The Appearance of Legitimacy

Japan have suffered a setback in putting whale meat on the table with their "scientific program" being labelled a ruse by an international court. Of course, the Japanese knew it was a ruse too (their disappointment was expressed in the denial of tradition, not of what they could have learnt from slaughtering whales), yet it was a ruse they needed to keep up for international obligations.

This same kind of legitimacy is presumably what Russia sought with the referendum in Crimea, or any dictator does with a "poll". It's the kind of ruse that fools nobody, yet it's enough to fend off simple criticism. Russia doesn't care about having a fair election any more than a dictator does, yet the burden is now on those who say it's unfair - a burden that really can't be met beyond suspicion.

The example I want to highlight, though, is scientific creationism. What should be said about all creationism is this - any starting point other than the science will exclude it from being science. It's that simple. The goal of science isn't to vindicate any doctrine, religious or otherwise, but to use observation to develop and test theories. Creationists fall afoul of this because they already have the answer.

Yet creationists want scientific legitimacy. While many will affirm that the bible is their starting point, they are also quick to criticise any scientific claim that seemingly contradicts that. They also crave people with qualifications - real qualifications if possible, but degree mills in the absence of those. They even have their own "scientific" journals where people submit "real" research.

What is interesting is exploring what the response to that should be. Science, of course, needs to be an open enterprise and people need to be able to explore avenues wherever they lead. At the same time, scientists need to guard against pseudoscientists who are looking to use the scientific process to serve their own ends.

What we end up with, sad to say, is Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The complaint was that Intelligent Design isn't being given a fair go by the scientific community, and proponents are finding that their support of Intelligent Design is meaning losing academic credibility. It sounds appalling, which it would be if it were the case.

There is a perceived circularity with scientific orthodoxy. Intelligent Design, to be a legitimate view, needs to have academic support. But since the evolutionists are the ones in charge of what gets called science, Intelligent Design cannot get the academic support it needs. In other words, the orthodoxy rigs the game by excluding any person or paper that might be sympathetic to ID as simply being anti-science.

Of course if this were really circular, then it would be utterly astounding that science progresses at all. Yet science does, and the ideas accepted by the biological community now are not the same as 50, 100, or 150 years ago when Darwin first published. The big deal is made of the orthodoxy because it's a convenient scape goat standing in the way of perceived scientific legitimacy.

What Expelled did was tie cases of ID proponents being fired or denied tenure to the fact that they were ID proponents. That in turn was tied into the wider narrative of academia trying to exclude God from the picture. What this does is gives a reason for the lack of legitimacy. They are serious scientists doing serious research promoting a serious view, but the atheistic evolutionists stand in their way. (One of the most baffling things about Expelled is how much of the film is about Richard Dawkins' atheism, from theologians discussing it to Ben Stein drilling Dawkins on what gods he doesn't believe in.)

The argument so far has been made without context. If we were to put ID into a cultural and historical context, ID an incarnation of creationism in an attempt to give it scientific legitimacy at least as far as what gets taught to students. ID is aimed at school boards, politicians, and at the wider public. It craves scientific legitimacy not because God should be vindicated in science, but because scientific legitimacy is what counts as far as what is taught in science class. If ID were to limit itself to being an expression of natural theology, there'd be no issue. But as the wedge document confirms, the motives of ID proponents is to ultimately bring people to Jesus.

Thus scientists are put in an awkward position. If people want to use the appearance of scientific legitimacy for their nonscientific ideas, then scientists have to guard against it. But if they do guard against it, they are accused of guarding the orthodoxy against proper scrutiny. Proper science is brought down to the level of pseudoscience by virtue of pseudoscience being able to better posture itself as legitimate science persecuted by the orthodoxy.

The value of real science is that what is the mainstream now had to be earned through the scientific process. Just as a real democracy requires an open political process. The pale imitation of dictatorships fools no-one even though it's an attempt of dictators to appease their critics. The same goes for creationists pretending to do science. They aren't doing so because they want to find the truth - they know their truth already - but because it's what's expected of them.

The problem is that their pale imitation isn't the same thing as doing real science, and real scientists call them out on it. The irony of it all is that scientists standing up for science has become to be seen an expression of ideology, while ideologues craving the appearance of scientific legitimacy as the persecuted minority standing up for Truth.

The Radiation Of Marsupials Post-Flood?

Following on from yesterday's post about a video by GreenSlugg, I want to follow up with something that emerged from the comments. Not content to sling arguments from my own blog, I engaged GreenSlugg on the comment section of his video. He claimed to have an answer to my objection about marsupials in terms of geographic distribution by sending me to another video.

Now that 9 minute video was quite tedious, he tended to lack a coherence to his argument and tended to ramble. Yet the video he wanted me to watch was over 3 times that length, coming in at 29 minutes! 29 minutes of him going through objections to Noah's Ark. You'd think in 29 minutes you could get through a lot, but he managed to get through four. Though to his credit, he managed to throw in a 2 minute plug for Jesus halfway through.

1. How did Noah get two of each animal?(Answer: Noah didn't, God did. Read your bible more)
2. a) How did Noah get so many species on the ark? (Answer: Noah didn't need to, the each pair of a 'kind' radiated out into all the species there are today)
   b) How did they stop the predators from eating the weak? (Answer: kept the predators in cages, just like at the zoo)
3. What about dinosaurs? (Answer: only needed 50 'kinds', kept them as juveniles "no bigger than a football")
4. What about marsupials? (Answer: it's a mystery to both creationists and evolutionists)

For anyone up for 29 minutes of creationist reasoning:

After all that, you could imagine my disappointment. He didn't give an answer at all, other than to make a tu quoque claim that evolution has a problem in answering the marsupial problem as well. My whole point is that Creation doesn't give reasonable explanations for why we should expect things to be the way they are; and sitting through 29 minutes of video to hear 6 minutes and 30 seconds of avoiding the challenge - that's simply pathetic. The closest thing to an answer was a link to a page on CreationWiki, but that could have been provided without the 29 minutes of incredulous tedium.

It's the lack of a good answer as to why the patterns are the way they are that's problematic. Without any reason as to why a certain pattern is the way it is means that there can be no claim of compatibility between an explanation and the evidence. All that we get is handwaving, as is the case in that video. He starts by claiming that it's wrong to call Noah's Ark a story, because that would imply it's a fairy tale - and he said: "I believe it's a true event". That's it!

For all the attempts to explain why objections fall flat, the main objection was dealt with as an article of faith. All that time trying to explain how small the dinosaur eggs were or that all the species really just came from a single breeding pair of a kind, or citing cave drawing as evidence humans and dinosaurs coexisted, or that kangaroos did migrate from the middle east - there was nothing beyond an article of faith that one should take Noah's Ark as something to even consider historically.

Noah's Ark and Biogeography

One cannot argue about the empirical in a vacuum; otherwise the claims will be ad hoc and unsubstantiated. When Jerry Coyne mentioned in a talk about biogeography not having a good account under creation, the Youtuber GreenSlug decided to take Jerry Coyne to task.

The response is not pretty in terms of its understanding of biogeography - in the end he frames it as a problem of migration for both evolution and creation. Even if this were the case (obviously there's migration), the reason why biogeography is such good evidence for evolution is the patterns of distribution. The question of why there are placental mammals and marsupials that are near identical in their appearance and evolutionary niche, but that marsupials are only found near other marsupials, is easily explained by evolutionary theory but has no reason as to why it should be so under Creation.

Yet GreenSlugg claims to have an answer: "biogeography makes perfect sense in light of creation: Noah". This is the problem of arguing in a vacuum. How does it make "perfect sense" exactly? Not through having any reason for any particular patterns just to be the way they are as arguing for migration post flood doesn't explain any patterns the way they are. How did flightless birds get to New Zealand but not any land mammals? How did Australia and South America end up with all the marsupials (and very different marsupials at that)?

GreenSlugg invoked land bridges for the animals to cross. In addition to the absurdity of why it is that certain morphologically-related animals all went in a similar direction, there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that such land bridges even existed - let alone that's the way it happened. He hasn't explained anything other than to create a "just so" account with an implausible mechanism with no regard for any actual evidence. If it makes "perfect sense", it's because there's no trying to marry evidence with the hypothesis. It's junk speculation!


Yet to think about the kind of answer that GreenSlugg gives, it's a problem of trying to marry a natural account with a miracle. If he's just trying to say it's not impossible to see how a Creation account could handle biogeography, there are a lot of easier ways to do it. The Creator could have moved the animals to where the Creator desired, with no need to say there were land bridges. The Creator could have created all the species after the flood without any need to account for migration. The Creator, once you grant a miracle, could do anything to make the patterns how we see it now. It's why invoking a Creator is a bad explanation.

I don't see any need to try to make a supernatural account otherwise plausible, as the supernatural account is still going to be the sticking point. Instead of just saying "God did it the way God did it because God did it that way" (i.e. a miracle), it's God did it plus a lot of ad hoc claims that have no more validity than just invoking a miracle. Is there some veneer of plausibility that comes from trying to include a naturalistic framework around a supernatural? I don't see the point!

A good explanation is one that can be falsified; it's one that gives reasons for why things are the way they are, and why they are not the way they aren't. A bad explanation is one that can easily be modified to fit the data however it is. To say that Creation can explain biogeography would mean that the account of Creation would have to be able to sit closely with the evidence. Otherwise any attempt to say Creation can account for the pattern of evidence is trivial - there's nothing in the account that even tries.


The real absurdity in all this is supposing that Noah's Ark is literal history to begin with; that a grown man even tries to undertake a reconciliation between myth and history is pathetic. There was no global flood, there was no single point of radiation of life, and the Genesis account of the global flood is not meant to be taken as science. All else that follows is mistaken on that error, though it was interesting to see the failure in reason that such a pitiful "defence" offered.

Creationists Using "Reason"

It's fair to say that pretty much all creationist arguments are trite. It would also be fair to say that the belief in creationism has little or nothing to do with those arguments. Perhaps some design analogies might be of some influence, but for the most part reason doesn't factor into it. Well, reason around the creationist arguments anyway.

The sad fact is, though, that creationists will use creationist arguments without seeing the problem with them. After all, they come to the conclusion that they hold for other reasons, so how could they be wrong!? Unfortunately going through the arguments and picking apart their reasoning isn't enough, as the following video demonstrates.

The reason for the need to stand up for reason is right there. Even with all the arguments dissected and countered, creationist #2 still thinks that he's the one with truth on his side and that he's one bringing truth to the table. It's laughable.

But therein lies the heart of the matter. They are not arguing from reason, but from conviction. The arguments are merely a foil for that, not really understood except for their perceived implication - that their conviction is vindicated in reason. Any counter isn't going to be on the argument itself, but measured against the conviction.

In short, the creationists are playing a game that they are ill-equipped to play. Instead of taking the time and effort to understand evolutionary theory and work through the arguments, they've jumped on whatever sounds good to back up the position they already hold to be true. There's just no reasoning with that, as evidenced in the video. The only rectification is if the creationists would take the time to study what evolution is - but why would they do that when they know that it must be false!

Materialism: The Ideology

Many creationists try to make a big deal out of the link between evolution and atheism. Those who stand up for teaching evolution are often branded as atheists, including many devout theists. It seems there are two central claims behind such links. The first claim is that evolution is incompatible with a belief in God - that it either leaves God redundant or diminishes our species to a mere accident. The second claim is that evolution is being used to push God out of the picture - that it's a materialist ideology masquerading as science.

The first case is one best left to theologians, but the second case pertains to the validity of evolution as a science. The relevant question seem to be whether something held for ideological reasons can also be valid. Even if it were true that evolution was purely materialist ideology whose leading proponents sought to exclude God, would this invalidate evolution as a science?


To look at this question I'm going to invoke a historical parallel. Jesus is the central figure to Christianity, without a historical Jesus most forms of Christianity would be wrong. So does the historical case for Jesus need exclusion on the basis that Christianity needs a historical Jesus?

I'm fairly sure I know the answer to this. Of course not! The case for a historical Jesus should be decided by the historical evidence. Indeed, I've heard the argument that the historical Jesus is the main reason to be a Christian.

So when it comes to evolution, even if there's people with an ideological agenda, surely evolution's status as a science depends on whether or not the theory is able to fit with observation and evidence. It could be that evolution is good science and good reason to be a materialist.


Interestingly enough, when it comes to evolution there is no divide among experts down religious lines. And when experts do speak about evolution, they talk about the evidence for evolution. Meanwhile the link between evolution and atheism is highlighted by creationists, who don't talk about evidence at all. It may be that Francis Collins has been brainwashed by materialists, or that he's not a True Christian™ if he's so willing to speak in favour of evolution, but either way such a statement shows where the ideological hand in the evolution discussion really lies...

Vacuous Nonsense

I got into a bit of an argument with a creationist recently, which is nothing unusual for me. In the ensuring discussion I asked them what evidence there was against evolution. They brought up intelligent design, together with a sarcastic quip that I reject it without having reasons why. The phrase vacuous nonsense comes to mind, though it's easy to demonstrate how intelligent design is vacuous nonsense.

What I find interesting about those who try to defend intelligent design as a science is that they don't operate on anything remotely resembling a scientific definition. My complaint that Intelligent Design makes no specific prediction and thus there's no way to know whether or not a designer was involved. It's an irreconcilable problem as far as ID as a science is concerned. Yet I've found that's not what people see ID as. A better working definition would be:

A designer must have been involved somewhere and somehow in the history of life.

In other words, what ID proponents hear is a denial of any role for Goda designer. It's not a scientific hypothesis in any way, it's touching on something far deeper and more personal. Whether or not current evolutionary theory is sufficient to account for what is seen in nature doesn't make the case for Goda designer any better, as all that would do is be making Goda designer an expression of our ignorance. Yet in the absence of making any predictions about patterns, there's really no way to tell whether designers were involved or not. Intelligent Design is making one big argument from ignorance.


Yet if we look at life as it is, we can and do have intelligent design mechanisms operating in nature. We have artefacts that are the product of intelligent designers, along with an understanding of how such mechanisms work. Even in nature, we have products shaped by intelligent designers. We couldn't account for agriculture as it is without including intelligent hands involved. Likewise with the domestication and modification of animals. And now the era of genetic modification has opened a new way that designers can act in nature.

All of these instances of design in nature are accounted for scientifically, we know the nature of what the designers can and can't do, and how the design happens. How cats and dogs became domesticated, for example, is something that is being scientifically studied. Deliberate cross breeding has been used to feed billions.

Contrast this with the nondescript statement that Intelligent Design proposes - that there was a designer who did something at some stage. Without knowing anything about the nature of the designer and the methods, and without making any specific predictions about how the designer operates, it's a useless speculation. Yes, a designer could have done something, but if we don't know anything about what the designer did or how, then how can we distinguish it from there not being any designer at all?

This is why I think Intelligent Design is vacuous nonsense. It's the pretence that there's something scientific about invoking God to explain life, without having the hassle of trying to substantiate that in any way.

Pyrrhic Arguments

Some arguments are just worth winning, the intellectual ground sacrificed is just too great. Ken Miller's argument for an interventionist deity that worked in the uncertainty of quantum mechanics would be one of those instances because it treats an interventionist deity as indistinguishable from no deity at all.

These arguments are Pyrrhic victories, and it baffles me as to why people would want to take them. I've found this in creationist arguments often when something that's treated as bad design or a remnant of evolutionary history is searched for even the most tenuous of function in order to serve the view that it was all designed by an omnipotent being.

Biologists treat the appendix as a vestigial organ, the argument goes, but the appendix plays a [minor] role in our immune system so it has function. of course that doesn't address what a vestigial organ is, but it does seem to save the day on the topic of useless design - except...

The appendix can also cause problems, it's prone to infection itself and can be both very painful and potentially fatal. And it can be removed without serious problem, so what little it gives is hardly something that gives a supposedly omnipotent omniscient deity credit. As a design solution, it's hardly an elegant one, and conjures up the problem of evil. It might be a victory of rhetoric, but the cost is far too great.


I think part of the issue is that, in general, we aren't good at thinking through the implications of what we say. And in a discussion, not being able to answer a question is in a lot of cases worse than giving a bad answer. After all, it takes understanding the topic at hand in order to be able to show why its not a good answer. So I would suggest that it's an exercise we all should try to do, to see whether or not such arguments give us a victory worth having. Otherwise arguments just serve as a rhetorical tool - something that does nothing to advance a position and will be picked apart by knowledgeable opponents.

QFT

"Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night." - Isaac Asimov

Morning Scepticism: Complete

In comparisons between Creation and evolution, I've seen arguments where Creationism is taken as superior to evolution because Creationism explains the origin of life while evolution cannot account for it. While it would be nice to have a theory of life's origins, it doesn't mean that all the evidence for evolution can just be ignored because Creation can explain what evolution cannot. The fossils are still going to be in the same strata, dead genes will still sit in the DNA, species will continue to change over time, and the earth will still date to billions of years old. That one idea has the potential to explain more than an another is useless if that one idea doesn't explain what is already known. You just don't get to ignore evidence because "God did it" explains* gravity while dendrochronology can only count tree rings.


*it doesn't actually explain anything, only the perception of explaining something.

Morning Scepticism: Self-Reflection

It's amazing the number of times a creationist will have a defeater argument for evolution which shows a complete misunderstanding of the process. Questions like "has a cat ever given birth to a dog?" or "where are the half-human half-monkeys?" or "How can the eye come about by chance?" These questions are just so far off the mark, that it's hard to even dignify them with an answer. Perhaps we could ask our own question in rebuttal.

"What's more likely: that every biologist and philosopher over the last 150 years who have spent their careers studying on the subject have missed such an elementary error, or that you might have misunderstood the process?"

Morning Scepticism: SLoT

Creationists often make the claim that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. The claim is that entropy means that everything tends towards disorder, so how could evolution make order out of disorder? My standard response is "what does the physics of heat have to do with DNA replication?" But of course that doesn't really satisfy the underlying quandary. Nor does saying that the earth is not a closed system, because the problem isn't with thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is just a way to have the underlying incredulity at order springing from chaos sound like it's contrary to nature. The problem is with the notion of design sans designer, and it's unfortunate that the question is asked in such a way that merits a scientific answer - because the scientific answer is not the answer to the question being really asked.

QFT

"One understands nothing about creationism unless one understands that it is meant to be a system of ethics. That is why the assault on evolution has always included a lengthy history of moral judgments against evolution." - Hector Avalos

Morning Scepticism: Designer

Creationists often charge that a design necessitates a designer. But I think they have this backwards. A watch may have a watchmaker, but watchmakers don't exist ex nihilo. To get a watchmaker takes so much R&D, both in terms of developing an organism capable of making watches as well as all the knowledge required in order to build a watch. In other words, the designer is designed.

Design doesn't necessitate a designer, but a designer necessitates design.

Morning Scepticism: Mind Creationism

In the 150 years since evolutionary theory has been in the spotlight, a substantial amount of evidence has been built up showing not only that evolution took place but how it did. Even among those who reluctantly accept this fact, the new battleground is the brain. To follow their logic through, it's saying that evolution might be able to build an eye, but it can't build processing software for that signal. The tiger's dagger teeth are just fine, but a human's brain-designed dagger is proof of a brain designer!

Creationist Logic

If you've watched Expelled, perhaps you wondered why the only scientific argument really brought up was the origin of life. Or wonder why Creationists spend time talking about just how tenuous the laws of nature that permit our existence are. Nothing to do with evolution you say? Well that's because you're not seeing the big picture.

1. Evolution explains the diversity of life.
2. The case for evolution is well established.
3. Evolution cannot explain the origin of life.
4. Even if evolution could explain the origin of life, it cannot explain the laws of physics that permit it.
5. Creationism explains the origin and diversity of life.
6. Creationism explain the physics that permit life's existence.

---

7. Therefore Creationism is a superior explanation to evolution.

And there you have it, creationist logic. The case against evolution these days is the case against evolution taking place to begin with, and from there concluding that God must be involved. And since God must be involved there's no need to posit evolution because God can create in any way He wants. And since there's an account of how God did create as revealed to Moses there exists an explanation. It's so sciency it burns!

Of course if pressed on the science, remember that while evolutionists might be able to explain the complexity of the eye they can never explain the complexity of the cells that make up the eye!

Morning Scepticism: Complexity

There's a particular degree of irony in those creationists who dismiss evolution because life is "too complex" because those who say it adhere to a myth that explains that God created man out of dirt and the "breath of life". Nothing about complex biochemistry there at all, which might constitute grounds for falsification right there.

Teaching The "Controversy"

I think I've figured out why creationists love the notion of teaching the "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution, it's because if you just teach evolution then those weaknesses don't come out. So instead of having a public that's educated about the topic, there's a host of creationists who have a fundamental misunderstanding of what evolution is and just engage in apologetics on talking points they have been told invalidate evolution. I've found myself time and time again answering the same fallacious objections only to find that the person raising them has no clue as to what they actually mean.

From the outsider perspective, it's actually funny reading creationist lesson plans. Because right there they have the chance to give the children a proper education in what evolution is even if they don't have to believe it, and instead they give a whole bunch of reasons that evolution couldn't work. Surely if evolution was as broken as the creationists make it out to be then a proper education on the subject matter would make those objections glare out. But no, it doesn't work that way. They have to highlight just what is wrong with evolution instead of affording the child to think about the concept and find those errors themselves.

One would be inclined to think that the reason they take this approach is because the case for evolution is so strong. It's an unconscious admission of the apparent validity of evolution because the only way they can teach it is to lie to children about it in the hope that those children won't learn any better.

Morning Scepticism: Ignorance

It's amazing that creationists still use the same debunked arguments despite there being plenty of information available showing exactly how and why the arguments are bad. The same misunderstandings of evolutionary theory could be remedied through readily available information: websites; lectures and courses put online in both audio and video format; podcasts; books; magazines; etc. It's all there and yet creationists still ask whether a cat can give birth to a dog as if that proves God made it all 6000 years ago.

Evolving Complexity

One problem in a creationist understanding of evolution is the problem of gradients. Terms like irreducible complexity are part of the description of the general idea that it either works or it doesn't, framed with such questions like "what use is half an eye?" Where this line of reasoning fails is the distinction between having something and nothing at all, and improvements on having something.

To take the eye, for example, the creationist looks at the eye as it is now. Multiple interlocking parts, where removal or modification means severely-reduced function or even no function at all. The Darwinian is left seeming to defend the absurdity that the eye so intricately complex as being able to come about through random mutation.

While the creationist intuition that it either works or it doesn't is correct, what they fail to grasp is the historical contingency of the matter. That is to say the modern eye (no matter what species) is a product of gradual improvements on simpler working eyes, that the jump from no sight to sight was to the bare minimum that it could be. It's not from a bare patch of skin to the human eye, but to photosensitive cells. From there, the Darwinian process could improve on the eye, all the while having working sight but getting better and better over time.


This is the danger of the post hoc reasoning that creationists often employ. By looking back on structures with function that Darwinian evolution posits has been modified over millions of years then asking about intermediates from an ex nihilo state, the process is misrepresented and the creationist making the argument has inadvertently attacked a straw-man.

The end result is looking at structures like wings and asking how they came about as if the structure is useless unless it's a fully formed wing. In wing evolution, the Darwinian account posits that wings are modified limbs, which in turn were modified fins. Even if the creationist is willing to concede this account, it still posits an irreversible divide between the limb / wing distinction on the same grounds - either it flies or it doesn't and a modified limb ceases to be useful as a limb and as a wing.

In the case of the wing we can look to the animal kingdom to see such an intermediate: gliding. Many creatures independently have developed the ability to glide in some capacity. Yet even if we didn't know of an intermediate, it doesn't mean that it wasn't there. In cases like eyes or wings we do have a good ability to reconstruct an evolutionary history through many different converging lines of inquiry, so a case where there isn't an obvious intermediate isn't reason to abandon all that we know for the sake of an unexplained history.


The absurdity is actualised when this logic is used to justify anomaly-hunting; the search for the clinching evidence that conscious and intelligent input is at the heart of nature. Why else would structure on a bacteria matter for someone looking for a proof of God? It's just one more unexplained structure in the long battle of wanting the breakdown of the Darwinian algorithm.

Yet there are always going to be anomalies because our knowledge is incomplete. Perhaps some of those anomalies will be sufficient to modify or overthrow some scientific conceptions but finding an anomaly is never going to mean that all the times when the explanation does work can be discarded.

The problem would go away if properly applied to the Darwinian evolutionary algorithm. That the binary approach of either it works or it doesn't has to be the very first step in a cumulative process, not applied to structures that have been crafted cumulatively over millions of years. The eye either sees or it does not, but a fly eye and a human eye both see, as do the eyes of much more simple creatures.


To illustrate this concept, consider a synthetic material that no life-form has the ability to break down. This is an untapped resource. So a mutation in a particular bacteria comes along that allows for the bacteria to "feed" on this synthetic material. It doesn't matter how rudimentary this is, since it's able to do something no other organism has. Then subsequent mutations aren't about whether it can or can't break down this synthetic material, but how well it can. It could break down the material from the first valid mutation, all subsequent mutation thereafter builds on that.

Morning Scepticism: False Witness

Some creationists go to elaborate efforts to "disprove" evolution, with thought experiments that clearly show the absurdity that those evil scientists try to force down our throats. Yet despite the likes of Ray Comfort and Kent Hovind clearly showing this absurdity, those dogmatic Darwinists won't budge... And we know the creationists must be right, because there's something about bearing false witness in their holy book being commanded against. So when those evil scientists say it's a straw man, it has to be the scientists lying because a creationist is commanded not to lie!