Hitler’s library

This is a fascinating article about Hitler’s library: he was an avid collector and reader, and part of his collection still exists, and you can even stroll down to the Library of Congress and ask to browse through the stockpile. The bulk of the books are about military strategy and tactics, and a subset are Hitler’s personal favorite light reading, cowboy stories. But there are also many religious texts that give insight into the way his mind worked.

Experts since then have been of two minds on the matter of Hitler’s spiritual beliefs. Ian Kershaw argues that Hitler consciously constructed an image of himself as a messianic figure, and eventually came to believe the very myth he had helped to fashion. “The more he succumbed to the allure of his own Führer cult and came to believe in his own myth, the more his judgment became impaired by faith in his own infallibility,” Kershaw writes in The Hitler Myth (1987). But believing in a messianic myth is not the same as believing in God. When I asked Kershaw in 2001 whether he thought Hitler actually believed in divine providence, he dismissed the notion. “I don’t think that he had any real belief in a deity of any sort, only in himself as a ‘man of destiny’ who would bring about Germany’s ‘salvation,'” he declared. Gerhard Weinberg, who helped sort through the Hitler Library back in the 1950s, likewise dismisses the notion of Hitler as a religious believer, insisting that he was driven by the twin passions of Blut und Boden–racial purity and territorial expansion. “He didn’t believe in anything but himself,” Weinberg told me last summer. Most historians tend to agree.

Some non-historians, however, have different views. In the 1960s Friedrich Heer, a prominent and controversial Viennese theologian, identified Hitler as a misguided “Austrian Catholic,” a man whose faith was disastrously misplaced but nevertheless sincere. In a dense, 750-page treatise Heer saw Hitler the Austrian Catholic at every turn: the nine-year-old choirboy catching his first glimpse of a swastika in the coat of arms at the Lambach Monastery; the beer-hall orator whose speeches resound with biblical allusions; the Führer of the Reich who re-created the splendor of the Catholic mass at the annual Nuremberg rally. Even his virulent hatred of Jewry found sustenance in those roots. Fritz Redlich, an eminent Yale psychiatrist, asserts in his book, Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet, that Hitler acted from a profound belief in God. Noting Hitler’s own words “Man kommt um den Gottesbegriff nicht um” (“You cannot get around the concept of God”), Redlich told me last summer that he was certain Hitler believed in a “divine creature.” He rejected suggestions that Hitler’s invocations of the divine were little more than cynical public posturing and insisted that we ought to take Hitler at his word: “In a way, Hitler was a terrible liar, but he was a tactical liar. In his essential line of thinking he was honest.”

I tend to favor the opinion that he was a lousy Catholic…but an even lousier atheist.

Happy Anniversary, Origin…some good news

Today is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and a few sites have taken notice.

A new science blog, The Whirlpool of Life, opens today.

CNN has published a brief retrospective from Richard Dawkins. It focuses entirely on “militant atheism”, which is odd since the book itself did not promote unbelief, but also indirectly appropriate, since the concept did end up undermining the argument from design, and contributed significantly to making god irrelevant.

And…that’s about it. No fireworks, no triumphant announcements, no scientists standing outside in candlelight vigils singing hosannas to Chuck. That’s about right, I think — it’s a great book, it made a difference in the intellectual world, but it ain’t religion, thank dog.

Ron Numbers—Anti-evolution in America, from creation science to Intelligent Design

Ron Numbers gave a brief history of creationism, reminding us that perhaps a majority of the people in the world reject Darwin, and he also emphasized a few facts in that history that many would find surprising.

There was no organized opposition to evolution until the 1920s, when it was marshalled by William Jennings Bryan, who was most concerned about the ethical implications of evolution. He made the point that the popular movie about the Scopes trial, Inherit the Wind, was historically inaccurate. One of the most memorable moments in the movie was when Darrow pinned Bryan down on the date of the creation to 4004 BC…but Bryan had no such preconception. The primary strain of creationism at that time had absolutely no problem with the age of the Earth, and Bryan plainly stated in interviews and speeches that he was a proponent of the day-age theory, in which the “days” of creation week were not required to be 24-hour modern days.

These early creationists had no bone to pick with geology at all, and were unperturbed at the thought that the world was hundreds of millions of years old. The two dominant explanations were the day-age theory, which stretched out the time-span of creation week to cover the whole of geological time, and gap theory, which argued that between the creation of the world mentioned at the beginning of Genesis, and the account of the 6 creation days, there was a long undocumented period of time in which geological history occurred. The latter model was also popular because it was presented in the Scofield Reference Bible, which specifically placed the geological column in a ‘gap’ in the account, and stated that the 6 days referred to the creation of Eden.

The dissenters from this position were a tiny minority, the Seventh Day Adventists, who were regarded as weird by the majority of fundamentalists. The Seventh Day Adventists credited a source of divine information other than the Bible, the prophecies and visions of their founder, Ellen White, who was the source of the idea that Genesis had to be describing a literal six 24-hour day creation occurring 6000 years ago. Her disciple, George MacReady Price, came up with the idea of wedging all of geology into the Noachian Flood. These were not popular ideas.

The mainstreaming of literalist creationism occurred in the 1960s, when John Whitcomb and Henry Morris wrote The Genesis Flood. It’s basically the same nonsense he Seventh Day Adventists were peddling, but Whitcomb and Morris were not SDAs, making it possible for conservative Christians, who regarded Seventh Day Adventism as a freaky cult, to coalesce in the formation of the Creation Research Society. These people had no ambition to convert the research community, but instead wanted to wean bible-believers away from what they considered the compromises of day-age and gap theory.

Another consequence of this shift was that it opened up hard-core creationists to a kind of hyper-evolution: they had to explain how a small ark of fixed size could contain all the animals in the world, so they had to postulate a small number of created “kinds” that diversified into new species after the flood, at a pace evolutionary biologists consider absurd.

In the early 1980s, these new, literal creationists got ambitious and started trying to push into classrooms by legislation, efforts that got stymied by major court decisions in Arkansas and Louisiana, which ruled that mandatory teaching of creationism was unconstitutional. One consequence of the Arkansas decision was that, when the creationists had been anticipating victory, they had begun assembling a creationist textbook. When they lost instead, they had to rewrite to remove the word “creationism” and replace it with “intelligent design”.

Numbers talked a bit about Intelligent Design, and argued that it was different from the previous version of creationism…but not in a good way, or in a milder way. The brainchild of Philip Johnson, Intelligent Design was far more radical than the previous iterations — Johnson opposed methodological materialism, and specifically wants to incorporate god into science. While arguing that ID is something new, though, he also made it clear that it is not because ID is a secular theory — it’s an extraordinarily religious idea, backed by religious proponents, and funded by theocratic extremists like Howard Ahmanson.

He ended by giving us the discouraging news that 65.5% of Americans believe in creationism, and that the movement is expanding beyond US borders to the Islamic and Jewish world, too. Bummer, man. He could have at least offered some hope for the future.

Dialogues with Darwin

Perhaps you don’t know this, but Philadephia has a very large collection of Darwin literature — it only makes sense, since in the early years of our country that city was the center of science and philosophy in the US. The American Philosophical Society Museum is having a major exhibit of those artifacts, so you should get down to Fifth Street and amble through. If you can’t make it (regretfully, I’m stuck in Morris for a while), they have an online tour.

Roger Ebert doesn’t review Creation

There’s a new movie coming out about Darwin that does something different: instead of talking about the science of evolution, it’s about Darwin’s personal life. Roger Ebert has seen it and offers a few thoughts on the subject matter (it isn’t a review, though!), and it sounds interesting — I’ll be seeing it if it appears in Morris, which isn’t likely, or when it’s available on DVD, which is much more likely. I’m not worried that it will provide comfort to creationists, but I am a little concerned that it may Hollywoodize history a little bit.

Ebert points out that it focuses on the difficulties he had with religion, and how it colored his marriage and work. I don’t know how well it represents reality, though. It’s a lens we use to look back on the 19th century, but it may not be entirely fair to Darwin’s views.

Fearing to offend his wife, he was shy about extending his belief to the evolution of mankind itself, but it is certainly what he privately thought. He denied being a atheist, but said agnosticism came close to reflecting his views. Apart from his research and ideas about science, that conflict in this marriage and with the conventional religious of his times was the most significant thing about him.

I have my doubts that the conflict with religion was a major issue with Darwin. He avoided it very effectively, and did not make public pronouncements on religious belief. He differed from his wife’s opinion, but here’s the thing: there isn’t the slightest hint in any of his writings that he was even tempted to disagree with Emma, and the impression I get is that at every step his priority was to accommodate his ideas with his wife’s beliefs.

Yes, I said it: Charles Darwin was an accommodationist.

I don’t think the most significant thing in his life was the conflict with religion at all — his family and his happy relationship with his wife and children was #1, and I don’t think ‘conflict’ was a word that applied (although, of course, it would have to be emphasized in a movie).

It also leaves something out: Darwin himself said that his greatest talent was as a businessman. Over his lifetime, he invested carefully and wisely and grew a small seed of money given at his marriage into a huge fortune. If anyone wants to sort out what contributed most to his scientific work, I think that fact should loom much larger than a slight tension on matters of religion in which he always deferred to his wife.

Alan Turing gets an apology

The government of the UK has officially apologized for its past abuse of Alan Turing. Here is the full statement.

2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.

But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices – that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.

Darwin and the vermiform appendix

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Last night, I asked for a copy of an article (I have plenty now, thanks!) that was getting a lot of press. The reason I was looking for it is two-fold: the PR looked awful, expressing some annoying cliches about evolution, but the data looked interesting, good stuff that I was glad to see done. Awful and interesting — I’m a sucker for those jarring combinations. My favorite pizza is jalapeno and pineapple, too.

I’m going to split my discussion of this article in two, just to simplify dealing with it. This is the awful part. I’ll do the interesting part a little later.

The paper is about the appendix, that tiny little organ in your gut that doesn’t have a whole lot of obvious function. The point of the work is to try and show that yes, it does something — which is fine and interesting, although I will quibble a bit with their interpretation. Where they go awry, though, is in trying to pick a fight with a dead man, and making that the focus of their public relations.

Now, some of those same researchers are back, reporting on the first-ever study of the appendix through the ages. Writing in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Duke scientists and collaborators from the University of Arizona and Arizona State University conclude that Charles Darwin was wrong: The appendix is a whole lot more than an evolutionary remnant. Not only does it appear in nature much more frequently than previously acknowledged, but it has been around much longer than anyone had suspected.

“Maybe it’s time to correct the textbooks,” says William Parker, Ph.D., assistant professor of surgical sciences at Duke and the senior author of the study. “Many biology texts today still refer to the appendix as a ‘vestigial organ.'”

Charles Darwin is dead. Your research can’t be very cogent if your approach to drum up interest is to dig up a 120-year-old corpse and kick it around; is there anyone alive who disagrees with you who can put up a more informative and entertaining struggle? What this does is pick this one fellow as a symbol of the whole edifice of evolutionary theory, which has the advantage of making one’s work seem very, very important (even if one is stacking the deck to do it), but has the disadvantage of giving every creationist on the planet something to masturbate over, and they’re icky enough without your help.

It’s also annoying. Charles Darwin was wrong about many things — I’ll even give an example at the end of this article — and it’s part of the nature of science that everyone’s work will be revised and refined over time, and some of us will even be shown to be completely wrong. It’s rather unseemly to collect a lot of data that Darwin did not have, run it through PAUP 4.0 on a fast computer, map the data onto a molecular consensus phylogeny, and cackle gleefully over discovering something Darwin did not know. Really, it doesn’t make you a better scientist than Darwin.

To make it even worse, people who do this can’t even make the corpse-fight a fair fight — they have to stuff the pathetic dead body with straw. In this case, they’re padding Darwin’s investment in the appendix a fair amount. They cite one work by Darwin, The Descent of Man, which mentions this issue. He wrote one whole paragraph on the topic, and here it is, in its entirety; it was presented briefly as part of a long list of human rudimentary structures, such as wisdom teeth, muscles of the ear, and the semilunar fold of the eye.

With respect to the alimentary canal, I have met with an account of only a
single rudiment, namely the vermiform appendage of the caecum. The caecum
is a branch or diverticulum of the intestine, ending in a cul-de-sac, and
is extremely long in many of the lower vegetable-feeding mammals. In the
marsupial koala it is actually more than thrice as long as the whole body.
(46. Owen, ‘Anatomy of Vertebrates,’ vol. iii. pp. 416, 434, 441.) It is
sometimes produced into a long gradually-tapering point, and is sometimes
constricted in parts. It appears as if, in consequence of changed diet or
habits, the caecum had become much shortened in various animals, the
vermiform appendage being left as a rudiment of the shortened part. That
this appendage is a rudiment, we may infer from its small size, and from
the evidence which Prof. Canestrini (47. ‘Annuario della Soc. d. Nat.’
Modena, 1867, p. 94.) has collected of its variability in man. It is
occasionally quite absent, or again is largely developed. The passage is
sometimes completely closed for half or two-thirds of its length, with the
terminal part consisting of a flattened solid expansion. In the orang this
appendage is long and convoluted: in man it arises from the end of the
short caecum, and is commonly from four to five inches in length, being
only about the third of an inch in diameter. Not only is it useless, but
it is sometimes the cause of death, of which fact I have lately heard two
instances: this is due to small hard bodies, such as seeds, entering the
passage, and causing inflammation. (48. M. C. Martins (“De l’Unite
Organique,” in ‘Revue des Deux Mondes,’ June 15, 1862, p. 16) and Haeckel
(‘Generelle Morphologie,’ B. ii. s. 278), have both remarked on the
singular fact of this rudiment sometimes causing death.)

Note why Darwin classed this appendage as vestigial: because it is greatly reduced compared to the homologous organs in non-human relatives, and because it currently exhibits a great range of variation, which is apparently non-functional. These are criteria which the paper in question does not refute at all. Darwin does say that the appendix is “useless”, and the paper will show some evidence that that is wrong. It’s also irrelevant.

The reason why it is irrelevant is that the presence of some function is not part of the definition of a vestigial or rudimentary organ — Darwin obligingly concedes that evolution will salvage some utility out of organs with little retention of their original function, but which are present as a consequence of contingency. He discusses this at greater length in On the Origin of Species, and here is a significant chunk of the relevant writing.

Organs or parts in this strange condition, bearing the plain stamp
of inutility, are extremely common, or even general, throughout
nature. It would be impossible to name one of the higher animals in
which some part or other is not in a rudimentary condition. In the
mammalia, for instance, the males possess rudimentary mammae; in
snakes one lobe of the lungs is rudimentary; in birds the
“bastardwing” may safely be considered as a rudimentary digit, and
in some species the whole wing is so far rudimentary that it cannot be
used for flight. What can be more curious than the presence of teeth
in foetal whales, which when grown up have not a tooth in their heads;
or the teeth, which never cut through the gums, in the upper jaws of
unborn calves?

Rudimentary organs plainly declare their origin and meaning in
various ways. There are beetles belonging to closely allied species,
or even to the same identical species, which have either full-sized
and perfect wings, or mere rudiments of membrane, which not rarely lie
under wing-covers firmly soldered together; and in these cases it is
impossible to doubt, that the rudiments represent wings. Rudimentary
organs sometimes retain their potentiality: this occasionally occurs
with the mammae of male mammals, which have been known to become
well developed and to secrete milk. So again in the udders in the
genus Bos, there are normally four developed and two rudimentary
teats; but the latter in our domestic cows sometimes become well
developed and yield milk. In regard to plants the petals are sometimes
rudimentary, and sometimes well-developed in the individuals of the
same species. In certain plants having separated sexes Kolreuter found
that by crossing a species, in which the male flowers included a
rudiment of a pistil, with an hermaphrodite species, having of
course a well-developed pistil, the rudiment in the hybrid offspring
was much increased in size; and this clearly shows that the
rudimentary and perfect pistils are essentially alike in nature. An
animal may possess various parts in a perfect state, and yet they
may in one sense be rudimentary, for they are useless: thus the
tadpole of the common salamander or water-newt, as Mr. G. H. Lewes
remarks, “has gills, and passes its existence in the water; but the
Salamandra atra, which lives high up among the mountains, brings forth
its young full-formed. This animal never lives in the water. Yet if we
open a gravid female, we find tadpoles inside her with exquisitely
feathered gills; and when placed in water they swim about like the
tadpoles of the water-newt. Obviously this aquatic organisation has no
reference to the future life of the animal, nor has it any
adaptation to its embryonic condition; it has solely reference to
ancestral adaptations, it repeats a phase in the development of its
progenitors.”

An organ, serving for two purposes, may become rudimentary or
utterly aborted for one, even the more important purpose, and remain
perfectly efficient for the other. Thus in plants, the office of the
pistil is to allow the pollen-tubes to reach the ovules within the
ovarium. The pistil consists of a stigma supported on a style; but
in some Compositae, the male florets, which of course cannot be
fecundated, have a rudimentary pistil, for it is not crowned with a
stigma; but the style remains well developed and is clothed in the
usual manner with hairs, which serve to brush the pollen out of the
surrounding and conjoined anthers. Again, an organ may become
rudimentary for its proper purpose, and be used for a distinct one: in
certain fishes the swimbladder seems to be rudimentary for its
proper function of giving buoyancy, but has become converted into a
nascent breathing organ or lung. Many similar instances could be
given.

I’ve highlighted the part most important for this discussion. Darwin did not discuss the appendix or caecum at all in the Origin, but this description does apply. If a portion of the gut, a digestive organ, is diminished in size such that it no longer contributes to the primary function of the organ, but does retain a secondary function, such as assisting in immunity, or as the authors of the recent paper will argue, in acting as a reservoir of bacteria for recolonizing the gut, then it is still a vestigial organ. It has lost much of its ancestral function.

I do not understand why this is so hard for so many people to comprehend. Biology is plastic and opportunistic. Accidents of history will always still be incorporated into the whole of the organism; we make do, or we die. Just because something is does not mean that the entirety of its nature is the product of selection.

I mentioned that I’d point out errors in Darwin’s understanding. They’re there, but note that seeing them now 150 years after he wrote his big book does not make me smarter than Darwin, nor does it invalidate the overall picture of his theory. You can see one ‘error’ in the quote above: we are now pretty certain that the original function of the swimbladder in fish was respiratory. It evolved first as a supplement to the gills, providing access to the rich oxygen content of the atmosphere, and was secondarily adapted to function for bouyancy. Hah, silly Darwin, that he did not know a detail of paleontology and phylogeny that would be worked out a century after his death!

He also made a more substantial error. He wondered how organs became smaller over time, and his answer was, unfortunately, a bit Lamarckian and also a bit muddled.

It appears probable that disuse has been the main agent in rendering
organs rudimentary. It would at first lead by slow steps to the more
and more complete reduction of a part, until at last it became
rudimentary,- as in the case of the eyes of animals inhabiting dark
caverns, and of the wings of birds inhabiting oceanic islands, which
have seldom been forced by beasts of prey to take flight, and have
ultimately lost the power of flying. Again, an organ, useful under
certain conditions, might become injurious under others, as with the
wings of beetles living on small and exposed islands; and in this
case natural selection will have aided in reducing the organ, until it
was rendered harmless and rudimentary.

“Disuse” is the magic word there: if a cavefish lived in the dark and never used its eyes, the idea was that its progeny would then have smaller eyes. This is not correct, but it was a central part of Darwin’s invalid theory of heredity. This is a much more substantial failing of Darwin’s work, but again, I can’t claim credit for figuring this out; it took the work of Mendel to get the core of genetics puzzled out, and then it took a whole generation of scientists to work out how genetics and evolution fit together. We can say “DARWIN WAS WRONG!” about that, but we can’t really say that about his treatment of vestigial organs in general, which seems to hold up fairly well…perhaps because Darwin himself was not so fervently committed to the absolute adaptedness of every single feature of every single organism as some of his later followers.

That said, I’ll move along to the substance of the paper next, which really does have some good stuff in it. Most of my complaints here are with the abysmal presentation of the ideas in it by the popular press, aided and abetted by the scientists themselves. Just keep in mind that whenever these press releases that declare “Darwin was wrong” appear, it’s usually an example of grandstanding and the regrettable tendency of competitive scientists to think the way to impress people with the importance of their work is to get into a penis-measuring contest with poor dead Chuck.

Smith HF, Fisher RE, Everett ML, Thomas AD, Randal Bollinger R, Parker W (2009) Comparative anatomy and phylogenetic distribution of the mammalian cecal appendix. J Evol Biol. 2009 Aug 12. [Epub ahead of print]

Yes, millions of years!

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That Answers in Genesis crackpot, Terry Mortenson, is speaking on “Millions of Years” at the Creation “Museum”. Those of us who visited that circus of charlatanry know that this is one of their obsessions — the idea that the earth is more than 6000 years old is one of the wrecking balls atheists use to destroy faith.

He’s right, of course. It’s a very useful tool. When fundamentalists tie their faith absolutely to a claim that is easily refuted, that contradicts the evidence, and that requires them to constantly escalate their denial and delusions in order to sustain their belief, it makes it really easy for atheists to demolish their religion. We don’t even need to attack religion in the classroom at all — we just calmly lay out the facts, let the students work out the conclusions, and sometimes…it’s epiphany time! They realize their pastor lied to them, or was just really ignorant, and suddenly their respect for Christian authority begins to crumble away.

It’s not the atheist’s fault, though. The lesson should be, “Don’t lie to your kids,” not “Silence the people who would reveal that you lied to your kids,” or worse, “Lie harder.”

This is not a lesson that Mortenson has learned. He is apparently planning to babble about revisionist history in his talk, claiming that the evidence for the age of the earth is the product of an atheist conspiracy among geologists.

To really understand what is wrong with belief in millions of years, we need to go back to the early 19th century and study the origin of this idea. This unique and interesting lecture, based on Dr. Mortenson’s PhD research, will clearly show that the idea was not the result of just letting the rocks and fossils “speak for themselves” but rather comes from anti-Biblical worldviews (or philosophical assumptions) being imposed on the geological evidence. The talk explains the key men who helped develop the idea of millions of years, one of the geologically competent Christians who opposed those theories, and the subsequent consequences of the church’s compromise with millions of years. Even non-Christians would find this lecture thought-provoking.

Hah! The only thought it would provoke in me is to wonder where they kept the straitjackets. Looney-tunes revisionist history is not thought-provoking in a good sense.

I actually spend a fair amount of lecture time on the early history of geology in my introductory biology course. One reason is that, if you talk to most people, you will discover this fallacious belief that evolution leapt fully-formed from the brain of Charles Darwin, and there’s an anachronistic idea that ideas about the age of the earth, which are built on independent evidence from geology and astronomy, are somehow rooted in biology. It’s not so! Darwin’s antecedents had already laid the foundations in working out that the earth was old, that life had undergone many transitions, and that maybe species were mutable. Evolution was an inevitable conclusion of the evidence; Darwin and Wallace were just the clever fellows who managed to pull the whole story together.

I find it very useful to give students a quick overview of 18th and 19th century geology before we talk about Darwin, since the creationists in the classroom usually have this image of Darwin as Satan who foisted a false belief on the world because he hated god (hey, sounds like Terry Mortenson!). It’s very useful to be able to show how views of the world evolved, not by ideology, but by the growth of a body of evidence.

Let’s begin with Robert Hooke (1635-1703). He dabbled brilliantly in many things, but one subject of particular interest was the origin of these curious fossils that people kept digging up, which were thought to be either creatures turned to stone by some miraculous process, or were the expression of an intrinsic nature of stone to mimic life. Hooke examined the details of fossils microscopically, and determined that they had once been alive, and also worked out how the transformation had occurred — by the perfusion of minerals into buried or immersed dead organisms. He also examined the distribution of fossils; finding fossilized clams on mountaintops, for instance, says something about the prior state of that environment.

Most of those Inland Places. . . are, or have been heretofore under the Water. . . the Waters have been forc’d away from the Parts formerly cover’d, and many of those surfaces are now raised above the level of the Water’s Surface many scores of Fathoms. It seems not improbable, that the tops of the highest and most considerable Mountains in the World have been under Water, and that they themselves most probably seem to have been the Effects of some very great Earthquake.

These conclusions were evidence-driven. Almost no one in the late 17th century would have been interested in opposing religion, so you can’t pin that heresy on Hooke. He is simply describing the natural world and finding certain conclusions inescapable, including some to which creationists today still can’t adjust — and note that he is writing this more than 300 years ago.

There have been many other Species of Creatures in former Ages, of which we can find none at present; and that ’tis not unlikely also but that there may be divers new kinds now, which have not been from the beginning.

And then there’s Baron Cuvier (1769-1832) and Alexandre Brongniart (1770-1847) who studied the rocks of the Paris Basin. There were many quarries situated around Paris that cut deep into the hills to provide building stone, and they gave these two the opportunity to look into the structure of the rocks. They identified five major layers, and by examining the fossils, worked out what kinds of animals and plants lived there when the layers were deposited. They found that layers with saltwater species were interleaved with layers containing freshwater species — Paris had been under the sea at least twice!

Cuvier was not an atheist. In fact, he was even adamant that the earth was relatively young, but in a way that contradicts what Answers in Genesis would tell you. He had worked out that there were different assemblages of animals in each layer, and proposed an explanation: a series of ages, each very different, with the most recent major catastrophe occurring five or six thousand years ago (to bring it in line with the literal interpretation of the Bible) and sweeping away prior forms to allow for the flourishing of human beings.

It is certain that we are now at least in the fourth succession of terrestrial animals. The age of reptiles was followed by that of the palaeotheres [primitive mammals], then the age of mammoths, mastodons, and megatheria. Finally we arrive at the age of the human species together with domestic animals. It is only in the deposits subsequent to the beginning of this age, in turf-bogs and alluvial deposits, that we find bones all of which belong to animals now existing…None of these remains belong either to the vast deposits of the great catastrophe or to those of the ages preceding that wonderful event.

If you want someone who was willing to assert that the earth was very, very old, we have to look to the Scottish geologist James Hutton (1726-1797), who was accused of atheism for his ideas, but they were backed up entirely by hard-earned evidence. He postulated that the geology we see was created by multiple cycles of sedimentary deposition, volcanic uplift, and erosion, and he mapped and documented complex unconformities and intrusions that demonstrated that the history of the earth was complex and required great time for the formation and distortion of rock. He also found that the evidence of the time was insufficient to even show the history of the beginning of the earth, which is why he closed his book, Theory of the Earth, with the famous line, “The result, therefore, of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end.”

Again, his conclusion was dictated by the evidence, not some atheistic philosophy.

At the same time Cuvier and Brongniart were exploring the Paris Basin, William Smith (1769-1839) was walking all over England, building up his geological map. We know what his motivation was: it was economic. He worked in mines, and was eager to capitalize on the opportunities opened up by the Industrial Revolution. Railroad and canal cuts exposed the strata of English geology all over the place, and being able to assess good locations for coal mines was a profitable skill — much like petroleum geology now. Smith observed consistent features of geology, like the way rocks were layered, and what fossils were present in specific layers, and could see that a layer was a slice of time, and that each slice contained different animals (which led to his Principle of Faunal Succession). He worked out the first geological map of Britain on the basis of his surveying.

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There is a pattern to geology: we can see that the strata are not purely local phenomena, but part of formations that often extend continent-wide. These strata also have a predictable order that reflects the timing of their formation. These observations are not reconcilable with the simplistic dogma of the creationists.

Charles Lyell was also an important geologist, who was also very influential on Charles Darwin. He was not an atheist, but rather, a devout Christian, which caused him considerable discomfort since he was never able to accept the full implications of Darwin’s work. Lyell’s key dictum was that the present is the key to the past, that what you needed to do was work out mechanisms in action right now and use those to explain what must have happened in the past.

Darwin himself applied this principle to estimate a minimum age for the earth. He knew from published observations that a rapid rate of sedimentary deposition was 600 feet in 100,000 years; he also knew that the known strata in England had a depth of over 72,000 feet, which implied that the earth had to be at least 12 million years old.

It’s so widely accepted that even creationists use it — it’s the basis for their arguments that the ocean sediments and moon dust say the earth is young. Unfortunately, the way they accomplish that is by either using the wrong numbers for accumulation or ignoring the multiple processes that affect the rate.

It is simply ludicrous to claim that 18th or 18th century geologists bent their interpretation to fit some imaginary godless worldview — in general, the scholars of that period were more concerned with avoiding conflicts with religion, since the majority of them were doctrinaire church-going Christians themselves. What led them to the conclusion that the earth was millions, and then billions of years old was the evidence, not their ideology.

And now, of course, the evidence is even more overwhelming, and it’s mostly physics at its heart. Trying to salvage Bishop Ussher’s weird numerological and biblical 17th century chronology in the 21st century by invoking the incomplete understanding of 19th century scholars is exactly the kind of inanity we’ve come to expect from creationists.