“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” - Alberto Brandolini, January 2013, From Wikipedia.
Creationism is an exercise in grievances and science denial.
Science denialists are all about their grievances. Flat earthers voice their distrust of NASA. Anti-vaxxers point a finger at public health officials and the pharmaceutical industry. Climate change deniers heap blame on various environmental, government and scientific institutions. Science denialists build silos of blogs, Facebook groups and You Tube channels where they congregate with like-minded compatriots to feed one another a regular diet of conspiracy, outrage, personal affronts, and misinformation to keep these grievances alive.
All of this is borne out of the grievance of feeling disenfranchised, of not being taken seriously, of being misunderstood, of their perception of being misrepresented. Some these grievances have merit but most are either imagined or overblown. Science denial as such is not a confrontation grounded in any substantive discussion of the evidence but rather in clashes of identity and the threat that science poses to some deeply held but narrow religious, ideological, political and economic positions.
Creationists who reject the well-supported scientific consensus on evolution and common ancestry are science deniers. This is especially true of young earth creationists who believe in a narrow fundamentalist interpretation of the Judeo-Christian Bible which says the entirety of the universe is a mere 6,000 or so years old and that about 4,000 or so years ago Noah and his family gathered every terrestrial animal on the planet in a wooden ark to ride out a global flood sent by God to punish the wicked. They believe that the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible created organisms de novo by divine fiat and genealogically independent of one another. Modern organisms are therefore either a descendant of those animals that Noah gave refuge to on the ark or the descendants of those that somehow otherwise survived the flood.
As articles of religious conviction these beliefs are fine. My own values are deeply rooted in many of the Christian traditions I absorbed growing up. I’m not one of the so-called “militant atheists” wishing to purge society of all faith and I have great respect and often admiration for many religious traditions and the place they have in human cultures. There can be enormous value to religious faith in society just as many human endeavors outside of scientific inquiry from art to literature to philosophy have value. I am however opposed to the representation of religious beliefs as something they are not and the agenda of many fundamentalist faiths to impose their beliefs on others. Many Christians would view a literal interpretation of Genesis as theologically unnecessary; but this is in the realm of another discussion largely outside my wheelhouse. As science however the claims of a young earth creationist are complete nonsense.
However, given that these religious fundamentalists must occupy a modern world that values science and views scientific support as a mark of credibility they have entered into this awkward juxtaposition of their religious beliefs and science known as scientific creationism. The scientific creationist tends to downplay what any fair-minded observer would see as the overt religious confirmation basis underlying their claims and attempts to distract a largely friendly and generally uninitiated audience with scientific sounding talk, sometimes what feels like mountains of it, to create the illusion that they are just guided by the facts and not beliefs.
Nathaniel Jeanson and the art of the perceived slight.
Nathaniel Jeanson of the Christian fundamentalist ministry Answers in Genesis is once again using his platform to voice grievances over how unfairly he thinks young earth creationist views are treated by scientists. This time the primary target is biologist, BioLogos contributor and University of Akron professor Joel Duff.
I too have found myself on the receiving end of Jeanson’s grievances after I agreed to discuss his book, Replacing Darwin, on a now defunct You Tube channel devoted, among other topics, to skepticism and debunking pseudoscientific claims like creationism and flat earth.
What I discovered in that experience is that Jeanson desperately craved the legitimacy of having his ideas parroted by working scientists outside of the Answers in Genesis silo. He refused to deal with the voluminous evidence for common ancestry and evolution that was in large part either conveniently or carelessly omitted from his book. Instead he just asked me to affirm and repeat, I assume he would prefer verbatim, the text of his book.
In my “debate” with Jeanson (I am hesitant to think of this as a meaningful scientific debate as there is no real debate about common ancestry today any more than there is a debate about a flat earth) he appeared completely unprepared to deal with the underlying science of systematics, molecular evolution and population genetics; all topics central to the arguments he was attempting to make.
For example, one of Jeanson’s reoccurring themes in his book and on the “scientific papers” he posts to the Answers in Genesis website (they are actually more along the lines of blog posts and not subject to any meaningful peer review; nor are they indexed through the International Scientific Indexing server) is that if we tally up the genetic variation among individuals within a species or among species, especially with DNA sequences derived from mitochondria (mtDNA), that these results conveniently support a timeline friendly to his religious beliefs.
“For example, by taking the evolutionary time of origin for humans or for other species from the fossil record and by multiplying the time by the mutation rate, we can predict how many mtDNA differences should be present today. For comparisons between individuals in the same species, this math and methodology is the same as that which the evolutionists have been using for years. In technical terms, the equation is a coalescence calculation” – Nathaniel Jeanson, Replacing Darwin, Chapter 7.
At the end of this passage he cites a footnote saying he borrowed this “coalescence calculation” from an undergraduate textbook (Futuyma, D. 2013. Evolution, Third Edition. Sinauer Associates Inc.). What Jeanson is referring to is NOT a “coalescence calculation” and nor does the undergraduate textbook he’s referring to treat it as such. In fact he seems to completely ignore the actual parts of that textbook dealing with coalescent processes (processes that permit us to trace the genealogical history of gene copies, see Futuyma’s 2013 evolution textbook pages 259-260, 275-276, 476-478 for a cursory explanation but there is considerable primary literature on this topic). The modern use of the coalescent in population genetics is derived by John Kingman in a series of papers from the 1980s and population geneticists have since built up an exhaustive volume of literature on coalescent theory and methods that make use of this theory when elucidating the history of genes in populations.
Jeanson never once cites Kingman in his book nor does he make use of any coalescent-based tools in molecular population genetics and systematics. In fact I have yet to see one place in any of this posted work where he actually uses an approach that could properly be called a coalescent approach. The coalescent deals not simply with the tallying up of fixed differences between two groups but in the coalescent process underlying gene genealogies and as such integrates concepts such as effective population size and lineage sorting in addition to substitution rates when estimating coalescent times from the data. I’ve seen no evidence that in his written work or in our “debate” Jeanson has made a single appropriate reference to coalescent theory.
Coalescent theory was not in Jeanson’s book yet he erroneously used the term. I suspect he had vaguely heard of it before and just threw in the word and made up the rest as he went along. I attempted to discuss this topic with Jeanson in our “debate”. He was completely unprepared. His only recourse was to parrot the same question repeatedly, “What does my book say?”. It’s a discussion of the book and more broadly the topic of the book; it’s not a recitation.
If I was misrepresenting his point all he had to do in that discussion was explain himself. He could not. All he had to do is give an accurate account of coalescent theory in population genetics for our audience. He could not. All he had to do was cite the relevant passages where he was correctly applying coalescent approaches in his analysis. He could not. He only insisted that I explain his points for him. If he could not explain what his book said in that “debate”, then how does he expect a sufficient explanation from anyone else.
Jeanson later explained this approach as him employing his version of the Socratic method. This is absurd. Socrates didn’t stroll around Athens saying “Did you read my book?” or “Please tell me exactly what I was thinking because I won’t tell you myself.” Like he mischaracterized the very nature of scientific inquiry at the beginning of our “debate” he grossly mischaracterizes the Socratic method.
The same thing happened repeatedly for topics that were explicitly dealing with claims he made in the book from the trivial, such as whether there are river otters in Hawaii, to the fundamental, like the distinction between de novo mutation rates and neutral substitution rates. His only recourse when criticism goes too far outside his knowledge is, like all science denialists, to obfuscate and shift blame. Only later does he write a blog post about our debate where he makes some feeble attempt to deal with my criticism of Replacing Darwin. Points he could have attempted to articulate in the “debate” itself.
No bigger adversary.
Now Jeanson is turning that same talent for unnecessarily verbose obfuscation to Joel Duff. Joel Duff is an avowed Christian, to my knowledge traditional in his beliefs in virtually every significant sense. For a young earth creationist there is no bigger adversary, no more existential threat, than someone who can say they share their faith but reject their science. It’s no wonder why Answers in Genesis devotes so much effort to eroding confidence in their fellow Christians who accept the scientific consensus on evolution.
Jeanson says Duff misrepresents the creationist position. Duff is right however. Creationists like Jeanson have in their desperate attempts to rationalize their literal interpretation of the Bible with the empirical evidence have adopted this odd embrace of hyperevolution but they are obviously loathed to admit as such. Like virtually all like-minded young earth creationists Jeanson broadly identifies created kinds as taxonomic families as he has said on many occasions including in his rebuttal to Duff. Such claims only highlight the degree to which creationist ideas are arbitrary, post hoc, and uninformed.
Take one example, the fruit flies of the family Drosophilidae. If creationists are saying a created kind is at the level of taxonomic family, as Jeanson has in fact done, they would conclude that all 3,000 plus species among more than 60 genera are descended from a common created fruit fly ancestor in just the past few thousand years. Creationists therefore are squeezing as much as 40 million years’ worth of evolution and speciation resulting in thousands of species into a few thousand years, more than 6,000 times faster than what evolutionary biology would claim. (see Russo et al. 1995. Molecular Biology and Evolution 12(3): 391-404 for starters and then to the mountains of additional work on evolution in the drosophilidae). This means they are allowing far more evolutionary change, in terms of everything from ecology, behavior, morphology, and genetics, than we see between humans and chimpanzees and in a vanishingly small amount of geological time. So yes, Duff is correct when he says modern creationists have embraced hyperevolution.
Jeanson would claim, contrary to Duff, that,
“…natural selection at the phenotypic level would not be a likely scenario for many of the ‘kinds’, especially for those that are highly speciose” - Nathaniel Jeanson and Jason Lisle, April 20, 2016.
Yet, in the Drosophilidae example above this begs the question; how did all the adaptive phenotypic differences among the thousands of fruit fly species appear in the context of a single common ancestry if not through evolution by natural selection? He instead favors this convoluted, uninformed and contrived idea involving “miraculous genetic intervention” where adaptive genetic diversity is created by God and later sorts after the flood through genetic drift; an idea so laughable and deeply misinformed on virtually every level it’s difficult to untangle without walking the reader through an undergraduate evolution and population genetics course. Once you have to invoke miracles from unseen divine agents you have divorced your ideas from anything resembling science.
Simple experiments have shown that selection in fact does take place in biological populations and does contribute to species divergence. Diane Dodd way back in 1989 demonstrated how differential selection in laboratory populations of the fruit fly Drosophila pseudoobscura does led to greater reproductive isolation than drift alone (Dodd, D. 1989. Evolution 43(6): 1308-1311). This finding and others like it are well known among biologists studying speciation. Jeanson is uncomfortable however in granting power to a blind emergent process like natural selection acting on heritable variation due to mutation, preferring an idea more friendly to his theology where adaptive traits are pre-loaded by the action of a wise Creator to sort themselves out demographically when animals leave the refuge of the ark.
Of course it’s no surprise to see Jeanson build narratives that leave out classic work and any study if it runs counter to his agenda. For someone so hypersensitive to being “misrepresented” Jeanson feels absolutely no responsibility to fairly represent the scientific literature.
Nathaniel Jeanson demands your full attention.
Jeanson goes on to vent his grievances over his perception that David MacMillan also misrepresented his work and describes mischaracterizing his blog posts as tantamount to “scientific misconduct”; a serious accusation which may be appropriate if we were actually dealing with science to begin with, and if MacMillan actually was misrepresenting his position. In another blog post Jeanson asks,
“Did he wade through all 29,000 words of my technical paper, exhaustively examining the data and searching for a testable prediction?” - Nathaniel Jeanson, August 6, 2016.
Needless to say I view Jeanson’s self-aggrandizing view of his work as “technical papers” as amusing. Jeanson himself has not even remotely given the evolutionary literature such “exhaustive” consideration; so this demand that we hang on his every word is more than a little disingenuous. He only seems to demand full attention and an exhaustive examination of his ideas while showing no compulsion to extend others a similar courtesy. Jeanson goes on to sanctimoniously preach about honesty in science saying he learned lessons in honesty from his undergraduate lab supervisor.
“In the realm of science, dishonesty is the cardinal sin.” - Nathaniel Jeanson, June 30, 2020.
I wonder how his graduate advisor at Harvard would feel knowing he matriculated in their lab to leverage an Ivy League PhD to undermine science in the name of fundamentalist religion? What virtue would they see in one of their former students signing a statement of faith conditional to their employment and then go around lecturing others about fairness and following the evidence? Those questions are rhetorical of course. I suspect they would look on this unfavorably. Jeanson is no one to lecture others about the virtues of honesty.
All science deniers seem to think the world owes them something whether it is a hearing, a debate, a publication, or just deference. What Jeanson fails to grasp is that an absurd idea divorced from the evidence and held in accordance to a religious belief remains an absurd idea as science regardless of how many words you can type. Jeanson’s conclusions are clearly at odds with the available evidence. His are deeply flawed and fundamentally unscientific ideas from their inception. Diligently spending months combing over his every utterance is not going to change that.
Let me provide an example of how even a very brief statement can justifiably erode confidence in someone’s scientific claims. Jeanson participated on one of his many streaming events on the Answers in Genesis You Tube channel on June 14, 2020 (start at 9 minutes 30 seconds and watch for about 4 minutes to see exactly what I’m talking about). There he showed a molecular tree showing the relationships among DNA sequences derived from various human populations (incidentally as far as I am aware Jeanson produces none of these data himself but only borrows sequences produced by others from public databases). This tree was unrooted. In systematics this means the tree did not include any sequences from outside the group of interest (although there are other ways to root a tree). Jeanson of course could not do what for evolutionists would be the sensible thing and root the tree with a sequence derived from a chimpanzee because doing so would be a violation of his religious beliefs. Unrooted trees however have no polarity. There is no reason therefore to point to any one branch point (nodes) on an unrooted tree and say it is older than the rest. Yet, this is precisely what Jeanson does pointing to three nodes on the tree and saying that because they are the oldest they represent the wives of Noah’s sons. (added in edit: evograd has a segment in his review of Replacing Darwin where he deals explicitly with Jeanson’s baffling inability to read an unrooted tree and he even takes the time to properly root Jeanson’s tree and finds his argument regarding the three wives of Noah’s sons immediately comes unraveled.)
This is classic Jeanson illustrated perfectly and succinctly in a single moment. He is making up the story to match his beliefs while remaining blissfully ignorant of what the actual science allows. There is no need to dissect thousands of words and diligently track down every footnote because no volume of words, no context can make up for such a basic error. Of course people, including myself more often than I care to mention, make innocuous mistakes all the time and every casual inadvertent slip or mischaracterization of some complex phenomenon is hardly a reason to write off everything someone says. But this sort of error is absolutely fundamental and Jeanson shows he simply does not possess the scientific attitude necessary to right his ship.
This blunder demonstrates in one stroke that he has no clue as to what he is talking about and anyone would be justified in doubting his credibility on this subject. Jeanson begins his entire thesis from a place of profound ignorance of even the most basic concepts of the field he’s trying to convince you he’s an expert in and he is therefore giving any informed person every reason to dismiss his claims.
If he truly had a scientifically iron-clad case, one grounded in the empirical evidence, then that case would be in the pages of Nature and Science and not confined to blogs, webpages, and You Tube channels run by fundamentalist religious ministries. In admonishing MacMillan for his perceived “sins” he cites a couple dozen or so works he accuses him of ignoring; none of which is a legitimate research article and at least two of those works are simply newspaper articles.
Jeanson’s premise is plainly at odds with the available scientific evidence and no matter how many times he massages the data or cherry picks the literature or how many words he writes for blog posts or how many misleading clumsy graphs he produces in Excel or how many You Tube videos he participates in for his overseers at Answers in Genesis will that change.
The earth is in fact not a mere few thousand years old. The available scientific evidence does in fact point to a shared ancestry for life on earth. Even some creationists themselves in rare moments of candor have acknowledged the explanatory power and empirical support underlying the science of evolution.
Science or culture war agenda?
Jeanson says that evolutionists don’t bother to read and thus are unaware of creationist research. I would argue that creationism has no research program but instead a propaganda program. Creationists like Jeanson produce overly verbose, cherry picked blogs, cheaply produced YouTube videos, papers in friendly in-house journals disguised as rigorous research, and books designed to preach to their choirs. Special creationism isn’t rocket science. We get it. Regardless of what they produce the conclusion is, often in accordance with contract, always baked in.
The creationist language, like all science deniers, is the language of slights, grievance, inferiority complexes and empty excuses. Jeanson after either suggesting Duff, MacMillan, or myself are dishonest or explicitly calling us dishonest ends this latest essay on his most recent grievance by saying,
“To be clear, this report is not a personal attack on any of the authors”. - Nathaniel Jeanson, June 30, 2020.
Of course it is, but ever eager to play the straight man contrasting his disguise of fair-minded congeniality with Ken Ham’s fire-and-brimstone approach Jeanson doesn’t want you to know his agenda.
That agenda is in lock step with Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis. It’s a culture war agenda that views those who don’t share their religious beliefs and their views on the science as enemies and it simply doesn’t matter that many of those perceived enemies are their fellow Christians. Jeanson has said before that he believes evolution is a front to cover up for immorality suggesting he believes evolutionists are immoral (he also goes on in this interview to express his disgust for everything from pre-marital sex to homosexuality, start at 4 minutes 20 seconds and watch until about 9 minutes to see what I’m talking about).
I asked him about this idea that evolution is a front for immorality at the end of our debate and he demurred suggesting he didn’t know what I was referring to. Of course he did. I believe he was lying. I simply do not buy that the belief that people use evolution as a front for their immorality is something that so easily and conveniently slips one’s mind. So yes, all this is very personal for someone like Nathaniel Jeanson. He wants science in essence to operate as a fundamentalist religious theocracy with scientists signing articles of faith as conditions for employment and secular society, and everything in it he finds so offensive, replaced with his theology. If you believe Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale should be a work of non-fiction then Answers in Genesis is maybe the place for you.
I only have a limited amount of time for bullshit.
Let me tell Jeanson the real reason why there are precious few working scientists clamoring over his every utterance, diligently combing through every blog post masquerading as a research article or lining up to debate him in a public forum. It’s because we don’t have time for bullshit.
I’ve spent my day writing this blog post. I promised myself not to spend more than that (actually by now it’s at least a day and half so I broke my promise to myself!). In my lab is a sequencing reaction ready to take off the thermal cycler to clean up and move over to be separated on the capillary instrument across the street. That work is contributing to solving some riddles in the evolution and systematics of island birds in East Asia. Come August I have two presentations slated for the now online, because of the COVID19 pandemic, North American Ornithological Conference. The 2020 Fall semester means reorganizing my undergraduate genetics course to deal with the changes also resulting from the pandemic.
Those are important things for a scientist and science educator to do, not to mention the myriad of other more worthwhile things I need to do as a father, husband and just for my own well-being. Combing over thousands of pages from a creationist is however, comparatively speaking, not important. It’s no more important or worthwhile than a geographer spending the next 6 months of their lives, or 6 minutes of their lives, pouring over the online manifesto of a flat earther.
I gave Jeanson the courtesy of no insignificant amount of my time and my scholarship. I read his book when I had piles of more worthwhile books and scientific articles I should have been reading. I sincerely tried to engage in a public discussion about that book with him online and outside of asking me to explain to him his own positions he seemed little interested in discussing that book. I even generously sent him my slides before that discussion at his request; a request I’ve never heard of before and an action he did not feel the need to reciprocate, nor did I ask. I’ve written a blog post dealing specifically with the details of his book with the intention of a follow up post but becoming busy with more important tasks and the appearance of another very extensive review meant this was unnecessary and a waste of my time. I also discussed his book with another blogger who has himself spent an enormous and thankless amount of time debunking Jeanson’s every claim.
Jeanson’s bullshit has been given far more attention that it deserves and today is the last of my valuable time Jeanson gets for the foreseeable future.
I am writing this in the middle of a once in a century pandemic. Science and scientific institutions are going to lead the way in seeing us to the other side of that but that struggle is unfolding at an unprecedented time in American history; one where anti-intellectualism, populism, and science denial have for decades grown to erode public trust in scientists and our scientific and educational institutions. Creationism is among those expressions of science denial that have contributed to that erosion and as such deserves its share of the blame for the situation we are in; a situation where much of the general public believes a blog post is on par in credibility with a paper published in Science.
Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci said this in a recent interview.
“Well, one of the problems we face in the United States is that unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science bias that people are, for reasons that sometimes are, you know, inconceivable and not understandable, they just don't believe science and they don't believe authority. So, when they see someone up in the White House, which has an air of authority to it, who's talking about science, that there are some people who just don't believe that. And that's unfortunate because, you know, science is truth. And if you go by the evidence and by the data, you're speaking the truth.” – Anthony Fauci, June 17, 2020, HHS podcast Learning Curve.
Creationists like Jeanson are doing nothing to advance science. They are doing nothing to promote confidence in our scientific institutions or public education. Their work has no impact within science. They have replaced a scientific attitude with unyielding religious dogma codified in mandatory statements of faith. They have substituted producing research to get us to a place where we can better understand the natural world with producing bullshit to further their culture war agenda. So why aren’t Duff and MacMillan and myself furiously burning through our work days digging into the minutiae of Jeanson’s blog posts, gently holding his hand through every last mischaracterization, or giving him a pro bono online course in systematics and population genetics? Because, speaking for myself, unlike Jeanson I have actual scientific work to do and real responsibilities as a science educator and only a limited time for bullshit.