After I finished the DNA Predictions on Cornelius Hunter’s Darwin’s Predictions website, I felt something lacking in my life. It felt as if I had a large, Cornelius-shaped hole in my Internet experience. I was craving his wit, his sense of humour, his unique writing style that always had me coming back for more. Yes, I realised I was totally addicted to bass him. So, without wasting any time, expect perhaps spending quite a few hours at school and sleeping, I’ve come back to fulfil more of my promise to deal with his monstrosity of a website.
Moving on further down Cornelius’s list of “predictions”, we come across the next category, entitled “Early evolution predictions”, which according to Cornelius himself, “[examine] predictions dealing with events hypothesized to have occurred early in the evolutionary process”. Sounds like some fun.
The first of these predictions is “Evolution has hundreds of millions of years available”, and it’s the one I’ll be dealing with right… now.
Article link: Early Evolution Predictions: Evolution has hundreds of millions of years available, by Cornelius Hunter
Prediction
[The] move to “deep time” in geology was crucial for evolution. Darwin himself advocated a 400 million year or more age for the earth, which he considered to be required for the new species to evolve. This requirement became particularly evident when William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) contradicted the trend toward longer time periods. Only a few years after Darwin had published his book on evolution, Thomson argued that the earth could be no older than 100 million years. Thomson later revised that figure downward to as little as 20-40 million years.
As we all know, Cornelius included, Kelvin was wrong about the age of the Earth. I won’t get into the reasons why, as I’m not a physicist and I’d spend more time explaining/learning principles of thermodynamics and heat flux than responding to what Cornelius is saying about evolution. But the point Cornelius is trying to make is quite evident: evolution requires a certain amount of time. Remove the time evolution needs and you can falsify it. Simple in theory, but he first has to justify the removal of hundreds of millions of years from the geologic timescale, or at least from the applied evolutionary timescale. Can Cornelius do it?
The 100 million years that Thomson allowed was not nearly long enough for evolution to work. “Thomson’s views of the recent age of the world,” wrote Darwin, “have been for some time one of my sorest troubles.” As Dr. Cherry Lewis of the University of Bristol recently explained, “The age of the Earth was hugely important for people like Darwin who needed enormous amounts of time in which evolution could occur. As Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s chief advocate said: ‘Biology takes its time from Geology’.” [2,3]
Yes, yes, we know. More buildup to the big reveal. Nice writing style though, I must admit: get your audience to agree with lots of reasonable things you say, then spring the odd dodgy claim in here and there and hope for the best. Not very honest, but effective.
Darwin and Huxley worked to overthrow Thomson’s time restriction. Darwin enlisted his son George, a mathematician at Cambridge, to rework Thomson’s calculations. Eventually, around the turn of the century, geology rejected Thomson’s arguments. The usual reason given for this is that Thomson was unaware of radioactivity as a source of thermal energy, though it seems the story is more complicated than this. [4] In any case, geology soon extended the age of the earth into the billions of years, and evolution’s prediction (and requirement) for long time periods, so it seemed, was fulfilled.
The scene is set, the lights dimmed, and spotlight is focused on the trapdoor from which Cornelius will now spring from with his “falsification”. So, he’s correctly stated, for I think the first time so far, an actual prediction evolution makes about the world we observe, as opposed to just things scientists speculated about which have been “falsified” by modern science. How will he follow through?
Falsification
It is now known that evolution has nowhere near the eons of time predicted and required by Darwin. Indeed, the time windows available are even less than those allowed by William Thomson, which themselves were unacceptable to the evolutionists. This falsification of evolution’s prediction does not derive from the age of the earth, but rather from the fossil record. We now know that, even with billions of years of earth history, the major events in the fossil record take place in time windows that are no longer than a few tens of millions of years or even less.
Hang on a minute. Darwin’s prediction was about the age of Earth, and that it must have been longer than the 20-40 million years that Lord Kelvin calculated. Darwin thought, correctly, that evolution requires longer periods of time than the timeframe Kelvin put forward. But he was not referring to specific parts of evolution, but the total development of all life on Earth from a single common ancestor. Cornelius has shifted Darwin’s intention from that to, strangely, specific events in evolutionary history.
There is, for example, the origin of the first organic cells. The early earth was inundated by meteors wreaking havoc on a global scale. Studies have shown that this process took the better part of a billion years. On the other hand, paleontologists continue to find evidence for ancient life forms, leaving little time for their evolution. As one researcher put it:
“I’m much more confident today than I was in 1996 about the likelihood that this is evidence of early [3.8 billion years ago] life. This is not “smoking gun” evidence—we are not seeing fossils—but in every case, the model has come through with flying colors.” [5]
The earliest unchallenged traces of life found are in rocks dated to 3.4 billion years old. The 3.8 billion year old biochemical traces that Cornelius cites are highly contested, as the traces can easily be explained by non-biological processes. But this is all smoke and mirrors. What Cornelius is really saying is “I think that 200-400 million years is not long enough to produce, via abiogenic processes, life that is complex enough to leave biochemical traces.” Uh, please show some evidence for why you think this way, other than it’s highly beneficial to your creationist worldview if it’s true. Arguments from incredulity are not impressive.
Life seems to have appeared early in earth’s history, leaving little time once the catastrophic meteor impacts ceased. This renders the age of the earth irrelevant. Darwin needed hundreds of millions of years for his evolutionary processes, but it is not available regardless of the age of the earth. Life apparently began rapidly, and this is the first of several “big bangs” of biology. Paleontologists estimate that over the past 600 million years a series of abrupt appearances were made by the major groups in the fossil record. The rule of the fossil record seems to be one of long periods of boredom with short fire drills interspersed.
More arguments from incredulity! How can people get away with thinking that this constitutes any sort of rational analysis of the issue? Cornelius seems to think that his own lack of ability to comprehend the variable rate of evolutionary progress is evidence against it. How much more logically-twisted can you get?
An example of these big bangs is the “Cambrian Explosion.” Estimated to have taken place almost 600 million years ago over an order of magnitude shorter time period than Darwin’s required hundreds of millions of years, it initiated virtually all the major designs of multi-cellular life with little evolutionary history. In a geologically short time period, the fossil species went from small worm-like creatures and the like to a tremendous diversity of complex life forms including virtually all of today’s modern designs.
The Cambrian explosion is always brought up by creationists, as it seems to be very good evidence for a “spontaneous creation event” that evolutionary theory cannot explain. But that interpretation is extremely superficial.
The “explosion”, as it is popularly referred to, was a period of 70-80 million years beginning 530 million years ago in which all the major body plans of animals was developed from supposedly very simple ancestors. As it took a considerable amount of time to progress, the popular “explosion” definition is not really all that accurate, and is probably why most creationists refer to it: an “explosion” seems to defy natural explanation, even if it only “exploded” in a geological timeframe.
Nevertheless, the Cambrian explosion is not hard to explain in evolutionary terms. When evolution progresses quickly, there is usually some environmental reason. This is pretty evident in the case of this radiation event, as the amount of free oxygen in the biosphere was constantly increasing throughout this time, increasing the ability of animals to evolve more complex traits and body plans, as well as generally increasing in size. The rapid development of the Hox gene family in animals could also have played a large part as well, increasing the genetic potential for different body plans in the animal kingdom.
There are many other explanations for the Cambrian explosion, and Cornelius is not the first to voice objections to evolution based partly on its existence. But it’s all been dealt with before, and poses no problem to evolutionary theory.
Darwin required several hundreds of millions of years for his process of evolution and was troubled even by Thomson’s upper limit of only one hundred million years for the age of the earth. Today we know that in many instances, the available time window for the process of evolution has been winnowed substantially and evolution’s prediction has been falsified.
But as I said before, Darwin was predicting an older Earth, and wasn’t talking about the evolution of specific traits or radiative events in evolutionary history. All radiative events in Earth’s history fit within their timeframe nicely, and there aren’t any that are truly instantaneous, ie. less than a hundred thousand years, which would literally be the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.
I have a big issue, again, with Cornelius claiming that evolution, or even Darwin himself, predicts/predicted that large scale radiative events such as the Cambrian explosion could not exist, which basically means that changes in evolutionary tempo are not allowed within the theory’s framework. This is nonsense. While it may be true that Darwin has no clue about changes in evolutionary tempo, if not simply because he was the first person to develop these ideas about biological development and it shouldn’t be expected that had to have thought of everything, evolutionary theory does not restrict genetic changes to a specific speed. Large changes that occur in the environment can effect similarly large changes in the genomes of organisms. This is not new information that Cornelius is springing upon the world of genetics.
Reaction
When Thomson argued that the earth could not be older than 100 million years, he knew that this was less time than evolution needed. “A correction of this kind,” Thomson pointed out, “cannot be said to be unimportant to in reference to biological speculation” [6] But Huxley had already anticipated the problem, and had argued that, in fact, the “biological speculation,” as Thomson put it, would merely adapt to the new time window:
“The only reason we have for believing in the slow rate of the change in living forms is the fact that they persist through a series of deposits which geology informs us have taken a long while to make. If the geological clock is wrong all the naturalists have to do is to modify his notions of the rapidity of change accordingly… It is not obvious that we shall have to alter or reform our ways.” [7]
I bet Cornelius is concocting a charge of “ad hoc” for evolutionary proponents. What’s the chance that I’m right?
Darwin rejected this protectionist argument. For Darwin, evolution did not merely occur at whatever pace geology dictated. Rather, the evolution of the millions of species and their many designs required a certain length of time. If that time period was not available, then this would be a problem for his theory. Darwin argued for a longer time period, not for speculative theory that merely adapts to whatever time window is allowed.
Yep, “protectionist”. Plus, he’s setting us Neo-Darwinians up against Darwin himself! Oh no!
Perhaps Huxley was a little out of line, claiming that the development of all life could have happened in 100 million years, but we shouldn’t expect too much of the pioneers of a radical new scientific idea. He got it right in the end, and that’s all that matters, especially when you lack data because you’re someone who lives a century before the real advent of the field of phylogenetics.
Both Darwin and Huxley were correct: the total development of life on Earth required a certain amount of time to proceed, but the changes that took place within that total past development need not occur at the same constant rate.
But Huxley set the tone for evolutionary theory in the twentieth century. Now evolution has been handed dramatically shorter time windows and evolutionists have responded with a substantial modification to the theory. Exemplified in a sub-hypothesis called “punctuated equilibrium,” evolution has now been generalized to accommodate both long, slow change and fast, abrupt change, though how this would actually occur remains speculative.
Oh, of course, because we all just want to cover up the truth, that evolution has been falsified many times over.
I find it funny that Cornelius thinks that it’s still “speculative” about how the rate of evolutionary change itself can change over time. Does he know anything at all about the role the environment plays in evolution, and the relationships that occur between predator and prey that can rapidly speed up their mutually-complex dance of modification? To implicitly profess ignorance of this magnitude is truly astounding.
Huxley represents the post-Darwin evolutionist for whom evolution is a fact. Therefore the theory, with whatever complications are necessary, is used to explain the empirical data, rather than being vulnerable to falsification by the data. Today, evolutionists erroneously view Darwin’s prediction triumphantly. Darwin argued for hundreds of millions of years and geology gave us an order of magnitude more than that. Is this not a successful prediction?
It is, Cornelius. It really is. I’m sorry you don’t understand what Darwin meant and you try to loudly tiptoe around it using erroneous arguments, but it doesn’t change the fact that Darwin was right, and evolutionary tempo can actually change.
It is not a successful prediction because Darwin predicted that hundreds of millions of years would be available for evolutionary processes. Geology gave us deep time but paleontology made it irrelevant. Evolution must occur much faster than Darwin predicted. Today’s theory of evolution has been modified to account for the shorter time windows, and as a consequence is substantially more complicated. Evolutionists yet again claim success while the empirical data challenge [sic] their theory.
I would strongly contest the idea that changes in tempo have made evolution more complicated. Firstly, they don’t, and secondly, it follows naturally from the mechanisms of evolution. Sometimes selective pressures are larger, sometimes they are smaller. The amount of pressure a population is under will determine evolutionary rate. It is quite clear that during all of the “explosions” that Cornelius would point to, there are many factors that could have easily ramped up the level of speciation and evolutionary progress going on.
Once again, Cornelius misinterprets both evolutionary theory and the data he claims supports its falsification. It’s really not looking good for his Darwin’s Predictions website.
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