Magi Mike’s Blog

The Rev Brenda Freije, Pastor for discipleship and formation, North United Methodist Church, Indianapolis

As a United Methodist pastor, I am part of a Christian tradition that looks to Scripture, church tradition, critical thinking and relevant experience to reflect on God and make decisions about life in relationship to our Scriptures. Within this framework, there is plenty of room for science, including the science of evolution. What can be measured and tested and studied through scientific methods informs my theology, and my theology informs how I understand the results of that scientific method. I am not an expert on other faith traditions, but I imagine that many of them could make similar claims.

The Scriptures are ancient writings crafted over centuries. The truths they contain are timeless and require attention and study to appreciate. One needs to be careful not to read the ancient writings as if reading a twentyfirst century newspaper article. The story of God is not so easily contained or summarized.

Problems arise when one confuses religion and science and tries to read the Bible as if it were a precise recounting of history. The two creation stories in Genesis at the very beginning of the Bible, which tell very different stories about how the world was formed, should be enough to give one pause. There is tremendous wisdom and sound advice in the Scriptures, and I believe the teachings in the Bible, if honestly followed, will be a source of joy, peace, love and life not only for the follower but also for the follower’s community.

Science and religion ask different questions and apply different methods of study. This doesn’t make them incompatible. It does make them distinct. Claims about God as the creator of life are claims of faith. Claims that there is no divine power behind the created order are claims of a different kind of faith. It is the role of parents and our communities of faith to teach about these claims and to help our children think critically about the science they are learning.

According to polling data, most Americans doubt that evolution is true, and many biology courses and textbooks dwell on the mechanisms of evolution—natural selection, genetic drift, and gene flow—but see no reason to repeat the evidence for. How do we know that species change?

In a slim volume, The Evidence for Evolution, University of Chicago (2011), University of Utah anthropologist, Alan R Rogers, fills in pieces that were missing from Darwin’s argument. He aims to answer persistent and inaccurate arguments against evolution with scientific evidence that was not available in Charles Darwin’s day.

Rogers points out that Darwin didn’t know about genetics, continental drift or the age of the Earth. He had never seen a species change. He had no idea whether it was even possible for a species to divide into two. He knew of no transitional fossils and of almost no human fossils. Rogers says:

[Later] evidence might have gone the other way. It might have refuted Darwin’s theory, but instead we have 150 years of evidence all of which supports his theory. My book tells the story of these discoveries.

Rogers has been teaching courses on evolution since the 1980s. Mostly, he didn’t say much about the evidence that evolution actually happens, feeling the issue was settled scientifically more than a century ago, and anyone interested could read the original books like The Origin of Species. The emphasis for today’s students was on what was still not properly known and what had been newly discovered. Classes and textbooks emphasize the aspects of evolution that are being actively researched. Rogers changed his approach in 2006 after he read a poll reporting that only about half of Americans believe humans evolved:

It occurred to me after reading this poll that it didn’t make much sense to teach students about the intricacies of evolution if they don’t believe that evolution happens in the first place. So, I decided that my introductory classes henceforth were going to have a week or two on the evidence for evolution, and I started looking for a text.

Rogers determined to write an “easy to read” book that gave modern support for evolution, without it being either too advanced or taking too much for granted:

I’m trying to convince skeptics that evolution really happened. If they’re skeptics, then as soon as I get to the point where I say, “trust me”, they’re going to say “no. The reason I’m skeptical is because I don’t trust you”.

Rogers hopes The Evidence for Evolution will encourage readers to think critically. He thinks it will be valuable to evolution skeptics as well as those already convinced. Evolutionists should be prepared to offer evidence when challenged, and even people familiar with biology will have something to learn. Despite spending 30 years studying evolution, Rogers still found material that was new to him.

All scientists are skeptics if they’re any good, but they’re not stubborn about it. In science, you have to be able to change your mind when confronted with evidence. It seems to me that learning that skill is important, not only for scientists, but for everybody. It makes us better citizens.

With The Evidence for Evolution, Alan R Rogers provides a straightforward text that gives the evidence for evolution. He gives the creationists’ arguments and offers the best evidence to counter them. He covers changes within species, which are much easier to see and believe, to much larger ones, such as from fish to amphibians, or from land mammals to whales. For each case, he explains evidence illustrating the changes, including fossils, DNA, and radioactive isotopes. His comprehensive treatment stresses recent advances in knowledge but also shows how we can be sure.

Alan Rogers addresses the political controversy over the theory of evolution—there’s no longer any scientific controversy—in the best scientific spirit—with evidence and logic. For anyone with an open mind, a curiosity about the natural world, and a desire to see controversies settled with evidence rather than rhetoric, this is an invaluable contribution and a fascinating read.

Steven Pinker, Harvard University

Brian Cox, the celebrity particle physicist and professor at The University of Manchester, says at Science and Religion Today that he’s fighting maniacs not religion. Brian is the former rock star astronomer who presents science and astronomy features on TV.

There is a lot of goodwill toward scientists among the religious communities in this country. I met the dean of Guildford Cathedral when I was an atheist on a panel and we… became good friends. I also recently got invited to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s house because he liked “Wonders of the Solar System”. Rowan Williams is a very thoughtful man. If you want to move society forward in a more rational direction, religious leaders can be useful because they share that view.

Brian Cox admits he considers it quite acceptable to be anti-Creationism—his anti-maniac—but being “anti-religion is not helpful”. Maniacs ignore all the scientific evidence that the world was created more than four billion years ago, and choose to believe—on no more evidence than that someone told them the bible is the word of God—that it says the world was made only 6,000 years ago. It is all right to say such a one is an idiot, or is insane, but trying to wage an atheistic war against all religion is an effort that ought not to be made.

One imagines that there must be more to justify Cox’s position, but this blog does not give it, so it appears there as a rather poor argument. Maybe the battle need not always be fought whenever a scientist meets a cleric, but it is only a polite suspension of battle orders for social reasons. Brian has met a couple of pleasant clergymen who are not as strident as the Discovery Institute at plugging Genesis, so we ought to abandon essential scientific principles in future contact with such nice old codgers. Old fashioned Church of England clergymen still consider nice to be part of their job description. Anglicans used to be generally nice, they were famously tolerant, but now the Evangelicals have taken over!

Brian Cox is skipping differences that cannot be reconciled between science and religion as world outlooks:

• Religion requires gullible people to be able to sell nonsense. Science requires skeptical people to question everything.
• Science honestly deals with the material world of observable phenomena, and the consequences of it. Religion is no different, but dishonestly pretends to deal with a fancied supernatural world, and invisible things.
• Science only considers acceptable what has been repeatedly tested and confirmed. Religion tells tall stories such as that of the eternal life after death, as if they were absolute truth, though no clergyman knows these stories to be true. Again, it is dishonesty.

Had Brian tried engaging his clerical chums in a serious discussion of metaphysics, epistemology and ontology, he must inevitably have ended up exasperated. They can no longer admit that much of the allegedly ancient parts of the bible—Christians seem to believe the bible is God’s timeline, like a divine diary—is mythical, and indeed has been shown to be substantially the same as even older myths from other Ancient Near Eastern countries like Babylonia. Their members, already getting thin on the ground and increasingly fundamentalist and intolerant force them to spout the inerrant line, or try to hedge their bets so as not to offend one side or other of the battle within Anglican ranks.

Brian Cox should take care whom he trusts. Many an innocent traveler has walked along a lonely road with someone they did not know, and woken up sore, cold and walletless. The footpad might not be the present Archbishop of Canterbury or Bishop of Guildford, but to think that men who put their own trust in a figment, and opportunistically will take the most convenient line to keep their congregations rather than correcting their false ideas, will not metaphorically mug you is pure naïveté.

Fear of death has long been considered a basic reason why people choose irrationally to believe in God rather than face up to the reality of mortality. God will save Christians from death merely because they are Christians, or so many of them believe, following S Paul’s distortions of Jewish Christianity. Even so, most are not so convinced of the certainty of the afterlife to want to test it personally ahead of their alloted time, and anxiety about it remains. Attendance at church and mass seems to increase once people are old and conscious of their impending death.

Researchers, University of British Columbia psychology professor, Jessica Tracy, Union College (Schenectady, NY) psychology professor, Joshua Hart, and UBC psychology PhD student Jason Martens, have now shown that people support theories of intelligent design and reject evolutionary theory because of their anxiety about death. The paper is the first to examine the implicit psychological motives that underpin one of the most heated debates in North America. Although so called intelligent design theory is not science, 25 percent of high school biology teachers in the US unconstitutionally spend class time on intelligent design. Most get away with it without reprimand, but very occasionally they are diciplined. Even in Canada, often thought to be sensible by comparison with the USA, Alberta passed a law in 2009 for parents to remove children from courses covering evolution.

The research showed that death anxiety also inclined people towards Michael Behe, intelligent design’s main proponent, and against British evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, perhaps the best known proponent of evolution. Professor Dawkins, like all but a handful of the myriads of scientists in the world, argues that the origins of species are best explained by Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Intelligent design advocates like Professor Behe, a US author and biochemist, say that some biochemical and cellular structures are too complex to be explained by evolutionary mechanisms and should be attributed to a supernatural creator. It is a “God of the Gaps” argument—the Christian idea that what science has not explained must be an act of God. Repeatedly it has been shown to be false, and such a prominent Christian as the professor of theoretical chemistry, professor C A Coulson warned against it, as disastrous for Christianity because every scientific explanation of a Gap filled by God, erodes God and belief in Him further. Jessica Tracy, leading author of the paper, says:

Our results suggest that when confronted with existential concerns, people respond by searching for a sense of meaning and purpose in life. For many, it appears that evolutionary theory doesn’t offer enough of a compelling answer to deal with these big questions.

The researchers carried out five studies with 1,674 US and Canadian participants of different ages and a broad range of educational, socioeconomic and religious backgrounds. In each study, participants were asked to imagine their own death and write about their subsequent thoughts and feelings, or they were assigned to a control condition—imagining dental pain and writing about that. The participants were then asked to read two similarly styled, 174 word excerpts from the writings of Behe and Dawkins, which make no mention of religion or belief, but describe the scientific and empirical support for their respective positions.

After going through these steps, participants who imagined their own death showed greater support for intelligent design and greater liking for Behe, or a rejection of evolution theory coupled with disliking for Dawkins, compared to participants in the control condition.

However, the research team saw reversed effects during the fourth study which had a new condition. Along with writings by Behe and Dawkins, there was an additional passage by Carl Sagan. A cosmologist and science writer, Sagan argues that naturalism—the scientific approach that underlies evolution, but not intelligent design—can also provide a sense of meaning. In response, these participants showed reduced belief in intelligent design after being reminded of their own mortality. Tracy says:

These findings suggest that individuals can come to see evolution as a meaningful solution to existential concerns, but may need to be explicitly taught that taking a naturalistic approach to understanding life can be highly meaningful.

Similar results emerged in the fifth study, carried out entirely with natural science students at graduate and undergraduate levels. After thinking about death, these participants also showed greater support for the theory of evolution and liking of Dawkins, compared to control participants. Tracy says:

Natural science students have been taught to view evolutionary theory as compatible with the desire to find a greater sense of meaning in life. Presumably, they already attain a sense of existential meaning from evolution.

The researchers say these findings indicate a possible means of encouraging students to accept evolution and reject intelligent design.

This photograph is proof of creationism according to a creationist, Terry Hurlbut. It shows what purports to be a monster akin to the Loch Ness monster, called Nessie by journalists, except that this one is on Lake Windermere in the English Lake District. The press have dubbed it Bownessie.

It proves creationism because it shows that the dinosaurs and human beings lived together simultaneously, or rather they do now, so must always have done. It is therefore an evolutionist myth that the dinosaurs preceded humans by some 60 million years and so humans and dinosaurs never occupied the earth together. As they actually did—according to this proof, still do—live together, God created them all, once and for all, just as Genesis says.

Now, I confess that this photograph is a fake, made by me using photo retouching software in about half an hour. But there is a “real” photo which has been published in various newspapers like the Daily Mail, and which “experts” say may be a fake but they cannot tell! Well, the one above is a fake, and the one below is the genuine one.

I mean it looks real, so it must be proof of God. Mustn’t it?

Oops! I hope I didn’t mix up the photos.

12 February is Darwin Day, the day when Charles Darwin was born in 1809. It commemorates Darwin, his remarkable scholarship and science in general, the methodical application of human curiosity and ingenuity to benefit us all.

Charles Darwin published his seminal book, On the Origin of Species in 1859. In it he laid out the evidence for natural selection as the mechanism behind biological evolution. The idea of evolution was already in the air. It was not evolution that Darwin discovered, but a feasible mechanism by which it could occur.

It was similar to the way even schoolchildren a hundred years ago could wonder at the way the South American and African continents seemed to fit each other like jigsaw puzzle pieces, as if the two continents had split apart and separated. It looked obvious, and geological features fitted too. But no one could figure out how massive volumes of rock—whole continents—could move. So, the theory of continental drift was pooh-poohed by many who discarded any notion that could not be explained.

Now it is accepted, just as evolution is, unless you are a Christian fundamentalist, because it has an explanation—plate tectonics, the fact that the continents are floating on molten masma. Darwin similarly allowed evolution to be accepted because he had an explanation for it.

Darwin proposed that all living beings—including humans—were related! Life is one enormous family—a kinunity! It means we are all descended from a common ancestor, far back in time. Though the idea that all of life are linked by family bonds sounds very spiritual or religious to some, the Christian fundamentalists want to be personally created by God, and not be in a mighty living family, even though they could continue to believe that this familial arrangement of life was God’s own doing! It does not actually match what their real God, the inerrant bible, says.

Religious fundamentalists believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis, so they oppose evolution. Genesis has God specifically making Adam out of earth and Eve out of Adam, and it must be so, even though it is manifestly a myth, because the inerrant bible is… well, inerrant! However absurd the myths in it, like the three mile deep flood, the talking ass, the star that moves and stops and starts and ends over a stable, the earth stopping from rotating, the contradictions, etc, etc, it is inerrant, full stop. Humans were specially created out of red mud, and evolution must be wrong—not just wrong, evil! Yet a silent majority of Christians find nothing in evolution to object to. A Chicago Lutheran pastor, the Rev Steve Swanson, says:

It’s hard to believe that fundamentalism has taken such deep roots in our culture, but it has.

A Presbyterian pastor adds that religious believers think science will destroy their faith, but that scientists think religious belief interferes with the teaching and practice of science:

It’s important to have a dialogue and show these fears aren’t necessary.

Sadly, the religious opposition to evolution shows that it is indeed impeding the teaching of it, and even some pastors are alarmed by that. The consequences of turning away from science could be disastrous to the future of our civilization. The Rev Swanson thought it was important to confront the impression that creationism is necessary for Christian belief, and that all pastors believe in it. Christians had to be loud and clear in pronouncing that creationism is not science and also that it is bad religion. Unless they do, people will think creationism is necessary for Christian belief.

It ought to be plain that, given that God meant to transmit into human minds the reality of creation 2500 years ago, it could not be done. If it were done, it had to be in terms that people this long ago could comprehend. It had to be done in myths, for that is how people thought at that time. Now the believer can call them allegories or metaphors, if they think the word “myth” is demeaning.

Christians who remain puzzled, can look up Michael Zimmerman’s the Clergy Letter Project, which has collected 12,000 signatures of vicars who oppose creationism. They think intelligent design or creationism is not science and cannot be taught as science in public schools, as American creationists want.

History and archeology are today scientific in approach and give us a right and a duty to question and correct the plain errors in ancient screeds like the compilation of them called the bible. The first thing we have to do is to stop using the bible’s own chronology. It is part of its aim of exaggerating its own antiquity, a failing common to the history of most nations, certainly in ancient times. Nothing in the bible is anything other than myth up until the appearance of Omri. Besides Adam and Eve, Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David and Solomon are all mythical people. It means Moses could not have written even the Torah (Pentateuch), as is evident from a reading of it.

After Omri some known kings are mentioned, so the chroniclers knew about them, but they will have known from the records kept by some major state because small insignificant states were mostly illiterate and had no reason for keeping elaborate records. In fact, the historical evidence for the state called Judah barely exists, at least until a few decades before it was wiped out. It seems likely that Judah was an Assyrian puppet carved out as a rump of Israel around the time the Assyrians annexed Samaria. Only the last few kings of Judah seem authentic, and Josiah, the famous reforming king seems to have been an invention to justify the change of worship in Judah from the familiar Canaanite mythos to a new one introduced by a conqueror.

Who then could have made this change and when? Well, if the bible existed in anything like its present form in the fifth century BC, Herodotus could never have been called the father of history, because the bible presents itself as a detailed history right back into the bronze age. The sixth century is when Cyrus took over the neo Babylonian empire which included Judah. The bible itself regards Cyrus as the messiah of the Jews because he “allowed them to return”. In fact no “return” happened before the fifth century in the time of Darius II, when the Persian empire was largely based in Babylon, and it is then when people were deported into Judah with the cover of being themselves former inhabitants of the country, the “Exiles”.

Not until this time, around 400 BC, did the bible start to be compiled, and it was not written in its present form until the Egyptian Ptolemies commissioned it in the third century. That is when we first begin to read in historical records that the bible existed.

From a posted comment to Jason Rosenhouse’s EvolutionBlog at Science Blogs.

A Christian liar called Barrett Vanlandingham complains that people in his bible classes do not always believe in God or the Creation. It is more fashionable to be an atheist and to believe in evolution. The Christian indoctrinator has the brass face to blame it on to the indoctrination of “America’s school children with the Big Bang Theory and Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in textbooks for many years now”.

The very word indoctrination refers to the centuries old Christian practice of getting the kids before they have developed any critical abilities and feeding them what Christians have to believe whether it is right or wrong. The normal education of a child in the discoveries we have made over recent years, the years since the various Christian churches were removed from direct influence upon our kids, is now, according to Christian liars, indoctrination. Instead of proper education supervised by teachers qualified in their subjects, Vanlandingham wants Christian kids to be taught by creationists like one Brad Harrub, PhD(!) who has written a creationist text called Convicted.

On Amazon, the book has invited two reviews, a favorable one by a woman who sounds like a Sunday School teacher, as she says she has bought a lot of these books for a class, but her husband, who she says is more scientifically minded, is not impressed by it. So, she says, “This book seems to be much more suited to those of us whom are less science-minded”.

The other review is critical. The writer however is delighted to have it on his bookshelf for its utter comedic worthlessness. This critic thought it sounded like a spoof, but Dr Harrub has a PhD, and seems to mean what he says. The reviewer wonders how it is possible for anyone to simultaneously be so wrong while remaining utterly unaware of the degree of their wrongness. The answer seems to be that they are convinced it is proper to be dunces and liars for God, especially when they can earn $50,000 a year for lecturing to Christians on this nonsense! The blurb says that Harrub is “not only convinced, he is convicted…” and so he should be. For perverting young minds.

Vanlandingham, apparently using the book as his source, says: “No one has ever proven that non-living matter can evolve from nothing. And certainly no one has proven that life can evolve from non-living matter.” He concludes that “something (or someone) had to have always been there for anything to be created”. Accepting this for the sake of argument, we would then want to know, Is God considered as alive? If so, then the living God must Himself have been created, because “something (or someone) had to have always been there for anything to be created”. Christians make an exception for God. He did not have to be created because He is eternal. That, we have to accept without proof. Why is inventing a superbeing without proof permissible but assuming matter is made spontaneously at the Big Bang is not permissible. It is more parsimonious in not requiring the invention of an unnecessary entity, God.

Next, we learn the Bible has proven itself many times over as reliable in the areas of history and geography. That is false, but Vanlandingham has a source. It is William Ramsay a man who was born in 1851 before Darwin published the Origin of Species. Ramsey found the geography of the book of Acts, was right. Why should anyone imagine an educated Roman did not know the places they were writing about? All were on regular trade routes. The gospel of Mark on the other hand is not at all good geographically about the land of Palestine, where the events described supposedly happened

Vanlandingham comes up with the old canard that “the Bible has never been proven wrong on anything”. This is too ignorant for words. He is not telling the truth at all. He is telling blatant lies, and depending on the ignorance and gullibility of his readers to accept them. Everything he says pertinent to the argument is false, or not in the least supernaturally true. Christians always want proof but will never give it. The bible is wrong on a lot of things, but we depend upon evidence, proof being all together less easy to supply for ancient books of poor provenance. But the bible is plainly self contradictory in many places, and contradictory assertions cannot be both correct. Only the contortions of fundamentalist exegesis can save it, for those who will believe anything. Much in the bible is wrong, many supposed prophesies are wrong, even Jesus’s own. I have a detailed website showing it, and exposing Christian liars like this man.

Jesus was a man of profound morals but hardly a Christian today follows what he taught even though he is meant to be God incarnate. The bible cannot be wrong, but God, when he is Jesus, can be wrong, and modern US Christians prefer S Paul to Christ. They believe what Paul taught in contradiction to Christ—the ancient mysteries of the dying and rising god, whom Paul made Christ into, even to the extent of frequently calling it all a mystery!

Vanlandingham ends up with Genesis. “Evolutionists insist creation took place billions of years ago. They push this view so there will be enough time to theorize that mankind evolved three-million years ago from non-living matter, then from amoeba, worms, reptiles, lower mammals and so on.” He says “there’s no way the Earth could be much older than 6000 years old—certainly not millions or billions of years”. He even comes up with this purler: “how could plants grow if they had to stay in the dark for millions of years waiting on the sun to be created?” This Christian teacher follows the biblical scheme of creation divided into days—imagining the plants and trees to have been made on day 3 before the sun was illuminated on day 4—but with each day stretched out to millions of years.

These days are so obviously the days on which certain acts of creation were celebrated in the New Year celebrations of old, that there is no need to think they were ever meant to be days of actual creation. The ancient people celebrated creation, but had no proper idea of the order in which things were made, and Genesis 2 contradicts this order in Genesis 1. He proves to our satisfaction that he is a dunce, even in Christian terms.

He concludes by saying humans were made in God’s image, but something must have gone astray even here, for half the human race differ in appearance from the other half—they are women. He then cites Hebrews as saying man was created “a little lower than the angels”. Well, the bible also tells us that angels and human women had intercourse, so Christ must have been mistaken when he thought angels were sexless animals, even though he was God and had had the Old Testament to read since he was a boy God! But “mankind is to rule over all the creatures”, and “amoebas, worms, reptiles and apes weren’t fit to rule over anything”. Well in the end, the worm indeed conquers, and worms, amoebas and so on will still be inhabiting the earth after humans beings have gone extinct. That is a safe prophecy.

He ends in American fashion with, “God bless you and have a great day!”, but God would truly bless us, and our days would be better, if He removed this dross from the world. However, God is caught on His own petard, because he says that sin will always be with us, so the best we can do is shut these criminals in a penitentiary, where they cannot harm our kids.

Someone calling himself Pater Pelligrino has written very truly on a list:

What is really interesting in all these debates between IDers (Christian Fundamentalists) and those who accept evolution, is that nothing, no matter what is said or read in online forums, will ever change a believer’s convictions. No argument or discovery or fact can ever be convincing enough to change a believer’s mind.

The most famous example of this is Kurt Wise who, incredible as it may seem, has a PhD in Geology from Harvard University where he studied under the supervision of Stephen Jay Gould(!). Wise is famous for stating that:

if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate

The obvious objection is how can one know that what is written in the Bible is, in fact, the word of god, while what is written in the Koran, or the Bhagavad Gita, or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy isn’t? Faith, by definition, is belief in that for which there is no proof. So, it all comes down to the circular reasoning of “I believe it because I believe it”.

Evidence is irrelevant. The people who argue against evolution think they see holes in the theory. There is still work to be done in explaining the details of how natural selection drives the creation of new species. However, the theist does not believe in creationism because he finds the argument for evolution unconvincing. Rather his religious faith takes precedence and determines his view on evolution. Like Wise above, even if the theory were rock solid perfect, with all the details accounted for, the creationist would still believe what he wants to believe. To someone wearing red tinted contacts the world will always appear red.

As I have learned from years of such arguments, there can be no fruitful dialogue between creationists and atheists. Either they end up talking past each other, or the debate degenerates into name calling.

Extinction of the Dinosaurs Left a Large New Niche for Mammals

Howard Falcon-Lang, reporting for the BBC, tells us in an article entitled “Space is the Final Frontier for Evolution” that research by a Canadian student of Indian extraction, Sarda Sahney, and colleagues at the University of Bristol suggests that Charles Darwin may have been wrong when he argued that competition was the major driving force of evolution. It has led to a flurry of creationist and right wing websites gloating that the theory of evolution has finally had its coup de grace.

The central idea of Darwin was his explanation of why evolution occurred, evolution as a fact having been realized already by many intellectuals at the time. What was missing was an explanation of why it happened, and that is what Darwin gave. Darwin came from a wealthy family living in the countryside, so he was aware of how farmers selected the best stock to breed from. It gave him the idea of “natural selection”—that overpopulation led to competition for valuable resources among individuals of a species, as well as between species, so that the organisms that were best able to obtain the resources needed for life survived, and those unable to get sufficient resources died early, and did not survive overall. Ability to get the resources needed, Darwin called “fitness”. Only the fittest survived in the long run and so the idea was called at a later date “survival of the fittest”.

The environment that the organism lived in effected the selection by culling animals unable to get the resources they needed. Darwin was impressed by Malthus’s ideas on the growth of population. Populations would grow exponentially until they saturated the resources available, then organisms previously able to graze abundant resources comfortably, found themselves struggling to get a share of the now scarce resources. The ones successful in getting sufficient to survive on until they found a mate and reproduced would have offspring to continue their line. Characteristics were inherited, Darwin wasn’t sure how, but Mendel founded the study of genetics and provided a mechanism. So the young of any species able to reproduce would carry the characteristics of their successful parents—the ability to obtain scarce resources in competition with others of their own kind and other species seeking the same resources. So, organisms battled for supremacy and only the fittest survived.

The Bristol study suggests the availability of “living space”, rather than competition, is the driving force for evolution. Studying fossils the scientists showed from evolutionary patterns over 400 million years of history, that biodiversity closely matched the availability of living space over time. Professor Michael Benton said they did not find that competition played any role in the pattern of evolution.

By living space, the scientists were actually referring to a suitable ecological niche to live in. The ecological niche concept of biologists is that environments have within them ecological niches that a species can occupy. A niche means that particular resources are available to an organism fitted to use them, and so any such organism can thrive free of competition from any other species that is not fitted to occupy that particular niche. It includes such as the availability of food and a favorable habitat.

The new study proposes that really big evolutionary changes happen when animals move into empty areas of living space, not occupied by other animals. For example, when birds evolved the ability to fly, that opened up a vast range of new possibilities, niches not available to other animals, triggering a new evolutionary burst. Similarly, the extinction of the dinosaurs left many niches empty, or left large volumes of living space open, free for the still surviving mammals to move into. It challenges the notion of “nature red in tooth and claw”, that intense competition for resources in overcrowded habitats is the major driving force of evolution. Professor Mike Benton, a co-author on the study, told BBC News:

Competition did not play a big role in the overall pattern of evolution. For example, even though mammals lived beside dinosaurs for 60 million years, they were not able to out compete the dominant reptiles. But when the dinosaurs went extinct, mammals quickly filled the empty niches they left and today mammals dominate the land

However, Professor Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University, US, told BBC News he found the patterns interesting, but the interpretation problematic:

To give one example, if the reptiles had not been competitively superior to the mammals during the Mesozoic, then why did the mammals only expand after the large reptiles went extinct at the end of the Mesozoic? And in general, what is the impetus to occupy new portions of ecological space if not to avoid competition with the species in the space already occupied? What is the impetus to occupy new portions of ecological space if not to avoid competition?

Stearns is showing that it was competition against the superior dinosaurs that kept the mammals in their minor position as little more than rats scurrying around the feet of dinosaurs for millions of years, the whole of the period the dinosaurs dominated the earth, because mammals arose at about the same time as the dinosaurs but were unable to find any niches to expand into. The dinosaurs had nearly them all. Once the dinosaurs died out, the competition was removed and the mammals could move into the “living space” dinosaurs had once occupied.

Darwin was aware of the importance of empty niches, because he had studied the Galapagos finches, which had themselves found a plethora of empty niches when they found their way to the islands, and began to diverge into different niches available. Why did they not all just move into the same niche? Plainly it was because competition in the favored niche was fierce once sufficient of the finches had bred. Thereafter, the birds could avoid such fierce competition by going for some other niche, and diversified.

Isolation of any segment of a species on to an island was recognized as a way in which evolution could speed up. The small number on the island were not likely to have a typical distribution of genes, and the conditions were not typical of those of the whole original population so the match between the characteristics of the sample and the resources available were not as well matched as they had been among the whole group. Quicker evolution is the outcome.

So, there seems on the face of it to be nothing really new in the Bristol paper except the viewpoint or emphasis. Eldredge and Gould’s hypothesis of punctuated equilibrium has suggested that evolution happens in spurts after long periods of stability, and the opening of “living space”, or the emptying of niches by large extinctions is one reason why spurts might happen, climatic and geological change might be other reasons for major change, and there could be many others down to new predators or new diseases affecting particular species that had been stable for long periods until this novel event happened.

So, it is hard to see anything in this new work that is revolutionary, and certainly nothing to stimulate creationist triumphalism. Indeed, the incomprehendable thing about the creationist fuss about Darwinism is that Darwin’s ideas could be utterly superceded by something new like this, but the mechanism that explains how evolution happens is not evolution. The theory can change, but the facts of evolution will simply remain to be explained. If it is to be Intelligent Design (ID), then the manifest facts of Unintelligent Design by an Omnipotent God (UDOG) have to be addressed by the creationists.