Everybody must be bored with Lesson 9 (no video), so I’m posting Lesson 10 early.  In return, I’ll need my smart friends with advanced degrees in biology to check my work here (and my pronunciation)! 

This here is the original Lesson 9: Special Creation Part 1.  However, the original lessons 9 and 10 (Special Creation Parts 1 and 2) have been reshuffled into lesson 10 (Special Creation vs. Evolution), Lesson 11 (Biological Classification) and Lesson 12 (Molecular Genetics).

The final Lesson 10 will include the first 6:17 of the original lesson 09 below, plus the following “family reunion” analogy, as per the script below.  You will see video of the “family reunion” analogy at the end of the original Lesson 10 (to be posted Thursday evening) because that is where I originally had it.  But I wanted viewers to see it now, since I think it fits better before the ensuing discussion of biological systematics. 

Also worth noting, at 10:10, I do a fun exercise that attempts to impose a nested hierarchical pattern onto a collection of automobiles.  The point is to refute the argument that cladistics simply shows evidence of “common design” and has nothing to do whatsoever with common descent.  But for some reason, I forgot to mention that — so the argument might seem out of place.  I made sure to fix this into the script for the final version.  As I hope you will see, this exercise effectively shows exactly why the ”common design” argument fails.  Common design never produces a nested hierarchy, but rather a more even (and whimsical) distribution of features that follows no predictable pattern. 

People tell me they like my analogies.  If I were to ever teach introductory biology, I would begin my lecture of systematics with the following analogy.  I think it really drives the point home of why common descent is essential to the life sciences.  It is the only existing material-based framework that provides scientists with more information than it takes to create the framework in the first place.  That’s such a simple, but powerful thing to point out.

In other words, special creation and ID may indeed be true on some level, but they are completely trivial in a scientific sense.  They are about as useful as “last-Tuesdayism” is for understanding the past.  You only get out of them the same assumptions that you put into them — ie: God created the universe, or all species show evidence of design – no kidding?  It’s right there in Gen 1:1 and Rom 1:20 in case you missed it.  That’s Christianity 101.  But there is nothing in those beliefs worthy of writing a proposal for a research grant!  (which explains why there is no research in ID or special creation).   

Only common descent creates a paradigm that ADDS to our material knowledge by revealing information to us that would not otherwise be accessible apart from the model.  That is what I hope to convey in simple terms with my “family reunion” analogy.

Special Creation vs. Evolution

(begin at 6:17 of original Lesson 09 above). 

I can’t stress enough the importance of the common ancestry paradigm for doing biology. So let’s consider this analogy of a random collection of individuals. Now, how difficult would it be to organize these people according to some sort of objective classification system? I submit that you couldn’t do it. Any list of distinguishing characteristics you chose would be completely arbitrary. For instance, organizing them according to favorite color or music preference might get you somewhere, but who decides which trait supersedes the others? And how could we objectively distinguish the groups from the sub-groups? You could also try to organize them by age, but the cut-off points would be completely arbitrary and the system is ultimately trivial. In other words, the system can’t provide you any more information than what it took to construct it.

I hope you can see how frustrating this exercise would be. Even if you could come up with a coherent scheme, there is little you could actually do with it because it would ultimately be just a man-made convention imposed on the group. Unless it reflected any underlying physical reality inherent within the group, it would be completely useless for investigating the relationships between the members of the group.

Now what if I told you that this was actually a family reunion, and all of the people were related to one another in a single family tree that starts with a single pair of individuals? Well now we’ve got something useful! Now we have an objective paradigm that gives us only one right system of organization, because there is only one family tree. If somebody wants to argue over whether two boys are brothers or cousins, a scientists can perform a DNA test and settle the controversy objectively. Now the analogy is not perfect since some folks would be only related through marriage, but I think you get the point.

And here is why this is so important: by considering the family relationships, we get a very practical description of reality that allows us to deduce non-trivial information that we wouldn’t have access to apart from the paradigm. Remember, since our other classification systems were arbitrary, they couldn’t really provide us any additional information. But once we decipher our family tree, we can use it to make some very important predictions. For instance, we might be able to figure out who is at risk of heart disease or breast cancer, or which relative can donate blood or a kidney to another relative. The paradigm actually means something because it is more than just a man-made convention imposed on the group, it is a natural system based on discernable patterns that are part of the created order.  And when we approach the biological science with this same paradigm, that all species a related in a single family tree, we get a unifying principle that has real predictive and explanatory power.

In our next lesson, we’ll look more closely at the science of biological taxonomy, or the classification of the species.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 5:36 pm and is filed under Christian Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.