Spirited biologist PZ Myers recently debated Geoffrey Simmons, a clueless twit who seems to know almost nothing about evolution and yet has written an anti-evolution book titled What Darwin Didn’t Know.

PZ posts about the "debate" here:

I was shocked for a moment when, after I’d mentioned the recent discovery of Indohyus, he went on to claim that there were no intermediates between that deer-like artiodactyl and modern whales … and when I tried to mention Pakicetus, Ambulocetus, Rhodcetus, Basilosaurus, etc., he seemed to have never heard of them, claimed his information came from a Scientific American article some months ago (way to plumb the depths of the scientific literature, Dr Simmons!), and then started making up stuff about them not exhibiting dorsoventral flexion in swimming, and not having dorsal blowholes. He wrote a whole book about "Billions of missing links"! His other book, What Darwin Didn’t Know, needs to be retitled in a new edition, What Geoffrey Simmons Doesn’t Know. It will be a very large book.

Fortunately the radio station provides online access to its audio archives, so you can listen to the good Dr Simmons swallowing his tongue as PZ politely tears him to pieces.

PZ has always come off as pretty forthright on his blog, so I was quite surprised at his softly spoken manner and the admirable restraint he showed during the debate. He could have easily added the words "…you idiot" to the end of everything he said, and I still think it would have been a fair exchange.

If you think Dr Simmons is getting a raw deal here, bear in mind he claims to have studied evolution for 40 years and understand it well enough to call out huge problems with it (having written at least two books claiming everyone else has it wrong) yet he appears unaware of the current state of the literature and offers no evidence or suggested mechanism for any alternative theory. He keeps harping on his point that no one is allowed to question Darwin’s evolution, even though there is significant debate within the field of biology on the details and mechanisms at work, and evolution belongs no more to Darwin than gravity does to Newton or Einstein. Simmons deserves about as much respect as someone standing in the middle of the room shouting about how maths is pointless and doesn’t explain anything.

Below the fold is a transcript of Intelligent Design fans listening to their champion go down in flames. Sooooo delicious :) It is provided here in the spirit of fair use, and also because it was disappeared from the where it was originally posted (ie they deleted it because they were embarrassed by it).

____________________

I’m listening right now. Dr Simmons just responded to PZM, which I only heard near the end, to inform us that he was a committed evolutionist for 40 years and does not believe in the Bible or Christianity, but changed his mind due to evidence he’s seen as a physician.

He’s forcefully answering PZM as I type about transitional fossils.

…

PZM just accused Simmons of making stuff up.

PZ caught Dr. Simmons over the pakicetus and ambuloucetus (spelling?) fossils. Made him look a little underinformed (especially for someone who wrote a book on missing links.)

The Mary Jane West-Eberhard book Myers referenced is on Google books - the Gaps and Inconsistencies portion is online here

…

Atom, PZM missed Simmons point - he didn’t have the names handy, but mentioned a recent article in Scientific American which he claimed buttressed his point, the specific names notwithstanding.

I heard Dr. Simmons’ response; the point is how he made Dr. Simmons look…Dr. Simmons is asking him for reading recommendations and PZ is coming off as more knowledgable in the areas they’re discussing…

Just my perception.

My running response to this debate:

PZ - What a critical start.

SIMmons - Discusses “diff btw man and monkey” brings out timing issues of transition of birth. I suspect chimps also have precision timing. While this may be a serious issue w/ placentals, I don’t see the separation btw humans and chimps here.

PZ - challenges that ID has no positive case.

PZ blows away SIM on whale fossils. PZ mentions specific “intermediate” whale fossils, SIM is unaware of the names of the 5 to 10 transitionals that is claimed — shame! Frustrating as this is SIM’s area of publication, and SIM brought it up.

PZ - recommends West-Eberhard, “Developmental Plasticity and Evolution”. PZ expresses specific respect for the fact that she “recommends alternative explanations” rather than saying anything about “god did it”. I personally reject PZ’s opinion that the only valid falsification of NDE is an alternative positive theory. As a valid scientific theory, NDE must be independantly falsifiable w/o a need for a replacement theory.

SIM - Brain too complex for evolvability.

PZ - “Brain is experimental” Brain is “perfect analog of natural selection”.

PZ - “What is difference btw human and chimp brain”, Only difference is in volume, in magnitude.

SIM - Produced no serious response to PZ on this. Ooooh. This guy is a medic! He throws in some snip about 180 degrees different between chimps and man.

PZ - Closes w/ brain evolution. Suggests that Simmons presented no “true” facts.

The topic question “Is Darwinism Religion” was truly not discussed.

If I had to use this debate to judge the validity of NeoDarwinism, I would be a Darwinist. Simmons is a terrible dissappointment. I shall pass on his books, though they haven’t been on my short list.

PZ’s gems:

“We do debate evolution a lot of time”

“You know nothing about the field”

“We know quite a bit about how the brain developed”

I’m with you bFast, I was disappointed by Dr. Simmons’ arguments and performance and think PZ easily won the debate.

Oh well, hopefully they’ll choose someone else for the anti-Darwin side next time…(Sorry Dr. Simmons!)

The Mary Jane West-Eberhard book Myers referenced…

Simmons should have pointed out that PZ was still censoring a viewpoint a priori, the view that a story/history of “evolution” is not applicable and therefore one need not to try to imagine one against known facts.

After all, what is the problem with admitting that a chain of natural history leads back to a singularity or that there is an uncaused cause in the present or the past that breaks apart a story or history rooted in naturalism? If naturalism is false in any instance then why must all be forced to try to imagine false stories against known facts?

Note that someone who admits that singularities, intelligence or some type of uncaused cause need not be censored even if it does form a gap in naturalism can see both secondary natural causes and their origins in singularities or acts of intelligent choice. It’s those who try to prop up a metaphoric Blind Watchmaker who have to make themselves blind to anything but a history that seems “natural” to them. Yet what is so dangerous about admitting that history is not an unbroken chain and why must the idea be censored? What if it is a dangerous idea that would stop progress and lead back to the “Dark Ages” which is true?

atom, Good point. If Simmons is going to use whale transitions in anti-darwinian talking points, due diligence requires he be able to express why PZM’s cited examples are insufficient to counter his claim. He seemed to generally hint at lack of blow holes, but wasn’t very forceful.

Just a suggestion…

What you guys might want to consider doing is address any of debate topics discussed that might have been perceived as being “won” by PZ.

I think that is something that might be helpful to lurkers who may have listened to the debate and are curious about what additional information Simmons could have brought to the table.

I’m with you bFast, I was disappointed by Dr. Simmons’ arguments and performance and think PZ easily won the debate.

The ID movement is wasting its time and resources, in my opinion. This ID vs. evolution fight will never be won with either debates, arguments, brochures, web sites or what have you. The opposition has a propaganda machine that is impervious to this strategy. If public debates and discussions are the best that we can do, I’m afraid we have lost the war before it has even started.

ID needs a BIG EVENT. It needs something that will get everybody (laymen and experts alike) to stand up and take notice, something that will quickly and decisively nullify the enemy’s defences. I don’t see these endless debates and arguments making a dent in their armor. They’re stronger than ever.

Education and arguments are nice but they will only be effective after we’re on top, not before. Sorry to sound so negative but that’s the way I see it at the moment.

*of [the] debate…typo queen.*

BTW, I’ve not listened to the debate yet…probably will. But, after reading this thread, it appears that I can look forward to becoming phyically ill afterward.

“We know quite a bit about how the brain developed”

You may say that these are gems sarcastically but he basically got away with passing them off as real, mainly because he could get away with assuming or imagining that his form of knowledge is the total truth or all the truth that matters. Given that his philosophy of knowledge wasn’t challenged the only response is: “Well, no we don’t know that much about it.” to which he will reply: “Well then get out of the way and let us progress on to more knowledge, naturally as scientists we’re working on it and stuff.”

Why not reply: “No, you don’t know quite a bit about how the brain developed, you’re just imagining stories about what you think you know based on natural selection. What is actually observed given our knowledge of the brain is intelligence at work, except in your case.” Or: “What is actually observed and known is that natural selection does not apply to man now, even Dawkins has admitted this, so why should we imagine that it always applied in all brains in the past?” Etc. You have to attack based on knowledge instead of sitting around waiting to point out a gap in knowledge assuming that the Darwinian way of imagining things about organisms is true.

Good idea FtK

One area that came up was the complexity of the brain.

I understood PZ to say that the details evolution of the brain were well known.
(Does anyone know of any brain fossils?)

Simmons pointed out the numerous proteins required (30?) for just one part, implying irreducible complexity or the difficulty of that all coming together by natural causes.

cf Dr. Howard Glicksman discusses vision:
Part V: Vision Part 2 –The Retina

Part VI: Vision Part 3 – What Does the Brain See?

A opthamologist technician mentioned the incredible accuracy of directing the optic nerves to the two halves of the brain.

I very quickly read someone’s post that says that Simmons was a-religious and a Darwinist most of his life. This all changed when he started looking into Darwinism.

With this background, and based on Simmon’s style of argumentation, it appears that Simmon’s was simply naive enough to think that if he pointed out to PZMeyers how “unlikely” it was that all these trillions of neural connections should come about through trial and error in only 150,000 years, that PZMeyers would say: “Oh, gee, I never looked at it that way,” and the debate would be over. Simmons is a reasonable man; because he’s reasonable, when inconvenient facts came to his attention, he changed his way of thinking; he’s made the mistake of thinking Darwinists are reasonable men and women, just simply under-informed. I would think that today was a learning experience for him.

For FtK’s request:
The Evolution of the long-necked giraffe: What Do We Really Know? - Dr. Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig

As for the whales lack of transitions, you could probably find some info on any young earth creation site. (BTW, ID wouldn’t necessarily argue that whales didn’t evolve from land-based creatures - only that the coordinated changes needed were not the result of random variation and environmental pruning.)

Atom:
“PZ mentions specific “intermediate” whale fossils, SIM is unaware of the names of the 5 to 10 transitionals that is claimed — shame! Frustrating ”
Perhaps but every transitional claim is dubious from the start once you understand the way they are decided to be deemed “transitionals”.

You must assume Darwinism is true in order to call anything a transitional! “Looks like this and that, therefore is a transitional between this and that” is a clear logical fallacy. (Undistributed Middle)
Unfortunately the majority of people never figure that out.

You can take ANY proclaimed transitional and undo it’s transitional status w/o much fuss - just using logic and the facts. And one of the facts is that, according to Darwinism, there ought to be millions and millions of clear transitionals. There aren’t.

“PZ easily won the debate.”
Thankfully “winning” a debate does not the truth make.

The flat-earthers of old no doubt often “won” debates against the less informed and less debate-able round-earthers.

I think that is something that might be helpful to lurkers who may have listened to the debate and are curious about what additional information Simmons could have brought to the table.

All additional information would be treated as ignorance for as long as the philosophy and narrative behind PZ’s views is left alone. It would fit these little narratives:

“We do know quite a bit.”

“No you don’t, see how this information over here doesn’t fit what you think you know.”

“You’re trying to stop us from progressing towards knowledge, if you want progress then you should help make it fit or get out of our way.”

“Well, here’s another big problem.”

“We’re still progressing, besides you didn’t know what you were talking about last time.”

“But you actually didn’t know what you were talking about either. After all, how could you have just made progress towards better knowledge if you weren’t wrong or ignorant back then?”

“I am right about progress so it doesn’t matter when I’m wrong, that’s the beauty of it!”

At some point empirical facts and bits of knowledge do make a difference, yet given the hypothetical goo typical to Darwinian reasoning and the way it is woven into a mythology of progress empirical facts will not make as much difference as they should.

Borne,

“You must assume Darwinism is true in order to call anything a transitional!”

No wonder anti-evolutionists say there are no transitional forms.

DLH: I understood PZ to say that the details evolution of the brain were well known.

Myers is lying, of course. He can get away with lying in a public debate because he comes off as being knowledgeable. The fact is that evolution cannot explain why the hemispheres are crisscrossed. This is an extremely over-complicated architecture with no survival value. Besides, there are no missing links with a non-crisscrossed architecture. Heck, evolution cannot explain why animals need two hemispheres in the first place let alone why they are organized in such a weird manner. After all, roboticists do not design double neural networks in the brains of their robots. Finally, evolution does not explain why humans “evolved” their inordinate infatuation with music and the arts. There are so many aspects of the brain that defy an evolutionary explanation that it’s hard to fathom how anybody with a modicum of honesty would fall for this nonsense.

Like I said previously, we are not going to win this war with honest arguments. If arguments could do it, it would have done it already. The enemy is fighting a political war, not a scientific one. They will lie as often as they have to. They are well equipped for it. Myers is a skilled and consummate liar, in my opinion.

Borne, you quoted bFast with my name.

As for your point on transitions, sure you can put any collection of items into a transitional sequence whether they are related by descent or not. (Scott Adams makes this point in “God’s Debris” using tea china as an example.) So there are always at least two ways of looking at any collection.

The relevant issue, however, is which view makes more sense? Is the transition a clear one, with complete skeletons, showing all different lines of morphology transitioning in the correct sequence to a relatively smooth progression? If so, I’d say that descent with modification is the best view, even if the mechanism of that modification is up for debate.

As for my personal preference, the “transitions” are not very smooth (the fossil record has a very jerky appearance in general with sudden appearance and stasis being the general trend) even for the supposed best examples (horse, giraffe, whale, hominid.) When you look in detail at these transitions (as Lonnig did in the linked article above) you usually end up finding the usual Darwinist bluster and extreme extrapolation from limited data points.

The Scubaredneck

Borne said:

You must assume Darwinism is true in order to call anything a transitional! “Looks like this and that, therefore is a transitional between this and that” is a clear logical fallacy. (Undistributed Middle)
Unfortunately the majority of people never figure that out.

Scubaredneck responds:

While similarity does not necessarily imply relatedness (it could be an example of convergence), I don’t believe that an argument that similar critters might be transitional necessarily commits an Undistributed Middle fallacy. It may very well be wrong but that doesn’t mean it’s fallacious.

The ONLY difference is in volume, in magnitude? Heck, I don’t spend as much time keeping up with research in that area and even I know that is proving not to be the case.

http://biology.plosjournals.or…..0&ct=1

For one thing, a big brain is a metabolic drain on our bodies. Indeed, some people argue that, because the brain is one of the most metabolically expensive tissues in our body, our brains could only have expanded in response to an improved diet. Another cost that goes along with a big brain is the need to reorganise its wiring. “As brain size increases, several problems are created”, explains systems neurobiologist Jon Kaas (Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, United States). “The most serious is the increased time it takes to get information from one place to another.” One solution is to make the axons of the neurons bigger but this increases brain size again and the problem escalates. Another solution is to do things locally: only connect those parts of the brain that have to be connected, and avoid the need for communication between hemispheres by making different sides of the brain do different things. A big brain can also be made more efficient by organising it into more subdivisions, “rather like splitting a company into departments”, says Kaas. Overall, he concludes, because a bigger brain per se would not work, brain reorganisation and size increase probably occurred in parallel during human brain evolution. The end result is that the human brain is not just a scaled-up version of a mammal brain or even of an ape brain.
….
As far as understanding how our brains evolved, more questions remain than have been answered. One problem is that we don’t really know enough about how our brains differ from those of other mammals and primates, although work by Zilles and others is helping here. We also know very little about how the areas of our brain are physically linked up, and we need to understand that before we can see how we differ from our nearest relatives. And as far as identifying the gene changes that were selected during evolution, although we have several candidates, we don’t know how or if these gene variants affect our cognitive abilities. It is one thing, concludes Dunbar, to identify genetic or anatomic differences between human and ape brains, but quite another to know what they mean in terms of actual cognitive processes.

Then there’s Homo florensiensis with its apparently full cognitive abilities despite decreased volume. “It’s not the volume, but the wiring…University of California at San Diego studied MRI scans of 24 monkeys and apes and 10 humans, and found that the frontal cortex, the supposed seat of human wisdom and understanding, was not proportionally larger than expected for a primate of our stature. This undermines the [hypothesis] that an enlargement of the frontal lobe is what gives humans the capacity for increased cognition and intelligence.”

Also, when I read the work of actual researchers I don’t get the impression that “we know quite a bit about how the brain developed.” Usually I see references to the huge problems that must be overcome by Darwinian processes.

I personally would love to see the topic of simiarities and differences between human and chimp brains, as well as a serious, humble, view of science’s debth of knowledge of brains discussed here. Albiet, I would like to see a genuine expert present the data.

I suspect that the differences between human and chimp brains are vastly more significant than PZ makes them out to be. I note, for instance, the HAR1F gene that is rock stable throughout mammals, yet is different in 18 bps in humans. I find the HAR1F to be inexplicable within a neo-Darwinan framework.

I agree with FtK - the Discovery Institute should put out a transcript of the debate with notes rebutting the lies of the atheist PZ Meyers.

Patrick and bFast,

In my study of the brain’s memory system, I have discovered that the human mind can do amazing things that cannot be explained by neuroscience. These are things that the mind can do with ease that are nevertheless biologically impossible. Human episodic memory can instantly record and reliably play back any short random sensory sequence up to the capacity and duration of working memory. What makes this amazing is the random nature of the sequence. This randomness is also apparent in our ability to instantly conceptualize (i.e., imagine) new random sequences at ease. Why is this biologically impossible? The reason is that instantaneous random memory access is physically achievable only on a fast computer. To access a memory node or neuron, the brain has to grow an axon and a synapse and make a physical connection with the neuron. This is a time consuming process. It cannot explain episodic memory.

I believe that this random access capability of humans is what makes us superior to animals, not the size of our brain. If brain size was the only thing that accounted for the superiority human intelligence, there is no reason that a dog could not be conditioned to learn chess or checkers even at the beginner level. Dogs certainly have enough neurons and they are certainly plenty intelligent in the things that they do. They can’t learn chess because the range of instant associations that they can make is limited by the wiring of their brains. Humans are not so handicapped.

But it gets even more interesting than this. Some savants can remember every sensory sequence perfectly including what they were thinking and feeling at the time. There is no possible way that a neural network, even with the capacity of the human brain, can record its own state moment to moment. There is something awesome, miraculous even, going on in the human brain that materialists and evolutionists cannot even begin to explain, their vociferous protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

vesf:

I agree with FtK - the Discovery Institute should put out a transcript of the debate with notes rebutting the lies of the atheist PZ Meyers.

In my opinion we should just close our eyes and pretend that this debate never happened.

Mapou, “I believe that this random access capability of humans is what makes us superior to animals, not the size of our brain.” It would be interesting to test whether animals have this random access capability. I bet they do. Animals have proven time and time again that their mental and emotional capacity is much greather than we have given them credit for.

On savants, well, this is an intriguing topic, and an intriguing challenge to NDE. There is one guy running around right now that can do math beyond belief. Further, he challenged that he could learn any language within a week. They stuck him up in Iceland for a week. At the end of the week he was interviewed on Icelandic national television where he demonstrated a rich ability to dialog in Icelandic. Absolutely amazing. What makes it the most amazing, however, is that this ability is the direct result of a brain injury as a child. What up wi dat.

Further, they took mouses, and killed an gene. The resultant mouses were significantly stronger, faster and smarter than their peers. How on earth does NDE create or maintain superior abilities that are governed down. Why would the governor gene just mutate to death producing super-mice? I cannot for the life of me put my NDE hat on (it works pretty good) and understand this.

I think people may be taking this debate a bit harder than they really should. Even if Dr. Simmons came off looking bad, interactions like these are always instructive at the very least. Identify Myers’ criticisms, determine which of them where valid, which of them were invalid, which of them were misunderstood, etc.

Some people simply aren’t cut out for debating, while others are. I’ve not read Dr. Simmons’ books, but to compare, I would never have expected Dinesh D’Souza to be as extremely capable as he is in debate by his opnion articles. Ask yourself if there were better responses to Myers’ claims than were presented by Simmons, and if Simmons did not make strong points he otherwise could have. If the answer is ‘yes’ to both of these, in a way you should be celebrating.

Then again, I’m an optimist.

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