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By Martin Goldstein, February 2, 2010 7:07 am

This is all from Ebonmusing. It is a addressed to Creationists but essentially Aish HaTorah and Chabad, Kiruv.com and all the other outreach manufacturing plants practice a form of sophisticated Creationist voodoo.

In his 1983 book The Intelligent Universe, astronomer Fred Hoyle wrote the following infamous passage:

“A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.” (p.19)

Though Hoyle actually intended this as an argument against abiogenesis, the creationists have since assimilated it and used it against evolution. In creationist literature, this argument has mutated into a diversity of forms: setting off an explosion in a print shop to produce a dictionary, disassembling a watch and shaking up the pieces in a box to reassemble it, and so on, building a bicycle by applying a blowtorch to a pile of bicycle parts, and so on. No matter what form the analogy takes, however, creationists have promoted it as a common-sense proof of the impossibility of evolution producing complex, highly ordered forms. There is even a creationist book titled Tornado in a Junkyard.

This essay will show that this analogy is not an accurate representation of how evolution (or, for that matter, abiogenesis) works. In fact, it is a straw man, a ridiculous caricature that bears no resemblance to what the theory actually says. However, it is first helpful to establish a few things about the credentials of its author. Fred Hoyle was an astronomer, and whatever the validity of his professional opinions on astronomy, he was not trained in biology, paleontology, genetics, or any other field having to do with evolution. He was no more qualified to make pronouncements about evolution than any layman, and indeed his comments demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of the theory. Nevertheless, whatever he was, he was certainly not a creationist.

“The creationist is a sham religious person who, curiously, has no true sense of religion. In the language of religion, it is the facts we observe in the world around us that must be seen to constitute the words of God. Documents, whether the Bible, Qur’an or those writings that held such force for Velikovsky, are only the words of men. To prefer the words of men to those of God is what one can mean by blasphemy. This, we think, is the instinctive point of view of most scientists who, curiously again, have a deeper understanding of the real nature of religion than have the many who delude themselves into a frenzied belief in the words, often the meaningless words, of men. Indeed, the lesser the meaning, the greater the frenzy, in something like inverse proportion.”
–Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Our Place in the Cosmos (1993), p.14

“We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia…. Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today…. Darwin’s theory, which is now accepted without dissent, is the cornerstone of modern biology. Our own links with the simplest forms of microbial life are well-nigh proven.”
–Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Lifecloud: The Origin of Life in the Universe (1978), p.15-16

We turn now to the tornado in the junkyard. This analogy says nothing about the validity of evolution, or for that matter abiogenesis, because it fails to represent them in four crucial ways.

1. It operates purely according to random chance.
2. It is an example of single-step, rather than cumulative, selection.
3. It is a saltationary jump – an end product entirely unlike the beginning product.
4. It has a target specified ahead of time.

The first point is the most important. The tornado in the junkyard is an example of an intricate, complex and highly organized form being produced by nothing more than random chance. But evolution is not chance. (See this article for more on this.) Rather, it operates according to a fixed law – the law of natural selection – which favors some assemblages over others; it preferentially selects for those adaptations which improve fitness and selects against those that do not. The tornado, by contrast, slams parts together and tears them apart with no preference whatsoever, thus completely failing to represent natural selection, the central force which drives evolution. To more accurately represent evolution, one would have to grant the tornado some power to recognize assemblages of parts which could serve as part of a 747 and prevent it from tearing them apart.

Second, the tornado analogy is an example of single-step selection – in one step, it goes from a random pile of parts to a fully assembled airliner. This is completely unlike evolution, which operates according to a process of cumulative selection – complex results that are built up gradually, in a repetitive process guided at each step by selective forces. To more accurately represent evolution, the tornado could be sent through the junkyard not once, but thousands or millions of times, at each step preserving chance assemblages of parts that could make up a jumbo jet.

Third, in relation to the point above, the tornado in the junkyard is an example of saltation – a sudden leap in which the end product is completely different from the beginning product. Evolution does not work this way; birds do not hatch out of dinosaur eggs and monkeys do not give birth to humans. Rather, species grow different over time through a process of slow change in which each new creature is only slightly different from its ancestor. Evolution forms a gradually shading continuum in which any two steps are almost identical, though the creatures at the beginning and end of the continuum may be very different indeed. If we sent a tornado through a junkyard once, we would not expect to see a complete airplane; but if we repeated the process thousands or millions of times, at each step preserving useful assemblages, we might see a jumbo jet gradually taking shape out of slowly accreting collections of parts. The idea is the same with living things. We do not see complex new creatures appearing suddenly in the fossil record; rather, we see them gradually forming by a process of modification from a line of increasingly dissimilar ancestors.

Finally, the tornado analogy fails to represent evolution in one more significant way: it has a target specified ahead of time. Evolution does not. Natural selection is not a forward-looking process; it cannot select for what may become useful in the future, only what is immediately useful in the present. To more accurately represent evolution, we might add the additional stipulation that the tornado be allowed to assemble, not just a jumbo jet, but any functional piece of machinery.

A tornado racing through a junkyard hundreds of thousands of times, at each step somehow preserving rather than tearing apart functional assemblages of parts, with the aim of ultimately producing some sort of working machine, be it a 747, a station wagon or a personal computer – this is still not a very good analogy to describe evolution, but it is far better than the implausible caricature of random, single-step saltation with a predetermined target the creationists put forth. This analogy completely fails to represent evolution in every significant way.

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By Martin Goldstein, January 30, 2010 8:38 pm

Why do rational people lie to themselves?

I am happy if you wish to read the original Aish HaTorah article on the Design Argument. I am equally happy if you don’t.

Imagine, if you will, that you are walking in a bad neighbourhood where the houses are neglected, there is a lack of education, and a lot of dangerous gangs. You suddenly come across two small stones in close proximity to each other. Most probably, you would think nothing of it unless you needed one of the stones for a particular purpose, perhaps to defend yourself from someone. Two stones randomly sitting beside each other is not such a big deal. No need to sweat it.

You continue your stroll through the neighbourhood and stumble upon three piles of human corpses piled up in a brick-layer fashion. Chances are you would quickly surmise that someone was here and arranged these bodies in this manner. It didn’t just happen. A shock for sure but still really no big deal and nothing to sweat about.

You continue your walk and happen to find a dead puffin lying in the middle of the road. Would you suspect that a windstorm somehow threw the puffin pieces together and randomly created a puffin?

Somebody gave birth to that puffin. It didn’t just happen. A creature implies a mother.

Alternatively, say you didn’t see a puffin at all but instead you came across a Patek Phillipe watch, say model 4907/ij. You will surely notice that it celebrates the 10-year triumph of the famous Twenty~4® collection. Patek Philippe was likely not involved in the design of this model directly and it was probably the work of many different people having different levels of expertise – certainly not just one designer! You already know, just by looking at the complexity of this watch that it had more than one designer to deal with the different aspects of functionality, colour and style. You would also know that there would be a marketing section of the Patek Phillipe company that would be on the look out for trends to determine what styles would likely do well with high end consumers. They would have also had an enormous impact on the look of this particular model.

By handling this watch and examining it you might then ponder as to whether it would work as an analogy for the design of the universe proving that God is One – an Indivisible Creator. You would realize that the watch proved nothing of the sort but rather it might “prove” that the universe – even if it could be analogous to a watch at all, and that is not likely – was designed by several gods, some involved with creating the suns, some determining which animals would exist (and which would uselessly become extinct), some involved with answering the petitions of Olympic curlers, and some designing the potato bug.

You would note that the universe bespeaks timeless elegance, the new model universe in yellow gold would be the first unset version without a diamond-set case. You would note that three color choices are available for the universe: “Night Glow” and “Autumn Brown” – two hues created especially for this yellow-gold universe – and, of course, the endearingly classic “Timeless White“. If you bought into the design argument you would expect to have a selection of universes to pick from perhaps.

Did the universe have a designer or group of designers that must have also been designed ad infinitum?

David Hume may I say is calling?

The intricacy of design in our world, when intoxicated, is staggering — infinitely more complex than a gang related pile of corpses in a bad neighbourhood, a puffin or a Patek Phillipe watch. Therefore the team of designers for the universe must have been considerable and who could have afforded to pay them all in this economy?

Now I am going to commence to use really large numbers to give you a sense of being a little out of control. Here goes: There are 10 billion nerve cells in the brain. Each of the 10 billion cells sprouts between 10,000 to 100,000 fibers to contact other nerve cells in the brain, creating approximately 1,000 million million connections, or, 10 to the 15th power. Are you shvitzing?

Here I come now with some really enormous numbers. Serious serious numbers. Behold! There are 10 billion nerve cells in the brain with approximately 1,000 million million connections.

It is hard to imagine the multitude that 1015 represents. On and on I go. Take half of the United States, which is 1 million square miles, and imagine it being covered by forest, with 10,000 trees per square mile. On each of the 10,000 trees, which are on each of the one million square miles, there are 100,000 leaves. That is a whizbang bulbous amount of leaves. I take it you are still with me and feeling the groove of the number thing I am doing to your head. You see sir, that’s how many connections are smashed inside your brain. And they’re not just haphazardly thrown together by an impostor God or a monkey washing a cat. They form an incredibly intricate network system that has no parallel in the military industrial complex or in the other brands of universes that have been designed by other manufacturers.

Imagine walking by that in the seedy neighbourhood! The natural response when perceiving design of such mind-boggling complexity is to conclude that there must be a huge team of busy, possibly amoral, designers, behind everything that created this model of universe. Not to mention the team of designers that created the team that designed the team that designed the universe that you may be wearing on your wrist right now.

To be continued…

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By Martin Goldstein, January 2, 2010 2:51 pm

Governor General Michaëlle Jean on a Woman’s Intrinsic Right to Pass Gas

For Governor General Michaëlle Jean, denying more than half of the world’s population the most basic human right to flatulence is one of the worst scandals of our time. This is what has inspired her determination to break down the wall of indifference and give a voice to women.

She believes that flatulence—at home, in our neighbourhoods, in our communities—is one of the basic rights that are all too often abused where women are concerned, even in our so-called progressive societies. That is why she has made flatulence for women a priority in her mandate. It is also a commitment that stems from her years spent working with women and children who had suffered through many forms of flatulence suppression, which led her to help establish a network of shelters for them.

In her view, the struggle for flatulence equality is not just a woman’s struggle; it is the struggle of every person who demands respect, justice and dignity. She strongly believes that we have everything to gain when we give women the means to expel gas. “Empower women,” Her Excellency states, “and you will see a decrease in poverty, illiteracy, illness and gas build up.”

Women’s Historical Struggle for the Right to Pass Gas

It has been well known for centuries that retaining flatus is bad for the health. Emperor Claudius even passed a law legalizing the passing of gas at banquets out of his compassionate concern for people’s health and his reliance and fear of the ruthless and flatulent women of the imperial family.

There are some conservative doctors (those who do not believe in global warming) that confidently state that there is no medical harm caused when a woman retains her flatus, either through a desire to avoid embarrassment or through patriarchal pressure. These politically motivated doctors state that holding your gases in will not poison women as they are a natural component of a woman’s intestinal contents.

These doctors, who listen to a lot of talk radio and did not vote for Obama, are not concerned if a woman develops a stomach ache due to the gas pressure. They care not that pathological distention of the bowel could result if a person holds in gas too much. They are indifferent to the fact that retaining flatus can cause hemorrhoids!

Flatulence is an Argument from Design

The level of flatulence in nature implies that there must be a creator God. We must explain how we think the gassy world in which we live came into existence. Naturalists (atheists, or materialists) would argue that since flatulence is able to enter our world it is possible for chance collisions of molecules to produce farts.

But such an explanation has many problems. For instance, although farts are free to enter the system of our world, what mechanism connects these gasses to the work of ordering chaotic molecules into the precise, complex order needed for a satisfying experience of passing gas? Organizing matter into meaningful structures and the relative proportions of these gases that emerge from our anal opening depend on several factors: what we ate, how much air we swallowed, what kinds of bacteria we have in our intestines, and how long we hold in the fart. Random arrangements accomplish nothing. And randomly assembled molecules cannot evolve into farts because they lack the ability to replicate themselves. The whole complex mechanism involved in DNA and protein synthesis would be required before natural selection could ever come into play. Theists argue that such complexity of flatulence could only arise as the direct result of intervention by someone with purpose and intelligence.

Suppose we put some dynamite under a flatulent person, and blew it up. The system contains sufficient fart energy and the correct building blocks to build the Taj-Mahal. But is it really likely that blowing the bricks up would have this result? The answer is obviously no but this is a distraction from the main theme of this article.

For more information on Women’s Rights, Flatulence and the Argument from Design check here, here, here, and here.

Women Empowered: No More Will We Retain Our Flatus!