"After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community." -- From Judge Jones ruling on the Kitzmiller vs. Dover, PA School District Decision (December 20, 2005)

"However, the longer I listened the clearer it became that creationism is not about science. It's about morality. Specifically, creationists worry that biological evolution undermines people's moral beliefs, leading to lawlessness, family breakdown, homosexuality, pornography, and abortion. The real heart of creationism is existential dread." -- "Creation Summer Camp", by Ronald Bailey (reason.com)

So why this discontinuity? And why would people reject evolution anyway, particular in nations with an excellent fossil record and easy access to information by almost everyone.

NOTE: This lecture primarily examines American, Christian denial of evolution. But there are people who reject of evolutionary science from other nations and other religions, such as:

• The Agudat Israel rabbinical council will not approve kosher endorsements on any product showing dinosaurs, because the idea of millions-of-years-old dinosaurs counters the idea of a 6000 year old Earth
• Adnan Oktar (pen name "Harun Yahya") is spreading US-style Young Earth Creationism to Turkey (and from there, to the other of Islamic countries)

For instance, Judaic chronologies traditionally held that Earth, Life, and Humanity were created over the course of the six day "Creation Week" described in Genesis, and that this was roughly six thousand years ago. Their neighboring cultures (Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks) thought that the Earth was created many 10s of thousands of years ago. Some (the Maya, for instance) had even longer time scales, and Hindu cosmologies suggesting an infinitely old, repeating Universe (with a present incarnation many many billions of years old.)

But many of these thought that the world was basically unchanged since the Dawn of Time, and did not consider any lineal connections of descent and ancestry among the species of the world.

Some philosophers suggested that it was non-divine processes to the worlds origin, and the possibility of transmutation. Among these were Anaximander of Miletus (610-546 BCE) and Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 99-c. 55 BCE).

During the early centuries of the Church, Christianity lived side-by-side with older pagan traditions of scholarship and research, exemplified by institutions such as the Library of Alexandria. Sometimes the relationship with non-Christian philosophers and thinkers was amicable, but sometimes less so. Among the philosophers of the early Christian Church was St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE), who argued that God formed the Earth and Life from pre-existing matter, and suggested that the six-day Creation Week was metaphorical or allegorical rather than historical. (However, he was adamant about a 6000-year old Earth rather than the longer Greek or Babylonian chronology.) He argued in the De Genesi ad literal (1:20) that Christians should be willing to change their minds about the natural world in light of new evidence:

"It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [i.e., a pagan] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters [i.e., natural phenomena], and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are."

With the collapse of the Roman world scholarship in the West was preserved and developed mostly by the Catholic Church, and there mostly by the professionally-trained priesthood. These were among the few who had access to both the Scriptures and other religious writing and to the scholarship of the Greco-Roman thinkers. With the Protestant Reformation, however, the Bible was translated into the vernacular tongues of Europe, and now ordinary people (or at least ordinary literate people) with no particular training in philosophy, history, or other academic disciplines had access to Scripture. For many this might be the only book they ever read.

As a consequence, the Protestant Reformation saw a spread of literalist rather than allegorical interpretation of the Bible. Some of these literalist ideas made their way to the very highest levels of Protestant hierarchies (for instance, Anglican Bishop James Ussher's 1650 chronology of the world, dating Creation to the nightfall before October 23, 4004 BC.) That said, there were many thinkers who considered other possibilities.

During the Age of Enlightenment (18th and early 19th Centuries) there were many arguments for and against naturalistic views of how the Universe operates and came to be. For example, David Hume observed order arising from mindless mechanistic processes (snowflakes from water, crystals from solution, and so forth), and considered that an ordered world might likewise come out of similar type processes. In contrast, others argued that the apparent Design of the Universe implied a Designer. This was most famously (although not firstly) argued as the "Watchmaker Argument" of William Paley in his 1802 Natural Theology.

"Natural theology" was that branch of theology that attempted to understand the nature of the Divine not through revealed wisdom and scripture, but from study of the natural world. It had a long tradition in the West (e.g., medieval bestiaries, where the aspects of different animals were interpreted as moral lessons for Mankind.) Many of the early geologists and paleontologists were natural theologians: Linnaeus and Buckland and Agassiz and Lyell and others.

But these naturalists also had to accept their discoveries of Earth vastly ancient beyond the chronologies of the Bible or the Classical World, with changing environmental conditions and inhabited by succession after succession of different life forms. Two major potential solutions were developed (or expanded from earlier concepts) to harmonize the observations of the natural world with Scripture:

• Gap Theory: the idea that there is a vast gap in time between two verses in Genesis. As commonly formulated, this was between Genesis 1:1 ("In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth") and 1:2 ("And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.") Under Gap theory, all of geologic time and the succession of life on Earth in the past took place between these sentences.
• Day/Age Chronologies: an ancient idea that the "days" in Genesis are not literal 24 hr periods, but are metaphorical "days" or "ages". Thus, each "Day" could be some vast chunk of Earth history. Unfortunately for this model, the argument fails when the particular sequence of phenomenon in Genesis 1 or the (contradictory) sequence in Genesis 2 are compared to the sequences discovered by cosmology, astronomy, geology, and paleontology.

Of course, much of this came to a head with Darwin and Wallace's discovery of Natural Selection. They had discovered a mechanism to produce design without any need for outside influence: simply variation, heredity, and superfecundity.

The following is a dramatic recreation of the result of the publication of The Origin in Victorian England, from the 1978 BBC costume drama The Voyages of Charles Darwin. (The first two characters to show up are Sir Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin; other characters whom we have encountered in this course are Thomas Huxley and Sir Richard Owen):

As this shows, the basic arguments were already set forth. However, one important thing to show: although Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley do represent the points of view of many of the religious and scientific thinkers (respectively) of that time, these camps were not entirely unified. Some religious thinkers were very much in support of Darwin and Wallace's new ideas, and some scientists rejected evolution (and more the specific model of Natural Selection) at that time.

This sets the stage for the 20th and 21st Century American situation, and the rise of organized evolution deniers.

Among the peoples of this movement was Canadian George McCready Price, who published various books (such as The Fundamentals of Geology, arguing for Flood Geology (the idea that most geological strata and structures were laid down by Noah's Flood) and a Young (that is, 6000-year old) Earth. Price's book, and those like it, were used by the growing Fundamentalist movement to provide support for people who did not want the scientific understanding of an ancient Earth and evolving Life taught in schools.

In 1925 Tennessee passed the Butler Act, "AN ACT prohibiting the teachings of the Evolution Theory in all the Universities, and all other public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, and to provide penalties for the violations thereof." Many other states followed suit, making the teaching of evolution illegal in the public schools. It was challenged later that year in the town of Dayton, where the ACLU financed a test case for this law (to which they objected). High school teacher John Thomas Scope was charged with teaching evolution, and the resultant Scopes monkey trial (technically State of Tennessess vs. John Thomas Scopes) made international news. It pitted two of the most famous lawyers of the early 20th Century (William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution, Clarence Darrow for the defense) against each other. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100, but it was overturned on a technicality (the jury, not the judge, should have set the fine!). The Butler Law remained on the books until 1967.

After embarrassment by the United States at the Soviet's early accomplishments in space travel (the Sputnik series; first manned space flight; etc.) in the 1950s, American educators sought to greatly increase the science component in its schools. But eventually the issue of Butler (and similar laws in other states) had to be dealt with. In many cases they were simply repealed. But in one situation, it went to the Supreme Court. This was the 1967 case Epperson vs. Arkansas, over a 1928 Butler-style law. Susan Epperson (high school biology teacher) filed suit over the constitutionality of this law. The Supreme Court found:

"The overriding fact is that Arkansas' law selects from the body of knowledge a particular segment which it proscribes for the sole reason that it is deemed to conflict with a particular religious doctrine; that is, with a particular interpretation of the Book of Genesis by a particular religious group."

"The state has no legitimate interest in protecting any or all religions from views distasteful to them."

So prohibiting the teaching of evolution was out. In response, states began to propose "Equal Time" laws, which stated that schools had to teach Creationism (i.e., a purely supernatural view of the origin of Earth, Life & Humans) alongside scientific ones. This led to the case Daniel vs. Waters, where the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit argued Tennessee's "equal time" act, which had stated

"Any biology textbook used for teaching in the public schools, which expresses an opinion of, or relates a theory about origins or creation of man and his world shall be prohibited from being used as a textbook in such system unless it specifically states that it is a theory as to the origin and creation of man and his world and is not represented to be scientific fact. Any textbook so used in the public education system which expresses an opinion or relates to a theory or theories shall give in the same text-book and under the same subject commensurate attention to, and an equal amount of emphasis on, the origins and creation of man and his world as the same is recorded in other theories, including, but not limited to, the Genesis account in the Bible."

"The teaching of all occult or satanical beliefs of human origin is expressly excluded from this Act."

The Court ruled that creationism--as inherently religious--was not objectively part of a secular program of education.

In response, "Creationism" evolved into "Creation Science". The idea was that by putting "Science" in the name it could now be taught as science. However, there was no actual change in content or evidence, just a rebranding. Groups to promote Creation Science were organized: the Institute for Creation Research (1972); Center for Scientific Creation (1980); Reasons to Believe (an Old Earth Creation group) (1986); and Answers in Genesis (1994).

The new Creation Science organizations helped promote a new series of "balanced treatment" laws, just like the old "equal time" Creation acts. One of these eventually resulted in the 1981 US Supreme Court case Edwards vs. Aguillard. The law in question was Louisiana's 1981 "Balanced Treatment of Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act". The US Supreme Court found that

"The Act impermissibly endorses religion by advancing the religious belief that a supernatural being created humankind. The legislative history demonstrates that the term "creation science," as contemplated by the state legislature, embraces this religious teaching. The Act's primary purpose was to change the public school science curriculum to provide persuasive advantage to a particular religious doctrine that rejects the factual basis of evolution in its entirety. Thus, the Act is designed either to promote the theory of creation science that embodies a particular religious tenet or to prohibit the teaching of a scientific theory disfavored by certain religious sects."

So Creation Science was out. It was rebranded again, and now called "Intelligent Design" or "ID" for short. This was an attempt to remove references to God and the Bible from materials promoting essentially the same arguments as before, in the hopes that in so doing it would not seem religious. However, despite what people in some intellectual circles think, it was just exactly the same idea as before. For example, the standard ID textbook Of Pandas and People states that "Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact. Fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, wings, etc." In fact, study shows the systematic replacement of "Creation" with "intelligent design" and "creationist" with "design proponent" over the earlier editions of the same book that became retitled Of Pandas and People:

Indeed, during the Dover trial (see below) the speciation event was captured in mid-transformation: a case where the editors of a draft of Of Pandas and Peoples accidentally inserted "design proponents" in the middle of the word "creationist" rather than just replacing it!

Upper edition is the earlier draft, lower one has the "transitional form".

The predominant organization promoting ID is The Discovery Institute (founded in 1990), which promotes their "Wedge strategy" to "to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies" and "to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God".

The ID proponents organized new sets of campaigns for laws around the country in the 1990s, such as "Teach the Controversy" and "Critical Analysis of Evolution" (basically new incarnations of "equal time" or "balanced treatment"). ID brought in new thinkers promoting particular new approaches, such as Michael Behe's Irreducible Complexity and William Dembski's Specified Complexity. We will examine these particular arguments next lecture.

With the backing of the Discovery Institute, then-Pensylvannia Senator Rick Santorum proposed the Santorum Amendment to the "No Child Left Behind" law. This was a law to promote the teaching of ID as an alternative to evolution, and to label evolution as a "theory in crisis". The amendment was not included in the federal law, but was modified to support similar measures within his home state.

This led to the adoption by the school board of Dover, PA of a statement to be read in all classes where evolution was taught:

"The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students to learn about Darwin's Theory of Evolution and eventually to take a standardized test of which evolution is a part.

Because Darwin's Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.

Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People, is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves.

With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. The school leaves the discussion of the Origins of Life to individual students and their families. As a Standards-driven district, class instruction focuses upon preparing students to achieve proficiency on Standards-based assessments."

A number of families brought suit against the School Board, leading to the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case in the US District Court. (Trivia time: my then-current phylogeny of theropods was used as part of the evidence by paleontologist Kevin Padian in the trial!) If you have two hours to kill, you can watch an excellent documentary about the trial.

After testimony that included leading figures on both sides, Judge Jones ruled that ID "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents" and is not Science. Additionally, it was made very clear in the testimony that although some ID thinkers might keep open the possibility that the Intelligent Designer was not divine, the supporters of the statement in the community and the School Board itself did not consider there to be any distinction between Creationism and ID, and were in fact promoting Young Earth Creationism.

The Dover ruling ground ID in its track, and the movement as such has stalled. But that doesn't mean that evolution deniers have given up. Over the last decade they continue to support "teach the controversy" laws, "strengths and weaknesses" laws, and "academic freedom" laws (which are all updates on the old "balanced treatment" or "equal time" laws). For instance Oklahoma's Senate Bill 320 (the "Science Education and Academic Freedom Act" of 2009, which thankfully died in committee) stated:

"The Legislature further finds that the teaching of some scientific subjects, such as biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning, can cause controversy, and that some teachers may be unsure of the expectations concerning how they should present information on such subjects."

"Students may be evaluated based upon their understanding of course materials, but no student in any public school or institution shall be penalized in any way because the student may subscribe to a particular position on scientific theories."

Numerous similar laws have been proposed (and occasionally are still on the books) in Louisiana, Tennessee, Colorado, Montana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Indiana.

With all this trouble, many teachers simply want to avoid the problem and don't teach evolution in the schools. Indeed, more teachers themselves believe in some form of ID or theistic evolution than in our scientific understanding. As a result, very few states require teaching about human evolution in the schools.

And so, the legal fights go on.

But what do evolution deniers really believe? And why do they believe it?

• Naturalistic/Scientific/Materialist Evolution: the standard scientific model, as taught in this course. Even many theists (believers in a God or gods) can hold this position, which simply states that our explanations for how and what has happened through time are by means of mechanistic phenomena.
• Theistic Evolution: the idea that everything we see in geologic time and evolutionary history actually happened, but that it was guided by God or some other "Higher Power" for a particular purpose. Although (as we will see) this is not the majority position within the population in the US, it is in fact the most common position held by high school teachers (see links in last lecture). And it is the position supported by (among other mainstream religious groups) many representatives of the Catholic Church. NOTE: despite what many people think, ID proponents do NOT belong here. Theistic evolutionists still accept natural selection or similar mechanisms for driving change through time; however, they think that God basically "stacks the deck" in favor of certain changes. In contrast, ID proponents do not accept natural selection as a mechanism for any significant change.
• Old Earth Creationism (OEC, from herein): this includes the Day/Age creationists or Gap theorist mentioned last time. They accept geology and Big Bang cosmology, but reject evolution as a cause for the diversity of Life and the origin of species. This system is fairly rare in the US today, but has support from organizations like Reasons to Believe. Also, some of the major public ID proponents (Behe, for instance) probably fall in this category: an ancient Earth, but no significant role for natural selection or large-scale connections in the Tree of Life. OECs are in conflict with basic science as they require supernatural explanations for a phenomenon already well-explained by science, and with the Young Earth Creationism by a number of theological issues (especially the existence of billions of years of death and suffering prior to the Garden of Eden and subsequent Fall of Man.)
• Young Earth Creationism (YEC): classic style Creationism. An early of only a few thousands or maybe tens of thousands of years, the Biblical Flood and Noah's Ark, a literal Garden of Eden at the beginning, etc., etc. The single most common belief in the US of all the ones listed here. Answers in Genesis and The Institute for Creation Research are the main "think" tanks for this movement. When pressed, many ID proponents reveal themselves to be YECs. BUT, despite what they claim, they are not Biblical literalists, because they accept the spherical Earth as a planet orbiting a star (the Sun) in a vast Milky Way galaxy in a universe of galaxies. As opposed to…
• Geocentrism: Yes, there are still hold to the view that the Earth is in the physical center of the universe, and the Sun and stars orbit around it. Just like it says in the Bible (or, basically, in all ancient cultures, because that's what it looks like.) But even these reject an aspect of the Biblical literal view of the Cosmos, as held by...
• Flat Earthers: a truly literalist Biblical view. Yes, some are still around...

Looking just at the YECs, how wrong is their chronology? The actual age of the Earth at about 4.557 Gyr, but they claim a mere 6000 yrs. This is exactly proportional to claiming that the distance from Washington, DC to Los Angeles, CA (3690 km, or 2293 mi) is really only 4.86 m (16 feet)!! And in order to do this, one has to reject physics (nuclear decay, the speed of light, and so forth), astronomy, geology, chemistry: indeed, the whole corpus of modern Science.

The Omphalos Argument: formulated by Henry Phillip Gosse in 1857, the idea that the Earth was created to LOOK ancient, but is really only 6000 years old. (It's name is from the Greek for "navel": the idea that Adam and Eve were created with navels, even if they were never gestated inside a woman and hence would not have umbilical cords!) This idea requires a trickster God (who wants to make things look ancient, up to and including light from stars and other objects more than 6000 light years away being created in transit.), which doesn't jive well with most standard modern theologies. Furthermore, if God is capable of doing this kind of fakery, what is to say He didn't create the Universe only last Thursday, and all the books, movies, photographs, even your memories, of the past were simply willed into being to appear as it there were a past. Intellectually this is EXACTLY the same argument. (This variation of Omphalos is called, not too creatively, "Last Thursdayism".) As such, you can see why it is really way outside the realm of Science.

Intelligent Design:

• Irreducible Complexity: Michael Behe's contribution. Irreducible complexity refers to any system "composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one part causes the system to effectively cease functioning." In practice, however, how does one demonstrate the appropriate level to look for IC? And at what point can you establish it is irreducible? Behe's particular favorite examples (the bacterial flagellum and the blood clotting mechanisms of vertebrates) have already been shown to be exaltations and other modifications of simpler structures. However, Behe refuses to acknowledge the refutation of these cases.
• Specified Complexity: William Dembski's contribution. Under this idea, specified patterns are ones that admit short descriptions; complex patterns are ones unlikely to occur by chance. Other mathematicians demonstrated flaws in this logic.

Here are a few good videos that explore ID arguments in greater details:

"It Can't Just Be Random Chance!" or "It Couldn't Just Happen!": This includes several problems. One is that evolution isn't "just chance". While randomness is a factor in the generation of mutations (that is, mutations appear without any particular direction relative to the situation the organism is in), selection itself is a non-random aspect. The other aspect is the "just" part. After all, one could say that a symphony is "just a bunch of notes in order" or a poem "just a bunch of worlds", and be technically correct. But "just" is a subjective qualifier that doesn't really have a place in Science.

"It's Just a Theory!": Ugh. As we saw earlier in this course, "theory" in Science is not a word for "guess" or "speculation" or "opinion". It is a model or set of rules with broad explanatory power about some particular phenomenon. So evolution is a theory, just like gravity, or the atomic theory of matter, or plate tectonics.

"Where are the Transitional Forms?": Ummm… Yeah. See the rest of this course...

Related to the above, Misunderstanding Sister Taxa and Ancestors: Similar to a lot of people, evolution deniers misunderstand when scientists are referring to sister taxa rather than ancestors. Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, but they aren't our ancestors.

"If Humans Evolved From Apes, Why Are There Still Apes?": This is like asking "If there are Norwegian-Americans, why are there still Norwegians?" Evolution doesn't convert all of the old taxon into a new form, just some subpopulation. This is part of the general misunderstanding that evolution is progression towards a particular goal (especially humans), rather than simply the divergence of the Tree of Life.

"There are Gaps in the Fossil Record!": Yes, we know. But as we saw earlier in the class, the vast majority of individuals, or even species, are unlikely to be preserved in the fossil record, much less discovered, described, and identified by paleontologists. Nevertheless, we get more information as time goes by. Indeed, ironically, you get more "gaps" the more information there is! As demonstrated by Futurama:

"Microevolution Happens, But Not Macroevolution!": At least some evolution deniers accept that natural selection can cause transformations from population to population over time by the differential survival and reproduction of variants in a population. But they think that this is somehow limited in scope, and cannot produce change from one "kind" of organism to another. But one of the big points of The Origin is the demonstration that seemingly distinct end members can actually be connected by small steps in between. "Macro-" and "microevolution" do not have different causes; they are simply different expressions at different scales of the same phenomenon. As critics of evolution deniers point out, accepting microevolution but rejecting macroevolution is like believing in inches but rejecting the reality of feet!

"Where You There?": A common trope of YECs. Without eyewitnesses, they claim, we can't be certain any particular event happened. Leaving aside the fact that eyewitnesses are actually notoriously unreliable as recorders of fact, we use reconstruction of past events from the limited preserved evidence all the time in society: reconstructing accidents; forensic medicine; history and archaeology; etc. And while you and I weren't there, the rocks themselves and the fossils therein damn well were!

"The Cambrian Explosion Disproves Evolution!": Why a particularly evolutionary event is supposed disproves evolution isn't clear, and the evolution deniers don't make it any clearer. In reality, this trope comes from a list that the evolution deniers got from… Charles Darwin! See the lecture on the Cambrian Explosion for Darwin's puzzlement at this, and solutions to this. (It is worth noting that many other cases on this list are from Chapter 6 "Difficulties on Theory of The Origin. Darwin was honest enough to understand potential objections to his idea, and elucidated why these objections were invalid or fallacious.

"Evolutionists Get Things Wrong or Disagree!": Evolution deniers love to point out cases where paleontologists misinterpreted or reinterpreted data, and then changed their mind. This shows that they simply do not understand the basic aspects of Science: that it is not a single revealed body of wisdom, but rather a process of developing observations and models to explain phenomena. Through hypothesis falsification and reciprocal illumination we may replace older ideas with newer ones as new information comes to light. That is fine: that is how it is supposed to work. Furthermore, when the data are not clearly decisive one way or the other--or where some group (cough, the BAND, cough cough…) refuses to acknowledge the rejection of their claims for personal reasons--you will find that scientists will disagree. That is fine. (And it isn't like different religious people, even of the same denomination, agree on all matters of theology, but they don't recognize that as a reason to reject their own beliefs.)

Confusing Evolutionary Theory with any Particular Phylogenetic Scenario: A special case of the previous one, the claim that rejection of a particular phylogenetic model means that evolution is incorrect. For example, whales were once thought to derive from a group of primitive carnivorous land mammal, but new evidence placed their ancestry within (omnivorous) early members of the artiodactyls (cloven-hoofed mammals). But this change of idea was done entirely within the context of paleontology and evolutionary biology, not in spite of it!

"Darwin Said the Eye Cannot Evolve!": Yep, he sure did. It's right there in Chapter 6 (see link above), where he wrote:

"To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree."

"Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real."

(Additionally, great as a scientist as Darwin was, evolutionary biology is not the "Gospel According to Charles"! Ideas in Science are accepted by their evidentiary merit, not by who said it.)

Conflation of "Evolution" with "Abiogenesis" &: "Big Bang Cosmology: When asked to state their objections to evolution, many deniers will include aspects which actually have to do with the origin of Life as a whole or even of the Universe itself. But these topics are other fields of Science: they aren't evolution. (This does go back to an earlier point, though: Creationism requires a rejection of essentially all modern science, not just the particular fields of paleontology, evolutionary biology, and geology!)

Related to the above, "How Can Something Come From Nothing?": This is a misunderstanding of both abiogenesis at one level, and Big Bang cosmology at the other. In the case of abiogenesis, there was never a magic moment when something was non-living and became living; instead, it would have been a stepwise shift of chemical processes from something unquestionably non-living through various quasi-life stages to extraordinarily primitive life and so on to LUCA. And in the case of the Big Bang: this was not, as pretty much the whole culture thinks it does, an explosion of everything inside a void. In fact, it is quite the opposite: EVERYTHING (all matter, all energy, everything) started out there in a mind-bogglingly condensed state and inflated. It wasn't an explosion of something in the nothing; it was an expansion of everything away from itself. (And neither of these are about evolution, anyway!)

"Argumentum ad Hitlerum" & "Argumentum ad Stalinum": A common trope (and theme of the misinformation "documentary" Expelled is that Hitler was applying Darwinian principles to eliminate inferior gene lines to improve the human race. (Similarly, but less often, people argue that Stalin was organizing the Soviet Union on Darwinian lines). This fails on two main lines.

The first is that even if these were true statements, it would not invalidate the reality of evolution. This is an Argument from Adverse Consequences: assuming an idea is false because bad consequences would result if the idea were true. But Hitler and Stalin's military made use of chemistry, physics, and so on to kill millions: that doesn't mean chemistry and ballistics and the like are untrue.

And furthermore, neither of these dictators actually supported Darwinian ideas of evolution, anyway! Stalin himself doesn't seem to have written much about it, but he promoted the work of the anti-Darwinian neo-Lamarckian Trofim Lysenko, who wrote:

"Such sciences as physics and chemistry have freed themselves from chance. That is why they became exact sciences. Animate nature was developed and is developed on a foundation of the most strict and inherent rules. Organisms and species are developed on a foundation of their natural and intrinsic needs. By getting rid of Mendelism-Morganism-Weismannism from our science we banish chance out of biological science. We must keep in mind clearly that science is the enemy of chance."

In the case of Hitler, we have his own writings to demonstrate that he rejected the transformation of species or the origins of humans from other types of animals:

"Even a superficial glance is sufficient to show that all the innumerable forms in which the life-urge of Nature manifests itself are subject to a fundamental law-one may call it an iron law of Nature-which compels the various species to keep within the definite limits of their own life-forms when propagating and multiplying their kind. Each animal mates only with one of its own species. The titmouse cohabits only with the titmouse, the finch with the finch, the stork with the stork, the field-mouse with the field-mouse, the house-mouse with the house-mouse, the wolf with the she-wolf, etc." -- Mein Kampf

"From where do we get the right to believe, that from the very beginning Man was not what he is today? Looking at Nature tells us that in the realm of plants and animals changes and developments happen. But nowhere inside a kind shows such a development as the breadth of the jump, as Man must supposedly have made, if he has developed from an ape-like state to what he is today." -- Tischgespräche

"For it was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties." -- Mein Kampf

Hardly the words of a man committed to an evolutionary worldview, trying to implement a Darwinist view on society!

"If We Teach Children We Are Just (or Come From) Animals, They Will Act Like Animals!": This is just another Argument from (in this case False) Adverse Consequences. Consider that in many nations (as we saw last time) there is far more belief in evolution than in the US, but their youths are not particularly prone to delinquency, rowdiness, or otherwise "animal"-like behaviors.

The "Gish Gallop": A common debating technique, named after YEC Duane Gish, and defined as "drowning the opponent in such a torrent of half-truths, lies, and straw-man arguments that the opponent cannot possibly answer every falsehood in real time." Sadly, this is by no means limited to evolution deniers, but is sort of a general rhetorical device. For proof, see the Internet...

Within the US, the general public versus Science (Pew Forum):

And by various subcategories of society (Pew Center):

By religion (US):

By state, with the most and least religious states noted:

Overall, the ratio of supporters in material evolution, theistic evolution, and creationism, have been largely constant over decades of polling (Gallup):

By education (Gallup):

and by politics:

and by church attendance:

Correlation between acceptance of evolution and belief in God:

So one of the strongest indicators of rejection of evolution is indeed religion (and in particular, evangelical Protestant Christianity, at least in the US). In fact, Protestant preachers are far more likely than the public to hold evolution denier views (LifeWay Research):

But why should (at least some) religious people feel motivated to reject evolution (as opposed to rejecting other aspects of science, like cellular biology, the germ theory of disease, the atomic theory of matter, galactic astronomy, or any other myriad fields outside the scope of Scripture)?

In the report cited at the quote at the top of the notes, it was noticed by the reporter that the real reason for rejecting this aspect of science wasn't the science itself: it was the perceived implications of a material origin for humanity on the source of morality. They felt that if humans were not divinely created there could be no absolute morality dictated (literally) from On High, and that lacking such any sort of behavior might be condoned. (Of course this ignores millennia of work by ethical philosophers to find reasons for moral behavior outside of divine command, but that's outside the scope of this class!)

Additionally, this is part of what Carl Sagan called "The Great Demotions": the perception by some that as Science discovers the size and age of the Universe, Earth, and Life, that we seem more insignificant:

So why should we matter that some people fail to accept real things for personal reasons? What is the harm? In and of itself, that's all well and good. But part of the problem is that failure to think critically on one issue is generally linked with failure to think critically in most issues. In other words, pseudosciences tend to travel in packs. So those who reject evolution also tend to reject the reality of climate change, a phenomenon which effects all of us and which requires voting citizens to act:

Basically, once you accept that an ideology trumps evidence in one sphere, it becomes difficult to use your critical faculties in others. So the harm in rejecting well-supported discoveries like the antiquity of the Earth and the evolution of Life makes one susceptible to accepting untrue ideas, which will result in faulty decision making.

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Last modified: 25 April 2016