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By Adam Schmoetzer

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Description:
This video discusses alleged human footprints found alongside dinosaur tracks, which are used by Young Earth creationists as evidence that humans & dinosaurs once lived alongside each other. It ultimately concludes that this evidence does not withstand scrutiny.

Connection:
Several reasons for believing in the validity of the tracks are mentioned in the video. One is patternicity - because the imprints look like human footprints, it is assumed that this is what they actually are. Another is ideology - it is assumed that these tracks provide evidence for a specific worldview. This ties into the red flag of ideological support (where claims are assumed to be correct because it is ideologically expedient to believe so).

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Do the Paluxy River Tracks prove Dinosaurs and Humans co-existed?

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Description:
This video discusses other evidence that dinosaurs lived alongside humans, again concluding that it is insufficient.

Connection:
One reason for belief discussed in the video is perception & observation: people claim to see dinosaurs, but these sightings are invariably mistaken. One red flag mentioned is ancient wisdom. Because ancient people allegedly made artwork that superficially resembled dinosaurs, it is assumed that dinosaurs still exist.

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Did Dinosaurs Ever Live Alongside Humans?

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Description:
This TEDx Talk by Louisiana native Zack Kopplin discusses the state's efforts to undermine evidence-based science education by allowing Young Earth creationism to be taught in schools.

Connection:
One reason people support Young Earth creationism is ideology - people assume that a literal interpretation of Genesis is theologically superior to other interpretations. One red flag mentioned in the video is the appeal to authority (schoolteachers are assumed to be authority figures on the subjects they teach).

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The Cost of Teaching Creationism : Zack Kopplin at TEDxLSU

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Description:
This article discusses the similarities between Young Earth creationism & conspiracy theories such as QAnon.

Connection:
In addition to the ideological support mentioned earlier, this article mentions alleged suppression by authorities as a line of argumentation used by creationists.

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Why creationism bears all the hallmarks of a conspiracy theory

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An inevitable part of the internet age, some conspiracy theories appear and then fade, but in the US particularly, creationism seems firmly embedded in religion, education and pseudoscience.

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Description:
These are notes for a lecture by paleontologist Thomas Holtz about creationism in the United States.

Connection:
This article discusses & refutes several creationist arguments as fallacious. One example is irreducible complexity, which is an example of the unexplained (or, more accurately, personal incredulity). Another is the Gish Gallop, a form of proof by verbosity.

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Spring Semester 2016

Denying the Fossil Record: Evolution Denial and U.S. Science Education

"After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community." -- From Judge Jones ruling on the Kitzmiller vs. Dover, PA School District Decision (December 20, 2005)
and
"However, the longer I listened the clearer it became that creationism is not about science. It's about morality. Specifically, creationists worry that biological evolution undermines people's moral beliefs, leading to lawlessness, family breakdown, homosexuality, pornography, and abortion. The real heart of creationism is existential dread." -- "Creation Summer Camp", by Ronald Bailey (reason.com)
American Exceptionalism is Not Always A Good Thing!

The above data is from the 2005 study byJohn Miller et al. As you can note, America ranks very far behind all other industrialized Western nations included, and just ahead of Turkey. Taking these data and plotting them against a measure of national wealth, we see that the US really is an outlier compared to other rich nations:

So why this discontinuity? And why would people reject evolution anyway, particular in nations with an excellent fossil record and easy access to information by almost everyone.

NOTE: This lecture primarily examines American, Christian denial of evolution. But there are people who reject of evolutionary science from other nations and other religions, such as:

The Agudat Israel rabbinical council will not approve kosher endorsements on any product showing dinosaurs, because the idea of millions-of-years-old dinosaurs counters the idea of a 6000 year old Earth

Adnan Oktar (pen name "Harun Yahya") is spreading US-style Young Earth Creationism to Turkey (and from there, to the other of Islamic countries)

Supernaturalistic vs. Naturalistic Views of the Origins of Earth, Life, and Humanity
All cultures of the world have had some idea about where the world, its life, and humans came from. For many the traditional idea is that some supernatural force of great power (a god or multiple gods) brought them into being. But they disagreed on details: which god; in what order; by what process; etc.
For instance, Judaic chronologies traditionally held that Earth, Life, and Humanity were created over the course of the six day "Creation Week" described in Genesis, and that this was roughly six thousand years ago. Their neighboring cultures (Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks) thought that the Earth was created many 10s of thousands of years ago. Some (the Maya, for instance) had even longer time scales, and Hindu cosmologies suggesting an infinitely old, repeating Universe (with a present incarnation many many billions of years old.)

But many of these thought that the world was basically unchanged since the Dawn of Time, and did not consider any lineal connections of descent and ancestry among the species of the world.

Some philosophers suggested that it was non-divine processes to the worlds origin, and the possibility of transmutation. Among these were Anaximander of Miletus (610-546 BCE) and Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 99-c. 55 BCE).

During the early centuries of the Church, Christianity lived side-by-side with older pagan traditions of scholarship and research, exemplified by institutions such as the Library of Alexandria. Sometimes the relationship with non-Christian philosophers and thinkers was amicable, but sometimes less so. Among the philosophers of the early Christian Church was St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE), who argued that God formed the Earth and Life from pre-existing matter, and suggested that the six-day Creation Week was metaphorical or allegorical rather than historical. (However, he was adamant about a 6000-year old Earth rather than the longer Greek or Babylonian chronology.) He argued in the De Genesi ad literal (1:20) that Christians should be willing to change their minds about the natural world in light of new evidence:

"It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [i.e., a pagan] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters [i.e., natural phenomena], and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are."

With the collapse of the Roman world scholarship in the West was preserved and developed mostly by the Catholic Church, and there mostly by the professionally-trained priesthood. These were among the few who had access to both the Scriptures and other religious writing and to the scholarship of the Greco-Roman thinkers. With the Protestant Reformation, however, the Bible was translated into the vernacular tongues of Europe, and now ordinary people (or at least ordinary literate people) with no particular training in philosophy, history, or other academic disciplines had access to Scripture. For many this might be the only book they ever read.

As a consequence, the Protestant Reformation saw a spread of literalist rather than allegorical interpretation of the Bible. Some of these literalist ideas made their way to the very highest levels of Protestant hierarchies (for instance, Anglican Bishop James Ussher's 1650 chronology of the world, dating Creation to the nightfall before October 23, 4004 BC.) That said, there were many thinkers who considered other possibilities.

During the Age of Enlightenment (18th and early 19th Centuries) there were many arguments for and against naturalistic views of how the Universe operates and came to be. For example, David Hume observed order arising from mindless mechanistic processes (snowflakes from water, crystals from solution, and so forth), and considered that an ordered world might likewise come out of similar type processes. In contrast, others argued that the apparent Design of the Universe implied a Designer. This was most famously (although not firstly) argued as the "Watchmaker Argument" of William Paley in his 1802 Natural Theology.

"Natural theology" was that branch of theology that attempted to understand the nature of the Divine not through revealed wisdom and scripture, but from study of the natural world. It had a long tradition in the West (e.g., medieval bestiaries, where the aspects of different animals were interpreted as moral lessons for Mankind.) Many of the early geologists and paleontologists were natural theologians: Linnaeus and Buckland and Agassiz and Lyell and others.

But these naturalists also had to accept their discoveries of Earth vastly ancient beyond the chronologies of the Bible or the Classical World, with changing environmental conditions and inhabited by succession after succession of different life forms. Two major potential solutions were developed (or expanded from earlier concepts) to harmonize the observations of the natural world with Scripture:

Gap Theory: the idea that there is a vast gap in time between two verses in Genesis. As commonly formulated, this was between Genesis 1:1 ("In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth") and 1:2 ("And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.") Under Gap theory, all of geologic time and the succession of life on Earth in the past took place between these sentences.

Day/Age Chronologies: an ancient idea that the "days" in Genesis are not literal 24 hr periods, but are metaphorical "days" or "ages". Thus, each "Day" could be some vast chunk of Earth history. Unfortunately for this model, the argument fails when the particular sequence of phenomenon in Genesis 1 or the (contradictory) sequence in Genesis 2 are compared to the sequences discovered by cosmology, astronomy, geology, and paleontology.

Of course, much of this came to a head with Darwin and Wallace's discovery of Natural Selection. They had discovered a mechanism to produce design without any need for outside influence: simply variation, heredity, and superfecundity.

The following is a dramatic recreation of the result of the publication of The Origin in Victorian England, from the 1978 BBC costume drama The Voyages of Charles Darwin. (The first two characters to show up are Sir Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin; other characters whom we have encountered in this course are Thomas Huxley and Sir Richard Owen):

As this shows, the basic arguments were already set forth. However, one important thing to show: although Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley do represent the points of view of many of the religious and scientific thinkers (respectively) of that time, these camps were not entirely unified. Some religious thinkers were very much in support of Darwin and Wallace's new ideas, and some scientists rejected evolution (and more the specific model of Natural Selection) at that time.

This sets the stage for the 20th and 21st Century American situation, and the rise of organized evolution deniers.
The American Experience with Evolution Denialism
The word "fundamentalist" is thrown around by popular culture for a person exceedingly committed to religious ideas, but that is not really the true meaning of the word. It actually refers back toThe Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, a series of 90 essays in twelve volumes published from 1910 to 1915 by the evangelical Protestant Bible Institute of Los Angeles. A Fundamentalist is ultimately someone who holds the views expressed in these books. This was the foundational set of documents for a new literalist movement in North American religious thinking.
Among the peoples of this movement was Canadian George McCready Price, who published various books (such as The Fundamentals of Geology, arguing for Flood Geology (the idea that most geological strata and structures were laid down by Noah's Flood) and a Young (that is, 6000-year old) Earth. Price's book, and those like it, were used by the growing Fundamentalist movement to provide support for people who did not want the scientific understanding of an ancient Earth and evolving Life taught in schools.

In 1925 Tennessee passed the Butler Act, "AN ACT prohibiting the teachings of the Evolution Theory in all the Universities, and all other public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, and to provide penalties for the violations thereof." Many other states followed suit, making the teaching of evolution illegal in the public schools. It was challenged later that year in the town of Dayton, where the ACLU financed a test case for this law (to which they objected). High school teacher John Thomas Scope was charged with teaching evolution, and the resultant Scopes monkey trial (technically State of Tennessess vs. John Thomas Scopes) made international news. It pitted two of the most famous lawyers of the early 20th Century (William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution, Clarence Darrow for the defense) against each other. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100, but it was overturned on a technicality (the jury, not the judge, should have set the fine!). The Butler Law remained on the books until 1967.

After embarrassment by the United States at the Soviet's early accomplishments in space travel (the Sputnik series; first manned space flight; etc.) in the 1950s, American educators sought to greatly increase the science component in its schools. But eventually the issue of Butler (and similar laws in other states) had to be dealt with. In many cases they were simply repealed. But in one situation, it went to the Supreme Court. This was the 1967 case Epperson vs. Arkansas, over a 1928 Butler-style law. Susan Epperson (high school biology teacher) filed suit over the constitutionality of this law. The Supreme Court found:

"The overriding fact is that Arkansas' law selects from the body of knowledge a particular segment which it proscribes for the sole reason that it is deemed to conflict with a particular religious doctrine; that is, with a particular interpretation of the Book of Genesis by a particular religious group."

and

"The state has no legitimate interest in protecting any or all religions from views distasteful to them."

So prohibiting the teaching of evolution was out. In response, states began to propose "Equal Time" laws, which stated that schools had to teach Creationism (i.e., a purely supernatural view of the origin of Earth, Life & Humans) alongside scientific ones. This led to the case Daniel vs. Waters, where the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit argued Tennessee's "equal time" act, which had stated

"Any biology textbook used for teaching in the public schools, which expresses an opinion of, or relates a theory about origins or creation of man and his world shall be prohibited from being used as a textbook in such system unless it specifically states that it is a theory as to the origin and creation of man and his world and is not represented to be scientific fact. Any textbook so used in the public education system which expresses an opinion or relates to a theory or theories shall give in the same text-book and under the same subject commensurate attention to, and an equal amount of emphasis on, the origins and creation of man and his world as the same is recorded in other theories, including, but not limited to, the Genesis account in the Bible."

but also

"The teaching of all occult or satanical beliefs of human origin is expressly excluded from this Act."

The Court ruled that creationism--as inherently religious--was not objectively part of a secular program of education.

In response, "Creationism" evolved into "Creation Science". The idea was that by putting "Science" in the name it could now be taught as science. However, there was no actual change in content or evidence, just a rebranding. Groups to promote Creation Science were organized: the Institute for Creation Research (1972); Center for Scientific Creation (1980); Reasons to Believe (an Old Earth Creation group) (1986); and Answers in Genesis (1994).

The new Creation Science organizations helped promote a new series of "balanced treatment" laws, just like the old "equal time" Creation acts. One of these eventually resulted in the 1981 US Supreme Court case Edwards vs. Aguillard. The law in question was Louisiana's 1981 "Balanced Treatment of Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act". The US Supreme Court found that

"The Act impermissibly endorses religion by advancing the religious belief that a supernatural being created humankind. The legislative history demonstrates that the term "creation science," as contemplated by the state legislature, embraces this religious teaching. The Act's primary purpose was to change the public school science curriculum to provide persuasive advantage to a particular religious doctrine that rejects the factual basis of evolution in its entirety. Thus, the Act is designed either to promote the theory of creation science that embodies a particular religious tenet or to prohibit the teaching of a scientific theory disfavored by certain religious sects."

So Creation Science was out. It was rebranded again, and now called " Intelligent Design" or "ID" for short. This was an attempt to remove references to God and the Bible from materials promoting essentially the same arguments as before, in the hopes that in so doing it would not seem religious. However, despite what people in some intellectual circles think, it was just exactly the same idea as before. For example, the standard ID textbook Of Pandas and People states that "Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact. Fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, wings, etc." In fact, study shows the systematic replacement of "Creation" with "intelligent design" and "creationist" with "design proponent" over the earlier editions of the same book that became retitled Of Pandas and People:

Indeed, during the Dover trial (see below) the speciation event was captured in mid-transformation: a case where the editors of a draft of Of Pandas and Peoples accidentally inserted "design proponents" in the middle of the word "creationist" rather than just replacing it!

Upper edition is the earlier draft, lower one has the "transitional form".

The predominant organization promoting ID is The Discovery Institute (founded in 1990), which promotes their " Wedge strategy" to "to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies" and "to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God".

The ID proponents organized new sets of campaigns for laws around the country in the 1990s, such as "Teach the Controversy" and "Critical Analysis of Evolution" (basically new incarnations of "equal time" or "balanced treatment"). ID brought in new thinkers promoting particular new approaches, such as Michael Behe's Irreducible Complexity and William Dembski's Specified Complexity. We will examine these particular arguments next lecture.

With the backing of the Discovery Institute, then-Pensylvannia Senator Rick Santorum proposed the Santorum Amendment to the "No Child Left Behind" law. This was a law to promote the teaching of ID as an alternative to evolution, and to label evolution as a "theory in crisis". The amendment was not included in the federal law, but was modified to support similar measures within his home state.

This led to the adoption by the school board of Dover, PA of a statement to be read in all classes where evolution was taught:

"The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students to learn about Darwin's Theory of Evolution and eventually to take a standardized test of which evolution is a part.
Because Darwin's Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.

Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People, is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves.

With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. The school leaves the discussion of the Origins of Life to individual students and their families. As a Standards-driven district, class instruction focuses upon preparing students to achieve proficiency on Standards-based assessments."

A number of families brought suit against the School Board, leading to the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case in the US District Court. (Trivia time: my then-current phylogeny of theropods was used as part of the evidence by paleontologist Kevin Padian in the trial!) If you have two hours to kill, you can watch an excellent documentary about the trial.

After testimony that included leading figures on both sides, Judge Jones ruled that ID "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents" and is not Science. Additionally, it was made very clear in the testimony that although some ID thinkers might keep open the possibility that the Intelligent Designer was not divine, the supporters of the statement in the community and the School Board itself did not consider there to be any distinction between Creationism and ID, and were in fact promoting Young Earth Creationism.

The Dover ruling ground ID in its track, and the movement as such has stalled. But that doesn't mean that evolution deniers have given up. Over the last decade they continue to support "teach the controversy" laws, "strengths and weaknesses" laws, and "academic freedom" laws (which are all updates on the old "balanced treatment" or "equal time" laws). For instance Oklahoma's Senate Bill 320 (the "Science Education and Academic Freedom Act" of 2009, which thankfully died in committee) stated:

"The Legislature further finds that the teaching of some scientific subjects, such as biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning, can cause controversy, and that some teachers may be unsure of the expectations concerning how they should present information on such subjects."
and
"Students may be evaluated based upon their understanding of course materials, but no student in any public school or institution shall be penalized in any way because the student may subscribe to a particular position on scientific theories."

Numerous similar laws have been proposed (and occasionally are still on the books) in Louisiana, Tennessee, Colorado, Montana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Indiana.

With all this trouble, many teachers simply want to avoid the problem and don't teach evolution in the schools. Indeed, more teachers themselves believe in some form of ID or theistic evolution than in our scientific understanding. As a result, very few states require teaching about human evolution in the schools.

And so, the legal fights go on.

But what do evolution deniers really believe? And why do they believe it?
Who Denies Evolution?
Despite what some might want to to think, there is no simple dichotomy between "godless materialist evolutionists" and "Biblical-thumping fundamentalist Young Earth Creationists". In fact, there is a spectrum of beliefs (although not all of them are broadly represented in society at equal numbers by any means!):

Naturalistic/Scientific/Materialist Evolution: the standard scientific model, as taught in this course. Even many theists (believers in a God or gods) can hold this position, which simply states that our explanations for how and what has happened through time are by means of mechanistic phenomena.

Theistic Evolution: the idea that everything we see in geologic time and evolutionary history actually happened, but that it was guided by God or some other "Higher Power" for a particular purpose. Although (as we will see) this is not the majority position within the population in the US, it is in fact the most common position held by high school teachers (see links in last lecture). And it is the position supported by (among other mainstream religious groups) many representatives of the Catholic Church. NOTE: despite what many people think, ID proponents do NOT belong here. Theistic evolutionists still accept natural selection or similar mechanisms for driving change through time; however, they think that God basically "stacks the deck" in favor of certain changes. In contrast, ID proponents do not accept natural selection as a mechanism for any significant change.

Old Earth Creationism (OEC, from herein): this includes the Day/Age creationists or Gap theorist mentioned last time. They accept geology and Big Bang cosmology, but reject evolution as a cause for the diversity of Life and the origin of species. This system is fairly rare in the US today, but has support from organizations like Reasons to Believe. Also, some of the major public ID proponents (Behe, for instance) probably fall in this category: an ancient Earth, but no significant role for natural selection or large-scale connections in the Tree of Life. OECs are in conflict with basic science as they require supernatural explanations for a phenomenon already well-explained by science, and with the Young Earth Creationism by a number of theological issues (especially the existence of billions of years of death and suffering prior to the Garden of Eden and subsequent Fall of Man.)

Young Earth Creationism (YEC): classic style Creationism. An early of only a few thousands or maybe tens of thousands of years, the Biblical Flood and Noah's Ark, a literal Garden of Eden at the beginning, etc., etc. The single most common belief in the US of all the ones listed here. Answers in Genesis and The Institute for Creation Research are the main "think" tanks for this movement. When pressed, many ID proponents reveal themselves to be YECs. BUT, despite what they claim, they are not Biblical literalists, because they accept the spherical Earth as a planet orbiting a star (the Sun) in a vast Milky Way galaxy in a universe of galaxies. As opposed to...

Geocentrism: Yes, there are still hold to the view that the Earth is in the physical center of the universe, and the Sun and stars orbit around it. Just like it says in the Bible (or, basically, in all ancient cultures, because that's what it looks like.) But even these reject an aspect of the Biblical literal view of the Cosmos, as held by...

Flat Earthers: a truly literalist Biblical view. Yes, some are still around...

Looking just at the YECs, how wrong is their chronology? The actual age of the Earth at about 4.557 Gyr, but they claim a mere 6000 yrs. This is exactly proportional to claiming that the distance from Washington, DC to Los Angeles, CA (3690 km, or 2293 mi) is really only 4.86 m (16 feet)!! And in order to do this, one has to reject physics (nuclear decay, the speed of light, and so forth), astronomy, geology, chemistry: indeed, the whole corpus of modern Science.
Common Evolution Denier Arguments, and Why They Fail
Let's take a look at a bunch of arguments, concepts, and rhetorical devices used by evolution deniers, and see how they hold up.
The Omphalos Argument: formulated by Henry Phillip Gosse in 1857, the idea that the Earth was created to LOOK ancient, but is really only 6000 years old. (It's name is from the Greek for "navel": the idea that Adam and Eve were created with navels, even if they were never gestated inside a woman and hence would not have umbilical cords!) This idea requires a trickster God (who wants to make things look ancient, up to and including light from stars and other objects more than 6000 light years away being created in transit.), which doesn't jive well with most standard modern theologies. Furthermore, if God is capable of doing this kind of fakery, what is to say He didn't create the Universe only last Thursday, and all the books, movies, photographs, even your memories, of the past were simply willed into being to appear as it there were a past. Intellectually this is EXACTLY the same argument. (This variation of Omphalos is called, not too creatively, "Last Thursdayism".) As such, you can see why it is really way outside the realm of Science.

Intelligent Design:
Two primary new arguments were suggested by the leading thinkers of the ID movement. These are

Irreducible Complexity: Michael Behe's contribution. Irreducible complexity refers to any system "composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one part causes the system to effectively cease functioning." In practice, however, how does one demonstrate the appropriate level to look for IC? And at what point can you establish it is irreducible? Behe's particular favorite examples (the bacterial flagellum and the blood clotting mechanisms of vertebrates) have already been shown to be exaltations and other modifications of simpler structures. However, Behe refuses to acknowledge the refutation of these cases.

Specified Complexity: William Dembski's contribution. Under this idea, specified patterns are ones that admit short descriptions; complex patterns are ones unlikely to occur by chance. Other mathematicians demonstrated flaws in this logic.

Both of these are cases of the oldArgument from Design of Paley and the like. These are really just cases of Argument from Ignorance ("We don't know, therefore Creation") (or more precisely, Argument from Personal Incredulity ("We personally don't know, even if other people do, therefore Creation").
Here are a few good videos that explore ID arguments in greater details:

"It Can't Just Be Random Chance!" or "It Couldn't Just Happen!": This includes several problems. One is that evolution isn't "just chance". While randomness is a factor in the generation of mutations (that is, mutations appear without any particular direction relative to the situation the organism is in), selection itself is a non-random aspect. The other aspect is the "just" part. After all, one could say that a symphony is "just a bunch of notes in order" or a poem "just a bunch of worlds", and be technically correct. But "just" is a subjective qualifier that doesn't really have a place in Science.

"It's Just a Theory!": Ugh. As we saw earlier in this course, "theory" in Science is not a word for "guess" or "speculation" or "opinion". It is a model or set of rules with broad explanatory power about some particular phenomenon. So evolution is a theory, just like gravity, or the atomic theory of matter, or plate tectonics.

"Where are the Transitional Forms?": Ummm... Yeah. See the rest of this course...

Related to the above, Misunderstanding Sister Taxa and Ancestors: Similar to a lot of people, evolution deniers misunderstand when scientists are referring to sister taxa rather than ancestors. Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, but they aren't our ancestors.

"If Humans Evolved From Apes, Why Are There Still Apes?": This is like asking "If there are Norwegian-Americans, why are there still Norwegians?" Evolution doesn't convert all of the old taxon into a new form, just some subpopulation. This is part of the general misunderstanding that evolution is progression towards a particular goal (especially humans), rather than simply the divergence of the Tree of Life.

"There are Gaps in the Fossil Record!": Yes, we know. But as we saw earlier in the class, the vast majority of individuals, or even species, are unlikely to be preserved in the fossil record, much less discovered, described, and identified by paleontologists. Nevertheless, we get more information as time goes by. Indeed, ironically, you get more "gaps" the more information there is! As demonstrated by Futurama:

"Microevolution Happens, But Not Macroevolution!": At least some evolution deniers accept that natural selection can cause transformations from population to population over time by the differential survival and reproduction of variants in a population. But they think that this is somehow limited in scope, and cannot produce change from one "kind" of organism to another. But one of the big points of The Origin is the demonstration that seemingly distinct end members can actually be connected by small steps in between. "Macro-" and "microevolution" do not have different causes; they are simply different expressions at different scales of the same phenomenon. As critics of evolution deniers point out, accepting microevolution but rejecting macroevolution is like believing in inches but rejecting the reality of feet!

"Where You There?": A common trope of YECs. Without eyewitnesses, they claim, we can't be certain any particular event happened. Leaving aside the fact that eyewitnesses are actually notoriously unreliable as recorders of fact, we use reconstruction of past events from the limited preserved evidence all the time in society: reconstructing accidents; forensic medicine; history and archaeology; etc. And while you and I weren't there, the rocks themselves and the fossils therein damn well were!

"The Cambrian Explosion Disproves Evolution!": Why a particularly evolutionary event is supposed disproves evolution isn't clear, and the evolution deniers don't make it any clearer. In reality, this trope comes from a list that the evolution deniers got from... Charles Darwin! See the lecture on the Cambrian Explosion for Darwin's puzzlement at this, and solutions to this. (It is worth noting that many other cases on this list are from Chapter 6 "Difficulties on Theory of The Origin. Darwin was honest enough to understand potential objections to his idea, and elucidated why these objections were invalid or fallacious.

"Evolutionists Get Things Wrong or Disagree!": Evolution deniers love to point out cases where paleontologists misinterpreted or reinterpreted data, and then changed their mind. This shows that they simply do not understand the basic aspects of Science: that it is not a single revealed body of wisdom, but rather a process of developing observations and models to explain phenomena. Through hypothesis falsification and reciprocal illumination we may replace older ideas with newer ones as new information comes to light. That is fine: that is how it is supposed to work. Furthermore, when the data are not clearly decisive one way or the other--or where some group (cough, the BAND, cough cough...) refuses to acknowledge the rejection of their claims for personal reasons--you will find that scientists will disagree. That is fine. (And it isn't like different religious people, even of the same denomination, agree on all matters of theology, but they don't recognize that as a reason to reject their own beliefs.)

Confusing Evolutionary Theory with any Particular Phylogenetic Scenario: A special case of the previous one, the claim that rejection of a particular phylogenetic model means that evolution is incorrect. For example, whales were once thought to derive from a group of primitive carnivorous land mammal, but new evidence placed their ancestry within (omnivorous) early members of the artiodactyls (cloven-hoofed mammals). But this change of idea was done entirely within the context of paleontology and evolutionary biology, not in spite of it!

"Darwin Said the Eye Cannot Evolve!": Yep, he sure did. It's right there in Chapter 6 (see link above), where he wrote:

"To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree."

Of course, the next sentence reads:

"Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real."

And the next several paragraphs document existing cases that demonstrate each intermediate form of eye still in use by some living animal.
(Additionally, great as a scientist as Darwin was, evolutionary biology is not the "Gospel According to Charles"! Ideas in Science are accepted by their evidentiary merit, not by who said it.)

Conflation of "Evolution" with "Abiogenesis" &amp: "Big Bang Cosmology: When asked to state their objections to evolution, many deniers will include aspects which actually have to do with the origin of Life as a whole or even of the Universe itself. But these topics are other fields of Science: they aren't evolution. (This does go back to an earlier point, though: Creationism requires a rejection of essentially all modern science, not just the particular fields of paleontology, evolutionary biology, and geology!)

Related to the above, "How Can Something Come From Nothing?": This is a misunderstanding of both abiogenesis at one level, and Big Bang cosmology at the other. In the case of abiogenesis, there was never a magic moment when something was non-living and became living; instead, it would have been a stepwise shift of chemical processes from something unquestionably non-living through various quasi-life stages to extraordinarily primitive life and so on to LUCA. And in the case of the Big Bang: this was not, as pretty much the whole culture thinks it does, an explosion of everything inside a void. In fact, it is quite the opposite: EVERYTHING (all matter, all energy, everything) started out there in a mind-bogglingly condensed state and inflated. It wasn't an explosion of something in the nothing; it was an expansion of everything away from itself. (And neither of these are about evolution, anyway!)

"Argumentum ad Hitlerum" & " Argumentum ad Stalinum": A common trope (and theme of the misinformation "documentary" Expelled is that Hitler was applying Darwinian principles to eliminate inferior gene lines to improve the human race. (Similarly, but less often, people argue that Stalin was organizing the Soviet Union on Darwinian lines). This fails on two main lines.

The first is that even if these were true statements, it would not invalidate the reality of evolution. This is an Argument from Adverse Consequences: assuming an idea is false because bad consequences would result if the idea were true. But Hitler and Stalin's military made use of chemistry, physics, and so on to kill millions: that doesn't mean chemistry and ballistics and the like are untrue.

And furthermore, neither of these dictators actually supported Darwinian ideas of evolution, anyway! Stalin himself doesn't seem to have written much about it, but he promoted the work of the anti-Darwinian neo-Lamarckian Trofim Lysenko, who wrote:

"Such sciences as physics and chemistry have freed themselves from chance. That is why they became exact sciences. Animate nature was developed and is developed on a foundation of the most strict and inherent rules. Organisms and species are developed on a foundation of their natural and intrinsic needs. By getting rid of Mendelism-Morganism-Weismannism from our science we banish chance out of biological science. We must keep in mind clearly that science is the enemy of chance."

and indeed Lysenkoists (with the support of Stalin's regime) had pro-Darwin workers banished to the Gulags along with other intellectuals who held ideas contrary to those supported by the State.
In the case of Hitler, we have his own writings to demonstrate that he rejected the transformation of species or the origins of humans from other types of animals:

"Even a superficial glance is sufficient to show that all the innumerable forms in which the life-urge of Nature manifests itself are subject to a fundamental law-one may call it an iron law of Nature-which compels the various species to keep within the definite limits of their own life-forms when propagating and multiplying their kind. Each animal mates only with one of its own species. The titmouse cohabits only with the titmouse, the finch with the finch, the stork with the stork, the field-mouse with the field-mouse, the house-mouse with the house-mouse, the wolf with the she-wolf, etc." -- Mein Kampf

and
"From where do we get the right to believe, that from the very beginning Man was not what he is today? Looking at Nature tells us that in the realm of plants and animals changes and developments happen. But nowhere inside a kind shows such a development as the breadth of the jump, as Man must supposedly have made, if he has developed from an ape-like state to what he is today." -- Tischgespräche

and
"For it was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties." -- Mein Kampf

Hardly the words of a man committed to an evolutionary worldview, trying to implement a Darwinist view on society!

"If We Teach Children We Are Just (or Come From) Animals, They Will Act Like Animals!": This is just another Argument from (in this case False) Adverse Consequences. Consider that in many nations (as we saw last time) there is far more belief in evolution than in the US, but their youths are not particularly prone to delinquency, rowdiness, or otherwise "animal"-like behaviors.

The "Gish Gallop": A common debating technique, named after YEC Duane Gish, and defined as "drowning the opponent in such a torrent of half-truths, lies, and straw-man arguments that the opponent cannot possibly answer every falsehood in real time." Sadly, this is by no means limited to evolution deniers, but is sort of a general rhetorical device. For proof, see the Internet...
Who Does and Doesn't Accept Evolution?
Rejection of evolution is higher in the US than other English-speaking nations (Angus Reid):

By religion (US):

By state, with the most and least religious states noted:

and by politics:

and by church attendance:

Correlation between acceptance of evolution and belief in God:

But why should (at least some) religious people feel motivated to reject evolution (as opposed to rejecting other aspects of science, like cellular biology, the germ theory of disease, the atomic theory of matter, galactic astronomy, or any other myriad fields outside the scope of Scripture)?

In the report cited at the quote at the top of the notes, it was noticed by the reporter that the real reason for rejecting this aspect of science wasn't the science itself: it was the perceived implications of a material origin for humanity on the source of morality. They felt that if humans were not divinely created there could be no absolute morality dictated (literally) from On High, and that lacking such any sort of behavior might be condoned. (Of course this ignores millennia of work by ethical philosophers to find reasons for moral behavior outside of divine command, but that's outside the scope of this class!)

Additionally, this is part of what Carl Sagan called "The Great Demotions": the perception by some that as Science discovers the size and age of the Universe, Earth, and Life, that we seem more insignificant:

Basically, once you accept that an ideology trumps evidence in one sphere, it becomes difficult to use your critical faculties in others. So the harm in rejecting well-supported discoveries like the antiquity of the Earth and the evolution of Life makes one susceptible to accepting untrue ideas, which will result in faulty decision making.

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Last modified: 25 April 2016

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GEOL 204 The Fossil Record: Denying the Fossil Record: Evolution Denial and U.S. Science Education

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Denying the Fossil Record: Evolution Denial and U.S. Science Education "After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science.

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Description:
This list documents several notable Christians who believed that evolution was compatible with religion.

Connection:
This list serves as a rebuttal to the argument of ideological support (namely that creationism is morally superior to evolution because it follows the Bible).

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Famous Christians Who Believed Evolution is Compatible with Christian Faith - BioLogos

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The list includes some of the most influential Christians of the last 150 years, such as Billy Graham and C.S. Lewis.

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Description:
This is a picture of Archaeopteryx, the so-called first bird (although it features several reptilian traits such as a long tail, clawed forelimbs & teeth).

Connection:
Creationists such as Wells (2000) emphasize the avian traits of this fossil while downplaying its reptilian traits (Gishlick, 2002). This is an example of confirmation bias. Indeed, new evidence (summarized by Paul 2002) demonstrates that several dinosaurs were actually more birdlike than Archaeopteryx.

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Description:
This is an illustration of Piltdown Man, a hoax created with human & orangutan bones.

Connection:
Piltdown Man is a classic example of a red herring. Creationists use the hoax as evidence that all of evolution is false while ignoring the overwhelming quantity of evidence.

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Description:
This graph from Nieminen & Mustonen (2014) demonstrates the presence of logical fallacies in creationist writings.

Connection:
One of the fallacies listed here that has been discussed in class is the appeal to authority. Another is the equivocation, a form of red herring.

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1. I was surprised to learn just how fallacious creationist writings are.

2. I have an amateur interest in paleontology & zoology, so I am greatly concerned that the general public is accurately informed about them.

3. I was interested to read Nieminen & Mustonen's (2014) research on creationist fallacies since I am not aware of any other attempts to quantify this.

4. I will remember the list of important Christians who supported evolutionary theory.

5. I agree that medical pseudoscience is the most dangerous pseudoscience since it puts people at risk of illness & death. On the other hand, belief in astrology, feng shui, etc. can be innocuous in moderation.

6. I would pass on the importance of shaking off ideological blinders.

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Gishlick, A. D. 2002. Icons of evolution? Why much of what Jonathan Wells writes about evolution is wrong.

Nieminen, P., and A. Mustonen. 2014. Argumentation and fallacies in creationist writings against evolutionary theory. Evolution: Education and Outreach 7(1): 11.

Paul, G. S. 2002. Dinosaurs of the air. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

Wells, J. 2000. Icons of evolution: science or myth?: why much of what we teach about evolution is wrong. Regnery, Washington, DC.

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Description:
This video critically evaluates the evidence for alleged living dinosaurs in central Africa - most famously the sauropod mokele-mbembe, but also the ceratopsian emela-ntouka & stegosaur mbielu-mbielu-mbielu. It concludes that the evidence for these creatures is deficient.

Connection:
One of the red flags discussed in the video is confirmation bias: explorers only acknowledge evidence that allegedly supports these animals & disregards that which doesn't. Another is ideological support - Young Earth creationists have attempted to use these alleged dinosaurs to advance their agenda.

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Cryptid Profile: Mokele-mbembe and the “Lost” Dinosaurs of the Congo

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Description:
This video discusses the case of the ropen, an alleged pterosaur living in the south Pacific. As with other claims of living Mesozoic reptiles, the evidence is ultimately deemed insufficient.

Connection:
One reason for belief discussed in the video is the ideology of its proponents, which is related to ideological support - as with the mokele-mbembe, Young Earth creationists have attempted to use the ropen as evidence against evolution (even though, if valid, it would do no such thing). Another is perception & observation - vague eyewitness accounts are assumed to refer to the creature.

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Cryptid Profile - The Ropen or "The Living Pterosaur"

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Description:
In this video, Vice correspondent David Choe discusses his experience looking for mokele-mbembe in central Africa, including a ritual that amusingly includes a very strong alcoholic beverage.

Connection:
One reason for belief in mokele-mbembe apparent in the video is the unexplained - no one can prove that a dinosaur doesn't live in the area. One red flag is ancient wisdom - old accounts of the creature are assumed to be valid.

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The Last Dinosaur of the Congo with David Choe

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Description:
This entry from The Skeptic's Dictionary critically evaluates the folklore surrounding the mokele-mbembe.

Connection:
One red flag mentioned in the article is the red herring - believers bring up the coelacanth as a similar case, but the two are not really comparable.

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From Abracadabra to Zombies

The mokele-mbembe is an alleged living sauropod dinosaur now living in the Likouala swamp region of the Republic of the Congo. The animal has allegedly been encountered by local pygmies who have given the creature its name. Mokele-mbembe means, depending on your source, "rainbow", "one that stops the flow of rivers", or "monstrous animal." The mokele-mbembe is allegedly the size of an elephant (the favorite prey of the local pygmies) with a very long reptilian neck. The creature is said to be hairless and reddish-brown, brown, or gray, with a tail five to ten feet long. The creature apparently spends most of its time in the water, but the pygmies claim they've seen prints left on land of a three-clawed foot.

Reports of this creature have been circulating for the past two hundred years, yet no one has photographed the creature or produced any physical evidence of its existence. Enthusiastic cryptozoologists like Roy Mackal ( A Living Dinosaur? In Search of Mokele-Mbembe, 1987) think we should give as much credence to the mokele-mbembe as to the Loch Ness monster. True, and it seems unlikely the creature exists, since there would have to be a significant number of the huge creatures to continue to produce descendents after all other dinosaurs were extinguished some 70 million years ago. Yet, they seem to have flourished without leaving a single carcass, bone fragment, or fossil.

Cryptozoologists argue that since a coelacanth was caught off the coast of South Africa, it is reasonable to think that a dinosaur might also have avoided detection for a few million years. However, there is a big difference between finding a fish thought to be extinct and finding a dinosaur. The fish is small and lives in the ocean. Oceans cover two-thirds of the earth and have depths of up to 35,000 feet. That is a lot of space to hide specimens and fragments of specimens. Dinosaurs are large, occupied the third of the earth mostly visible to its other inhabitants, and thus would be much more likely to be detected than the coelacanth.
Last updated 20-Dec-2013

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The mokele-mbembe is an alleged living sauropod dinosaur now living in the Likouala swamp region of the Republic of the Congo. The animal has allegedly been encountered by local pygmies who have given the creature its name. Mokele-mbembe means, depending on your source, "rainbow", "one that stops the flow of rivers", or "monstrous animal."

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Description:
This article discusses the original African folklore surrounding the mokele-mbembe, noting similarities to other worldwide myths & bemoaning the extent to which Western interpretations have dominated.

Connection:
One reason for belief in mokele-mbembe is simplicity - it is simpler to assume that accounts of large unknown creatures refer to real animals rather than to mythical entities. A pertinent red flag is an ideological support for a particular worldview - as mentioned earlier, the stories have been hijacked by Young Earth creationists.

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Variations: Mokéle-mbêmbe, Mokele Mbembe, Monstrous Animal; Nsanga; Emela-ntouka, Emia-ntouka, Aseka-moke, Ngamba-namae, Killer of Elephants, Water Elephant; Nguma-monene, Badigui, Ngakoula Ngou, Diba, Songo; Mbielu-mbielu-mbielu

Tales of the Mokele-mbembe, "One Who Stops the Flow of Rivers" (or, more simply, "River-Shutter"), come from the Congo River Basin, around the Ikelemba, Sanga, and Ubangi rivers and Lake Tele. It is the most discussed and well-known of the "African mystery beasts" primarily due to the cryptozoological interpretation that defines it as a surviving sauropod dinosaur. It - or its unnamed predecessor, at any rate - was initially described as hailing from Rhodesia (Zimbabwe).

There is nothing unique about the mokele-mbembe. It is at least four notable mythic creatures: the river-shutter, the pachyderm slayer, the unicorn, and the giant reptile. River-shutters are sub-Saharan creatures with an aptitude for withholding or releasing a river's water; in communities dependent on life-giving water, this can mean the difference between life and death. The pachyderm slayer - a creature so mighty and dangerous that it routinely kills the biggest and scariest animals known - is a far broader category that has been famously applied to the dragon and the unicorn. The presence of a single horn is a recurring feature of monsters, most notably the unicorn. Finally, giant reptiles (often irresponsibly called "dragons") are a worldwide theme.

The first to suggest the existence of a large dinosaurian creature was big-game hunter and zoo supplier Carl Hagenbeck. Hagenbeck reports a huge animal, half elephant and half dragon, from deep within Rhodesia (not the Congo, where the mokele-mbembe eventually took up residence). He said that there are drawings of it on Central African caves but provides no further detail on that angle. All in all it is "seemingly akin to the brontosaurus [ sic]". Hans Schomburgk, one of Hagenbeck's sources, stated that the lack of hippos on Lake Bangweulu was due to a large animal that killed hippos. An expedition sent by Hagenbeck to investigate the creature's existence found nothing. Tantalizing as it may be, the entire episode with the nameless saurian is no more than an aside in Hagenbeck's book, an attempt to attract potential investors by capitalizing on the contemporary "dinomania" sweeping the globe.

The first decade of the twentieth century saw a vast increase in public interest in dinosaurs. In 1905 the mounted skeleton of Apatosaurus was unveiled at the American Museum of Natural History and London's Natural History Museum inaugurated its Diplodocus. Soon museums across the world were receiving their own gigantic sauropod skeletons courtesy of Andrew Carnegie, industrialist and patron of the sciences. In 1907 the skeletons of enormous sauropods emerged in German East Africa; these eventually formed a hall of titans in Berlin's Natural History Museum. Hagenbeck's account of a living sauropod was not written in a vacuum, but was - consciously or not - drawing on contemporary massive interest in massive reptiles.

E. C. Chubb of the Rhodesia Museum dismissed Hagenbeck's claim. To him, this creature was no more than another example of the "land edition of the Great Sea Serpent". He received further accounts of the Rhodesian creature, a large beast with flippers, rhinoceros horns, a crocodile's head, a python's neck, a hippo's body, and a crocodile's tail; a three-horned creature from Lake Bangweulu, Zambia, that killed hippos.

The next step came with Lieutenant Paul Graetz in 1911. He wrote about the Nsanga of Lake Bangweulu, a "degenerate saurian" like a crocodile but without scales and armed with claws on its feet. Graetz supposedly came by strips of nsanga skin but saw nothing more tangible.

The account that concretized the mokele-mbembe and gave it its name was that of German officer Ludwig Freiherr von Stein zu Lausnitz. His report places the mystery beast firmly in the Congo, around the Likouala rivers. The mokele-mbembe has smooth, brownish-grey skin. It is approximately the size of an elephant, or a hippopotamus at the smallest. Its neck is long and flexible. It has only one tooth, but that tooth is very long; " some say it is a horn " adds Stein (this feature is usually ignored, as it does not conform to the sauropod narrative). It has a long, muscular tail like a crocodile's. It attacks canoes and kills its occupants without eating them. The mokele-mbembe is vegetarian and it feeds on a type of liana, leaving the water to do so. It lives in caves dug out by the sharp bends in the river. Stein was shown a supposed mokele-mbembe trackway but could not make it out among the elephant and hippo tracks.

Stein's account is the basis for the modern mokele-mbembe legend. The report was never officially published, but was publicized by Willy Ley (who inexplicably linked the mokele-mbembe to the dragon of the Ishtar Gate).

This in turn led to successive expeditions to the Congo by James H. Powell Jr. and Roy Mackal. Mackal determined the mokele-mbembe to be 5 to 10 meters long, most of which is neck and tail. It has smooth brown-grey skin and a very long neck with a snakelike head on the end. Sometimes there is a frill, like a rooster's comb, on the back of the head. The legs are short and stout, with three claws on the hind legs, and leave 30-centimeter-wide prints. The malombo plant is the staple of the creature's diet. While herbivorous, the mokele-mbembe is very aggressive and will destroy any canoes that approach it. It does so by tipping the vessels, then biting and lashing out with its tail.

In addition to the mokele-mbembe, Mackal is responsible for bringing to light a whole menagerie of prehistoric survivors and some unusually-sized modern reptiles as well. The Emela-ntouka, for instance, is larger than an elephant. Its skin is smooth, hairless, and wrinkly, brown to grey in color. Its legs are thick and columnar to support its weight. The tail is heavy and similar to a crocodile's. There is a single horn on the front of the head. These creatures are herbivorous and kill buffaloes and elephants by goring them with their single horns. If all this sounds familiar, it's because none of it is distinguishable from what has been said about the mokele-mbembe (including the horn, no longer an inconvenient detail). Mackal optimistically proposes that the emela-ntouka is a late-surviving ceratopsian dinosaur.

Nguma-monene, "large python" (from nguma, "python", and monene, "large") is reported from the Dongou-Mataba river area. It is a large, serpentine reptile, some 40 to 60 meters long, with a saw-toothed ridge down its back. The head is snake-like with a forked tongue that flicks in and out. It is greyish-brown like just about every other large reptilian cryptid. It is indistinguishable from the badigui, ngakoula ngou, diba, or songo of the Ubangi-Shari. All of these are giant snakes which kill hippos and browse on tree branches without leaving the water. They leave tracks behind like those of a lorry. All of them are indistinguishable from the mokele-mbembe. Mackal describes them as enormous monitor lizards.

The Mbielu-mbielu-mbielu, or "animal with planks growing out of its back", is restricted to the Likouala-aux-Herbes in the Congo. It is known solely as a large animal that has large "planks" on its back with algae growing between them. The rest of its appearance is unknown. Only one informant reported the mbielu-mbielu-mbielu. Mackal makes a surviving stegosaur out of it.

Finally there is the Ndendecki (a giant turtle), the Mahamba (a giant crocodile), and the Ngoima (a giant eagle). None of these are any more believable than the mokele-mbembe and its host of synonyms.

It would be tedious to list all subsequent expeditions (all unsuccessful) or the anthropological procedures used (all unprofessional). It should however be noted that the hunt for the mokele-mbembe has been coopted by the creationist movement. For some reason these people have decided that the discovery of the mokele-mbembe will be enough to destroy the entire theory of evolution (it won't) because a surviving dinosaur would be a lethal paradox to science (it isn't).

There is nothing unique about the mokele-mbembe, but as a vaguely defined reptilian river-shutter it is a sort of Rorschach test that viewers can project their preconceptions onto. Far from a detailed local legend, the myth of the mokele-mbembe evolved to suit the needs of the visitors who sought it, whether zoo suppliers, colonialists, cryptozoologists, or creationists. Any underlying folklore about river-shutting reptiles has long been abandoned and discarded, relegated to an etymological footnote. It does not fit the narrative.
References
Hagenbeck, C., Elliot, S. R. and Thacker, A. G. trans. (1911) Beasts and Men. Longmans, Green, And Co., London.

Ley, W. (1959) Exotic Zoology. The Viking Press, New York.

Loxton, D. and Prothero, D. R. (2013) Abominable Science! Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and other Famous Cryptids. Columbia University Press, New York.

Mackal, R. (1987) A living dinosaur? E. J. Brill, New York.

Naish, D. (2016) Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths. Arcturus, London.

Weishampel, D. B.; Dodson, P.; and Osmolska, H. (2004) The Dinosauria, 2nd Edition. University of California Press, Berkeley.

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Variations: Mokéle-mbêmbe, Mokele Mbembe, Monstrous Animal; Nsanga; Emela-ntouka, Emia-ntouka, Aseka-moke, Ngamba-namae, Killer of Elephants, Water Elephant; Nguma-monene, Badigui, Ngakoula Ngou, Diba, Songo; Mbielu-mbielu-mbielu Tales of the Mokele-mbembe, "One Who Stops the Flow of Rivers" (or, more simply, "River-Shutter"), come from the Congo River Basin, around the Ikelemba, Sanga, and Ubangi rivers and Lake Tele.

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Description:
This article discusses the several unsuccessful expeditions to find mokele-mbembe.

Connection:
One reason for belief discussed in the article is an emotional connection - people want to believe so badly that they ignore the lack of evidence.

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A wannabe-biologist is planning to bring a dinosaur back alive, even though the creature he's after doesn't exist

smithsonianmag.com

There aren't any sauropods in the Congo Basin. There's not a scrap of evidence that long-necked, swamp-wallowing dinosaurs are hiding somewhere in the jungles of Africa, or anywhere else. And I say that as someone who was enthralled when I saw the puppet brontosaurs of 1985′s Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (see the clip above), arguably the best movie dinosaurs before Jurassic Park stomped along. After seeing that movie, I really, really wanted there to be living sauropods, but the evidence simply doesn't exist.

Rumors that there might be an Apatosaurus-like dinosaur in the Congo Basin have circulated for years. Young earth creationists have been especially enamored with the idea, as they wrongly believe that finding a living, non-avian dinosaur will discredit evolutionary theory. (The existence of a living sauropod wouldn't be any worse for evolutionary theory than the discovery of modern coelacanths. These archaic fish were thought to be extinct, but once living fish were discovered, they fell perfectly well within what scientists have understood about evolutionary patterns since Darwin's day.)

Numerous expeditions have been launched in search of the legendary animal. None have come back with evidence that some Cretaceous holdover is hanging out in Lake Tele or anywhere else. You'd think that a population of huge, amphibious dinosaurs would leave plenty of tracks, scat and skeletal remains behind, but-surprise, surprise-apparently not. There is a collection of stories, fuzzy photos, audio recordings and supposed footprint casts, but none of this adds up to anything. The last of the sauropods died more than 65 million years ago. If they had survived beyond that time, we would have certainly picked up the trail of the survivors in the fossil record.

Even modern field ecology argues against the existence of large dinosaurs in the Congo Basin. Zoologists often conduct multiple searches for species that went extinct during recent history. Sometimes a few hold-outs turn up, and the search intensity is key here. In a study tracking the rediscovery of presumably extinct mammals, zoologists Diana Fisher and Simon Blomberg found that still-extant species were often found again after three to six searches were conducted. After that point, the likelihood of success plummets. Given that there have been over a dozen unsuccessful expeditions to the Congo Basin looking for sauropods-immense creatures that would leave plenty of evidence in the landscape if they existed-the conclusion is clear. There are no amphibious dinosaurs to find.

But the facts haven't discouraged Stephen McCullah. A few months ago various news services reported that the wannabe biologist launched a Kickstarter page to fund a three-month expedition to the Congo Basin in hopes of capturing Mokele-mbembe, the name by which the mythical sauropod is often called. Sure, McCullah mentions that the trip's goal will be "categorizing plant and animal species in the vastly unexplored Republic of the Congo," but the focus of his pitch is clearly the search for a dinosaur that doesn't exist. Not surprisingly, McCullah and his team don't seem to have any formal qualifications to speak of. (McCullah's bio says he studied biology at Missouri State University and UMKC, but that's all.) Passion is great, but the Kickstarter page for the project gives no indication that he and his team are trained in field techniques or are approaching the trip with a scientific attitude. (See this video from Chicago's Field Museum to see what responsible field biology really looks like.) It just seems like a kid's bid for fame on someone else's dime.

McCullah's expedition recently hit its funding goal. It looks like the expedition is on, and rumor has it that the trip will be turned into another crummy basic cable documentary. If the program is anything like the MonsterQuest episode about Mokele-mbembe, it will be another hyped waste of time.

Throughout all this, many journalists have handled McCullah with kid gloves. The fact that someone says he intends to capture a living sauropod is apparently much more important to some media outlets than the fact that such a creature no longer exists. Some of the worst coverage has come from the Huffington Post, which, as science writer Seth Mnookin has commented, has featured plenty of bad science and facile reasoning. Lee Speigel, a journalist focused on UFO-related stories and a self-professed "truth seeker," concluded his first article about McCullah's expedition with: "One thing's for certain: will have to bring enough equipment. Capturing a living dinosaur may require some very big nets."

Speigel's follow-up was even more credulous. After acknowledging that paleontologists have not found any indication of modern or recent sauropods, Speigel cites an ambiguous 5,000-year-old pictograph found in the Amazon as evidence that humans and non-avian dinosaurs overlapped in time. Speigel omits the fact that the two "researchers" who make the grand claims about the ancient art-Vance Nelson and Harry Nibourg-are creationists who have a strong bias in favor of modern dinosaurs because of their fundamentalist beliefs. In another evidence-free portion of the piece, Speigel writes, "Many previous expeditions have attempted to follow up on these reports by tracking the dangerous, swampy Likouala region of Congo, which has a climate not much changed since dinosaurs roamed in large numbers millions of years ago." Never mind that the continents have shifted and the climate has in fact fluctuated widely over the past 66 million years-Speigel is setting up the Congo Basin as a pristine lost world where Cretaceous monsters still lurk.

The coda to the article is even better. Speigel reported that McCullah's team planned to bring firearms on the trip, with the implication that expedition members might slay any dinosaur they find. McCullah wrote back: "Killing a creature like mokele-mbembe is really not an option as far as the team is concerned. If it were a life-threatening situation, that could change, but our plan for a confrontation with a mokele-like creature as of now is to chemically subdue the animal." The plan is to bring "mokele-mbembe back alive," McCullah said. Clearly he hasn't seen 1925′s Lost World- sauropods and cities don't mix. But it's all absolutely absurd. McCullah's team is carefully planning to use firearms on an imaginary animal. You can't tranquilize a dinosaur that doesn't exist.

Reports like Speigels are why I wish ill-informed journalists would just leave dinosaurs alone. It's so easy to quickly and foolishly regurgitate fantastic claims, and when reality isn't as wonderful as the claims being made, some writers aren't above just making stuff up as they see fit. In this case, McCullah's expedition was really a non-story. "Wannabe-adventurer seeks dinosaur that doesn't exist" isn't much of a headline. Some writers bought into fantasy to sell the story, leaving all those inconvenient facts behind.

About Riley Black

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A Dinosaur Expedition Doomed From the Start

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smithsonianmag.com There aren't any sauropods in the Congo Basin. There's not a scrap of evidence that long-necked, swamp-wallowing dinosaurs are hiding somewhere in the jungles of Africa, or anywhere else. And I say that as someone who was enthralled when I saw the puppet brontosaurs of 1985′s Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (see the clip above), arguably the best movie dinosaurs before Jurassic Park stomped along.

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Description:
This picture contrasts descriptions of mokele-mbembe as a lethargic aquatic beast (left) with our modern understanding of sauropods as active terrestrial animals (right).

Connection:
The most relevant red flag is ancient wisdom: older depictions of sauropods are assumed to reflect a hypothetical living representative even though our knowledge of actual sauropod biology has advanced considerably over the last century.

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Description:
This is a photograph of an alleged mokele-mbembe footprint, although Loxton & Prothero (2013) note that it does not resemble the tracks of any animal past or present.

Connection:
This is a classic example of patternicity - since the imprint superficially resembles a track, it is assumed that this what it is.

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Description:
This is an infamously grainy aerial photograph of what is allegedly mokele-mbembe, although Naish (2017) notes that it is most likely a canoe.

Connection:
This is a clear example of perception & observation - an object is observed & assumed to be the creature even though alternative explanations are far more likely.

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1. I was surprised to learn how Westernized the folklore surrounding mokele-mbembe has become.

2. As I have an amateur interest in paleontology, I find it more productive to educate people about real dinosaurs rather than uncritically accept fantasy stories.

3. I am interested in how our understanding of dinosaur biology has changed & its implications for cryptozoology.

4. I will remember to keep an eye out for red herrings such as the coelacanth.

5. I reiterate my conclusions from the first half of this presentation.

6. I would advise people to beware of those with duplicitous motives.

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Loxton D, Prothero D. R. 2013. Abominable science!: origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and other famous cryptids. Columbia University Press, New York.

Naish, D. 2017. Hunting Monsters. London: Acturus.