do not endorse these views by “Catholics” who don’t follow their own Church’s teachings.

The latest convention of crackpots and crazies occurred on the weekend of July 6-9, 2011, when the “Natural Philosophy Alliance” held their 18th Annual Conference at the University of Maryland, claiming 269 participants with 138 abstracts. The term “Natural Philosophy” in the title is a clue, because that’s what people used to call investigations of nature (usually in the context of studying God’s handiwork) before the term “science” came along with its secular influences and emphasis on experiment and testability. The entire world of “natural philosophy” faded away slowly in the mid-nineteenth century as truly scientific ideas like evolution, modern chemistry and physics, and uniformitarian geology drove out the old-fashioned religion-based approach to the natural world.

So who are these “natural philosophers” in the 21st century world of modern science? If you scan down the list of named “scientists”, you’ll find a lot of writers, “independent researchers,” engineers, artists, film makers, a dairy farmer—but hardly any real scientists. Some claim the title “Dr.” in their biographies, but when you look closer, their “doctorates” are questionable ones from diploma mills. If their credentials are legit, their doctorate is in a field far from what they were talking about at the conference, such as philosophy or religion, not science. Almost none with doctorates seem to have ever held an academic position, so they were seldom exposed to the continuous challenge of skepticism, peer review, and scientific give and take that real scientists must continually deal with. Instead, most seem to have made their living outside of science where their ideas are not challenged.Their entire output seems to be abstracts for conferences like this one, or publications in their own journals, or self-published books. Clearly they are afraid of peer review by real scientists. A good indicator of the disreputable nature of the meeting is the large number of abstracts published “in absentia” with no speaker to deliver the paper or defend the abstract. This is not tolerated at real scientific meetings, where you are supposed to designate a backup speaker if you can’t attend, or withdraw your abstract. No hiding from your peers is allowed!

But let’s not resort to an ad hominem argument—maybe these people is actually on to something that scientists have missed. Unfortunately, a scan through their abstracts is even more discouraging. The program is a veritable smorgasbord of nearly every discredited idea that ended up on the scientific trash heap over the past 200 years. Most are attempts to restore “intuitive” notions about physics against the counter-intuitive world of modern physics and cosmology, from many attacks on Einstein and relativity (complete with “Neo-Newtonian theory”, even though we still use good old Newtonian mechanics in most everyday matters), to weird ideas about gravity and electromagnetism, to attempts to deny heliocentrism or the nature of the universe. The long-extinct concept of “ether” (debunked a century ago) makes its reappearance, which seems truly odd to anyone who is raised in modern science and has only heard of it as an historical mistake. Several of these presentations are actually modern versions of Velikovsky’s crackpot notions of planets violating the laws of physics as an attempt to explain biblical miracles. There were a handful of geological talks proclaiming weird ideas about the earth that no one has taken seriously in a century, and showing just how ignorant the speaker is about modern geology. Apparently, these folks don’t discuss biology much here, so the meeting focuses mostly on attacking modern physics, not evolutionary biology.

So what is going on here? If you read the abstracts carefully, you’ll find that a few of the authors reveal religious motivations or attempts to square reality with the Bible (as Velikovsky tried to do). But most seem to be old-fashioned Luddites, battling against modern physics and cosmology because it is counter-intuitive and not easy to understand without advanced training in physics and mathematics (which most of the speakers apparently lack). In contrast to a convention of creationists twisting the science to fit the Bible, most of these guys (almost none are women) are just old-fashioned cranks who think they have a great idea—but are unwilling to listen to any legitimate scientists who might prove them wrong. Thus, they preach to the converted and speak to conventions of other fringe scientists and crackpots, publish their non-peer-reviewed abstracts, and pad their “credentials” as if this would make their ideas any more credible or scientific.

We laugh at them and go on with our lives, thinking that their pathetic “convention” is of no consequence. But there are serious issues here. First, why was the University of Maryland renting out its space to crackpot pseudoscientists? There are lots of convention centers and hotels that will host meetings of any size regardless of affiliation—so why does a major research university allow these pseudoscientists on campus? I realize that state universities are desperate for money these days, but this is scandalous. Are they just selling out to the highest bidder to use their empty buildings in the summer? If so, they might as well rent their buildings to Neo-Nazis or con artists or fundamentalists doing revival meetings. Don’t they realize that each time a legitimate research university sells its soul to pseudoscientists for a few bucks, they are giving the cranks the appearance of legitimacy—and sullying their own reputation?

But there’s an even larger question. We may laugh at this gathering of 269 crazies once a year (or 2143 “scientists” their website claims for the “World Science Database”) as inconsequential. Yet there are a lot more of them out there. The office of the Skeptic Society gets letters and phone calls and emails from cranks several times a day, all claiming to have the latest “great idea” that they want Skeptic to publish. But even though they are not as numerous as the creationists, who hold 40% of the American population in the their thrall, these pseudoscientists are a clear example of why science has to stand up against nonsense, not ignore it. The creationists’ current favorite political tactic is “teach the controversy”, where their garbage is given “equal time” with legitimate science—and a large percentage of politicians and the American public agree with this and think it is only fair. What happens when a state with “equal time” legislation on the books (like Louisiana) decides to teach “the controversy” about geocentrism, ether, Velikovsky’s ideas, and attempts to discredit Einsteinian relativity and modern physics in their classes instead of teaching real physics?  All these anti-scientists need do is point to the “Natural Philosophy Association” and their many “published abstracts” and meetings, or get one of their “scientists” to testify—and then our students would be just as misled about physics or chemistry or geology as they currently are about modern biology.

We’ve all heard stories about crackpots like this—but they are much more numerous than you realize, and no longer isolated, but meeting at their own conventions and “publishing abstracts” so that a layperson wouldn’t know the difference between them and real scientists. That is no laughing matter.