The dichotomy of how many Americans view science was brought home to me rather vividly the other day in two television shows on the same evening. A Nova program on PBS called The Four Winged Dinosaur was a fascinating look at how science works. It was a documentary about the investigation of flightless birds, in particular the archaeopteryx. That same evening, on the NRB Network, there was a Creation Ministries International program on Dinosaurs and the Bible.

In a similar vein, on one of the religious channels, there was a broadcast right from the Creation Museum "in northern Kentucky," as the minister said several times. He tried to make the same points as Dr. David Catchpole did in Dinosaurs and the Bible. These men argued that there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark, that evolution is an embattled scientific theory, and that young earth creationism is making great head way in scientific circles - all of which are untrue. Despite lying being a cardinal sin, religious fundamentalists, including Jehovah’s Witnesses (JWs), have no problem playing fast and loose with the truth when they feel it benefits their cause!

Seeing those religious television shows contrasted against the Nova documentary was enlightening, to say the least. The creationists practice the same brand of unethical journalism that completely soured me on the Watchtower Society (WTS) "science" of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The unethical journalism of the Witnesses, including their use of partial quotes, their use of quotes taken out of context, and their deliberately using these methods to say something that the person being quoted never intended to say - all of which are despicable violations of the Journalist’s Code of Ethics - were central among my reasons for rejecting JW theology. Among those television programs, Catchpole in particular was disturbing. He has a PhD in plant physiology, so I would assume he understands what scientific evidence is all about. Not that he actually used any, though. He constantly repeated the phrase, "I think" or "I believe," as though his thinking something made it correct or important. 

Catchpole’s talk was basically illustrated by cutesy cartoon drawings of dinosaurs, one with a baby dinosaur in a t-shirt that said "I Survived the Flood." You get the picture. He used a graph showing that there is limited growth in baby dinosaurs for the first year or two after birth to "prove" that if Noah had taken newly born dinosaurs on the Ark, they wouldn’t have taken up much room. He also showed a photo of two similar dinosaur skull fossils that scientists classify as two different species. He remarked that he thought they looked a lot alike and were really just one species. That was pretty much the extent of the "science" that he used in the discussion. It seems the point he was trying to make was that there were really only a handful of dinosaur species, so Noah would likely have only had to bring a few dozen different young dinosaurs on the Ark to preserve them. 

He capped the discussion off with a map of the Earth on which he had arrows going out from the Middle East to the far corners of the globe showing how all the animals then spread out all over the Earth from where the Ark came to rest. Of course, he failed to mention that science proves a completely different story. He explained the whole concept perfectly when he showed another cartoon of a man next to a copy of the Bible, and noted how all of his ideas stemmed from letting the Bible completely take over one’s thinking and using it to shape one’s world view. An Awake! article a few years ago by a scientist who became a JW and then rejected evolution said a very similar thing. 

The second show, the one "Live from The Creation Museum in Northern Kentucky!" was similar. One really funny thing was that the minister bragged about how many Americans questioned evolution, and noted with pride that only Turkey had fewer people who didn’t accept evolution. When he talked about the countries where the vast majority of people accept evolution, he noted Northern Europe and Iceland in particular, he attributed it to their "lifestyles," by which I’m assuming he meant their "immoral lifestyles." 

That the majority of Americans reject evolution was the extent of the "evidence" this minister gave in support of creationism, except that he did mention the concept of irreducible complexity a few times. Irreducible complexity is the brainchild of Michael Behe, a biochemist at Leigh University in Pennsylvania. It’s a concept that is a darling of the intelligent design crowd, and Behe is a fellow at the Discovery Institute, which promotes the teaching of intelligent design. Irreducible complexity is the idea that certain aspects of a body - the eye, wings, and so on - become worthless if they are reduced to a less complex condition, and therefore must have been created in their complex state and didn’t evolve.

Behe avoids peer reviews of his writings, his own department at the university where he teaches has an officially published statement rejecting intelligent design in order to distance themselves from Behe’s writings, and much of his work is viewed as pseudo-science by the overall scientific community.

Behe is also hard for the fundamentalist crowd to work with, as he accepts aspects of evolution, including common descent and the evolution of humans from other primates. 

These creationist shows basically just went from one unsupported anti-evolution statement to the next, used scriptures as "proof" of creation, and presented no scientific evidence at all. The Four Winged Dinosaur, on the other hand, was a real overview of how the scientific method works. Scientists traveled to China to work with Xu Xing, a paleontologist who has the largest collection of archaeopteryx fossils in the world. They went through the collection and carefully measured every part of the bird in all the available fossils in order to create an overall picture of archaeopteryx. Obviously some of the fossils would have some parts of the bird more carefully preserved and detailed than others, and by combining all of the data, the scientists were able to build an accurate, full sized model of archaeopteryx. 

The model was then tested in a wind tunnel at Brown University’s Flight Mechanics Lab. The scientists would come up with a theory as to how archaeopteryx used it’s four wings, test it in the wind tunnel, and reject or accept the idea based on the result. When a theory was wrong, it was rejected amidst laughter, and when other ideas proved more accurate, they were gladly accepted. The end result was a remarkably detailed understanding of how the archaeopteryx used its wings. Also made clear during the documentary, was that flightless birds still make great use of their wings, which could aid in gliding in some cases, but even more so in ascending very steep surfaces, which would have been vital in escaping predators.

These are the types of programs more scientists have to become involved with here in the US. Education is the greatest weapon against ignorance and superstition, and that means more scientists have to come out of the lab or off the field research site and into the homes, books and television sets of the American public. That was what I was writing about in this blog, http://www.freeminds.org/blogs/a-freethinker-s-journal/creating-the-third-culture-thinkers-speak-out.html, on the Third Culture, the culture of scientists, thinkers and writers dealing directly with scientific issues in plain and understandable terms, writing for the non-scientist.

This year, with the 200th birthday of Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, is an ideal time to see that tide change. A movie on Darwin’s life is in the works, and some excellent television programming on evolution is becoming available, especially from the BBC. With over 50 percent of Americans questioning the truth of evolution, calling it "just a theory," and believing that it’s a scientific theory in trouble instead of one of the best supported and fact-based concepts in science, this is a not-to-be-missed opportunity to begin educating the American public about evolution in earnest.

TrackBack URI for this entry