Conjectures and Refutations

A story at Phys.org discussed a recent paper which, I should've thought, would have created shock waves among scientists and philosophers, but which so far has generated very little comment.

A little background: Darwinian evolutionists argue that life on earth has been around for billions of years and that the various forms, were we able to see all that have ever appeared, would be observed to grade into each other almost seamlessly. In a gradual process that takes millions of years, one species slowly transitions to a similar but slightly different form, until the original form and its descendents become two separate species.

On the Darwinian view different taxa would appear at different times in the history of the earth, and thus the age of one species might be substantially different from the age of another, perhaps by millions of years.

On the other hand, many creationists, at least those who eschew the notion of universal descent from a common ancestor, assert that both of these claims are incorrect. They predict that on the creationist hypothesis, all species on earth are approximately the same age and that since the major taxa were created independently there will not be significant evidence of transitions between them.

The article in Phys.org reveals that both of these creationist predictions, neither of which is entailed by Darwinian evolution, seem to have been confirmed. Here are a few excerpts:

The study's most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. "This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could," [said David Thaler at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who co-authored the findings last week.]

That reaction is understandable: How does one explain the fact that 90 percent of animal life, genetically speaking, is roughly the same age? Was there some catastrophic event 200,000 years ago that nearly wiped the slate clean?

In analysing the [genetic] barcodes across 100,000 species, the researchers found a telltale sign showing that almost all the animals emerged about the same time as humans.

This doesn't mean that life is only 200,000 years old. It only means that 90% of the species on earth today have been in existence for about the same length of time. In other words, this is consistent with the creationist hypothesis that there was a major environmental event early on in the history of the human race that produced a biological bottleneck of sorts, out of which emerged most of the forms that we find inhabiting the planet today.

This does not, of course, refute Darwinism and establish creationism, but it is a finding that requires a secondary explanation on Darwinism but which is directly predicted by creationists.

Here's another:

And yet—another unexpected finding from the study—species have very clear genetic boundaries, and there's nothing much in between. "If individuals are stars, then species are galaxies," said Thaler. "They are compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space."

The absence of "in-between" species is something that also perplexed Darwin, he said.

In other words, the lack of transitions between species is perplexing on the Darwinian view of a gradual evolution of life. Creationists have long pointed to the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record, but this study shows that even in extant forms of life species seem to be genetically isolated from each other. Again, there could be a satisfactory Darwinian account of why this is, but the point is that it confirms a direct prediction of the creationist hypothesis.

None of this means that creationists are correct and that Darwinians are wrong. The article offers some possible explanations for why, on Darwinian terms, the results I've alluded to may obtain. What it does seem to suggest, though, is that the Darwinian criticism of creationism, that it's a metaphysical, not a scientific, construct, is becoming harder to defend.

The distinguishing characteristic of science is what philosopher Karl Popper called conjectures and refutations. That is, scientific researchers make predictions based on theory and then test those predictions to see if they're confirmed or refuted by the evidence.

To the extent that the creationist hypothesis generates predictions that are confirmed by the empirical evidence, to that extent it confounds those who wish to exclude it from the realm of science and consign it to the sphere of religious faith.