The debate that should not be: Some thoughts about creationism, intelligent design and other "alternative explanations"

If you blog about human evolution there’s one topic which is really hard to avoid. I’m of course speaking about creationism, or “intelligent design” or some other kind of unscientific explanation about human evolution. So far I tried to avoid this topic as best as I could, since I don’t feel competent enough to actually write something about it. However, last week I received an Email from one of my German readers which forced into writing something about it. 

I don’t want to talk about the exact content of the email or about the (rather short) debate I had with the person who wrote me this Email. What I want to talk about is my point of view on this whole issue and why I think we shouldn’t even have these kinds of debates.
It goes without saying that this text only represents my opinion so don’t interpret the stuff I’m going to write as some kind of general explanation about this topic.
I’m going to split this Post into three different parts to make it a little bit easier to follow my line of argument.


1. Why Sciences and Religion shouldn’t interfere with each other.
To understand this point, first of all we need to define what we understand under the term “God”. This probably is a topic for not one but several posts itself, but for the sake of my argument, let’s put as simple as possible.
“God” is an entity which almighty and which isn’t completely detectable. The first premise directly leads to the latter, because if an entity is almighty then it also has power over those parts of reality which we can’t perceive.
Now, if we want to build a scientific hypothesis, we have to make sure that we can actually falsify it (if you want to know why, I wrote something about it here). But how can we falsify something which isn’t completely detectable? The simple answer is: We can’t.
Therefore, if we try to explain our world due to the work of a non detectable entity, we’re leaving the scientific framework.
The scientific method is not suited for those questions. You simply can’t prove or disprove God due to scientific methods. Or to put it more bluntly: “God doesn’t matter in Science”
This does not mean however, that each scientist is an atheist. You can believe in whatever you want, as long as you don’t try to mix up both “worlds”. Every attempt to do otherwise ends in a logical fallacy.

2. Why, in my opinion, Science produces reliable statements about our world.
Some of the more “advanced” criticisms of evolutionary theory try to show that the theory itself or the scientific method itself is somehow erroneous in some manner.
The interesting thing about the different perspectives on the world, whether they are scientific or more metaphysical is, that all of them need some kind of basic assumptions to actually work. If you don’t make those assumptions you will, at some point during your argument, come to a stage where your own arguments become circular.
But which are those basic assumptions for a scientific world-view?

The first assumption is that we live in a world which consists of laws.
-If there are no laws in nature, then we won’t be able to make any reliable statements about it.

The second assumption is that we’re able to recognize these laws.
-Science is a cognitive process. If we weren’t able to recognize any of these laws, than we couldn’t do any kind of science.


These basic assumptions are the fundamental aspects on which every other scientific theory is build upon and it’s the only context in which they make any kind of sense. The question, whether or not I “believe” in evolution isn’t a real question. It’s simply the explanation which, in the framework I presented here, makes the most plausible. The “question of faith” doesn’t ask itself if you look at separate scientific theories, it’s only important if you look at the basic assumptions of Science. And so far I haven’t found anything which convinced me that those basic assumptions are wrong.
However, this does not answer the question, whether or not science can answer every question. Unfortunately we will never receive a message which says: Achievement get! Explain every law of nature!” Or to say it with the words of Gerhard Vollmer:

"The degree of consistency between our theoretical knowledge of the world and the real world remains unknown to us, even if it's complete."

[From: Vollmer G. (1975) Evolutionäre Erkenntnistheorie Hirzel, Stuttgart, Leipzig, p. 137, (probably horribly) translated])

Ok, after we set the stage for the debate, let’s move on to the original point of this post.


3. What’s that stuff got to do with creationism?
The first point of my argument shows that it’s completely impossible to prove or disprove God within a scientific framework. Therefore any kind of “theory” which tries something like that is making a logical fallacy. This works in both directions. You can’t explain any kind of natural law with the work of God, as well as you can’t demonstrate that God doesn’t exist.


The second point shows that it’s not the question whether or not someone believes in a certain scientific theory, because its validity is the result of the scientific framework. Not “believing” in a certain theory means omitting any kind of ability to recognize laws in nature and therefore this person leaves the scientific framework. Any kind of argument which follows after this point is subject of my first line of argument.


Now about the debate on creationism: Both of my arguments show that any kind of argument which is brought up by these people is not part of the scientific framework. This means that their arguments don’t matter in a scientific discussion. But it also means that you’ll never be able to use purely scientific arguments if you want to debate with them. Someone who isn’t convinced that we’re able to recognize laws in nature will never be convinced by scientific arguments, simply because he doesn’t believe them.

In my opinion the only thing you can try to do is to show, that there are no conflicts between scientific and metaphysical (e.g. religious) views on the world, as long as both sided try to stay within their specific framework. Both sides have completely different premises and thus there is no reason for a conflict. Those conflicts only occur if one side tries to interfere with the other, but as I demonstrated, this is logically false.
Trying to debate this stuff on this level is pretty difficult, since you’re leaving the scientific framework and enter a purely philosophical one and I think this is the reason why this whole debate does not take place on this level. This and also because I think there isn’t much public interest in these kinds of debates. The public tends to direct its attention to the loudest participants and those aren’t often the most competent when it comes to actual discussions.


Anyway, this is my opinion about this whole story. I have to admit that I'm not very comfortable with this post. Firstly because I think I left some important questions unanswered and secondly because I’m not very confident that my English is actually good enough for this topic, in fact I’m pretty sure it isn’t. So, if you don’t understand some of my arguments, please tell me and I’ll try to clarify things. Furthermore I would really like to know how other people think about this debate.

Where to put Australopithecus sediba?

It took me some time to decide what I should do with Australopithecus sediba on this Blog, in the end I decided to concentrate on the aspects I at least know a little bit of, one of them is taxonomy.


I had to reconstruct a bunch of phylogenetic trees in the last few months and I found  some free online tools which enabled me to do this without using any fancy (and expensive) Computer Programs. The only disadvantage of these resources is that they were originally made for molecular data sets. This made my work a little bit more complicated since I had to modify my morphological datasets in a way that these programs were able to work with them. I won’t talk about the exact process right now; instead I want to show you some of the stuff I did with Australopithecus sediba.
First of all, let’s have a look at a classic tree which illustrates the phylogenetic relationships among the genus Homo. I took the tree from Strait et al. (1997) for this particular example:

Strait et al. (1997)

There’s nothing really special about this tree, sure you could discuss whether or not the shown phylogeny represent the true relationships of these fossils, but discussing this stuff always tends to get boring, since you have to look at the characters and you need to discuss the validity of each of them
To make things a little more interesting, I took the character matrix from Strait et al. and included Australopithecus sediba. The characters for Australopithecus sediba were taken from the initial description of this Fossil (Berger et al., 2010). This is the tree you get, when you run this modified matrix through an Analysis:

Same character matrix but with A. sediba.

Sediba ruined everything!
What in the first tree looked like a nice and clear relationship is now collapsed into something completely indifferent.
To make things clear, the taxonomic position of Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis never was pretty clear. In fact, the latter species was established, because the initial hypodigm (the total sum of all fossils which describe a species) of Homo habilis was so diverse in its morphology that it was split up into two separate species. The “new” species was then called Homo rudolfensis. I won’t talk up the exact reasons why this was the case, since it would make this post too long, but I will eventually come back to this topic in another post.


Let’s go back to Australopithecus sediba for the moment. It’s not only that the fossil practically ruins the common taxonomic picture of relationships of early homo, it’s also very young. Right now, Australopithecus sediba is dated at about 1.9 million years, this is very young, if you keep in mind that there are fossils of Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis which are much older then 2 million years. There are also possible fossils from Homo ergaster/erectus which are only slightly younger then the sediba fossils. Now add the about 1.7-1.8 million year old remains from Dmanisi/Georgia to this mess and you can see how complicated this whole story starts to look.
Fortunately the tree I showed you at the beginning of this post isn’t completely useless since it shows that Australopithecus sediba falls somewhere within the relationship of Homo ergaster/erectus, Homo rudolfensis and Homo habilis.


So let’s have look at the possible relationships and the possible consequences of each scenario:






Scenario if A. sediba would share a LCA with the Genus Homo


In this scenario, Australopithecus sediba would share a last common ancestor with the Genus Homo. The only problem which arises from this tree is that you have to discuss what you should do with the Homo rudolfensis and habilis fossils which pre-date the emergence of Australopithecus sediba in the fossil record.






All other scenarios basically ruin our contemporary picture of the Genus Homo:



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Two of the possible relationships if A. sediba would be place somewhere within the Genus Homo

 No matter which scenario we look at, none of them shows the Genus Homo as a monophyletic group. This means that either we have to include Australopithecus sediba within the genus Homo which I’m not very fond of since it would lead to an even weaker definition of it. Or we have to exclude Homo habilis and/or Homo rudolfensis from the genus Homo. The Genus Homo would then begin with Homo ergaster/Homo erectus and everything before that species would be either inside the genus Australopithecus or in a complete new genus.
Personally, I have no Idea what I should make out of this stuff. Right now everything seems to contradict itself and I think we need to have much more knowledge about this certain period of time. This means of course more fossils from this period but also more research on the already known fossils.
What I think we can safely right now is that the emergence of the genus Homo didn’t happen in a gradualistic fashion where one species slowly evolved into the next one. I think what we have here is a series of, possible independent, speciation events. This would explain why we have that many species that look similar to another but who overlap in spatial as well as temporal aspects and whose phylogenetic relationships are completely unclear. I have some more thoughts on this matter and I will write another Post where I go into much more detail. For now, all I can say is that, although Australopithecus sediba completely ruins the contemporary phylogeny, it might help us to really understand what happened back then.








References:
 Berger, L., de Ruiter, D., Churchill, S., Schmid, P., Carlson, K., Dirks, P., Kibii, J. (2010). Australopithecus sediba: A New Species of Homo-Like Australopith from South Africa Science, 328 (5975), 195-204 DOI: 10.1126/science.1184944
Strait, D., Grine, F., Moniz, M. (1997). A reappraisal of early hominid phylogeny Journal of Human Evolution, 32 (1), 17-82 DOI: 10.1006/jhev.1996.0097

Back from Leipzig

Well, the Congress is over and after a very long and very weird train ride, first there was someone who decided to jump in front of another train, which led do a 45 minute delay and after that, some Idiot decided it would be a good Idea to forget his suitcase within the train. And since some other Idiots decided to fly two airplanes into some buildings 10 years ago, a forgotten suitcase in a train is a case for the police. To make a long story short: I arrived in Mainz with a total delay of around two hours yesterday and was as exhausted as I was the days before.

The conference itself was great. I’ll have to admit that I thought I would be able to participate in the discussions there, but I saw pretty quickly that most of the other People there were on a completely different level then I was. This bothered me for quite some time, but then I realised that, as an undergraduate student, I don’t need to know all this stuff by now. So instead of showing off my tremendous knowledge (which I didn’t had) I started to enjoy listening to the stuff other people said and there was a lot of really interesting stuff going on.
In the end, the days in Leipzig were a very exhausting, intimidating and humbling experience, but I’m glad I went there. I saw how much stuff I still need to learn to really understand this field but I also realised that I really want to learn all this stuff. The last days gave me even more motivation to continue my studies so that maybe by the same time next year, I have something to present at the next ESHE Meeting, or somewhere else.
I’ll try to write about some of the stuff I heard in Leipzig within in the next weeks and there’s also this stuff about Australopithecus sediba which I wanted to write. I hope to get this Post done within this week.

At last I want to thank Anna Barros and Tracy Kivell who were both kind enough to answer a bunch of my questions and listened to some of my weirder thoughts during the Poster session on Friday.

Eric in Leipzig: Lessons from the first day

Scientific congresses are, especially if you're a little student a place to learn a lot of new stuff. So far I learned the following lessons:

1st Lesson: Don't be cheap.

I wanted to save 12,50€ for an addional night in a bed in a cheap hostel and decided to arrive at Leipzig the day the conference started. Only Problem: The conference started at 10am. This forced me to spend my night in a train, which lead to the nice fact, that I had around 1 hour of sleep in the night from Wednesday to Thursday.

2nd Lesson: Don't attend to a course on geometric morphometrics when you're deprived of sleep.

Lesson 1 leads directly to Lessen 2. I remember some of the stuff that was mentioned in this course yesterday but the most parts of it, and I think those were the more important parts, I forgot about five minutes after they were told.

3rd Lesson: Speak more english!

I think that I understand english fairly well, be it spoken or written. I think I'm also able to write in english in a at least partially understandable way. But my spoken english is abyssimmal. I have next to zero practice in speaking english and therefore my pronounciation is just bad and unsophistacated. And as you might guess, it's pretty hard to ask intelligent questions if hearing yourself speaking gives you nausea.

Well, those are the lessons I learned yesterday. I also learned something anthropological, but nothing of it is related to this congress and besides, I learn something about Anthropology almost all the time.

Let's see what interesting stuff happens today.

P.S.: I'm pretty sure, the english in this post isn't very good as well. But please keep in mind that it's around 7am and I'm still a little bit tired.

Sediba Post: Status report

I said I was going to write something about Australopithecus sediba, and believe it or not, I still intend to. However there were two things which mainly kept me from doing so within the last weeks:

1. Time:
In the last two weeks, my studies kept me from doing anything related to A. sediba other then reading the papers.

2. My Head:
To make things worse, I got a really good Idea what I can do with this fossil. There's something really neat which I wanted to demonstrate for quite a long time now, and I think the sediba fossils are the perfect objects for this little project. However I will need some time to prepare this post properly.

And at last, I'm about to go to Leipzig at Wednesday evening, where I will have the pleasure of walking around on a scientific congress until sunday. So don't expect something related to Australpithecus sediba until next week, but I might write something about this congress if I find something interesting.

Until then, why not read something about Australopithecus sediba at "Lawn Chair Anthropology"?

Australopithecus sediba: First (small) information dump

I didn't had enough time to completely dig through all the information towards Australipithecus sediba, but I intend to do so tomorrow. Until then, why not heare some words about Australopithecus sediba by some people who are far more competent then I am?

For example, you can read/hear an Interview with Lee Berger on the Science Podcast: Right here

Or you can read/hear an Interview with Lee Berger and Bernard Wood at NPR: Over there

The slump is over!

(well, at least kind of...)

Sometimes it's funny how things turn out in the end. Just as I'm about to finish the Assignment that ate up all my further interest in anything even remotely related to science so I could get started to get back into maintaining this Blog, Science released a bunch of Papers regarding Autralpoithecus sediba. This species was first announced last year, an announcement I somehow completely ignored back then, probably because the authors didn't put any effort into making some waky claims that could've set me up.
Anyway, I haven't looked much into the articles but I intend to do so within the next few days and report on what I think about them.

And since I have a little more time at my hands, I'll try to write about some of the other stuff that circles in head as well.